“Sex is not private out here, people are dating here and having sex constantly, all the time.”
This statement may strike a familiar chord for the readers of a university newspaper. It may sound like something a typical 20-something college student would say when asked about the night life on campus.
But this statement was made during an interview of a 40-year-old woman making her living as a window-brothel prostitute in the Red Light District of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
On June 11, 2005, we sat down with “Debbie.” For 75 Euro and a cup of coffee, she gave us an hour of her time, during which we could ask her whatever we wanted to know about the life of a sex worker. The price we paid was cheap, by her standards – Debbie gave us a discount from her usual rate of 200 Euro an hour.
We contacted Debbie through the Stichting Prostitutie Informatie Centrum, the Prostitution Information Center. The PIC occupies a small room right off the main drag of the Red Light District and right across a small alleyway from the oldest church in the city. It’s a little shop full of hand-painted condoms, tourists’ guides to the best brothels in the city, Red Light District memorabilia and friendly workers behind the counter, all of whom have worked in the sex industry before coming to the PIC.
Technically, prostitution has always been legal in the Netherlands, and Amsterdam is known worldwide for its Red Light District, where women like Debbie stand in windows lit by fluorescent red lights, wearing anything from a string bikini to a silk nightgown, beckoning prospective buyers and gawking spectators. Debbie and the women she works with are technically self-employed, renting space by the hour from brothel owners who have only recently been legally allowed to profit from the women’s work.
In the Netherlands, prostitution has been tolerated since the middle ages, but federal and local administrations limited sex work to certain zones within cities. For much of the Netherlands’ history, working as a brothel owner, pimp or other “proprietor” was technically illegal, even though prostitution itself was not. In 1911, Dutch officials took a bold step and made brothels illegal, turning the workplaces of prostitutes into crime scenes. This move didn’t change the day-to-day reality of prostitutes and their clients, however, and local authorities continued to tolerate nearly all quiet and safely run brothels.
Then, on Oct. 1, 2000, the Dutch made another bold move: Officials legalized window brothels and sex clubs. The new laws made it officially lawful to sell sex for money and to profit from that sale as the owner of a club or brothel. The age-old prostitute-pimp relationship remains illegal, leaving countries like the United States to ask whether the Netherlands has outlawed the individual pimp so that the country itself can step in as a kind of “super pimp.”
Dutch officials refute this argument, stating that the new laws are intended to reflect a more modern understanding of Dutch and global economy, an understanding that rests on the premise that prostitution has always existed and will always exist, and thus must be treated as a concrete reality rather than as a theoretical or moralized issue.
In an April 21, 2005 letter to Ambassador John Miller, the United States’ director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, eight prominent Dutch officials “question the methodologies and the generalizations contained in studies” conducted by Miller, accusing him and others in the Bush administration of propagating policies based on “unsupported or unproven assertions” linking prostitution to trafficking and organized crime.
The United States has dealt with the discrepancy between the ideal and the real for many years, particularly and recently in the debates over the legalization of marijuana. Issues like prostitution and marijuana legislation force governments to confront on the street level what may be unpleasant realities.
But the United States is not just dealing with marijuana when it handles the “ideal versus real” issue. The prostitution question exists here, especially in Dallas. We have all driven down Harry Hines Boulevard or Northwest Highway; we have all seen the back pages of The Dallas Observer, where anyone can find the number for a “men’s club,” escort service, massage parlor, bath house, sex hotline or adult media store. To think that legalized or tolerated prostitution is a problem only in the Netherlands is naïve and perhaps even blind.
President Bush – who is familiar with the Dallas area and its sex economy – claims to be concerned about the women and children involved in prostitution, but his accusations about the Netherlands as “super pimp” belie an oversimplified understanding of the economy of sex. Prostitution is not just about women being exploited by their pimps or men in general, but also by their countries of origin. Many people ask, if a woman was in anything other than a compromised position, why would she turn to prostitution as a source of income?
There is another side to the story, however. “My mother had to marry to have her own life,” Debbie told us, as we sat in the train station in Amsterdam. She then said that she didn’t have that same narrow set of possibilities in her own life, largely thanks to sex work. Debbie has worked as a prostitute in one venue or another for over 10 years.Her family and close friends are aware of her choice, and they support and love her. Debbie says she would recommend prostitution to any woman, because it is a way for a woman to be independent and free from the pressures she experiences when she is struggling and in debt.
Debbie raises the point that prostitution may empower as many women as it disadvantages, a point Miller and his researchers are not willing to investigate.
In future articles, we will deal with questions surrounding prostitution and trafficking in persons, especially as it concerns us in the United States and in regards to our position in the global economy and political arena.
The questions remain, even after we spoke with Debbie, even as we synthesize our research and present it for publication: Is sex private? Is sex for sale? Is sex something a government can realistically legislate?
Can any of these questions be answered the same way in different parts of the world?
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.
