Sex Work
© Style Rotterdam
I once met an older woman at a friend’s house in Kidderminster. She was a teacher and in her spare time ran a sort of party brothel in Bicester, servicing the US airmen from the Upper Heyford air base. Most of the women who worked at the brothel were otherwise respectable Bicester folk; housewives and office workers looking to earn a few quid in their spare time and have some fun along the way. This made me realise that a lot of sex workers are really just ordinary women.
Not long afterwards, whilst working for Cincinnati Milacron, I was in Rotterdam for acceptance trials on some machine tools I’d sold, just me and a customer called Pete.
Pete said that since he was in Holland he wanted to go to a legalised sex club. I’d been to Rotterdam many times, even worked there for a few months, but didn’t know where one was, so I asked a taxi driver if he could take us to a sex club. He pulled up outside this rather nondescript looking little building, I have no idea what part of town it was in, and I forget what it was called. I paid for us to go in, and we made our way to the bar and sat on stools. Within seconds two girls came and sat with us and asked us to buy them a drink. It was supposed to be champagne, but it was about sixty percent water and ridiculously expensive. The club was like every sleazy cliché you could imagine – red lights, velvet wallpaper, subdued lighting.
There were pornographic films showing and a tiny stage in one corner with a bored-looking stripper. My new companion and I made our way over to the lounge area where the films were playing and the stripper, who it turned out was one of club’s ‘working girls’, was going through the motions. I asked my new-found friend if she ever stripped, she spoke excellent English and said “I’m supposed to, but I don’t like it. It’s not my job; I’m a hopeless dancer. I usually sell my slot to one of the others”. I was tempted to ask her if she was in a different union or something. We settled on one of the sofas. She began to kiss me and interfere with my person, then asked if I’d like to go upstairs. Her main selling point seemed to be that we didn’t need to use a condom, so for that she could charge a premium price of four hundred guilders. I really wasn’t that interested, so offered her two hundred, which offer she quite understandably found offensive:
“Why won’t you pay me the full amount?”
“Well, look around the room. I’m relatively normal, in good condition and probably the youngest man in here. Would you rather go to bed with me or one of these fat sweaty old men?”
Not the most inspirational chat-up line, I concede, but the best I could come up with under the rather trying circumstances.
“Yeah, I see your point, but what you’re offering me is insulting. How about three hundred?”
“Two fifty?”
“Two eighty”
“OK, two eighty then”
Just as these complex and delicate negotiations were reaching a mutually acceptable conclusion, an anxious-looking Pete came over:
“Col, could you lend me four hundred guilders? I’ll pay you back tomorrow”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake! Here, off you go…”
My companion and I went upstairs and before I could blink, she’d ripped off all her clothes and clambered onto a huge bed. One wall of the room was a large mirror, two-way, no doubt, in order to ensure that the girl was safe. She made me go to a sink in the corner and wash my willy in some kind of purple disinfectant stuff and then resumed her groping and kissing. I have to say I really didn’t like it much - this was a procedure, a transaction, nothing more, nothing less. It was all very hasty, methodical and systematic. Nevertheless, matters swiftly escalated and developed from there.
Afterwards, we lay on the bed and had a chat. She’d been thrashing around, moaning and groaning, acting as if I were some kind of great lover. I told her she was a very good actress. She laughed (we got along pretty well, being more or less the same age. We probably could have been mates under different circumstances):
“Actually, I AM an actress! I do this to earn some money when I’m not working on stage or radio. I’m from Germany, but I come here to work in Holland because I wouldn’t want to be recognised by someone back home. It pays very well, it’s easy and things here are very safe, clean and well managed. I’ll probably do this until I’m in my thirties and then if the acting hasn’t taken off properly, I’ll give up both jobs and get something more routine, an office job, a shop assistant or something. Anyway, we must go back downstairs now, your time’s up”.
We went back downstairs and she promptly abandoned me and went shooting off in search of the next punter at the little bar, hopefully one not a tight-fisted as me who would pay her the full 400 guilders and not quibble.
In the taxi back to the hotel, there was a bit of an awkward silence. Pete said his companion had been very pleasant and friendly, she was a married woman, probably in her late thirties. Pete was a married man with two kids, by the way, I was unattached at the time.
Back in England I put my expenses claim in as per usual. My boss Nigel called me at home:
“Colin, your expenses don’t tally up. There are hundreds of guilders that don’t correlate with any receipts”.
“Well, Nigel, it’s like this…”
I told him all about Pete’s request to go to the sex club, well not ALL about it, not all the messy details, for which he was doubtless eternally grateful, but the general gist of where the money had gone and the fact that Brünnhilde, or whatever her real name was, didn’t issue receipts. Nigel was OK about it, not exactly thrilled, but OK. He signed off the expenses with all the ‘unreceipted items’ and we never spoke of it again.
It wasn’t really a particularly enjoyable experience. I suppose I’m just not the kind of person that wants sex for its own sake; I need to at least have some kind of rapport or relationship with the other person and also some mutual respect between us. I’ve had a few one-night stands in the past, but it’s usually something physical that both parties are out looking for, just two people scratching an itch, and not a rather cynical business transaction like it had been with the sex worker. I really don’t see the attraction from the man’s point of view and I’m sure that a lot of the women don’t really want to be doing it, deep down, but are forced into it by circumstances. The German lady seemed quite hard-nosed, philosophical, businesslike and relaxed about it all – it was simply a perfectly legal job she did to pay the rent when she wasn’t acting, I suspect she saw punters like me as pathetic mugs for paying for something so routine, and good luck to her. In effect, we were exploiting one another.
I suppose in many ways she was cut from the same cloth as the erstwhile housewives and, it seems, off-duty teachers of Bicester.
© Rolling Stone
In an ideal world, you could treat Brünnhilde to a cup of coffee, but Heaven only knows where she is now. Instead, we could share one in her honour. It needn't cost 400 Guilders, either - £2 would do! :)
