Legalizing Prostitution: From Illicit Vice to Lawful Business (35 page)

PERSONABLE
: she smiles and engages you in non-selling banter.
PATIENT
: she will spend a little time getting to know you in terms of your interaction style. She makes no demands on you, never says anything implying you’re less of a man for whatever reason. . . .
SOBER AND INDEPENDENT
: she’s not under the influence of drugs or alcohol or a guy [e.g., pimp] watching out for her movements.
EXPERIENCED
: she’s done this before. . . .
CLEAN
: her place is orderly, she takes pride in her kamer [window room] and her work. … She doesn’t get easily distracted from your conversation or your session. . . .
¹⁵⁷

But a few weeks later, Bookguy offered a word of caution:

Beware, however, that she also could be misleading about how convivial she would be during a session, because she might be a great salesperson but not so great a service provider. In short, there’s not really any sure way of determining whether or not the gal will be excellent at the agreed-upon services or not, at least not strictly from a mere encounter and glance from the street.
¹⁵⁸

He added that the “most reliable information” could be found in the reviews of specific women on client’s message boards. The Ignatzmice website features a list of all known workers, their specific window location, descriptions of their physical attributes and demeanor, and reviews of their services and performance culled from years of online postings. The objective is to assist men in making informed choices and to help them locate a preferred provider if she has relocated to another window. In addition to the list, many clients post detailed online accounts of their sessions with particular providers, ranging from disastrous to fabulous. And some men wax sentimental about their all-time-favorite provider: “Even years past [
sic
] since I saw her I still miss and love her so much. I think she does not work any more behind the window. So I wish her all the best and happiness. If some of you know something about my sweet Dolores, please let me know.”
¹⁵⁹

As is true for similar websites in other countries, client postings reveal an emergent subculture among sex buyers who share their experiences and advice and participate in the creation of conduct norms, but many of the Netherlands postings are specific to Dutch window or brothel prostitution. And the postings are not limited to carnal interests or to proper etiquette. The men discuss what they have observed in various brothels, windows, and
clubs as well as practical issues regarding hygiene and safe sex in these places. And they debate a wide range of policy issues, sometimes posting newspaper reports and asking for comments. My review of entries found strong criticisms of Amsterdam’s decision to close some of the windows; a debate on whether workers should be registered, as the national government plans to do; questions about how the 2010 Dutch election might impact the sex industry; descriptions of the plusses and minuses of RLDs in other Dutch cities; discussions on whether some providers are forced into prostitution or trafficked from another country; advice on how to spot signs that someone is working involuntarily; and what to do if one believes that a worker has been abused. That some clients are concerned to avoid situations in which a worker is exploited or abused is significant and has also been documented in studies of clients in other societies.
¹⁶⁰

Many of the workers have regular clients whom they see in the windows or elsewhere. In a survey, only 5 percent of window workers said that they had no regular clients, while 47 percent estimated that 30–50 percent of their clients were regulars.
¹⁶¹
One worker told me that she had just spent six hours with one of her regulars at a private location, earning
€
1,000 ($1,400), which, she said, “pays my rent for the month.” I have spoken to another provider, Jasmine, on several occasions. She has worked in Amsterdam’s windows for four years, has a number of regular customers, and makes lots of money. She works about seven hours a day, takes a day or two off each week, and periodically returns to her home country in southern Europe for visits with friends and family but does not sell sex there. Jasmine told me, “I like it. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t do it.”
¹⁶²

Jasmine also sees some of her regular clients, whom she initially met in her window, in their hotel room or apartment. She does not consider herself an “escort,” does not have a website, and does not give out her email address. She told me that seeing a man first in her window, over several visits, allows her to screen him before deciding whether to see him outside. Some clients do not like coming to the red-light district, preferring to see providers under more discreet circumstances. Such private encounters are much more lucrative on a per-client basis than window work is. Like most other window workers in Amsterdam, Jasmine charges
€
50 at the window but
€
400 per two-hour minimum elsewhere, at hotels or apartments, and she tells me that the date usually lasts more than two hours. She prefers out-call work, stating, “I could do this five days a week!” Some weeks she has three or four dates, but other weeks she has none, which explains why she continues working at her window.

