NOOOOOOO! Bring back the brothels and the windows! What is Amsterdam Doing?
Supposedly, corporations are buying up the window brothel hot spots in Amsterdam, Netherlands. They are closing up shop. I am so disappointed! I do not know about you but I dream about going to Amsterdam for the harlots in the windows. I love the fact that the country is so free with their sexuality and that people do not have to deal with half of the bull crap the majority of the American people go through. They should seriously keep to their own set of beliefs, keep the brothels open, and attract tourists.
I skimmed the article so I know there are also other reasons for closing some of the brothels but still. Amsterdam is known for the Red Light District! Do not get rid of it.
I am out!
Link to the article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070920/ap_on_re_eu/netherlands_brothel_clos...
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Agreed! I too dream of going there someday they shouldnt change it. Then it will lose it's charm and attraction!
sad day
I was there in June, and don't worry, there are plenty of windows with hookers. But, as a side note, the Dutch pretty much hate tourists, and only like 6% of them smoke pot. So they don't really give about the Red Light District. Sorry.
b-money
"A cactus is the opposite of a chair. In my house you can sit anywhere but there."
the Australians really not liking Steve Irwin.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth!~JFK
Yeah, but he's one of them. And now he's dead. It's like New Yorkers getting annoyed at Japanese tourists for stopping in the middle of the sidewalk (not to stereotype, but I guess I am...)
b-money
"A cactus is the opposite of a chair. In my house you can sit anywhere but there."
interesting
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth!~JFK
"But, as a side note, the Dutch pretty much hate tourists, and only like 6% of them smoke pot. "
I've been to Amsterdam about 10 times, I used to go twice a year, for the coffee shops mostly. I always got that feeling too, that the Dutch, in Amsterdam anyway, hate tourists. I had a lecturer in college, who was this 60 year old Dutch guy from Amsterdam. He smoked weed and I sorted him out with a bit one time. When he saw the grade of weed I gave him, he asked where I got it. I laughed and said Amsterdam. So he started asking if I'd spent much time there and I went into telling him about friends who lived there and how I visited regularly.
He asked what I did when I was over there, so I said that I was embarassed to admit, but mostly I just smoked weed and wandered about stoned looking for street art to photograph. He said that there was nothing wrong with that, that he spent much of his visits home smoking weed and going to art galleries. So I said that I thought that Dutch people hated all the coffee shop culture, the weed and everything and he confirmed that for me.
He said that was the reason he didn't live in Holland and was why he moved to Ireland, he didn't like the Dutch attitude, it didn't suit him. He said that Dutch people put on a front of being liberal, but it was bullshit. He said that Dutch people were obbssessed with being the best at everything, which includes tolerance. He highlighted a distinction between being liberal and being tolerant of liberalism. Basically he said he hated living in Holland because his fellow countrymen looked down their noses at everybody else, which would include tourists who he said are viewed with contempt by many Dutch.
All of this came from an old Dutch man, who really set the record straight. What I had identified in Dutch people I've dealt with in Amsterdam as being 'honest and straight to the point', he corrected me by telling me that I was being too kind and a little naive. He labelled it as 'arrogant and superior', he told me that the 'honesty' I saw was actually 'bluntness' and was the result of them not bothering to charm a lowly tourist.
It's interesting because I've met several Dutch people who also live in Ireland and they are charming and warm, but they all say the same thing about Amsterdam and the attitude of Dutch locals there.
To be honest, I couldn't give a shit how sullen they are when I'm in the Dam, because most of the people I encounter aren't Dutch anyway. Amsterdam is Amsterdam, not because of the Dutch, but because of the outsiders who bring their culture and warmth to the place, the Dutch only facilitate through trying to prove that they're more tolerant than everybody else. Ironically this tolerance is also what has allowed intolerant religiously driven attitude to turn around and start to make the place a whole lot less tolerant.
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I am the people my mother warned me about.
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/tuffgong
Hey, thanks for posting this. Interesting to know.
I wonder about this though - does the hating tourist part, especially concerning the red light district, have any connection with how the dutch might feel about foreigners having sexual relations with their women?
We had this debate in our highschool in Taiwan and we discussed the possibility of using this as a point against having a red-light tourist district in Taiwan. The side that was supposed to argue 'for' a red-light district nearly always uses the Dutch model as an example of how clean and up-front such a wonderful policy would be - besides, since most of us asians have the sense that anything western is superior (even if we won't admit it, you should see how young girls attach themselves to aging western men in pubs here), citing the Dutch would actually hit a few points with the same-minded Taiwanese judges.
I argued that the Dutch don't really view the red-light district as the 'pride of their nation' (for some reason the judges and my opponent didn't seem to believe me) and when the opposition came up with the wonderful policy of lowering crime and infidility in the mainland by barring Taiwanese men from using such facilities and restricting it for tourist use only, I retorted sharply that what was the point of Taiwan running a public brothel for foreigners to **** our women. Did we really want to earn that sort of money for our country and how would our own countrymen feel about this? This would in no way solve our current problem of private prostitution.
Besides, the Dutch have a different reputation in the foreign arena than Taiwan, so we can not honestly use this as a way to boost our image.
"does the hating tourist part, especially concerning the red light district, have any connection with how the dutch might feel about foreigners having sexual relations with their women?"
No, as far as I know most of the prostitues aren't Dutch. Many are Eastern European, African, Asian and some are from other Western European countries.
