Twenty five years of legalised prostitution in Holland has provided reams of evidence of its abject failure, resulting in more danger for the women, impunity for pimps and punters, and vile propaganda
One thing I really like about Julie Bindel's writing is she goes behind the propaganda and shows people what is really going on. In this case, it sounds like Amsterdam's approach completely failed to reduce prostitution's harms. I suspect it did not work because there is no way to make prostitution "safe" or "pleasant" or a "normal job". I think the nature of the work is awful, I think the customers are frequently awful, and the pimps are also awful. Basically, I suspect there is no way to prevent prostitution from harming prostitutes. I do not think sex was meant to be something which can be bought and sold. I suspect buying and selling it leads to shame, depression, trauma, and drug/alcohol use.
"Erotic Centre" could not be less sexy if you tried! There's a connection between this "Dutch progressivism" on prostitution and the Dutch Protocols (DeVries, Cohen-Kettenis, Steensma, et al, 2014) advocating wrong sex hormones after puberty blockers, followed by sex trait modification surgeries for teens diagnosed as "trans" or "gender dysphoric." It is the centuries-old attitude of superiority in the social and scientific world, going back to the innovation of the dikes which took back the land from the sea around the year 900. There's a mentality of arrogant superiority, whereby movers and shakers in The Netherlands believe they lead the world with innovative approaches to society's problems. A couple of Dutch journalists have written about this, but of course it isn't reported outside of gender critical circles. The puberty blocker concept came from the actual dissatisfaction of adults who "transitioned" after normal puberty and imagined themselves "passing" better if they'd done the hormones and procedures earlier. Thus, children are trafficked into permanent sexual dysfunction by "researchers."
On the mark article, but there are three other sides to the story. Fond memories.
I lived in Amsterdam for most of the 90’s and lived for a year in De Wallen. I had vacated the US in 1990 because everyone I knew was dead, lived in a commune in Paris for three years working in music research and got tired of the crazy, and in 1993 rented a room for a year in de wallen are from a friend who managed a sex club / Leather Bar.
I had the bizarre experience of having my (tiny) bedroom window open onto the airshaft above a tranny bar. The air shaft had a 2nd window above the tranny bar jukebox so I was lulled to sleep at night by “I Will Always Love You” or some ditty about a man who “had long sexy legs”. Not ideal.
One day I came home from my tech job and the adjacent ground floor door was smashed in. Seems there were tranny hookers living there and something went wrong with their pimp. This all went down three doors from a police station, big fucking help.
When I lived there what was remarkable to me were the number of tranny hookers and Muslim guys drooling over them in red windows. There are two kind of people I can see from a mile away. A man with AIDS who’s on Crixivan (fat belly, thin arms, facial wasting), and a man dressed as a hooker. I know from tranny hookers. Lots in De Wallen (or de wallen, more local form). [Side 1: red windows have a lot of tranny hookers, not just Eastern European women].
[Side 2] Now there aren’t just red lights, there are also lots of blue lights, in doorways. That’s because you can see veins in a red light, but you can’t in a blue light. Nobody wants a dead junky in front of their door in the morning in de wallen so you get blue lights, because they can’t shoot up. Because where you have tranny hookers and pimps, and feral Moroccan boys, you have junky’s (Dutch apostrophised plural).
My walk home from a parking garage in central station involved avoiding junky’s selling “ecstasy” (spoken in a raspy voice which made Harvey Fierstein sound like Glinda the Good warbling in the Oz movie where she’s not skeletal, and people sang, not screamed). The entire area is saturated with drugs, not “soft drugs” as the Dutch say, like marijuana, but Coke and Heroin and Meth, where “I’ll shoot/snort in instead of take out.” [A straight, chubby American hippie friend of mine from Paris who hit me up for odd jobs to make a little money in Amsterdam, especially when I had a penthouse on Keisersgracht years later, suddenly appears one day gaunt, needing 100 Gulden. I gave him cash and got him to do some odd jobs to save face, he didn’t want a donation, then a few months later his son shows up with him, Meth gaunt - sweating, jittery - for some folding money. They look quite ill, Amsterdam floats on drug money. I heard later they died. Like Sharon Stone as Katherine Trammell in “Basic Imstinct” people I like or love tend to die I sometimes think.]
