“They [men] stare at you like you are a special monkey at the zoo,” and, to cope, you “build up a little wall around you.”
The women in the windows lining the streets of the Red Light District wear not only different outfits designed to display their bodies and interest customers, but also various expressions, from alluring and come-hither to disinterested and even disgusted with the very men they hope to have sex with for money.
Mariska Majoor explained to us, with the above statement, the ways many of those women cope with a life they may or may not have chosen, a life surrounded by stigma, judgment, and even danger.
Majoor, founder of Stichting Prostitutie Informatie Centrum worked as a prostitute for five years between the ages of 16 and 21. When we went into the PIC to speak to Majoor, we found a little shop full of colorful paintings, T-shirts and sexually-oriented gag gifts. In such an environment, we expected to find Majoor open and excited about sex work, with a positive attitude about the business.
We found a woman in only mediocre health who walked slowly and spoke bitterly in halting English about the police and their underhanded practices, as well as about men’s reasons for buying sex and women’s reasons for working as prostitutes.
Majoor began working as a prostitute because she was already living independently at the age of 15, and she wanted to buy a dog she saw advertised in the paper. “Somebody else could have borrowed the money, not have bought the dog or stolen the money,” Majoor said. “Working in prostitution is a personal choice and not everyone can make it. I can not imagine working in a slaughterhouse, for example. Despite the fact that the idea of having sex with ‘all these men’ for money is horrible for some people, I would find having to kill these animals in a cruel way even more appalling.”
Tuesday we talked about the legal and practical problems of abolishing prostitution versus legalizing it. The Dallas vice officers facing reprimands for having unnecessary skin-to-skin contact with prostitutes during a sting operation compromised the prosecution of a brothel owner, as well as the reputation of the Dallas Police Department. If prostitution were legal here, those officers would not have been committing a crime, but they might not have known about the underground brothel in the first place. We asked, based on this case, whether the United States’ abolitionist approach or the Netherlands’ legalization approach worked better. The answer to that question cannot be answered through legal or practical means alone, however.
Even through legislation and police enforcement, governments cannot control or determine individual’s personal reactions and desires. Individual attitudes toward sex are perhaps the most personal of reactions, as Majoor points out in her discussion of personal reactions to prostitution versus slaughterhouses.
Governments all over the world make a grave mistake when they try to handle prostitution through legislation based on generalized moral values. These generalizing and moralizing laws shortchange people like Majoor, who choose the work, as well as women who do not choose the work and are trafficked into invisibility. The women working in the Acapulco Spa in Dallas may or may not have chosen their work, but they were certainly pressured to continue doing it and to hide from the police. They learned ways to be sure they were not dealing with an officer and ways to negotiate deals without incriminating themselves. Women all over the world work in underground conditions like these for reasons just like Majoor’s: they want something they cannot afford, they live a wild life or they want to try something new and exciting that they don’t find reprehensible.
Both the United States and the Netherlands make the mistake of moralizing individual behavior through legislation, but the Netherlands has found a way that is less naïve about the realities of sex, gender, sexuality and sex work. The United States prides itself on its moral center and its obligation to bring freedom and guidance to other societies, but do these impulses conflict with individual rights to express and explore? Does the United States have the right to tell anyone – including its own people – how to understand their personal sexuality, economics or interpersonal relationships?
The Netherlands’s policy toward prostitution is pragmatic, rather than dogmatic. The Netherlands’s choice to legalize and control the economic and civic aspects of the business, allows for more effective policies in relation to trafficking as well as general workers’ rights, like worker’s compensation, tax breaks, fair treatment by an employer or mandatory vacation days.
How do love, sex, sexuality, gender and many other personal issues work in a world where national governments are obligated to protect their citizens but are restrained by the fact that their citizens are all different and therefore need varied kinds of support?
They live in the underground – even when that underground is legalized and regulated – and people who explore love, sex, sexuality, gender and those other personal issues in a nonstandard way build up walls to protect themselves from mainstream judgment, from governments who don’t see them or their contribution to society. They live in a place that is never seen as normal, even though it is anything but an aberration.
Prostitution is, after all, the world’s oldest profession. What is more normal than that?
Mallory Harwood and Heather Neale studied and researched prostitution in Amsterdam for five weeks under the Richter International Fellowship, sponsored by the University Honors Program.This series will run every Tuesday and Wednesday.
