A few days in Amsterdam. I found a lovely hotel in the Red Light District (and I'm being sarcastic here) The room was cheap (30 Guilders a night) and the hotel was near the train station, the two criteria I had when I stumbled into town. To get to my room, I had to go up three different flights of stairs, separated by two dingy halls, and through four fire doors (a rather labyrinthine hotel I must say). My single room overlooked Warmoesstraat. The Cinema Adonis was right across the street and if I poked my head out the window, I could see the Club Argonaut and the Buddy-Buddy Bar down the block (I seemed to be in the gay section of the Red Light District, although, much to my disappointment there wasn't a red light to be seen from my hotel room).
The room itself was tiny. I could stand in the middle and touch both walls with my fingertips, without really trying. Graffiti littered the walls (not much of a surprise). Scratched into the wall right above my pillow was written:
just LOVE ME
please
DON'T!! HURT ME
!!just love me!!
What was happening in this sad, saggy single bed?! Over by the sink was written:
PEACE
FOR
EVERY
HUMANBIAN
END DON'T FERGET
please please please LOVE EVERYBODY
At night into the heart of the Red Light District! But it wasn’t what I expected on this my first trip. Being of a Libertarian bent, I always liked the idea of a truly free place, a place where one could find and imbue all those necessary evils of our repressed society. A place where one could get drugs, whores, if one wanted. I've always been against the moral posturing of our government and its constant quest to legislate the morality of the American people. Hell, if I want to take drugs, I should be allowed to. If a woman wants to sell her body for sex and a man wants to pay for it, all the power to them (have at it, have fun). That's what I've always thought (and I still do). But I also always thought that a place which was free, like Amsterdam, would be a festive, happy place; a place where people are able to live out their fantasies, do what they want when they want, not live in guilt and fear. But as far as I can tell it's not, it's rather depressing.
Walking around it all seemed so sad.
Yes there are women who sit in their lingerie on black vinyl stools or chairs in red lit windows beckoning to passersby. It's true. They have a little bag of make-up by their feet, a curtain which can be pulled when it's time to get to business. And what I found surprising was that most of the women are not Dutch, most are Asian or black, South American, immigrants. And most of them are pathetically ugly (Imagine me stuffed in a tight pink teddy, lipstick, rouge, a long black wig, you'll get the idea). Oh, there are a few that are good looking (but not particularly sexy), dancing about their little windows to entice the tourists, but not many (the ugly ones don't even try to be sexy, just sit there looking dazed and bored). And the music they listen to, one had on cheesy Spanish disco; another listened to a Madonna rip off on; still a third had (I swear): Edith Piaf. And what was really surprising was that men were going in, stepping up to the door and asking "Hoeveel kost ...?" or "Combien de ...?" or "How much?" I must've seen fifteen or twenty bargains stuck in my hour and a half walk (Most along this near deserted stretch of the Geldersekade, no tourists, just intent, lonely men and the ugliest of whores). And I don't think this was all that sad (pathetic yes, but not sad ... well maybe sad too (to think that I thought I was sad and lonely! These men come here to get something they can't get at home or in their day to day life. They can't get love and sex in their life! And these women have no other option but to provide it! What is wrong with our society?)).
But the really weird shit was happening in the middle of the District, along the Achterburg Wal (a canal with streets lining either bank). Here the tourists swarmed along in huge packs, German octogenarians, American retirees from the Midwest, Japanese families (little kids too), British pensioners, American and German college students, just walking up and down the street gawking at all the decadence. It was so weird! Families with little kids?! And a doorman of a sex club would yell out "Bumsies, bumsies" in a Indian accent, or "Good family entertainment" in a clipped British. the tourists giggled, pointed at the lurid pictures below the marquee, and walked on. They'd stop at the window of a sex shop and point out the cock rings to each other, the huge rubber dildos (two feet long, a foot in circumference (I'm not making this up)), the two headed dildos, the life-sized rubber fists. They'd stand at the window like it was Macy’s on Thanksgiving Day and the new display had just gone up -- but they'd never go in (heaven forbid!). And every other door is a pub or a cafe, with folks sitting out at plastic tables taking in the night air like there were along the banks of the Seine, or on Newbury Street or something.
The Red Light District is a tourist attraction! But sin should not be for tourists!
At one point along the way, I passed this group of Scottish men (about seven of them, college age) waiting on the street for their friend who had gone into one of the red windows. Curtains drawn, they were chanting "Howie! Howie! Howie!" like it was a football game, or a wrestling match. In the day, this area is quiet, a few cafes, a few people, but at night it turns into a carnival.
Does this all seem slightly sick? It does to me, Foucault was right in saying that ours was a perverse culture, not because it is infatuated by the perverse, but because it is indeed perverse, through and through (no offense). And who is more degraded by all this? The women who have to dance in the sex shows, or stand behind the rouge glass trying to look alluring, or the idiots who stare at them from the street (and that includes me, I was there too, stalking my way through the crowds in my loose jacket and tattered baggy chinos, combat boots, hands deep in my pockets, head down. I couldn't look at anyone straight on, not the tourists, not the whores, just scowled at everyone from under by brow (I must've looked like a true pervert))?
On my way back to my hotel room, I passed through the the Dam (the main square of the city, well away from the Red Light District). There I stumbled upon this pack of pubescent girls in black leotards dancing about with strips of rubber (they used the rubber alternatively like boa, doing a Marilyn Monroe move, and a whip, slapping themselves and gyrated) to this smarmy song from "A Chorus Line" ("I Can Do That"). It's a scary world. It turned out that these girls were part of the "9th World Gymnaestrada," whatever that may be. But they did have a weird sort of resonance with those other women in the red glass aquariums ... I don't know which I found more terrifying.
Back in my hotel room, I got ready for bed: you know, cold cream the make-up off, hair net, brush and floss. Then tried to get to sleep. But below my window, just as I was nodding off, this fight broke out in the street. It quickly progressed through the yelling obscenities stage (I'm guessing that's what they were yelling, they were yelling in Dutch), to the throwing of fists and inanimate objects stage. It ended with someone throwing a big cinder block through someone else's window, and then everybody ran (some chasing others). Sleep well.
