“The small stone chapel that local people once used for baptisms, first communions and weddings is now a storeroom and the sign that read Hotel Mercéi has been replaced by a glowing piece of neon announcing that this is now a busy brothel called Madam’s. Selling sex is, as this thriving, 50-room ‘macro-brothel’ shows, a far more lucrative business than catering for the family celebrations of a scattered population of farmers and wine-growers in this north-eastern corner of Spain. Located on a main road just inside the Spanish border with France, Madam’s has a large sign reading Entrée. The yellow number-plates on the Peugeots and Renaults in the car park are also mainly French. ‘Most of the clients are from over the border,’ says Patricio, the muscle-bound, tattooed manager of what is now one of the biggest businesses in the small municipality of Capmany. ‘Things are a lot stricter over there.’ Inside, several dozen scantily clad women in thongs and micro-skirts sit at the neon-lit chrome bar. Others totter around on glittery platform shoes or in thigh-length boots. Despite the ample display of flesh, they are having trouble competing for the attention of a handful of early evening punters with the World Cup football showing on a giant screen. Occasionally, one walks off, a client in tow, to the lifts that take them up to the four floors of bedrooms above. Madam’s is just one of more than a dozen macro-brothels to be found on the outskirts of the small inland villages of a region known as the Alt Empordà. ‘They are turning us into Europe’s brothel,’ complains Ferran Jarabo, the priest for four small village parishes…” — Guardian (UK)

It is ironic that, just as cell phones and internet listing services have made it easier for individual entrepreneurs to work for themselves without madams or pimps, there comes this prostitution backlash of sorts. Like the adult superstore popular here in the United States, the macro-brothel replaces mom-and-pop dens of iniquity with megastores, veritable Wal-Marts of flesh. No doubt this will come with the same batch of relative advantages and disadvantages that occur when, say, Barnes & Noble competes with independent booksellers.

The Guardian article does an excellent job bringing out the way in which one country’s liberality can serve as another’s covert exploitation. Spain is permissive — whee! It sounds like a great time. But then you start to read about sexual slavery, human trafficking, and young mothers who screw French vacationers to support children they’ve left behind in the Ukraine… It certainly takes the shine off.

“Macro-brothel” is a great neologism, though. It’s so modernist, like a piece of sleek glass architecture, and yet somehow it also calls to mind macrobiotic — the very association makes you wonder if, like macrobiotics, macro-brothels could become a healthy lifestyle choice. Eat whole grains and exploit young Eastern European girls — will these be the yin and the yang of an age in which morals are brought more strictly to bear on food choices than on sexual behaviors? After all, there are circles where it’s more acceptable to indulge perverse desires than to eat beef or bioengineered tomatoes.

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