“If you want to watch Nick having sex with a prostitute, he’s happy to let you. The 36-year-old bank-security technician drove eight hours from his home in Metz, France, to Big Sister, a Prague brothel where customers peruse a touch-screen menu of blondes, brunettes and redheads available for free. The catch is clients have to let their exploits be filmed and posted on the Internet… Big Sister is marrying 21st-century technology with the world’s oldest profession to profit from the public’s appetite for ever-more graphic reality TV. Since 2005, more than 15,000 men have taken up the offer of free sex in return for 15 minutes, or less, of fame, according to the brothel. Big Sister is now expanding into the U.S. with a local version of its Web site. Visitors to the virtual brothel pay 29.95 euros ($43.88) for a one-month subscription to a smorgasbord of sex listed by position, preference and number of people. Big Sister also produces cable TV shows that air on Sky Italia and the U.K.’s Television X, as well as DVDs such as ‘Sex Hyenas’ and ‘Voyeur’s Eye.’ ‘Our goal is to attract as many people as possible to catch the first reality sex TV,’ says marketing manager Carl Borowitz, who goes by the name Carlos. ‘This is National Geographic for adults. Everyone’s curious to watch their neighbor.’” — Bloomberg (US)

To the extent that this is a logical extension of reality tv programming, there is nothing very remarkable about Big Sister. The French poet Stéphane Mallarmé once said that the world exists only to end up in a book, and reality tv has simply updated the assertion: the world exists only to end up on screen. Sex, cooking, travel, the clipping of toenails — it’s all fodder for the camera.

From the vantage point of prostitution, however, Big Sister is a remarkable development. Just think of it. For thousands of years brothels have sold sex. Now Big Sister is giving it away. Or is it? The women who work at Big Sister still sell their bodies for sex, and Big Sister still finds a way to profit from it. The innovation is that Big Sister no longer sells women but rather imagery of women and their clients. In other words, Big Sister makes its money not by catering simply to lust but to a perverse variant of it: voyeurism.

As a business idea, it’s brilliant. However, there are clearly limitations to how far it can go. There will always be men willing to trade their anonymity for free sex, and there will always be women who want or need to engage in sex work. But how many subscribers does Big Sister need to make the whole thing profitable? As the web is glutted with porn, will there always be a sufficient number to cover the costs (which, between the workers, the technology, and the location, must be significant)? Or will Big Sister and the imitators it will inevitably spawn be forced to turn to increasingly melodramatic tactics to attract subscribers? You can imagine variants where the “free brothel” gimmick becomes something else — a farm where bestialists can have free access to a variety of animals, a charnel house where necrophiles can molest all the cadavers they want, provided only that they do it on camera.

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