Jasmine describes herself as completely independent, never having had a pimp or other manager. She says she does not understand why some other women have pimps and is perplexed by women who advertise and go on blind dates with clients, putting themselves at risk. For her, “It is not only about the money but also about safety.” She says that the window women are “easy to get to” by men who are looking for someone to abuse, because the windows are so accessible, like street prostitution. I asked how often she has arguments or other conflicts with men who approach her window or when inside her room, and she said, “Very rarely. I avoid conflict.”
¹⁶³
Over time she has learned to look for signs of potential problems and screens these men out. Jasmine has established very clear boundaries with clients—no kissing and no sex without a condom, which are reserved “only for a boyfriend.” From her, a client will only get a “girlfriend experience” if he has known her for a very long time; she likes to converse with customers but jealously guards what she calls her “private life.”

Jasmine’s story is presented here to give the reader a sense of how some window workers experience the work, and she differs from at least some other providers along axes that determine the degree of empowerment, exploitation, or risk taking—whether they are pimp managed, know their rights, engage in condomless or other risky practices, and the like.
¹⁶⁴
Jasmine is not unique, however. Almost all the providers in the RLD insist on condoms, and Jasmine told me that the sex workers who are her friends operate with the same safeguards as she does and fully control their working conditions. The survey of window workers discussed earlier in the chapter suggests that a significant proportion of window workers share Jasmine’s work etiquette, although it is by no means universal.

Chapter 4
argued that legalization can be judged superior to criminalization but also that much depends on the specific regulations underpinning any given legal order. The regulations shape the extent of the state’s involvement, the beneficiaries, the community impact, and the degree to which the problems associated with blanket criminalization are reduced. In the aftermath of legal reform, there is naturally a period of adjustment by interested parties and often some amendments to the regulations, designed to address unanticipated problems. Competing interests make the postlegalization period at least somewhat precarious and unpredictable, perhaps resulting in changes that were not the original intent of law reform. What is the Dutch record?

First, a gulf exists between legal and illegal workers and businesses, and key stakeholders consider the illegal sector a major problem. In the legal sector, most proprietors have adjusted to the new regulations even as they find fault with some of them. We have seen that the window owners’ and brothel owners’ associations feel that they are under the government’s microscope and overregulated, while the illegal enterprises escape oversight precisely because they are clandestine. Other interest groups offer mixed assessments of the new regime. The premier Dutch prostitutes’ rights organization Red Thread considers legalization an improvement over the previous arrangement but also wants to see fewer restrictions and more guarantees of civil and labor rights. Red Thread favors a nationwide enforcement of existing labor laws; opposes caps on the number of sex businesses allowed in a jurisdiction, leaving it to what the market will bear; wants a hotline created for workers to report abuses to the authorities and a mobile unit to investigate infringements of rights; opposes restrictive controls on independent providers; and wants the state to facilitate small enterprises owned and operated by the workers themselves.
¹⁶⁵
Red Thread opposes registration of workers and the proposal to set the minimum age at 21 instead of 18.

Second, have labor relations changed appreciably under legalization? Prostitutes now have rights vis-à-vis owners and managers, but, as is common elsewhere, most opt not to assert them.
¹⁶⁶
As of 2004, only 60 percent of sex workers knew about the 2000 law, and of these, less than 40 percent considered it a good thing.
¹⁶⁷
Today, awareness of the law is more widespread, but concerns about its benefits persist. It is not surprising that sex workers would be slow to assert their rights. As a population that is stigmatized and has never had rights, it is risky for prostitutes suddenly to begin claiming them. A change in their legal situation does not necessarily translate into empowerment, even when workers are aware of their rights and the specific avenues for holding employers and customers accountable. Reluctant to take an owner to court, disgruntled workers tend to change employers instead. After a decade of decriminalization, brothel owners continue to set the rules, and their workers have little leverage over working conditions. Freelance escorts and window workers are the exception because they do not work for an employer.

