G reat news! Kiev, the city of my birth, has been ranked by Traveler's Digest as number one β as far as the presence of "beautiful women" is concerned, that is. Am I glad? Or am I a joyless feminazi who will use this news as an excuse to launch into a diatribe about how the beauty of women is a red herring in a country as plagued by social problems as Ukraine?
The truth is, Kiev probably does have some of the most beautiful women in the world β and they are present at all levels of society. They're the trophy wives coolly observing the world from the back of chauffeur-driven Bentleys, and the bored supermarket cashiers who will raise their eyebrows if you fail to produce the exact change.
They include a jailed former prime minister , and the teenage mother who will bum a cigarette off of you outside the airport terminal when you first arrive. Soon, hordes of football fans arriving in Ukraine for Euro will find out exactly what I'm talking about β and I'm sure that many of them are excited by this prospect. But here's the thing about being a beautiful woman in Ukraine: it does not protect you from harm or poverty. Perhaps most pertinently, it also does not protect you from winding up in the sex industry.
Police officials in Ukraine are already stating that a "strict control" will be enforced during Euro , and that only a handful of prostitutes will be able to "get to the foreigners". Such statements are almost humorous, as they assume that the foreign visitors are passive partners in the whole thing. And the fact that these foreigners will be participating in a system of exploitation and inequality bothers few people, the topless protesters of Ukraine's Femen group notwithstanding.
Here's the thing about the Ukrainian sex industry β it is unregulated and scary. I personally know people who have gone into it by choice, but they will not romanticise it. As Femen's own Anna Gutsol said to me back in "Around here, people don't think about purchasing sex, they think of it as purchasing a human being. Most sex workers who do not use condoms report that they are pressured to do so by their clients.
