Legalizing Prostitution: From Illicit Vice to Lawful Business (26 page)

Figure 5.7. Sudfass Sauna Club.

All other sauna clubs are located outside Frankfurt’s two RLDs—in residential areas, suburbs, or small towns surrounding the city. Sudfass is the oldest club in Frankfurt (founded in 1981) and is unique in having both a hotel-brothel in one part of the building (called Amor Eros Center) and a sauna club in another part. The photo in
figure 5.7
shows the entry to the hotel-brothel adorned by outsized woman’s legs. Sudfass is located in a mixed commercial-residential area.

In another club on the outskirts of Frankfurt, I interviewed the owner and toured the premises.
¹⁰⁰
Both the customers and the providers pay a €29 entry fee; the workers do not have contracts and are freelance operators. The women receive a percentage of the alcohol drinks they sell the men, but the owner tells me that they are not constantly soliciting drinks and will leave a man alone if he wishes. Customers come from the greater Frankfurt area and from the small town where the brothel is located. The age of most of the clients is between 40 and 70. Around 10–15 women are working at any given time. They range in age from 25 to 35, and most hail from Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. I ask what the owner looks for when he interviews new prospects.
He asks them where they come from, what work they have done previously, if they have ever worked at a FKK club before—questions that one would expect in any job interview. He will reject someone who, by appearance, “does not take care of her body,” telling me that “sanitation is important at FKK clubs.” All of the women I saw in this club were tall, tanned, thin, white, and attractive.

The place is tastefully decorated throughout. I tour the club with the female manager, entering through a small “casino” with slot machines. There are private rooms upstairs for sexual activities, but one can elect to have sex in a public area as well. The owner tells me that one out of ten men have sex publicly. There are eleven women working and a dozen customers at the time, around six p.m. on a Thursday. The women are in various states of undress; most are topless. One is dancing nude on a small stage with a stripper pole, rock music blaring, as two men watch from couches nearby. As one man walks by the stage, the dancer playfully blocks his path with her outstretched leg. Another woman is sitting on a couch chatting with a man; two men are visible in the glass-enclosed sauna; three men are outside by the pool; one woman is lying on a couch by herself, half naked.
¹⁰¹
Most of the men that I see are in the 50–70 range; all are white. The owner tells me that some men come just for the sauna or to swim and bring a book to read. Several of the men are talking to other men, confirming the owner’s point that the women do not cling to or pressure the men. In one large room, there is a porn film showing on a large TV screen while a couple is having sex on a couch. They do not appear to notice us.

Unlike the hotel-brothel owner discussed earlier, who had a negative view of the police, this FKK owner has had a different experience. Before he opened the place, he met with local police and asked them what they needed in order to allow him to operate freely. The police said they wanted to view the passports of everyone working at the club, and the owner shows me a binder with photocopies of passports. He tells me that the police visit once or twice a year and that he has had “no problem with them.”

One might wonder how a sauna-brothel in a suburb of Frankfurt is regarded by the residents. The owner tells me that “everything is okay with them,” that no one in the area has demanded that the club close, and that it is important to talk with the residents to show them that the brothel is a normal business and thus gain their acceptance. He mentions that his next-door neighbor sponsors weddings on his premises, implying that the sacred and profane can coexist within a stone’s throw of each other. This owner entered the brothel business because a friend who owned a sauna got him interested
in this kind of enterprise, and in my interview he presented himself as an ordinary businessman who has good relations with local people rather than feeling stigmatized and shunned.

A year later, I interviewed the manager at another FKK club in Frankfurt. The manager had friends in the brothel business and knew the owner before he started working in this club’s bar, after which he became manager. He tells me he does not feel stigmatized by the nature of his work: “I never hide what I do. It’s not just a business, it’s what I live. I live my club and can’t separate myself from it. In a good way! The people I meet don’t condemn me; instead they are interested in what I do.”

