A central social dividing line is between women who are 'good' and those who are 'bad'. Good women are those who are sexually chaste and monogamous — their sexuality is expressed and celebrated within the confines of marriage, as are, their child-bearing capacities. Good women are those who fulfill their proper domestic roles, and these are intensely moral. The site of permissible sexuality is the conjugal bed, and middle-class morals promote discretion and reticence in sexual practices.

The presence of 'other' women — prostitutes — helps to demarcate the boundaries of respectability. Prostitution connotes sexuality for sale; wifehood implies home, domesticity, morals. But just as prostitution is the 'other' of all that is respectable, the very existence of prostitutes serves to haunt middle-class morals, to question its identity. One of ennobling self-restraint and sexual purity. Language and ideas constitute reality, they define social conduct and forms of behaviour. In social usage, they are not neutral, they organise and structure our feelings. "Khanki", "magi", "bessha", "sex-worker" — these words are imbued with middle-class conceptions which deny female prostitutes any existence besides sexuality: it is assumed that their life revolves around the sexual act. The words 'bessha', 'sex-worker', etc., deny the realities of raising children responsibly as mothers. The words deny the realities of remitting money to elderly parents in the village as daughters. They deny the realities of a never-ending struggle. Most of all, they deny the possession of intellectual faculties.

In this calendar, Drik brings together the work of three photographers who have attempted to break these stultifying images. Images which are actively created to maintain masculine sexual control and regulation. The photographers have tried to question complex social relationships, they have tried to document instances of state repression. They have worked among brothel prostitutes, and among street-prostitutes. What is absent in their work are images of 'illicit' sexual pleasures sought and practised by the Bangladeshi male elite and of women who work as prostitutes in upper social circles. The respectable are more successful at concealment.

There is festivity in the air as the new millennium approaches. Images which are pleasing to the eye would undoubtedly have soothed the minds and hearts of the privileged. But it is necessary to maintain a safe distance from celebratory moods which ignore the existence of social inequalities. Through focusing on 'other' women — prostitutes working in the streets and in brothels — Drik carries on its work of using the medium of photography to raise questions about social realities, and their representations, into the next millennium.