Eventually (years later, I’m in SF now) My FB Eduardo, 6’ Brazilian/Arabic model who owned the Argos, oldest leather bar in Europe, sold it and it closed. I taught him to use Femidom’s and he did a safe sex sex show in a venue in the Wallen demonstrating them a month later. Eduardo’s cock was the size of a beer bottle, prophylactics were a problem.
My FB Brian Derbyshire who owned a Leather Hotel across/down the street from me (Julie you may have known him, he wrote a bit for Gay News, then Gay Times, then HIM. His dream was to have a little gay B&B in Amsterdam and indeed his dream came true. Life was rough then in London for the Spanner crowd) died, I miss his undressing me with his eyes and that mustache, he knew how to work it. Our mutual friend Bill Ward who did “Drum” comic strip for Drummer Magazine, A “Leather Fraternity” died in London a year or so after I had moved to Amsterdam, he did a comic strip about me. Another story.
Paul who ran “The Eagle” (all gay “Eagle” bars evolved from being WWII servicemen PTSD therapy venues), and “Dirty Dicks” is dead, he steered me to men who enjoyed my rather large “personality” in his sex club. Club Jacques is long closed, where I met my husband while I was sitting in the window with my shirt off being muscularly not Dutch. [Side 3: de wallen was an area saturated with gay leather bars].
I don’t think sex and drug, or tourist trade scales. The streets there are now impassable, it’s a layer cake of exploitation, and nobody speaks Dutch. In 1993 I was chased on Warmoestraat while driving a pristine Inca Orange BMW 2002 (national color) by a crowd of shaved head men in black polo shirts buttoned to the neck, and bulky blue jeans rolled up high over boots, baseball bats, saw my little car. That’s when I noticed the smashed in cars and windows along the street, I knew which alleys o could drive through and ones not and got away. My heart in my throat. British Hooligans at a major soccer event come into the city for a little Ultraviolence. Not even remotely possible to get away like a mini “Italian Job” driving today.
An Erotisch Centrum can’t scale the sex at de wallen. Singapore learned the hard way. I lived in the Malaysian jungle of Sabah in the late 80’s on a photography fellowship for a year, and aside from an apartment in Kota Kinabalu, I went to Singapore for civilization, and found to my horror that Jalan Bugis was gone, just demolished. It was also a warren-like maze of tranny/hooker dens, demolishes, then Singapore tried to periodically rebuild it into a manageable tranny/hooker warren for the tourist trade, but bringing the dead to life was impossible.
[Do see “Saint Jack”, Peter Bogdanovitch’s treatment of Theroux’s book, about a pimp in Bugis street. The perennially hot Ben Gazzara stars. My fantasy film team has Telly Savales, Ben Gazzara, Anthony Quinn, Jim Brown, Clint Walker, John Cassavetes, Ernest Borgnine, and John Amos running a male sex club in de wallen where Topol falls in love with Sean Connery who is a hustler with a heart of gold]
Xaviera seemed to have made sex work work. When I was at birthday parties at her house in the cushy north part of Mokum Alef (the name of Amstedam, I like the Yiddish word Mokum, sounds like coffee), it was much better than my penthouse. I never had the chance to really talk to her 1:1 about “work”. Last I saw her was at a Klezmatics concert. She’s a hoot.
Perhaps only women should be allowed to manage women.
Hi Julie, I have no reason to object to your belief that the Amsterdam situation is worse for the women than elsewhere. But the only such evidence that I could see from what you wrote, was that more women had been trafficked due to legalization. Well that obviously is good reason to object to the Netherlands situation. But do all prostitutes suffer equally everywhere, so is it the increased numbers who are pushed into it which is your main objection?
An earlier interview by you concluded that prostitution is torture. So is it simply the same torture everywhere? If you think that, I think it would be helpful if you said so.
I share your hope, Julie. The contemporary ramping up of misogyny and corruption has to stop.
