Red Light, Green Light

I recently had the incredible good fortune to spend nearly a week with some of my favourite people in a city I now have a swooning crush on: Amsterdam. Its winding canals and cobblestone streets and unbelievably, impossibly ubiquitous bicycles (not to mention its accompanying civilized cycling culture, in which bicycles always have the right of way) hooked me.

Our hosts, my friends Wanda and Craig, had made Amsterdam their home for the past 8 months, and made sure we had ample opportunity to explore by creaky, fixed-gear fietsen. They lead us down narrow streets, over canal bridges, through densely populated parks and throngs of other cyclists with an easy familiarity that I found baffling. A couple of days into our visit, we decided to pass through the fabled Red Light District. I have dim memories of my first visit there, nine years ago, recalling mostly that I felt then that the city had two faces, a glossy, shiny one for daytime and a decidedly more debaucherous one at night. As you no doubt know, prostitution is legal in the Netherlands, and many sex workers ply their trade openly, in street-level windows illuminated by red lights. I remember walking through the streets back then under the overprotective arm of an American rugby player, who I met (along with his girlfriend, who had the other arm) while traveling and spent a few days with. We watched with wide-eyed fascination as women in g-strings gyrated and beckoned in our direction, and men in actual trench coats offered us drugs. We scurried through the streets, trying to be cool and take it all in, none of us wanting to admit to the others that we were freaked out. This time around, I thought, my matured gaze could handle it better. I couldn't wait to see it all again with fresh eyes.

Amsterdam's Red Light District is controversial for those of us in the business of trying to work out how sex workers' safety, human rights and dignity can best be preserved. It is, for some, upheld as a bastion of freedom, in which sex workers can join unions, receive health benefits, work in secure spaces and find widespread acceptance that their work is valid and respectable. It's also seen as a way of ghettoizing sex workers and their patrons, keeping them separate and removed (physically, and by extension conceptually) from the rest of 'civilized' society. I was raring to meander the streets and to see for myself, and had plans to visit the Prostitution Information Centre, where visitors can learn about the Netherlands' sex work laws, have a walking tour of the Red Light District by Centre staff (all former sex workers); but even sex work advocates take Easter Sunday off. It was closed, and I didn't return to it.

So we wandered the neighbourhood ourselves. “I never really go down there,” Wanda had said to me the day before. “I don't like it. It's not the women that bother me, though, it's the groups of guys, I'm disgusted by them.” This got me thinking about something we talk about at work sometimes, about the tension between being pro-sex work and still feeling discomfort (and judgement) about Johns, the (mostly) men who pay for sex workers' services. I squared my jaw and thought to myself, “You can't be grossed out by the customers if you believe the business is a legitimate one. That's the just and non-hypocritical way to look at it.” And then we entered the neighbourhood.

It was teeming with men. Groups of foreign, mostly english-speaking guys crowded every bar's patio, and individuals and pairs of men wandering the streets, stopping to point and gesture at women separated from them only by a pane of glass. The looks on some of their faces reminded me of that cartoon wolf (was it a Looney Toon?) who used you drool and snarl and howl and look hypnotized when that woman in a hot red dress would pass by. They seemed delighted with themselves, confidence bolstered by morning beer. They snapped photos (despite the signs on every agency wall insisting we refrain from doing so) and made lecherous, immature comments. We were followed into a store (comically named SexyLand Erotic Supermarket) by a group of tall, stocky English guys who clearly thought it was ok to invite themselves into our personal space, sidling up beside us while we were looking at underwear and stockings, and ask “See anything you like? I'll get it for you if you do.” They'd chuckle wildly and loudly at each other's banter; we left. “They were enjoying that way too much for us not to be getting paid for it,” I sighed to my friends when we were away from their gaze. As a sidenote: this was the precise moment when I realized how much my perspective has shifted over the past decade.

Of course, there are customers who don't behave this way; we just didn't see them, because they're so much quieter and less conspicuous than the ones who do. While the Dutch men (friends and family of Wanda's) I talked to about my work back home and about the Netherlands' prostitution laws had mature and nuanced approaches to the issue, throngs of tourists to the area are clearly leagues behind in having any kind of analysis about prostitution as an industry, like any other, whose workers are entitled to operate free from harrassment and degradation. It makes me doubt that the Red Light District really accomplishes what I think should be broader goals of communities that embrace either legalization or decriminalization of sex work: normalizing and integrating the industry into the rest of society. The spectacle of it, the erotic supermarkets, the women (and some girls) in windows, the drunken, sunburned guys making obnoxious gestures through the windows, the tacky souvenirs (my favorite: a sex worker in a glittery snowglobe), trivializes the industry, invites voyeurism without requiring any standard of behaviour in return, and distracts from any semblance of intelligent conversations about sex work. While sex workers may receive a generally positive social response from Dutch citizens, the Red Light District feels like something of a theme park both staffed by and designed for visitors (as many as 95% of sex workers in the area are from other countries). I expected better. “You imagined emancipation and you got a freak show?” my office-mate suggested.

Exactly.