STONE COLD HAVEN

Loss leading is as old as the concept of marketing itself. Whether it’s the freebies provided to promote a new lager at the local bar, or the free samples of cosmetics and fragrances dished out at beauty stores, or the good old fashioned buy one get one free – inducement to invite custom are part and parcel of our business world.

It’s unsurprising then, to find a storm brewing between groups of commercial sex workers in Copenhagen and the Mayor’s office who are determined that none of the working girls are going to have an early Christmas. What with the whole world descending on Copenhagen, it’s naive at best to assume that horizontal refreshments aren’t part and parcel of the ’entertainment package’ available to delegates at the climate and environment conference just beginning in the Danish capital. Just because it’s not on the official programme doesn’t mean that it’s not available.

So when the Copenhagen Mayor’s office issues a formal communiqué that blatantly says ”Be Sustainable, Don’t Buy Sex” and distributes it to hotels, the response from representative groups of the working girls is emphatic.

Conference delegates who show the official “Anti-prostitution postcards” being distributed at the conference and in hotels, in conjunction with their official conference delegates ID cards – are being offered free sexual services as a retaliatory measure against the move by the Mayor’s office.

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I could have sworn it was only the other day that thousands of tree hugging, Guardian reading, bike riding, fair trade consuming mercenaries for the cause of mother nature got together in Portugal. It can’t have been that long ago (I’m talking a matter of weeks or at the extreme, a few months).

The reason why this is pricking my stone cold conscience is that I distinctly remember the environmental doomsayers breathing fire and brimstone down our throats that if we don’t do something about the environment pronto, the world is inevitably going to suffer the worst death of its kind (speaking of which – I’d like someone to validate this claim with a plausible comparison of any other kind of bad death of human kind).

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