The first thing the Latvian authorities demanded was not to place sexual advertising in the airport. As minister Ainārs Šlesers stated, now the first thing a passenger who descends the gangway sees is a list of the full range of intimate services. Instead, they should be offered advertising booklets with Riga’s attractions. For example, an exhibition “Amazing Latvia” has just opened in France, on which €2 million was spent.
Then the government began to think about how to punish agencies that lure sex tourists into the country. They decided that since the country’s Criminal Code (CC) already provides for punishment for the sexual exploitation of people, there is no need to bring tourist sex agencies to administrative responsibility. Moreover, they can use the experience of other European Union countries, which regard sex tourism as sexual exploitation of a person.
True, it is not yet entirely clear how they will prove the involvement of agencies in sex tourism. Meanwhile, at the airport you can easily find such an absolutely free advertising and information booklet that gives dozens of sexual advertisements. Or offers of so-called escort services aimed specifically at foreigners. True, the advertisement for the night strip club Dolls, with which Riga Airport greeted guests, had to be removed by the airport management, almost under pressure from Transport Minister Ainārs Šlesers, paying the club a penalty.
At the same time, in the spring, the now former vice-mayor of Riga, Juris Lujāns, said that it was impossible to ban advertising, let alone the activities of “adult” establishments. But after the president and the government became concerned about the country’s image, Šlesers began to fight against what he himself had contributed to – the main flow of sex-oriented guests to Latvia arrives precisely on the planes of cheap airlines Ryanair and EasyJet, which Šlesers had brought to the Latvian market...
The main contingent of sex tourists is the European proletariat. Instead of the respectable businessmen and pensioners the government had counted on when inviting discount airlines, young sex hunters from England, Italy, Sweden and Germany are flying to Riga. Moreover, Europeans could well have gotten their first impressions of the “forbidden fruit” in the Baltics from the scandalous film Buy Bye Beauty by Swedish director Hollander, which caused a stir in Latvia several years ago. In the documentary, the Scandinavian clearly told how compliant Latvian girls are. And all the pleasure for a minimal price. And he compared Latvia then to a European Thailand.
Now foreigners learn about Latvia’s charms from the virtual guide World Sex Guide. The Baltic republic appears in it as a kind of paradise for sexually obsessed men. It also contains a detailed instruction “How to find a prostitute in Riga?” and a bunch of approving reviews from those who have visited Latvia. To suit the taste of tourists – both individuals and groups coming for a bachelor party – trip organizers devise an extensive entertainment program. Well, if there is demand, there will be supply. Such are the laws of the market. What frightened the country’s leadership most was that sexual services had become a real branch of the economy. According to calculations by the publication “Business & Baltics”, at least 10% of all foreigners visiting the country are aimed at sex tourism. That is about 200,000 to 300,000 people a year. They are served, according to unofficial data, by 5,000 to 6,000 representatives of the oldest profession. Moreover, tourists spend about €100 million on these purposes annually – about 1% of the country’s current GDP! Moreover, analysts predict a constant increase in the flow of tourists. There is, however, one “but” – almost all the money going into the sex industry settles in the shadow economy. The rest of the official business in this field (local porn publications, intimate goods stores and the once-flourishing phone sex) receives at most a tenth of the total amount.
By the way, another popular business in modern Latvia is the production of porn films. A film with a budget of $10,000 is shot in at most a month. And the sale of such a picture to order brings about 30,000 “greenbacks”. And this is a completely legal business – the production of such video products in Latvia is not prohibited. Since 1998, even a special license is not required for this. The main thing is that the participants in the filming are adults. Therefore, Latvia has long headed the hit parades in the field of XXX cinema.
At the crest of the wave in Latvia is also a relatively new phenomenon of the industry – video chats. Here, according to approximate estimates, more than four thousand people are already working. For “work” you only need a room, a computer, the Internet and a web-camera. The website www.unitedstudios.lv claims that work in video chats is one of the highest paid. With a 40-hour working week, earnings can range from $500 to $1,300 per month. The rates are as follows: 10 minutes of video conversation with a Latvian web worker costs the client at least $20. Of this, about half goes to the girl, half to the organizer of the video chat.
Note: the Riga City Council partially legalized prostitution back in 1998, but it never found an answer to the question of where the priestesses of love should “work”. The girls themselves, meanwhile, moved from Čaka Street to Old Riga.
Riga residents themselves are not satisfied with such a status of their beloved city. At the end of November, young artists even tried to attract citizens to a discussion using the action rigasexcity – all night they painted representatives of the industry on the walls of houses. But the discussion has not worked out so far. The annual Riga exhibition under the piquant name “Erot” attracts more and more visitors – last time, more than 15,000 people visited it over 3 days, and the “forbidden fruit” is still just as interesting to Europeans. And prostitution cannot be eradicated by laws and booklets about the sights of Riga. The question is that Latvia, having plunged into the charms of Europe, did not cope with the temptation – girls prefer to earn money on the street rather than study or work for a hundred lats. Apparently, Europe had to be made from the inside first.