When I ask what he looks for when interviewing a prospective worker, he says that she must be at least 21 years old (i.e., above the legal minimum of 18), have legal papers to work in Germany, be “visually nice,” and be “free of pressure” from any third party. Regarding the latter, he looks to see if someone is waiting for her outside after the interview and says that if he has any suspicions about her independence, he will not hire her. He says, “Ten years experience tells me that I will get much bigger problems if I hire someone who is controlled by someone else.” He adds that 70–80 percent of the women have worked at his club for a long time, some for many years: “so we know them very well.” Occasionally, a woman misbehaves: if she gets drunk, he sanctions her with a three-week suspension, and if she steals from anyone, she is immediately fired. What about problem clients? The manager tells me that they are rare and that only one case in the past ten years presented a real problem. Perhaps surprisingly, no security personnel work at the club. The manager accounts for the lack of problems from the men as “psychological”: the men are vulnerable, walking around in towels or robes and thus stripped of their usual, clothed comfort zone: “That’s why we don’t have any stress.”

At this sauna club, both customers and providers pay a €75 entry fee. The women work as freelancers “when they want and for as long as they want.” They speak English along with other languages. On this Saturday night, 60 women are working in the midst of about 100 customers. When I tour the place, I see a lot of men hanging out with other men; others are sitting on couches with a woman, chatting or caressing each other. The men are diverse in age and race, while most of the women are white. They wear lingerie or are fully nude. The place is rather large, with a sauna room, a movie room, a big central room with dance music blaring, a couple of bars, and some peripheral quiet rooms where I see couples nestled on couches. The club also has a therapeutic massage room and a beauty parlor for guests. The place is upscale and tastefully decorated.
¹⁰²

My observations, coupled with clients’ online descriptions of other clubs, indicate that these places are a rather distinctive kind of commercial sex venue, offering a variety of recreational options in addition to sex. Given the extended amount of time that a man can spend chatting with a woman, sharing intimacies, and perhaps bonding emotionally, the clubs seem tailor-made for men who seek a “girlfriend experience.” This depends, of course, on the parties’ ability to speak the same language. Providers vary in how fluent they are in German or English, but they would not work in an FKK club if they did not have a minimum of conversational skills. Moreover, like the workers who spend a great deal of time chatting with foreign men in sexually oriented bars and karaoke clubs elsewhere in the world (briefly described in
chapter 2
), extended conversations with clients (from different backgrounds) in sauna clubs give workers an opportunity to learn other languages and to expand their cultural repertoire, thus broadening their cognitive horizons.

Many sex workers throughout the world work out of their own premises, either by themselves or with a few other providers. In Frankfurt and many other German cities, it is legal for a maximum of three workers to sell sex in a residence, provided that at least one of them lives there and the place is registered in her or his name. I visited one of these worker-run “brothels” in Frankfurt.
¹⁰³
Heidi, who runs the place, sells sex along with her three colleagues. Almost all clients are German, as are all the providers, and about five clients visit every day. Heidi tells me that appointments are not necessary, as she likes to cater to men who act on the spur of the moment as well as those who plan a visit ahead of time. The entry fee is €50, plus €150 for “straight sex” and €200 for S&M, a specialty of this house. The brothel advertises on a website and in a newspaper. Heidi likes the small scale of the enterprise; more women might create conflicts, she says. The women do not live in the house but sometimes stay overnight if they live outside the area. A customer arrives during the interview, so I am hustled away until the man retires to a room with his chosen provider. Two women are hanging out in the kitchen, and another, wearing only a thong, walks nonchalantly from one room to the next. I then tour the rooms with Heidi—viewing a large S&M dungeon, a room with a Greek theme, and a medically themed room complete with examining bed and medical supplies for men who fantasize about sex with nurses or doctors. Heidi says that the existence of this brothel is no secret to the neighbors, who are tolerant of it because it is discreet. Residential brothels can be found in cities throughout the world, but in Germany, they are legal and can operate quite openly as long as they are small-scale enterprises.