Third, has legalization increased the amount of prostitution? It is difficult to answer this question. The legal sector, though diminished in recent years, is nevertheless considered “much more sizeable” than the illegal sector.
¹⁶⁸
There is a popular impression in the Netherlands that illegal prostitution has skyrocketed since legalization, but this cannot be substantiated given the
underground nature of this market both before and after 2000. A 1995 survey reported that one-fifth (22 percent) of Dutch men had bought sex from a prostitute, but we have no recent survey to determine if the number has increased in recent years.
¹⁶⁹
In addition, many clients in the Netherlands are foreign tourists who would not be represented in a survey of Dutch men. It is quite possible that the overall number of sexual transactions has not changed much over the 20-year period before and after legalization (1990–2010), given the tolerant approach taken by the authorities in the decade prior to legalization in 2000. Still, the lack of reliable data makes it impossible to say whether, or how much, it has increased. Data on the size of the market are lacking for most other nations that have legalized prostitution, but in New Zealand, the number of sex workers has not increased since legalization in 2003.
¹⁷⁰

Fourth, how safe are the workers in the legal venues? A Ministry of Justice evaluation concluded that the “the vast majority” of workers in legal brothels, clubs, and windows report that they “often or always feel safe.”
¹⁷¹
Window alarms go off rarely in the main RLD in the Wallen, about twice a month. I have heard alarms on a few occasions, and each time the police arrived within a couple of minutes. Since I began conducting observations in 1997, I have seen increasing numbers of police foot patrols in the RLD over time. In addition, both the police and the window owners have installed video cameras outside the rooms, which they monitor. In an upstairs room above a row of windows, an owner I interviewed had a computer screen showing realtime video from four angles outside his window rooms. He told me that he rarely sees anything that requires his intervention.

A recent survey of 94 window workers reported that 61 percent of them had never experienced a threatening situation at work, 81 percent had never been harassed by a client, and 93 percent had never been abused at work.
¹⁷²
Almost all of those who had such an experience reported that it had happened only rarely. These findings are consistent with the Ministry of Justice’s assessment of safety in legal, indoor settings. When providers leave their shifts, they are typically accompanied by another sex worker, adding to safety. I have observed groups of two and three workers leaving and arriving in the window area when the shift changes in the evening.

Fifth, to what extent is coercive or parasitical third-party involvement a problem? The “great majority” of window prostitutes associate with “a so-called boyfriend or pimp,” according to the government,
¹⁷³
but it is impossible to tell how many workers in the more hidden sector (escorts, underground brothels) have pimps. It has been reported that “problems with pimps occur
relatively frequently among East European, African, and Asian prostitutes,” and most of the pimps in Amsterdam are young Moroccan or Turkish males or older eastern European men.
¹⁷⁴
In fact, an official at the Ministry of Justice told me that the single biggest challenge since legalization has been the difficulty in curbing pimping.
¹⁷⁵

Eastern European pimps monitor their women via frequent phone calls, whereas some other pimps linger near window rooms, either observing their women or trying to intimidate unattached women into forming an association. The pimp will try to convince the woman that she needs protection and may threaten her if she is not interested in his “services.” In the Wallen RLD, I have observed many individuals who appear to be pimps because they simply stand by a row of windows and observe without cruising, a modus operandi confirmed by the police and documented by other researchers.
¹⁷⁶
These men linger for a long period of time, either to intimidate a particular woman or for surveillance over someone who is already connected to them. This public monitoring does not happen outside a closed brothel. Others have been observed talking to a specific woman, as described in my fieldnotes: