Legalizing Prostitution: From Illicit Vice to Lawful Business (23 page)

Traditional brothels
vary in size, amenities, and class but usually have a parlor or bar where clients can fraternize with providers. There are house rules and a manager on the premises. At the high end, Kamilla la Dee in Berlin bills itself as “the erotic saloon in Berlin, the brothel of extraclass, where you may have excellent girlfriend sex in a beautiful, relaxed atmosphere with an intimate girlfriend on limited appointment. With her you may enjoy passionate girlfriend sex. Tender, soft, cuddly, or wild and frivolous.”
⁶⁶
Other conventional brothels range from similarly fancy to much less so.

Hotel-brothels
(also called an eros center, sex inn, or laufhaus) are buildings where a landlord rents workers rooms for the day or half day. It is not a traditional brothel governed by house rules or where the daily activities are dictated by a manager. The workers are essentially independent providers renting a work space.

Sauna clubs
offer a different kind of experience for the customer—one that includes recreation, “wellness,” and nonsexual intimacy with women as well as erotic titillation and sex. Many of the clubs are known as FKK clubs (Frei Körper Kultur), which translates as “free body culture,” harking back to their origins as nudist clubs. (I use the term
sauna club
interchangeably with
FKK club
, bearing in mind that not all such clubs are technically FKKs. Austria, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic have FKKs as well.) The clubs vary somewhat in price, amenities, and rules, but generally the client pays an entry fee (€25 to €80) that gives him access to a pool, sauna, food, and drink. Men wear towels or robes and chat with the sex workers on duty; the women are scantily clad, topless, or nude. The women pay the same entry fee and are considered freelancers. They receive no salary, social security, or other benefits but keep their entire earnings. The number of providers working at any given time varies tremendously, from cozy clubs with five to ten women to those with up to a hundred working at the larger emporiums.

Prostitution was de facto decriminalized in Frankfurt (on a minor scale) long before the 2002 national law liberalized the situation nationwide. In 1969, the city government decided to issue a permit for the first large brothel in the city in order to reduce street prostitution near residential areas. The police essentially forced street workers into the brothel.
⁶⁷
Opened in 1971, this hotel-brothel, Crazy Sexy, is distinguished by the dancing mannequins on the building’s facade (shown in
figure 5.3
; Crazy Sexy is now part of a chain of brothels, with sister locations in Bonn, Wiesbaden, Leipzig, and Mainz).
⁶⁸
Other tolerated brothels followed, and over time, their owners gained some acceptance as entrepreneurs, although suspicion and tensions have lingered to the present time.
⁶⁹
A diverse red-light district grew up around the initial brothels in the Bahnhofsviertel area, and street prostitution was almost entirely eliminated from the area by the mid-1980s.
⁷⁰

About 2,000 women sell sex in Frankfurt. A 2006 census revealed that 50 were working on the street, 1,155 in brothels, 630 in their own premises, 100 in sauna clubs (plus those in sauna clubs outside the city limits). In the main RLD in Bahnhofsviertel, it was estimated that 9,200 customers purchased sex in the hotel-brothels each day, based on the finding that 920 women were working each day and seeing an average of ten clients per day. This translates into 64,400 paid sex transactions each week in the hotel-brothels alone.
⁷¹

An estimated 40 percent of prostitutes in the country are of German background,
⁷²
and many of them are concentrated in escort services and brothels
located outside the urban red-light districts. In Frankfurt’s hotel-brothels, only 4 percent of the prostitutes are German; a few (7 percent) come from other western European countries, but most are from eastern Europe, Thailand, Colombia, or the Dominican Republic.
⁷³
Eastern Europeans are the fastest growing group, constituting 20 percent of the total in 2006 (up from 6 percent in 2002).
⁷⁴
Their numbers increased after 2004 when eight nations were admitted to the European Union (including Poland, Hungary, the Balkans, and the Czech Republic). Migrants are allowed to work as freelancers in a business in an EU member nation, but not as contract employees of that business. Another migrant wave came after 2007, when Bulgaria and Romania became EU members. Since then, Romanians and Bulgarians have flocked to Germany (and other western European nations),
⁷⁵
so the current figure is probably significantly higher than the 20 percent reported in 2006. One estimate is that Romanians alone now constitute 20 percent of the total.

Figure 5.3. Crazy Sexy brothel.

