“I don’t see myself as – a dangerous threat. No! I’m just selling a product, a commercial thing.”

Debbie, the Red Light District window-brothel sex worker we interviewed this June, replied with this statement when we asked how she felt about her work in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where prostitution is legalized and regulated by the government.

When we conceived of a research project centered around sex work in Amsterdam, we questioned prostitution as a profession. We believed, based on the research we had already conducted, as well as our own personal views, that a “business” based on women selling sex to men could never be fair, safe or defensible. Our hope was to leave the country with an understanding of the business, as well as an understanding of its implications. We assumed we could go to Amsterdam and uncover the truth about sex work and the women involved.

We learned that Amsterdam’s Red Light District and the sex culture surrounding it is bright and flashy. And it is not isolated. An entire culture, different from America’s, surrounds two small streets where women stand scantily clad in front of windows, advertising sex for money. Whereas in Dallas most of the sex work economy is veiled and the normal citizen’s relationship to it is distant, in Amsterdam, sex is everywhere and demands attention and thought.

Amsterdam shocked us. What we saw was nothing like what we had read in all of our books and articles. All over the world, but especially in Amsterdam, sex work is a practical, business-based culture with many different faces. Just like in Dallas, the Amsterdam sex economy includes scantily dressed waitresses at a local bar, street walkers, live sex show performers, window brothel workers and high-end escorts: representations of the many levels and faces of sex work and the many faces of the desires of the sex workers’ clients. Unlike Dallas, these people are out in the open, not just in vague advertisements or obscurely worded billboards.

Amidst all the confusion, only the business-based aspect of the atmosphere was consistent and understandable to us. It felt like capitalism. It felt like America.

We saw the truth in Debbie’s statement about sex as a product. After all, we had paid her 75 Euro and a cup of coffee to speak with her for an hour. What was different about her asking a client for 200 Euro for an hour of sex? Isn’t the latter product somehow more valuable? Shouldn’t sex be a more expensive commodity, if it’s going to be sold at all?

Our backgrounds, especially as women, made us question the commodification of sex, but we also began to wonder about the possibility of Debbie’s having a fair point.

Perhaps Debbie’s ideas about sex are not so foreign to the American mindset.To Debbie, sex is a product, and prostitution is a capitalistic venture where women can finally earn money more quickly and in greater amounts than men. What is more American than capitalism, the search for the best-selling product and the best salesperson? What has more resonance on the campus of Southern Methodist University than the power of money and the consumer?

On our campus, each and every structure and breezeway is named for someone whose money spoke volumes. Tuition for one year costs more than many Americans’ annual household incomes. And the Princeton Review publishes quotations from students who state that the typical SMU student is someone who sports “Louis Vuitton bags adorned with sorority pins, Daddy’s credit card [and] bronzed tans year-round.”

Not only that, but we also can’t ignore the fact that sex can be bought in Dallas as easily as it can be bought on the streets of the Red Light District in Amsterdam.

A trip to Silver City or a call to Lone Star Escorts is like ordering pizza from Domino’s: All of the companies are listed in the yellow pages, and you can have the women delivered right to your dorm room, if you don’t want to go out for the evening. In Dallas, as in Amsterdam, buying sex is as easy as buying dinner.

If the sale of sex happens in both countries, what is it that makes Debbie’s statement difficult to handle for Americans, many people from countries all over the world and even for some Dutch? The question is: What does sex mean? Does it denote love and passion, or a whim in the form of a one-night stand? A commitment, or a fling?

Can it be, as Debbie says, “a product, a commercial thing”?

Finally, just because the sex culture in the United States, in Dallas, is more veiled than it is in Amsterdam, does that mean we shouldn’t give it the same attention, the same thought?

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.