| Author |
 Topic  |
|
serenata
Germany
1400 Posts |
 Posted - 20 Oct 2006 : 16:24:24
|
quote:
Originally posted by Babylon
Yep... and then we have those women who donīt have nice bodies at all and still likes to show them off to any desperate fool who wants to see. 
Speaking of no self respect...
YEP!!!  |
 |
|
|
LEMON TIME
Afghanistan
1295 Posts |
Posted - 20 Oct 2006 : 17:04:04
|
Its a Free country after all thank God people have their own rights to do what they want.I went to Frankfort in Germany, their is a redlight area from the train station to the main town center.Germany and Holland has the most prostitutes in the World not to mention Thailand.Aleast Gambians just wear closes that make them feel good.Dont throw stone if you have a glass house yourself.
|
|
|
|
serenata
Germany
1400 Posts |
Posted - 20 Oct 2006 : 17:30:01
|
Lemon Time, if your experiences with Germany are not more than the red light zone of Frankfurt, then you'd better keep quiet. Frankfurt and certain areas of Hamburg are known as the two capitals of prostitution in Germany. And I don't know where you took your statitists about prostitution from.
From another one of your postings (Holocaust) I get the impression that you are walking in the footprints of people you formerly addressed as insects. What's going on? Do you think the Bantaba only comes to live if there are personal quarrels, or if someone has to play the bogeyman? |
|
|
|
anna
Netherlands
730 Posts |
Posted - 20 Oct 2006 : 18:09:19
|
Serenata, Lemon Time thinks Holland is Amsterdam's Red Light District (which in reality only consists of two beautiful old canals and their side streets), so never mind. I bet he would like to spend some time there, seeing that he gets excited over the Sun's page 3 -girls. I am sure he cannot be bothered with statistics.
Also he clearly likes to play the bogeyman - or else he wouldn't care to come up with this scary picture all the time. |
When an old African dies, it is as if a whole library has burnt down.
Amadou Hampate Ba (Mali) |
|
|
|
serenata
Germany
1400 Posts |
Posted - 20 Oct 2006 : 18:21:13
|
  |
|
|
|
jambo
3300 Posts |
Posted - 20 Oct 2006 : 20:21:00
|
babylon oops |
|
|
|
LEMON TIME
Afghanistan
1295 Posts |
Posted - 21 Oct 2006 : 13:10:29
|
| Anna i did not mean to hurt anyone's feelings,sorry if i did. |
There is no god but Allah |
|
|
|
anna
Netherlands
730 Posts |
Posted - 21 Oct 2006 : 22:51:28
|
| Well, you certainly didn't hurt mine. Just wondered if you ever visited Holland, or if this was just hear-say. Don't believe everything people tell you! |
When an old African dies, it is as if a whole library has burnt down.
Amadou Hampate Ba (Mali) |
|
|
|
LEMON TIME
Afghanistan
1295 Posts |
Posted - 22 Oct 2006 : 14:13:34
|
| I was in amsterdam three months ago stay near The Dame Hotel.Anna i think i have Travel If not Half Of western Europe.The Thruth hurts. |
There is no god but Allah |
|
|
|
LEMON TIME
Afghanistan
1295 Posts |
Posted - 22 Oct 2006 : 16:22:58
|
Prostitution population
A study by the Dutch Ministery of Foreign Affairs in 2000 estimated that there are a total of between twenty thousand and twenty-five thousand prostitutes in the Netherlands on a yearly basis. Approximately 32% are Dutch, 22% are Latin American, 19% are Eastern European, 13% are African (south of the Sahara), 6% come from other countries from the European Union (aside from the Netherlands), 5% come from Northern Africa and 3% are Asian. Approximately 5% of the prostitutes are male, and another 5% are transsexual. However with new legislation from 2001 that prohibits migrants from outside the European Union to work legally, demographics most likely has shifted.