As indicated earlier in the book, estimating the number of migrants who enter a country voluntarily versus coercively is fraught with problems. However, a 2006 survey of migrant women working in the German sex industry concluded that the majority had entered the country voluntarily with the assistance of intermediaries.
⁷⁶
To what extent this is true today for those Romanians and Bulgarians who entered the country after 2007 is unknown, but the fact that they are now permitted to work in Germany means that they no longer need to operate in a clandestine manner. One final point about these two groups: despite the willingness of many young Bulgarians and Romanians to migrate to red-light destinations, the population at home is more unreceptive toward prostitution than it is in most other European nations. In fact, Romanians score higher than any other European nationality on the opinion that prostitution can “never be justified”—69 percent of Romanians hold this view, as do 46 percent of Bulgarians (see
table 4.2
). Yet the severe lack of job opportunities in Romania and Bulgaria is a strong “push factor” explaining why so many Romanians and Bulgarians have migrated to western Europe.

The main RLD in Frankfurt’s Bahnhofsviertel area is not the only sexually oriented district in the city. A tiny RLD is located miles away, on Breite Gasse street, where approximately 235 women work in four hotel-brothels.
⁷⁷
One of these, Penthouse No. 1, has a bar on the top floor, where women are available as drinking companions.
⁷⁸
When I visited the area in 2010, the atmosphere was placid and a few men were cruising the brothels. On a return visit a year later, there was very little action on a Friday night, with few men around and only one of the hotel-brothels occupied. Most of the women I tried to speak to in English looked perplexed or responded in some other language. A sign above the doorway of one of the brothels prohibits women and anyone under 18 from entering. There are no women on the street on this Saturday night. The women in the area’s hotel-brothels vary considerably in age, ethnicity, and appearance. The Breite Gasse district is shown in
figure 5.4
.

Frankfurt’s larger RLD in Bahnhofsviertel is a spectacle compared to Breite Gasse and much seedier than Antwerp’s RLD. Many men on the street are young, in their 20s, but there are older men as well. In Germany, it is legal to drink alcohol in public, and I saw men in this RLD entering sex businesses with alcohol in hand. Few women are visible on the streets of this largely male domain: brothel workers walking to and from work, women who work at the dance clubs and erotic bars and stand outside trying to lure men in, and a few street prostitutes. On one corner is a sex arcade with video cabins. The manager told me that street prostitutes sometimes bring a man into the
cabins, pretending that he is her boyfriend (couples are allowed to go into a cabin together). When they leave, they go in separate directions, and plain-clothes police officers then alert the manager. This happens once or twice a month. Drunks and drug addicts occupy two streets; there, I saw people using drugs, drinking alcohol, and sleeping on the sidewalk. These individuals generally keep to themselves and do not hassle passersby.

Figure 5.4a, 5.4b. Breite Gasse red-light district.

My observations are confirmed in clients’ online descriptions of this RLD. One says, “I have seen a host of seedy characters and other creeps in various stages of inebriation,” and another calls it a “place for suckers and old men”: “I don’t know how anyone who has ever been to a FKK [sauna club] can go there.”
⁷⁹
One recommended that the owners of hotel-brothels charge people €5 ($7) to enter, to keep the “low-lifes” out. But others are not bothered by the RLD’s atmosphere and value the tremendous variety of sexually oriented businesses there.

The downscale ambience of the area on the ground level is one of its most noticeable features. The aesthetics of the buildings, however, convey a classier impression, one that clashes with the vice scene on the street. The buildings’ facades are adorned with neon lights, fancy decor, and erotic advertisements. The area is packed with sexually oriented places such as strip clubs, erotic bars, a sauna club, cabarets, and hotel-brothels, in addition to snack bars, casinos, and other shops (depicted in
figure 5.5
). To appeal to an international clientele, almost all of them have English names, such as America Peep Show, Foxy Ladies, Double D Girls & Drinks, Starstars Tabledance, Pure Platinum, New York City Bar, Miami Sauna Club, and Golden Gate. The signage features images of scantily clad or nude women or large red lips, but some attempt to conjure other fantasies, with images of palm trees (Miami Sauna Club), hearts (several Eros Centers), or a party atmosphere (Crazy Sexy’s dancing mannequins).

The erotic bars and cabarets employ hostesses who sit and drink with a customer and offer sexual entertainment. Male and female solicitors stand outside these bars and try to entice or drag male pedestrians inside. If women attempt to lure customers, male touts are more aggressive, blocking the sidewalk and grabbing men who pass by. They wave and call out to men they see from afar and will even run across the street to try to entice a person into their place, often saying, “Come in just for a minute.” My fieldnotes describe my experiences:

• On several occasions a man outside a bar blocked my path on the sidewalk, once forcing me into the bar, where a woman immediately appeared and tried to coax me into a curtained room “just for a minute.” As I tried to leave the bar, a bouncer blocked my exit, and I had to push my way out of the place. Inside another bar, a man and a woman clung to my arms, trying to prevent me from leaving.

• I saw a tout from Bistro 91 standing in the middle of a traffic intersection beckoning to men on the four intersecting streets. After failing to get anyone interested after a couple of minutes in the street, he returned to the front of his bar.