VIEW ORIGINALA Girl in The Red Window. My Hour With a Prostitute in Amsterdam’s Infamous Red Light District
I was visiting Amsterdam a short time back. A girl's weekend, two friends and I. After a lovely dinner, they wisely decided to call it a night. I, however, ventured out to the city's infamous Red Light District…alone.
The canals were electric, alive and glowing from the reflection of the bright neon marquess advertising live sex shows and private dances. The narrow cobblestone streets were lit by red lights casting a glow above the small shop windows. That was where the girls were and my real purpose that night.
Some of the girls were more overt, obvious. You know, the ones you'd imagine dressed in black lingerie, heavily contoured cheeks and spiked, shiny boots. A couple had a Britney Spears Oops, I Did It Again feel, with super short pleated kilts and blouses tied high just below their heaving breasts. A few looked more academic, the sexy librarian vibe with messy up-dos and reading glasses teetering on the edge of their noses. There was even one woman who had to be in her sixties, looking so very, very tired and worn. She stood out from the rest.
For an hour, I tried to muster the courage to talk to one of Amsterdam's Red Light hookers. A place where prostitution was legal. I walked the narrow red streets, trying not to overtly stare at the variety of girls selling their bodies in the windows like a variety of cakes in a patisserie.
I'm not sure why I was so intrigued by them or why it was so important for me to hire one for the sole purpose of talking to her and hearing her story. I wasn't sure if I had the nerve. Not the talking bit— that I knew I could do, but to knock on their window in the first place. But as fate would have it, standing in her doorway, one girl started talking to me first. "You," she yelled in a Dutch accent, "you're not allowed to take photos." Putting my phone down, I apologised, explaining that the girls weren't in the pictures, which wasn't exactly true, but with that, I made my introduction.
"Can I pay you to hear your story?" I asked. “You don't have to tell me your name, but I would like complete honesty for everything else.” She looked up and down the street. Outside her window stood one messy older-looking man. She looked back at me and said, "sure, why not?"
She led me back into a tiny room with a small bare bed, a sink, a hook to hang clothes and an emergency panic button. A red glowing light lit all.
"50 euros" was her price for 15 to 20 minutes. "Upfront."I gave her 70 and made myself comfortable as the two of us lay on a vinyl covered mattress that countless had laid on before. There was no where else to sit.
And like teenage girls discussing a crush, I began.
"What would you like me to call you?"
"What would you like to call me?" she smiled. As if she had used that line a thousand times, becoming everything and nothing to everyone who entered that room.
I continued without a name.
I had a thousand questions, but the most obvious was how did it all begin? She smiled, "we all have a story, don't we?"
She was just shy of her 18th birthday when her boyfriend, 22, "put her in the window." She was youthful, beautiful and not yet spoiled. "I was in love," she told me. "But I was too young to know that love doesn't look like that." “It was easy money”, she said. "Although that first time, I remember feeling dirty. Quickly I started making more money than I had ever seen.”“It’s like an addiction, the money, not the sex. That’s why it's so hard to quit.”
She was one of seven sisters, split between two marriages. Her mother, 61, knew what she was doing or what she did back then. “I've quit a couple of times now. But the money drew me back. It always does.” She added, “so my mother doesn't know I'm back at work. But you know, mothers, they always know everything."She spoke of her father with sadness. "I didn't speak to him for six years until he got sick, and then it was too late. I have a lot of regrets about my dad", she shared. He had worked in a laundromat until he hurt his back. "He was a good person", she sadly added. He died at 56.
The girl without a name is forty now. Attractive, tanned and Dutch, with her long dark hair pulled into a high Ariana Grande pony. She spoke of early days when she could earn the equivalent of a couple of thousand euros a night.
She would take “anyone and everyone” who showed up at her window.
That has all changed, she said. I’m pickier now, and the work is so much slower. Of course, covid has directly impacted her taxed income, and there are fewer tourists. Some nights she doesn't break even, as it costs her 200 euros a night to rent the room.
"Would you do it privately," I asked? "No," she said without hesitating. "You can't trust men, any of them. It is safer here."
She spoke of her cliental—mostly men between 20 and 40. Of course, some lesbians too, and couples, she added. "I had one young man before you came. He had never been with a woman. Only men. But his dick wouldn't get hard, so I told him, forget the women honey, you're gay." We laughed.
"What won't you do?" I asked.
"I won't have sex without a condom. Some girls do, and it's their body, so they decide, but I won't." And like Julia Roberts's character in Pretty Woman— she doesn't kiss.Like any hard-working girl, she pays her taxes, goes on holidays and likes to shop. She had a childhood dream of becoming a stewardess. She looked so happy reflecting on that question. "But I needed a second language," she said, "and back then, I struggled in school and with English." She smiled and added ironically— “you need at least two languages in this job too.”
We spoke for almost an hour, even though I had reminded her once that my time had run out. “I will tell you when you have to leave,” she smiled as if she welcomed this nostalgic distraction.
I ended my time with her with this last question.
"What would you tell an 18-year-old girl today if she was thinking of getting into this line of work?"
So got super serious and said, "don't do it!""Why?" I asked.
She answered that it’s a tough job, emotionally very tough.
“I've learned that you can't trust men, any men…and that is why I don't have a boyfriend. This was a repeated theme. And once you are in, it’s so hard to stop.” She looked pensive as she paraphrased a Dutch proverb, "and what you don't know can't hurt you."
"I will give it up…soon," she added. My mind returned to the 60-something woman sitting in another window on some nearby street.
“What will you do?” I asked. “I mean, for money?”
She joked and laughed, “I don't know, maybe I become a stewardess”. Then the laughter subsided, “I guess”, she said, “I will figure it out then."
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