“Lower class prostitutes in Weimar Germany, 1920′s” (that’s all the info. that accompanied this Google searched image….Hate not crediting a photo, don’t understand how people can steal photographs that have attribution)
Fascinating article I have my students read every year as we discuss the Weimar era “New Woman”. I highly recommend it. Here’s an excerpt to get you interested:
“Sexually predatory and educated, she achieved financial independence through employment and spent her earnings on fashion and fun. She had short bobbed hair, wore relaxed masculine clothes, smoked cigarettes and enjoyed the globally notorious nightlife of Berlin’s theatres, cinemas, cafes and bars. According to the historian Ute Frevert, the Weimar women were ‘children of the new age who were variously celebrated or accursed’.”
Kind of interesting to read against this prostitution code from a sex tourist brochure (or adapted from several, can’t recall), which I will share with my students as well:
BOOT GIRLS: Dominatrices whose sexual services
were signaled by the color of their boots, laces, and
ribbons, sometimes worn in combination.
BLACK BOOTS: Buttocks cropping (lying on bed).
BROWN BOOTS: Asphyxiation by boot or
stockinged foot.
COBALT-BLUE BOOTS: Penetration by female.
SCARLET BOOTS: Cross-dressing humiliation.
BLACK LACES: Punishment with a short whip.
GOLD LACES: Defecation on chest.
WHITE LACES: Collared like a dog.
WHITE RIBBONS ON TOP OF BOOTS: Male customer
begins as the dominant figure and ends
as the submissive party.
DOMINAS: Leather-clad women who specialized
in whipping, humiliation, and other forms of
punishment, and worked in lesbian nightclubs
that admitted heterosexual couples and
male clients.
FOHSES: Independent prostitutes who advertised
in newspapers and magazines as manicurists
or masseuses.
GRASSHOPPERS: Streetwalkers who performed oral
sex in the Tiergarten.
GRAVELSTONES: Physically deformed women who
worked in north Berlin.
MEDICINE GIRLS: Child prostitutes who were “prescribed”
by pimps posing as physicians in phony
pharmacies in west Berlin.
MUNZIS: Pregnant women who waited under
lampposts on Münzstrasse.
RACEHORSES: Masochistic prostitutes who worked
in Institutes for Foreign Language Instruction,
where the schoolrooms were equipped with
bondage equipment.
TAUENTZIEN GIRLS: Women wearing the
latest fashions and hairstyles, often working in
mother-daughter teams near the Kaiser Memorial
Church.
TELEPHONE GIRLS: Child prostitutes, aged twelve
to seventeen, who were made to resemble junior
versions of theater or film starlets and were ordered
by telephone.
— from Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin
And I’d like to get my hands on this book, too.
