I am sat here in The Eye. I'm going to call it Amsterdam's Mareel.
It's fantastic, a museum to film, with tours, virtual workshops, classes, not to mention a couple of screens and a cafe boasting a magnificent view over the water towards Amsterdam Central Station. I watch the ferries to Amsterdam head back and forth. So it's like if Mareel was on Bressay. Exactly that.
I haven't written a blog post on here in a while. Long gone are the promises of weekly updates from what I've been doing, where I've been applying to and finally where I'm working. Although as I've always said, I'd rather not talk explicitly about my work on here. Never wise to mix employment and personal life on the internet. Facebook is still asking me who my employer is.
Last time I wrote here the post was entitled "Home Sweet Homeless" on the eve of us all moving. That's all sorted out now. It's nice, we watch Firefly in the evenings. Well we did, till it finished. One series Fox gave Whedon, madness. More on that, here:
http://marjoleinsroomwithareview.blogspot.nl/2013/12/firefly-and-serenity-no-spoilers.html
That's my new review blog by the way, called Room With A Review (thanks Hayden - he named it) so I suppose I have still been blogging, but just more in the way of reviewing films, tv shows and gigs.
By the way, if anyone has a suggestion for a new series for us to watch please say, we are thinking Eutopia, but it's very dark, so something lightsome to make us smile again afterwards would be great.
The Red Light District
I didn't really know what to expect when moving to Amsterdam. I thought living here would be an educational experience, except I suppose what I have had is a change in my previous thoughts on the city. Things that I thought were a good thing I now can't believe I was tolerating the idea before. This is mainly and I suppose solely in terms of the Red Light District.
I realise now how naive I was, thinking that legalization would make for safer trade for the girls who chose to be involved. Yes brothels have guards and pimps, but so many of the girls who work in Amsterdam are predominantly foreign, 80%, and 70% have no immigration papers, suggesting human trafficking (figures from French Newspaper, Le Monde Diplomatique).
When I first came here I looked everywhere for jobs. If you look on online for work, often in the entertainment section of many websites, there are countless jobs for 'dancers'. So many girls are promised dancing careers, once they get here they are told they just need to work in a window for a few months then they can move onto a dancing career, whether this happens I don't know. To be honest I think it's irrelevant as they have already been made to prostitute themselves before they can dance. These girls are made to prostitute. In order to get to Amsterdam in the first place they have had help acquiring passports, paying for travel and accommodation. They arrive in the city with debts to pay and they pay them by working in the windows. Once they begin working in the windows they also need to pay those middle men, the pimps, bouncers and such. Often they have family at home who they have promised money to, not realising how long it would be before they could earn for themselves, so they need to work for a long time in order to fulfill their promises.
Please watch this video, it is an eyeopener:
Even before I had read the above information about the Red Light District I couldn't stand the area. As I have said earlier in this blog, before coming here I had thought the idea behind the Area was a good thing. Then I walked through the District. It is too easy to look, point, talk about the women in these windows, worryingly so. This is not just legalizing prositution, this is the most blatant exploitation of women I have ever seen. They are literally turning them into a commodity you can buy for the price you decide in barter. They stand in windows like some sort of goods that people point at. There are the different women who come out at different times saving the 'prettier' girls for later. There are people who write guides about how to get the best girl at the best time for the best price. They are literally seen as a commodity.
The only men I have ever seen in windows in the Red Light District have been cross dressers. Even the men are dressed up as women. How is Amsterdam this so called city of tolerance when it displays some of the most backwards treatment of women I have seen? It is frustrating.
I could write so much more about this but I'm going to stop, the main points for me to cover here were the worrying numbers escorted here through trafficking; that buying legal sex is indeed believed to encourage trafficking; and the sheer lack of respect for women.
For more information please read:
http://humantraffickingsgp.weebly.com/amsterdams-red-light-district.html
Thanks to:http://humantraffickingsgp.weebly.com
http://getvideoartwork.com
