It could be the plot of a film by Pedro Almodóvar, but the dimpled flesh and slightly crooked smiles make it all too real.
The good housewives of Serradilla del Arroyo, a remote Spanish village with a population of just 400, decided to raise money to build a children’s leisure centre last autumn by stripping for a saucy calendar.
The month of December 2008 showed the señoras posing together, wearing little more than tinsel and elf hats. Other months showed a wife holding a rifle and covered with furs, while a third showed the baker’s wife lying provocatively before her oven, cakes placed strategically before her.
Sadly, the seven brave mums of Serradilla overestimated how popular their racy calendar would be. They managed to sell 1,500 copies to sheep-faced husbands and slightly embarrassed relatives in the surrounding villages. But 5,500 remained stubbornly unsold.
Last month, the printer sued the women to recover the outstanding €9,000 – plus €18,000 in damages. The news triggered an outpouring of sympathy throughout Spain.
“We were fighters but now we are truly disillusioned,” one of the wives, Rosa Garín, said at the time. “We don’t even have the money for a painting workshop for our kids.”
Adding insult to injury, a group of Ryanair air hostesses had sold 70,000 copies of their own calendar, prompting several to burst into tears, she said. “OK, so they are better-looking, but we think that you buy this kind of thing because of the cause, not for how hot the woman is.”
Fortunately, help was at hand this week from an unexpected source: a Spanish internet site specialising in home-made porn. On its site, Fisgon.com said it would pay off the debt because “such a good idea for such a noble cause did not deserve to end this way”.
Mrs Garín said they had initially harboured reservations about accepting the money from a porn site. “But independently of what they do, this company has been wonderful to us. If we have to do it again,” she said, “we’ll do it.”
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