Scantily clad women could soon disappear from billboards in Berlin under a proposed ban on sexist advertising. The German capital has been associated with sexual licentiousness since its days as a wild party city in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s.

But its image may be about the change under a proposed ban agreed by the city’s regional government. Advertising that reduces women to a “readily available sexual pleasure object” will be banned, as will images in which “a woman is barely dressed and smiling for no good reason, while a man is completely and comfortably clothed”.

The ban will extend to all images in which women are protrayed as “beautiful but weak, hysterical, dumb, crazy, naive, or ruled by their emotions”, according to proposals drawn up by the ruling Left Party.

Sexist adverts are already banned on hoardings owned by the city, but the new ban will apply to privately owned displays as well. A special panel will examine individual adverts.

The proposal is backed by a ruling coalition of left-wing parties in the Berlin state government that is widely seen as a model for a possible national government led by Angela Merkel’s chief rival, Martin Schulz.