- #HAVE SEX IN RED LIGHT CENTER HOW TO#
- #HAVE SEX IN RED LIGHT CENTER FULL#
- #HAVE SEX IN RED LIGHT CENTER WINDOWS#
According to official figures, Amsterdam has around 7,000 sex workers today. Sex workers have to officially register and also pay income tax. Prostitution was legalised in the Netherlands in 2000. Gloves, face masks and hand sanitisers will be available in each room in case they are needed.
#HAVE SEX IN RED LIGHT CENTER FULL#
(For the full list of recommendations, click here). They are also advised to provide adequate ventilation before, during and after the appointment. Sex workers are encouraged to take their customers through this before their appointment. The National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, a Dutch research institute, has also prepared a questionnaire. Sex workers must work either on a one-on-one basis or with a couple who share a household. No sex positions or actions have been taken off the table, and face masks are not mandatory, according to this report. Basically, no kissing (something we already learned from Vivian in Pretty Woman).
Sex workers have been advised not to shake hands with customers, to shower or wash before and after every appointment, to change bed linen after every customer, and to “avoid each other's moist breathing zone”.
#HAVE SEX IN RED LIGHT CENTER HOW TO#
The museum's manager, Natascha Flipsen, agrees that guided tours help educate the visitors not just about the history of the centuries-old red light district, but also about how to treat the women who work there with respect.Īnd she says that tourism is good for the business.įor tourists, "this is like the once in a lifetime experience, so they visit the sex work as well of course," Flipsen said.Here's what one can now expect at Amsterdam's Red Light District:Īccording to the Prostitution Information Centre, contact should be short and all-high contact spots in rooms should be cleaned thoroughly, including the door handle, reports Dutch News.
#HAVE SEX IN RED LIGHT CENTER WINDOWS#
The red light district is a tourist magnet, especially after dark, with crowds of people waiting to get into sex shows and visiting the Red Light Secrets Museum of Prostitution, where you can experience the windows from a sex worker's perspective by sitting on a stool in front of a "window" onto which images are projected of men walking past and peering in. Kock acknowledges that not everybody is happy, but says many others are pleased that the city is tackling the tours. People who work in Amsterdam's sex industry question whether there are more tourists, or whether similar numbers are squeezing into a red light district that has shrunk in recent years as hundreds of the sex workers' windows have been shuttered in an attempt to diversify the narrow streets. residents basically couldn't leave their homes anymore because the alleys were blocked," the city's deputy mayor, Udo Kock, told The Associated Press. "Yeah, there's really over-tourism there - too crowded. "I mean it's like in Paris if you're forbidding (tours) to go to the Arc de Triomphe or the Eiffel Tower," she said.Ĭity Hall says that more than 1,000 tour groups per week now operate around the Old Church Square in the heart of the red light district.
She said it means guides won't be able to explain to tourists where Rembrandt van Rijn painted one of his first famous works or where the painter's wife is buried. 1, is another step in the city's campaign to reduce the problems associated with over-tourism and part of a broader package of measures reining in tours in the city.īobien van Aalst of the Dutch tour guide association Guidor slammed the ban on tours, not just to the red light district but to other historic parts of the city. The district has just about everything a sex haven requires: live sex shows. The total ban on guided tours, which is planned to come into full force on Jan. Prostitution has always been rife in the Red-Light District, but it wasn't.
Velvet declined to give her real name, saying that because of the stigma attached to sex work, most sex workers use a working name or pseudonym to protect their privacy and safety.Īmsterdam's Prostitution Information Center, which is housed in the same building as Proud, offers its own red light district tours. "It could also be that now there are no guides that people just wander into the area themselves and gawk at the women behind the window and take photos because there is no one anymore to inform them how to behave or what the rules of the game are in this area," said a sex worker who goes by the name of Velvet and is the advocacy coordinator for Proud.
On a recent Friday night, the problem was clear to see: Tourists bathed in a red glow emanating from the windows and peep shows' neon lights were packed shoulder to shoulder as they shuffled through the alleys.īut sex workers' union Proud questions whether banning tours will reduce tourist numbers and argues that guides educate visitors and encourage them to behave more respectfully toward the women. The first step in the new policy was taken Monday night in the red light district, with tours banned from 7 p.m.