Amsterdam's Red Light District: Freedom or Bondage?

My wife and I were in Amsterdam this week and one evening we made our way to what we were told was the best Tibetan restaurant in the city.  En route, we passed through part of ‘De Wallen’, the famed/infamous Red Light District.

I understand that the majority of sex workers are coerced into ‘the industry’; something that is entirely reprehensible.  In this blog, however, I want to reflect on those sex workers in Amsterdam’s Red Light district who state that their involvement is a genuinely free, commercial choice.  For the purposes of this article, I will not dispute their claim.

I am not remotely prudish, I respect individuals’ freedom to engage in the consensual sexual activities of their choice, I acknowledge that some people might choose to become sex workers, that there are many reasons why people choose to engage their services and, in general, I prefer regulation to prohibition in the arena of ‘public morality’.  I was, nonetheless, disturbed by my fleeting experience of De Wallen.  

In truth, I was initially a little slow on the uptake; we entered the area in daylight so red lights were at a minimum.  I mistook the first young woman I saw for a lingerie manikin until she waved; in my defence her window was beside a clothes shop.

There might well be racier windows in the area, but in the ones we passed on our way to the restaurant, greater ‘exposure’ could be encountered on hundreds of Mediterranean beaches.  The poses were not provocative; indeed listlessness pervaded.  What I found disturbing was the fact that it was happening at all.

I felt a kind of hollow sadness and despair that anyone, male or female, might choose to put themselves on display so that others could ‘rent’ their bodies for a few minutes of non-relational sex.  That anyone should consider ‘renting’, I found chilling.  The whole thing smacked of those disgraceful accounts of slave auctions from the past.  For bodies to be reduced to commodities and for sex to be reduced to manipulating bits and pieces of anatomy, I found profoundly dehumanising.  Perhaps in pornography, some half-hearted pretence might be made that desire, passion or mutual lust is involved; in DeWallen no pretence at all was evident.

There was no respect to be discerned anywhere.  I gained no impression that the women were being treated with respect by anyone and I could see absolutely no reason why, at most, the women ought to treat their clients with anything other than disdain.  It was an untrammeled exercise in personal liberty, devoid of personal relationship.  To quote one of the great commentators on human nature, Leonard Cohen, ‘It looks like freedom, but it feels like death’