Antwerp and Frankfurt differ substantially in the way their red-light districts are organized and in the kinds of prostitution available elsewhere in each city. What accounts for the differences? First, Germany has, since 2002, a system in which prostitution is decriminalized and de jure legalized. In Belgium, all third-party involvement is illegal yet tolerated and regulated in certain places—de facto legalization, in other words. The legal order allows prostitution to proliferate in many different forms in Frankfurt, whereas it is more contained in Antwerp, which lacks, for example, sauna clubs, other legal brothels, and German-style erotic bars. Second and related to this difference, the authorities in Antwerp consciously designed the RLD in a way that would maximize tight control, after having experienced years of problems with prostitution throughout the city. The police in Frankfurt stage raids on premises periodically, but the sex sector is clearly less confined and controlled than is Antwerp’s RLD. This is largely due to the different legal systems operating in each country, which are more constraining in Belgium, as well as each city’s local policies on prostitution. Third, the absolute demand for commercial sex appears to be less in Antwerp. Frankfurt is about a third larger in population than Antwerp is, and Frankfurt has about three times more tourists visiting every year. Furthermore, Antwerp’s RLD is small and fairly isolated, whereas Frankfurt has two RLDs, one of which is larger and much more varied than Antwerp’s, as well as saunas and other brothels elsewhere in the city. This translates into significantly fewer people buying and selling sex and less third-party involvement in Antwerp, which reduces the frequency of problems that come to the attention of the media and the authorities and thus the chances that the sex industry will become politicized and catalyze a public backlash against it. In
chapter 6
, we turn to our third case: the Netherlands and specifically the city of Amsterdam, whose red-light landscape differs in important respects from those in Antwerp and Frankfurt.

It doesn’t even occur to me that prostitution should be illegal.

—Young woman, resident of Amsterdam
¹

The Netherlands has long tolerated prostitution. As far back as 1413, a bylaw of the city of Amsterdam permitted brothels, with the following justification:

Because whores are necessary in big cities and especially in cities of commerce such as ours—indeed it is far better to have these women than not to have them—and also because the holy church tolerates whores on good grounds, for these reasons the court and sheriff of Amsterdam shall not entirely forbid the keeping of brothels.
²

During the next 500 years, the tolerance policy was periodically suspended due to scandals, increases in crime, or concerns about prostitutes’ welfare, but after some time, the approach typically reverted to some kind of tolerance.
³

In the 19th century, Amsterdam had several brothels, including some luxurious houses with the following features:

In the small drawing room gentlemen who did not want to be seen by other guests, were received. When the customer had made his choice, he could then retreat to one of the private rooms on the first floor. The big drawing room was richly decorated with mirrors in heavy gold-plated frames, crystal chandeliers, leather couches and red sofas, marble tables, and a buffet. … Here the customers could drink champagne with each other or with the girls, have a conversation, or dance. Often there was a piano and the girls sang. In the meantime, the gentlemen could choose a lady with whom they would go upstairs later that night. The customers often were older married gentlemen, habitués of the establishment. De
Fonteyn on de Nieuwmarkt offered its customers even more divertissement. Besides a pub, a restaurant, and a beautiful ballroom, the brothel had a poolroom on the top floor where during the evening naked girls would play pool. The gentlemen could enjoy this while having a drink and a cigar. The mostly foreign girls [from France] led a sad life in the luxurious brothels. They had no or hardly any personal freedom. … . Very seldom were they allowed to go in the streets and then only in [the] company of a governess.
⁴

Small brothels dotted the alleys in the area that is now today’s central red-light district. Women solicited clients on the street and brought them into these brothels. Other prostitutes worked in bars, where they received a percentage of the drinks that they encouraged patrons to buy and made themselves available to be taken out to a hotel after paying the bartender a fee—a precursor to the bar system operating in parts of Asia today.