This is the full interview with Chiela Rosa. She has worked in different kinds of Dutch prostitution for ten years, and she walked me around De Wallen and told me what I was actually looking at.
She started at eighteen in a brothel. We went through the money, which is not what tourists imagine it is, and through the clients, including the ones who push and the women who cannot say no to them. She has had days with sixteen clients. She explained what makes a woman popular in the windows, and what happens to the ones who are not.
She is clear about which parts of this were her own choice, and she is just as clear that the answer is different for most of the foreign women working alongside her. Pimps run the streets, she says, and they are attached to the women who came from somewhere else. She showed me how you spot a woman who is being controlled, which is a skill she has because she has needed it.
Some of it is funny, in the way people who do hard jobs are funny about them. Germans are dirtier. There is a Museum of Prostitution around the corner from real working windows and she has views about that.
Most of it is not funny. She talked about police who laugh at the women, and worse. She talked about how once you have done this you cannot really do anything else afterwards, and about how the longer you do it the less it hurts, which she said as a plain fact rather than a complaint. I asked her whether she would let her daughter do this work.
If you watch one thing about Amsterdam, I would make it this one. It is a woman describing her own job for an hour and a half with nobody speaking for her.