Thank you Julie.
I’ve learned so much about this insidious industry from you.
Carry on boldly!
One thing I really like about Julie Bindel's writing is she goes behind the propaganda and shows people what is really going on. In this case, it sounds like Amsterdam's approach completely failed to reduce prostitution's harms. I suspect it did not work because there is no way to make prostitution "safe" or "pleasant" or a "normal job". I think the nature of the work is awful, I think the customers are frequently awful, and the pimps are also awful. Basically, I suspect there is no way to prevent prostitution from harming prostitutes. I do not think sex was meant to be something which can be bought and sold. I suspect buying and selling it leads to shame, depression, trauma, and drug/alcohol use.
"Erotic Centre" could not be less sexy if you tried! There's a connection between this "Dutch progressivism" on prostitution and the Dutch Protocols (DeVries, Cohen-Kettenis, Steensma, et al, 2014) advocating wrong sex hormones after puberty blockers, followed by sex trait modification surgeries for teens diagnosed as "trans" or "gender dysphoric." It is the centuries-old attitude of superiority in the social and scientific world, going back to the innovation of the dikes which took back the land from the sea around the year 900. There's a mentality of arrogant superiority, whereby movers and shakers in The Netherlands believe they lead the world with innovative approaches to society's problems. A couple of Dutch journalists have written about this, but of course it isn't reported outside of gender critical circles. The puberty blocker concept came from the actual dissatisfaction of adults who "transitioned" after normal puberty and imagined themselves "passing" better if they'd done the hormones and procedures earlier. Thus, children are trafficked into permanent sexual dysfunction by "researchers."
On the mark article, but there are three other sides to the story. Fond memories.
I lived in Amsterdam for most of the 90’s and lived for a year in De Wallen. I had vacated the US in 1990 because everyone I knew was dead, lived in a commune in Paris for three years working in music research and got tired of the crazy, and in 1993 rented a room for a year in de wallen are from a friend who managed a sex club / Leather Bar.
I had the bizarre experience of having my (tiny) bedroom window open onto the airshaft above a tranny bar. The air shaft had a 2nd window above the tranny bar jukebox so I was lulled to sleep at night by “I Will Always Love You” or some ditty about a man who “had long sexy legs”. Not ideal.
One day I came home from my tech job and the adjacent ground floor door was smashed in. Seems there were tranny hookers living there and something went wrong with their pimp. This all went down three doors from a police station, big fucking help.
When I lived there what was remarkable to me were the number of tranny hookers and Muslim guys drooling over them in red windows. There are two kind of people I can see from a mile away. A man with AIDS who’s on Crixivan (fat belly, thin arms, facial wasting), and a man dressed as a hooker. I know from tranny hookers. Lots in De Wallen (or de wallen, more local form). [Side 1: red windows have a lot of tranny hookers, not just Eastern European women].
[Side 2] Now there aren’t just red lights, there are also lots of blue lights, in doorways. That’s because you can see veins in a red light, but you can’t in a blue light. Nobody wants a dead junky in front of their door in the morning in de wallen so you get blue lights, because they can’t shoot up. Because where you have tranny hookers and pimps, and feral Moroccan boys, you have junky’s (Dutch apostrophised plural).
My walk home from a parking garage in central station involved avoiding junky’s selling “ecstasy” (spoken in a raspy voice which made Harvey Fierstein sound like Glinda the Good warbling in the Oz movie where she’s not skeletal, and people sang, not screamed). The entire area is saturated with drugs, not “soft drugs” as the Dutch say, like marijuana, but Coke and Heroin and Meth, where “I’ll shoot/snort in instead of take out.” [A straight, chubby American hippie friend of mine from Paris who hit me up for odd jobs to make a little money in Amsterdam, especially when I had a penthouse on Keisersgracht years later, suddenly appears one day gaunt, needing 100 Gulden. I gave him cash and got him to do some odd jobs to save face, he didn’t want a donation, then a few months later his son shows up with him, Meth gaunt - sweating, jittery - for some folding money. They look quite ill, Amsterdam floats on drug money. I heard later they died. Like Sharon Stone as Katherine Trammell in “Basic Imstinct” people I like or love tend to die I sometimes think.]
