Perhaps earier generations knew something that we have forgotten: Selling and buying s8x may be the oldest trade in the book, but it isn’t the basis for a viable civilisation.
My advice to my younger self – Find a nice girl and marry her. Sure you will be bored. But you will also be happy.

Men want sex. Women who are willing to sell sex for money are inevitably going to be seen as merchants and the sexual use of their bodies will be seen as nothing more than a service. If the service is very expensive, complex to arrange, and conducted under more refined conditions, the merchant and the service are likely to be regarded more positively and treated with greater care. Not always, but more often than not. If the service is provided under the most coarse and meaningless conditions then the service will be seen as being worth much less, the provider will be regarded with less esteem – perhaps even contempt. Not always, but more often than not. This is the difference between dining at a fine restaurant and getting a burger at MacDonalds drive thru. This is also the difference between an expensive ‘date’ with a high classed escort in a nice hotel versus sexual intercourse with a woman who is advertising herself by sitting in a window. Both are merchants selling a service, but they are regarded and treated differently by their customers. That this surprises anyone seems disingenuous to me. That you get more of this if you legalize it and advertise it and make your country the world’s best known purveyor is breathtakingly ignorant. If you see this kind of cheap, meaningless, commercial sex as degrading but you make it a profitable business then your community and your culture will be degraded. This is an example of people getting what they asked for and then lamenting the entirely obvious effect that it produces.

You can’t have your cake and eat it too on the emancipation of women. Julie Bindel is once more experiencing the paradox of liberalism rumning up against reality.

There is always this tendency to romanticise prostitution. Hollander’s ‘Happy Hooker’ is one. Sydney Biddle Burrows’ ‘Mayflower Madam’ is another. And as for ‘Pretty Woman’…! The trick only works if you are in happy ignorance about what the real thing looks like.
The problem is we don’t really know what the real thing looks like. Are the girls Julie spoke to typical? It’s been reported that students take on sex work to finance their studies (https://theconversation.com/student-sex-work-is-happening-and-universities-need-to-respond-with-health-services-167767). If so, there ought to be quite a lot of middle class, middle aged graduates out there, with dark secrets in their pasts. Gentlemen, you might even be married to one!
We really do need to find out more, if we are to protect the women who choose to take on this line of work.

All this may be true and the seedy awful human trafficking side cannot be denied. Then again, I still do think that being in a red light window is safer than working from for instance one of the ‘puti clubs’ far from civilisation along Spanish motor ways on industrial sites (polígonos) for instance. The usually illegal women there are alone and vulnerable in the middle of nowhere, completely ignored by law enforcement and indeed Never seen by anyone but their pimps and customers. Where there is demand there will be offer. Sex work is usually not a free choice or at least a desperate one. Making it illegal however only makes it worse and less safe. In the olden days the local red light ladies were known, they worked for themselves, they were greeted by everyone and were part of the fabric of the community. My grandparents lived in Amsterdam all their lives and were friendly with some of them. I fear that in a way the sex trade has also hardened and became much worse for the (men and) women in it by globalisation and large scale organisations.

It beggars belief there are still people on this site, in this world, who can witness with their own two eyes the effects of legalization on the people and communities where it happens, and still argue that it’s just fine. It’s a bit like the unbelievable fact that after 200 years of one abject failure after another, there are somehow still self-professed Marxists out there. The Marxists and the libertines all put their faith in their ideology over the plain reality of how humans are actually made.

As they say, people get the govt they deserve. Sadly for those of us in the minority, we get the govt they deserve, too.

Anyone that knows the name of Anja’s organisation?

“Men in De Wallen have no respect for the women they ogle.” Neither do the women in the windows have any respect for themselves.

This article makes it sound as if the Walletjes neighborhood with its masses of horny window-shoppers and oppressed women is a brand-new phenomenon, caused by “legalisation”. But none of that is true. I can vouch that it was flourishing in the early 1960s, and had been for much longer; and that it looks worse now may well be due to the multiplying British tourists, who have gained reputations for behaving swinishly from there to Ibiza . As to legalisation, Dutch laws about human conduct are not enforced according to Anglo-American rules. Instead, when it’s obvious that people are breaking them but enforcement would be impractical, the politicians call for a “gedoogbeleid“, or a policy of tolerance, meaning: “Don’t do it, WINK-WINK”, but without necessarily changing existing laws, so that they can enforce them if things get too far out of hand. That has long been the policy toward illegal drugs, also — even though the “enforcement” part often seemed lost in some bottom drawer at City Hall.

The red light district may not be perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than what I’ve seen in countries where prostitution is illegal e.g. England where underage girls fall into the hands of grooming gangs or are made to stand on the streets waiting for curb crawlers. It just needs to be better regulated so that the women are in charge and not their pimps. The situation there got uglier due to the large influx of male immigrants that started to come in to the Netherlands during the 1990s from places like Eastern Europe and North Africa.
I used to work in a bar in the red light. It was one of the best experiences of my life and I met so many fascinating people from all over the world. The Dutch have quite an open attitude toward sex and I’d hate to think of Amsterdam going the same way as London or New York – once vibrant cities that are now rather tame and lackluster, catering as they do to the unadventurous type of tourists.

Xavier’s was never a “notorious pimp” in Amsterdam. She was the top madam in New York, then wrote her book, and with the proceeds, opened a legit boutique hotel in Amsterdam (still there today). She was a smart, lively woman with a hilarious sense of humor and not the best place to focus one’s moral outrage.

We walked through De Wallen this year, and it is frankly a little seedy and maybe depressing for our middle class tastes, but most of the stories about gangsters are apocryphal, and the negatives are nearly all anecdotal. Drunk British tourists are the bane of capitals all over Europe. There are far worse places in the world for puritan anti-sex crusaders like Ms. Bindel to dwell on.

No community will be successful when all its businesses are operating in the same trade. It makes no more sense than requiring all the coffee shops or bars be in a single neighbourhood. If prostitution is legal, it should be legal everywhere in the country, rather than being forced to cluster in a single neighbourhood.,

Where there are buyers there will be sellers. Where the sellers are is where the buyers will be. Nasty that some men treat women as pieces of meat, but then again, that’s how some women advertise themselves.

You’re wasting your time Julie.
I stayed in Haarlem (a beautiful town 20 minutes from Amsterdam) recently, and the 5* hotel there had flyers in the welcome pack for hookers.
They don’t call it the World’s oldest profession for nothing.

Anyone seen the LUPANAR (Brothel) in Pompeii?
If not, prepare to be ‘educated’.
“Nunc est bibendum “.

Now this is an issue? That trade has been going on, well, forever. Perhaps if there are abuses of the sex workers, more attention to that is needed.

The real problem here is the ridiculously prurient, even neurotic sexual attitude of Semitic Christianity towards copulation and nudity in general. Nothing has been the same since Eve revealed her voluptuous body in the Garden of Eden, and Adam was unable to control his priapism.*

The Ancient Greeks and Romans took a far more pragmatic view of this very ‘natural’ subject, although the Greeks views on pederasty are still somewhat beyond the pale.

(* Named after you know who?)