One of Amsterdam’s most iconic sights, the city’s world-famous red light district where sex workers pose in windows to attract passers-by, could be shuttered for good.
It could be curtains for the brothel windows of the city’s renowned De Wallen district, as the local council votes this week on whether to clean up Amsterdam’s image by forcing the red drapes - currently only shut when seeing a client - to stay closed for good.
Under the proposal window brothel curtains in the iconic tourist destination will stay shut and clients will be asked to book via a QR code on their smartphones instead of talking to the sex worker behind the glass.
The local head of the Dutch Liberal D66 party, who proposed the new law said sex work had become a tourist attraction, leading to “degrading, undesirable” behaviour towards sex workers by drunken tourists - behaviour which she claimed “does not contribute to improving the position of women in the MeToo era."
However sex workers themselves in the city said that the new measures will make them less safe as they won’t be able to see who has booked them until the client is already inside the room.
“How can I attract clients with the curtains closed?” asked one Dutch sex worker, Lucy.
“They say it is for my protection, but that is nonsense. If someone denigrates me, I denigrate them back. It isn’t an automatic service I negotiate. If drunk people come, I don’t let them in.”
Window brothels allowed sex workers to operate safely and independently, she explained .
"You don’t have to answer mails, you don’t have to pay for web adverts,” she added. “You register at the Chamber of Commerce, buy a set of lingerie and a box of condoms and you can begin,” she told the Telegraph.
Other measures to crack down on nuisance tourism are being voted on this week alongside the D66 proposal to force curtains to stay closed.
The measures would include earlier closing times for bars and brothel windows as well as a ban on smoking cannabis in public areas.
Amsterdam councillor Diederik Boomsma, from the Christian Democratic Appeal party, said he wanted to get rid of Amsterdam’s image as a city where tourists “can do all the things that aren’t allowed at home”.
Earlier this year, Amsterdam officials told British sex and drugs tourists to stay away from the city as part of a a new advertising campaign.
The Dutch capital will begin a "discouragement campaign" to put off "nuisance" Brits by bringing in a number of new restrictions.
Amsterdam’s cannabis coffee shops are often a major pull factor for some troublesome groups of stag and hen parties, with drunk or stoned groups of young men walking to the famous red light district also causing problems.
Councillors in the Dutch city say the move to discourage Brits from attending would be part of a “targeted, digital discouragement campaign on foreign visitors who only come to Amsterdam for alcohol, drugs and sex”.
The “stay away” campaign will focus on British tourists at first and, if this is successful, will be used to tackle to nuisance-causing groups from other countries, local broadcaster Noord Holland reported.
Sofyan Mbarki, the city’s deputy mayor who is in charge of the tourism measures, said: “The aim of the discouragement campaign is to keep out visitors that we do not want.