Eventually (years later, I’m in SF now) My FB Eduardo, 6’ Brazilian/Arabic model who owned the Argos, oldest leather bar in Europe, sold it and it closed. I taught him to use Femidom’s and he did a safe sex sex show in a venue in the Wallen demonstrating them a month later. Eduardo’s cock was the size of a beer bottle, prophylactics were a problem.
My FB Brian Derbyshire who owned a Leather Hotel across/down the street from me (Julie you may have known him, he wrote a bit for Gay News, then Gay Times, then HIM. His dream was to have a little gay B&B in Amsterdam and indeed his dream came true. Life was rough then in London for the Spanner crowd) died, I miss his undressing me with his eyes and that mustache, he knew how to work it. Our mutual friend Bill Ward who did “Drum” comic strip for Drummer Magazine, A “Leather Fraternity” died in London a year or so after I had moved to Amsterdam, he did a comic strip about me. Another story.
https://lgbthistoryuk.org/wiki/Bryan_Derbyshire
Paul who ran “The Eagle” (all gay “Eagle” bars evolved from being WWII servicemen PTSD therapy venues), and “Dirty Dicks” is dead, he steered me to men who enjoyed my rather large “personality” in his sex club. Club Jacques is long closed, where I met my husband while I was sitting in the window with my shirt off being muscularly not Dutch. [Side 3: de wallen was an area saturated with gay leather bars].
I don’t think sex and drug, or tourist trade scales. The streets there are now impassable, it’s a layer cake of exploitation, and nobody speaks Dutch. In 1993 I was chased on Warmoestraat while driving a pristine Inca Orange BMW 2002 (national color) by a crowd of shaved head men in black polo shirts buttoned to the neck, and bulky blue jeans rolled up high over boots, baseball bats, saw my little car. That’s when I noticed the smashed in cars and windows along the street, I knew which alleys o could drive through and ones not and got away. My heart in my throat. British Hooligans at a major soccer event come into the city for a little Ultraviolence. Not even remotely possible to get away like a mini “Italian Job” driving today.
An Erotisch Centrum can’t scale the sex at de wallen. Singapore learned the hard way. I lived in the Malaysian jungle of Sabah in the late 80’s on a photography fellowship for a year, and aside from an apartment in Kota Kinabalu, I went to Singapore for civilization, and found to my horror that Jalan Bugis was gone, just demolished. It was also a warren-like maze of tranny/hooker dens, demolishes, then Singapore tried to periodically rebuild it into a manageable tranny/hooker warren for the tourist trade, but bringing the dead to life was impossible.
[Do see “Saint Jack”, Peter Bogdanovitch’s treatment of Theroux’s book, about a pimp in Bugis street. The perennially hot Ben Gazzara stars. My fantasy film team has Telly Savales, Ben Gazzara, Anthony Quinn, Jim Brown, Clint Walker, John Cassavetes, Ernest Borgnine, and John Amos running a male sex club in de wallen where Topol falls in love with Sean Connery who is a hustler with a heart of gold]
Xaviera seemed to have made sex work work. When I was at birthday parties at her house in the cushy north part of Mokum Alef (the name of Amstedam, I like the Yiddish word Mokum, sounds like coffee), it was much better than my penthouse. I never had the chance to really talk to her 1:1 about “work”. Last I saw her was at a Klezmatics concert. She’s a hoot.
Perhaps only women should be allowed to manage women.
Hi Julie, I have no reason to object to your belief that the Amsterdam situation is worse for the women than elsewhere. But the only such evidence that I could see from what you wrote, was that more women had been trafficked due to legalization. Well that obviously is good reason to object to the Netherlands situation. But do all prostitutes suffer equally everywhere, so is it the increased numbers who are pushed into it which is your main objection?
An earlier interview by you concluded that prostitution is torture. So is it simply the same torture everywhere? If you think that, I think it would be helpful if you said so.
Ian Mordant