Feminists set love trap

Press, 26 July 1983, Page 21

Feminists set love trap

Feminists in Norway have publicly branded eight men as “whore customers” after trapping them with false advertisements placed in newspapers, writes Harald Offerdal in the London “Observer.”

A hotel manager, a shipowner, and six other men woke up to find their names plastered all over 16 underground stations in Oslo. They had all answered advertisements in the lonely hearts column of a daily newspaper offering sexual services for sale.

The advertisements — “Voluptuous lady seeks generous gentlemen,” and so on — had been placed

in the paper by a group of women who have so far managed to keep their identities secret, but who are believed to belong to a Maoist political party.

In reply they collected the names of 250 men, of which only eight have so far been named, but the women are threatening to publish more names. The effect of their action, in a city of only half a million people, where most people know each other, has been profound.

The hotel manager, as well as being branded a “whore customer”

on the posters, was publicly named on the air on a small private radio station which also broadcast a conversation he had with one of the girls. He made an official complaint to the police. They are uncertain how to handle the affair. “If the allegations are untrue, it is a clear case of libel,” said Superintendent Anne Marie Aslaksrud Gran. “But if they are true, I really can’t see what we can do.”

They point out that many of the men named are married, and the public exposure is unfair to the families.