"I argued that the Dutch don't really view the red-light district as the 'pride of their nation' (for some reason the judges and my opponent didn't seem to believe me)"
The reason for them not believing you probably lies in the fact that many Dutch used to be proud of their handling of the sex trade. However, these days religious conservatives are backlashing against it. The rise of religiously generated intolerance is largely to blame for Dutch disdain for their previously tolerant ideals. In my opinion the disdain is based on dogmatic moral outrage, not reason. Conservatives there are not looking to conserve anything, the are looking to regress. If they get their way prostitution will not just vanish, it will merely disappear back underground and into the hands of far more dangerous criminals.
"barring Taiwanese men from using such facilities and restricting it for tourist use only, I retorted sharply that what was the point of Taiwan running a public brothel for foreigners to **** our women. Did we really want to earn that sort of money for our country and how would our own countrymen feel about this? This would in no way solve our current problem of private prostitution."
Firstly, the idea of barring Taiwanese men from the brothels makes no sense to me. Either they are open to everybody of a certain age, male or female, or there is no point. The whole concept behind the Dutch policy was not simply part of a tourism proposal. The idea was to bring an underground industry overground. It was to provide protection for sex-workers and clients. There is a big trade in Eastern Europe for sex slaves. They are kidnapped or tricked into the illegal sex trade in other European countries where prostitution is illegal. In the underground, they are abused, maltreated and at far greater risk than they would be in a legal Dutch brothel.
Aside from that, why do you have such a problem with foreigners fucking 'your women'? That sounds a little bit xenophobic to me. Personally nothing pisses me off more than hearing my countrymen describing Irish women as 'our women'. Especially when most of the guys I know who describe them as 'their women' couldn't get one of them to piss on them if they were on fire. A woman is her own woman, she doesn't belong to a bunch of strangers who just happen to have been born in the same country as her. I'd hate to think if I hooked up with a Taiwanese woman that Irish women would give her shit for stealing 'their' men.
I don't know what cannabis laws are like in Taiwan, but if you're talking tourism here, coffee shop culture would put Taiwan on the map big time. Asia is one of the most popular backpacker destinations for Western European tourists. Prostitution is sewn up in Thailand, and it's not pretty. There is a place for an Asian state with relaxed cannabis laws though, as penalties can be stiff in popular Asian backpacking destinations. It would highlight Taiwan as a progressive Asian nation and definitely generate a lot of tourism.
Coffee shop culture in Taiwan would attract me as a tourist, not prostitution. As is it's just a very costly exercise to travel to Taiwan due to access. It is far easier for me to fly to Thailand, from where I am able to travel easily to Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, etc. Taiwan is just a bit further out of the way, so it would be a destination I would have to travel to specifically. Coffee shop culture would be an incentive to make that extra effort.
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I am the people my mother warned me about.
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/tuffgong
I'm studying Dutch history and culture right now, and the motivations behind closing brothels and coffee shops is less that corporations are specifically buying them out (though that could be happening) and more that the conservative-leaning politics that are dominating Parliament and bigger majorities of society are pressuring corporations (who have money) to do something about these social indiscretions.
The country itself is becoming more conservative, and for however progressive the Netherlands once was, the fact is, their open-arms policies of the 70s and 80s are coming back to haunt them as their "multicultural" society is becoming more and more polarized.
The Dutch are quickly realizing that they can't be tolerant of the intolerance that has immigrated there, but they realized too late that those whose cultures clashed were gaining a sociopolitical majority capable of pressuring brothels and butchers to stop selling sex and pork.
*tear*
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth!~JFK
"The Dutch are quickly realizing that they can't be tolerant of the intolerance that has immigrated there, but they realized too late that those whose cultures clashed were gaining a sociopolitical majority capable of pressuring brothels and butchers to stop selling sex and pork."
Call it what it is. Intolerant religious folk saturating the country and spreading their intolerance like a disease, the same thing many religions do everywhere they land. If it isn't rabid Christians, it's rabid Muslims. They rail, piss and moan about religious tolerance, then they muscle in on the laws of the land and demonstrate what intolerant monsters they actually are. They revel in the tolerance afforded to them, then turn around and stab those who extended it to them in the back by being agressively intolerant of other peoples lifestyle choices.
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I am the people my mother warned me about.
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/tuffgong
I would hesitate to say that this is true of the entire population of religious immigrants in the Netherlands (or at least in Netherlands' case) because there are a large number of successfully integrated immigrant cultures-- like the Surinamese who, though many have a very different outlook on life and generally refused to "become Dutch," nevertheless adapted Dutch culture to their own and created more of the multicultural ideal the Dutch had originally hoped for.
The Dutch are a weird people.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth!~JFK
You sound surprised. Check out apartheid in South Africa, who's idea do you think that was?
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I am the people my mother warned me about.
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/tuffgong
Damn
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth!~JFK
I wouldn't let it put you off visiting Amsterdam though, as I've said I've been there 10 times, I wouldn't go there if I didn't love the place. The city is beautiful, all canals and quaint dutch architecture, there's so much life there and it is hugely multicultural. The Dutch there aren't hateful are anything, some can just be a little arrogant and superior to tousrists, but that's easily drowned out by everybody else and more notabley by the fun to be had there.
_____________________________________________________________
I am the people my mother warned me about.
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/tuffgong