SEX, DRUGS AND WAFFLES

Actually, I’m not going to go into the waffles here, except to say they were delicious. I just threw in a reference to breakfast pastry to soften the headline a little.

I’m in Amsterdam, which is as close as you can get to Disneyland for adults without an invitation to spend the weekend at Silvio Burlesconi’s private villa. Sex and drugs. Legal but not free. It’s like the inversion of the hippy dream. In fact, it’s how the hippy dream would look if it were acquired in a hostile takeover by the Disney Corporation. So yeah, Disneyland for adults it is.

The most striking thing about the whole set up is not its prominence – and it is entirely indiscreet – but how comfortably integrated it is with the rest of the city. There’s absolutely no blush or tut-tut at all. At four in the afternoon school-run mothers cycle past the flesh and sexual paraphernalia on display in the cat-house doorways and sex-shop windows, their children perched on the luggage racks of their bikes. Along the central canal a middle-aged couple feed bread to the hungry swans, blind to the flashing neon behind them advertising dinner and a sex show at a reasonable price. An aging hooker looks on in absentminded boredom as a man buys a falafel from the kebab shop next door. I can’t quite decide whether this is liberated, tolerant or just weird.

Beyond sex slavery, which is abhorrent in all its forms, I find it difficult to condemn the trade, or feel anything about it at all actually. Taken in isolation it feels pretty conventional, particularly in this heavily regulated setting. Just cash for services rendered. What makes it seedy, at least to my mind, is not the commoditisation of sex, which I suppose I should object to, yet feel strangely unconcerned by, it is the voyeurism of those who have absolutely no intention of paying for sex. The sight of groups of men – and it’s almost always groups – intoxicated to varying degrees by various substances, using the district as an informal, un-ticketed ogling tour seems a far more offensive form of objectification than actually employing one of the women. I’m not sure if this makes me an apologist for the sex industry or just an arch capitalist. Either way, it does make me a hypocrite, having treated the district as just another stop on the sightseeing tour myself.

But I can’t help feeling that this window-shopping is a massive liberty, making zoo animals of the women who preen and tap the glass like sexualised dancing bears. At least those men who step through the window and draw the curtain are actually paying for the privilege – the negotiation and exchange of money in some ways empowering the woman and giving her a value, which is denied her by those whose approval of the trade goes only so far as to look but not touch. To me, being prepared to look but not pay is hypocritical insincerity; in many ways worse than actually forking out for sex. It’s a condemnation and tacit approval in the same breath.

And I can’t escape the feeling that the most aggressive ‘look-but-not-touchers’, those who spend the most time openly leering at the working girls, are certain to be the men most likely to be implacable if their girlfriend or wife revealed that she used to be on the game. Although that might well say more about my own prejudices than it does theirs.

I guess it comes down to personal morality, a term not unlike ‘absolutely unique’ in that the first half is redundant. Ultimately issues of sex, like issues of religion, are entirely the preserve of the people involved. The degree to which is it exploitative depends on individual circumstances. All I can say is that professional sex is not for me, even if the women plying the trade in Amsterdam are, by any standards, absolutely stunning*.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson

* Insert note of heavy irony here.

The European office of the New York Stock Exchange is situated at the south-eastern corner of the sex district. Given the press that brokers have been getting since the credit crunch it is perhaps a neat fit. Although, to be fair, I’m not sure the hookers would be delighted with the comparison.*

* Yes, it is lazy joke making.