Prostitutes in the Netherlands work in several types of prostitution. The most common form is in sex clubs and private houses. Approximately 45% of the prostitutes work in this type of prostitution (private houses are brothels where prostitutes are directly introduced to the clients in a separate room, there is no bar and the client is not confronted with other clients). Approximately 20% works in window prostitution, 15% in the escort, 5% on the streets and 5% in their own homes. An estimated 10% works in other types of prostitutes, like massage parlours, sexshops, sex theaters and bars. (Numbers based on estimates in 1998-1999  ) |
There is no god but Allah |
|
|
|
LEMON TIME
Afghanistan
1295 Posts |
Posted - 22 Oct 2006 : 16:35:04
|
Amsterdam's Red Light District
written: December 1997
Sex sells. And sex is sold as well, although we often choose not to talk about it. Not every sexual encounter in this world is the consummation of two people's deep and undying love for each other, or two people happily entering into parenthood, or even a lusty dalliance after a night of flirtation. Some sexual encounters are negotiated and paid for.
Prostitution exists in all cultures, though it is often considered a topic of conversation more suitable for a magazine in a brown wrapper. But this attitude about sex, or at least sex that veers outside of conventional boundaries, is one that is particular to America. Here, prostitution is a crime for both prostitute and customer, and a concept deeply intertwined in the public imagination with drugs and poverty. For someone who has not travelled extensively, attitudes about prostitution in other nations may surprise, amuse, shock. We are used to officially condemning such activities even though, in our films and our tabloids, they are more often celebrated as illicit pleasures. But in other Western cultures, the public and private ideas about prostitution do not diverge so rigidly and anxiously.
In Amsterdam, which has perhaps the most famous red light district in Europe, prostitution is valued as part of the lucrative tourism that invigorates the economy. But it is not just a vice provided to restless foreigners. It is also an accepted part of their culture, and is merely one aspect of a more humanistic, if weary, attitude toward sexual morality.
Windows
As evening approaches, Amsterdam's Red Light District comes alive with activity. The district is focused around four blocks of Oudezijds Voorburgwal, one of the oldest streets in the city, straddling each side of a narrow canal. The famous windows start at a small alley called Stoofsteeg and end at an even smaller alley called Korte Storm Steeg, forming a kind of four-block rectangular track that seems to compel visitors into turning slow laps around the neighborhood. Those who came to look or to partake might make several circuits around the area, and explore the offshoot alleys also dotted with red lights, before mustering up the courage to approach a woman or duck down a side street for home. Soaring above the district is Oude Kerk, a church constructed back in the 13th century. Every so often its bells ring out, an unsettling contrast to the gleaming sex below.
A visitor new to the district finds that the area's boundaries are not at all clear. But wrong turns lead wanderers not to ramshackle warehouses and flophouse hotels, as in other areas of urban prostitution, but rather to apartments, sidewalk pubs, even a Hard Rock Cafe. And these businesses do not only surround the area, but even share the same streets with the prostitute's windows; it is not surprising after passing a few windows, a woman posing languidly in each, to discover that the adjacent door is the entrance to a school of music. Along the main thoroughfare, a window adjacent to a prostitute's may be a neighborhood tavern, with one type of customer looking out at a very different type of customer looking in.
The staccato arrangement of illuminated windows amidst doors, apartments, and businesses creates a kind of morse code effect as the street stretches away into the distance. If the red fluorescent light above a window is on, there is a prostitute inside, usually standing close to the glass and swaying to some unheard music. Black light inside the room makes their lingerie or bikini glow under the lights; the women take care not to smile too broadly, as the light reflects off their teeth as an unnerving shade of fluorescent green. They deliberately make and hold the eye contact of passers-by, maintaining expressions of simmering intensity or dramatic non-chalance. This is a place fundamentally about looking -- us looking at them, them looking at us, playful or urgent communications exchanged with the eyes through panes of glass.
Kate, an Amsterdam prostitute when she is not a law student at home in Poland, says that working the windows means that "sometimes you feel like you are in a zoo." Most visitors come to the district to look, excited by the mere possibility, while others find it amusing to taunt her from the relative safety of the street. "I mouth back at people if they mouth off to me. If they say 'hey, look at the whore', I say 'you want this whore? That's why you're here!'" But her life as a prostitute, she says, is neither dangerous and exploitative (as on the nightly news) nor glamorous and erotic (think Pretty Woman). It is more a career choice that is serving her financial goals and moving her towards visions of prosperity, comfort, and independence. "I want to save enough for a beautiful house," she says, and sees six or so years of prostitution as a far better prospect than working for decades to save enough. She works three months at a time, then returns home to Poland for vacation, telling her parents of her "job" in a bar or disco. This three month schedule is typical among prostitutes, a consequence of the regulations of the Dutch tourist visa.
Her clients, typically up to 10 per night, come in all forms and with all manner of interests. Some men simply want sex. Others come to talk, and she is willing to listen. Others actually bring their wives along; Kate says they are "bored, need spice after 20 years together", and she accommodates them too, although she has a personal rule against being touched by women. Although reluctant to disclose exact amounts, she estimates that she earns between five hundred and a thousand guilders a night (a thousand guilders being more or less five hundred U.S. dollars). She avoids drugs, although she knows women in the district who are not so diligent, but jokes that the money is her drug -- she says she often pictures it during the sex, rolling in piles of cash rather than with the man who will give it to her. The work can be emotionally draining, she admits. "It can make you crazy in the head, a hundred men touching you, telling you you're too beautiful to be a whore." But she also says that sometimes it can be fun. More often than not it is just a job, a job that moves her closer to her dreams, faster than her other options could.
Streets
The Red Light District is not just prostitutes in windows and patrons in restaurants. There are others who hope to separate the tourists from their cash without the offer of sex. Panhandlers have recognized the opportunity the district offers; men making laps around the canal will have guilders in their pocket, either for the prostitutes and peep shows or simply because they are tourists. A panhandler can stake out a spot and let the slowly circling crowd filter by, reading the multilingual crowd carefully to request a spare guilder from each tourist in their own language. Tourists are the district's lifeblood, and make up most of the area's population each night. Eric Johnson, a former employee of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines now job-hunting in Amsterdam, put it this way: "It is the heart of the historic center of the city. But, as most New Yorkers have never seen the Statue of Liberty, most people in Holland have not visited this district. It is a tourist zone, and with the exception of the university, almost every business is tourism related and dependent."
Tourists wander the district in groups and alone, either peering surreptitiously at the women or swaggering boastfully past. Three men from Brussels, in Amsterdam for an AT&T conference, called it "window-shopping", although their interactions with the prostitutes consisted only of an occasional flirtation exchanged with women lingering outside their open doors. Outside one window, watching a woman dance slowly and gaze intently at him, the blondest of the three boasted to his friends, "she's probably saying, 'I hope I get the blond one, I hope I get the blond one.'" Whether the door opens and money is exchanged or the tourists move on down the canal, fantasies are being explored, desires are being brought to the surface.
The Red Light District is no secret; although it is not marked on the illuminated maps that stand on many Amsterdam street corners, every travel guide tells of it in deliberate detail. And the district is only the most obvious area of prostitution in the city. Other neighborhoods are dotted with slightly more discrete brothels catering to a more local clientele. Many American communities are faced with this kind of prostitution; most tend to grudgingly tolerate such establishments until community discontent provokes the police to make their presence felt. But the Netherlands, and most European countries, have taken a different attitude towards the oldest profession, a pragmatic perspective that chooses to allow the vice in order to reduce its worst aspects. Legalizing prostitution allows for the regulation of the traffic of women from other countries and the exploitation of children as sex workers. It allows the application of building ordinances and inspections that maintain hygienic and safe environments for prostitutes and customers to conduct their business. It even allows for taxes to be collected: a number of ordinances have passed recently taxing the sex industry, although Kate says that a tax on self-employed prostitutes has been postponed until next year.
The Dutch have also installed a number of support mechanisms to maintain the health and social responsibility of their city's prostitution. A research organization called the Dutch Institute for Prostitution Issues claims in their literature "to diminish the problems associated with prostitution by providing scientific analyses of its developments with an emphasis on policy implications." The Prostitution Information Center, with a street corner office just outside of the district, provides information about the city's prostitution and publishes an annual "Pleasure Guide" full of advice, instructions, stories, and advertisements for escort services and sex clubs. Also in the business of making prostitution an even more natural element of Dutch society, the P.I.C. "provides information, counselling and advice on prostitution and everything related to it." According to Kate, prostitutes are mandated to undergo free AIDS testing every three months. And most recently, the Association of Sexclub Owners created an independent organization called Erotikeur, which inspects brothels and sex clubs that apply and designates the most clean and safe with a mark of quality they can display in their window.
Cultures
From an American perspective, this tolerance of the sex industry may seem unusual, even distressing. While the Dutch have clearly opted to support the business of prostitution rather than struggle to shut it down, America seems to be pursuing a different approach to the problem of prostitution. New York has passed strict zoning laws to push the erotica shops and porn theaters (and the prostitutes with them) out of Times Square to the fringes of Manhattan and across into the neighboring boroughs of Queens and the Bronx. These changes followed on the heels of the Disney Corporation's massive investment in the area, including nearly $34 million to renovate the New Amsterdam Theater for its "Lion King" stage show. Most of the old 42nd Street porn theaters have since been converted to show Disney and Disney-esque children's movies. Communities like Kansas City have instituted what they call "John TV", where men arrested for soliciting prostitutes are broadcast back to the community on cable access. Other cities have pursued similar shame and humiliation tactics to combat prostitution in their neighborhoods.
Of course, the American approach to prostitution is not quite so one-dimensional. Several counties in Nevada continue to keep prostitution legal, and San Francisco recently considered (but eventually rejected) legislation for a city-run brothel as a drug-free, regulated, and taxable alternative to its growing population of streetwalkers. Some activists criticize the criminal prosecution of prostitution along the same logic espoused by Dutch social policy, and a woman in Florida recently sued the state, arguing that laws against prostitution infringe her right to make a living. But these critical voices are few and far between; with the exception of Nevada, these dissenting voices face a tide of moral outrage against the commerce of sex. The Dutch are aware of how they are perceived in other parts of the world: Mariska Majoor, director of P.I.C. and editor of their "Pleasure Guide", writes that "in America... they think Amsterdam is a dangerous city. They believe everyone there is stoned and obsessed with an insatiable lust for sex."
The difference between Amsterdam's opinion of its sex industry and the American perspective is not one of sexual appetite, but of a distinctly different cultural morality. Jan Visser, a sociologist at the Dutch Institute for Prostitution Studies, writes that the Dutch pragmatic approach to legislation belies a different sense of public morality. "A number of 'private' activities in the sphere of morality are officially tolerated if they do not interfere with public order. So if prostitution is not disrupting ordinary life in a neighborhood, it will be allowed to exist openly. Dutch people then seem not to be so quickly offended by public exposures to different lifestyles." American public morality belies a much more schizophrenic take on human sexuality that, to either the delight or outrage of the American traveller, simply does not exist on the Amsterdam streets that glow red at night.
Tarleton Gillespie
|
There is no god but Allah |
Edited by - LEMON TIME on 22 Oct 2006 16:36:06 |
|
|
|
LEMON TIME
Afghanistan
1295 Posts |
Posted - 23 Oct 2006 : 00:48:43
|
| Watch for more Fact about Germany and Holland. |
There is no god but Allah |
|
|
|
anna
Netherlands
730 Posts |
Posted - 23 Oct 2006 : 10:01:03
|
Lemon Time, those were excellent articles describing the situation exactly as it is.
But i was surprised to see these long postings from you! I know if someone else had posted them, you wouldn't have cared to read all of it because in the recent past you often stated that you found these long articles 'boring, finding yourself falling asleep halfway'!
What point do you want to make? That there is prostitution in Holland? I never denied it. The first (not very recent) article claims that there are between 20,000 and 25,000 prostitutes in Holland. I am sure there are more of them about (they have their own trade union) and the prostitutes in the red light district are mostly visited by tourists (but by Dutch too). I am happy that now everyone on Bantaba can read that the government does all it can to organise everything in a calm way and that the women working there have access to medical help (a.o.) and that there is always police protection for them. The second article describes very clearly how the district in A'dam has been there for ages along two sides of a beautiful old canal and the side streets, like i said.
Apart from the 'windows' there are very nice little shops and restaurants there, and the district is also the place to go if you are looking for a coffee shop where they sell marihuana legally. So i once took my Gambian partner, who is a true rastafarian, there. He was shocked to see the women in the windows, and shocked to see that they had their businesses right next to or opposite the beautiful old church. But later, when he was more relaxed after a few puffs, he wandered around with me and calmed down - seeing that there is no harassment of any kind and Dutch people don't mind to have their coffee and read their newspapers on the terraces of the restaurants next to the red lit windows.
Prostitution exists, in every culture and in every country - also there where you live, Lemon Time (whereabouts is that, by the way. I am happy that the Dutch manage to take that as a fact of life, that the measures necessary to protect the women doing this kind of work, are taken and that the governments (the current one and the ones before) see to it that it will not get out of hand, that there is no prostitution going on in the neighbourhood of schools etc.
Anyway, i like our way much, much better than the hypocritical way of the Americans and i feel that the writer of the second article you posted (an American himself?) feels the same way.
Well, i am curious to see your new postings promising more facts about Holland, and Germany too. I am not afraid we will be discredited.
Thank you for the articles, they make me want to spend a day in Amsterdam in this free week i now have because of half term. I think i will have a nice coffee somewhere along the Oudezijdsvoorburgwal! Or maybe a glass of wine, which i will drink to your health. |
When an old African dies, it is as if a whole library has burnt down.
Amadou Hampate Ba (Mali) |
|
|
|
Babylon
Sweden
691 Posts |
Posted - 23 Oct 2006 : 12:49:40
|
quote:
Originally posted by anna
Apart from the 'windows' there are very nice little shops and restaurants there, and the district is also the place to go if you are looking for a coffee shop where they sell marihuana legally. So i once took my Gambian partner, who is a true rastafarian, there. He was shocked to see the women in the windows, and shocked to see that they had their businesses right next to or opposite the beautiful old church. But later, when he was more relaxed after a few puffs, he wandered around with me and calmed down - seeing that there is no harassment of any kind and Dutch people don't mind to have their coffee and read their newspapers on the terraces of the restaurants next to the red lit windows.
Lol! sorry, donīt mean to disrespect the very liberal dutch ppl. Iīm sure you are proud to be so unique in the world about your liberal ways. To me this whole thing sounds kind of sick though, or like a black comedy.
I see a vision where a dutch family is having nice sunday dinner at the restaurant and right across the street the kids can watch the girls in thongs in their windows... Later dad goes to the "coffee shop" and gets high.
How cute... |
|
|
|
anna
Netherlands
730 Posts |
Posted - 23 Oct 2006 : 13:24:08
|
Yeah. well - your vision is your own responsibility of course, it's not for me to say anything about that. People can go there, people can stay away. But apart from all the businesses going on, this is a residential area as well. But i think families with (young) children would prefer to be in another area, where kids can play outside with their friends, play at football or be on their bikes.
You are right, mostly i am proud of our liberal ways. They make for a healthier society (although that sounds strange in view of the subject of these postings that have not much to do with how to behave in a muslim country in the first place) where prostitution is not denied but registered and in this way organised and so also restricted to designated areas. The A'dam district has existed in these streets for ages, there is no other Dutch town that has a district like this. It is very popular with the tourists, and it is also mostly the tourists that misbehave, probably because they cannot handle the freedom.
By the way, welcome back - i thought you said goodbye to us for good some weeks ago. |
When an old African dies, it is as if a whole library has burnt down.
Amadou Hampate Ba (Mali) |
|
|
|
Topic |
|
|
|
Topic Locked
