Holland today is probably the worst country in Europe, a sinkhole of social pathologies that would make Berkeley blush. And yet, at every step, the decisions the Dutch took to liberalize their formerly straitlaced Calvinist society seemed to make sense at the time, at least to some
Today, with crime rampant, social tensions brought on by enormous, apparently unassimilable migration from the Muslim world, and the collapse of its social cohesion and cultural self-confidence, the Netherlands is the Sick Man of Europe.
I originally wrote this story for the now-defunct Mirabella Magazine, to answer the editorial question: why are the Dutch so tolerant. “Tolerant” seemed like the right word at the time; today, nearly 18 years later, “suicidal” might be a better choice.
This is what I found.
The smoke is overpowering as I climb the steep stairs and enter the tiny second-floor room at a neighborhood joint called “Balou.” A group of young men are sitting at a handful of tables, talking, listening to loud rock music, looking out the window at the street below or watching a Detroit Pistons – Cleveland Cavaliers basketball game on the television perched mutely in the corner, each puffing away contentedly. The 25-year-old owner, Jerry, is standing behind the bar and gabbing affably to some of the regulars, displaying upon request a menu of the evening’s offerings. This might be anywhere, in any bar USA. Except it’s not.
Jerry shows me the menu. Compared with competing locals like “The Grasshopper” and “The Bull Dog,” it’s rather small. This is what it says:
Hashish
_____________________________
Moroccan — 6.50
7.50
Ketema –12.50
Grass
______________________________
Sensimillia — 12.50
Skunk — 13.50
I am in a typical Amsterdam “coffeeshop,” where the coffee is sold downstairs, but the real action takes you one floor higher. You pays your money — in Dutch guilders — and you takes your choice: with an expert hand, Jerry measures out precise quantities of the drug of choice into a small scale, right in front of the customer, then bags it. (A gram of powerful “skunk” marijuana would cost about $8.) Whether tobacco or grass, many Dutchmen prefer to roll their own, but fumble-fingered Americans unskilled with cigarette paper can buy Jerry’s ready-made joints for five guilders (about $3) apiece. Just apply a lighted match to the joint’s tip and, voila! It’s the sixties all over again. And all perfectly legal (well, decriminalized, at least) to boot.
Under an informal agreement between police and drug-sellers, shops like Jerry’s are supposed to have no more than 30 grams of marijuana or hash on hand, but no one pays much attention to that. What is strictly enforced, however, is the ban on hard drugs like cocaine; the night before, in a citywide sweep, police raided and closed 18 coffeeshops (out of an estimated 350) where hard drugs and weapons had been found. Jerry rejects any notion that the ultra-mellow, laid-back coffeeshops contribute to street violence: “When you come in here you are safe, and it’s my responsibility to keep it that way. What happens to you once you go out into the street is the responsibility of the police or the government.”
Welcome to the Netherlands, the original laissez-faire capitalist society where doing well by doing good and winking at venial sins has kept the country healthy, wealthy and relatively wise since the 16th century. When the Huguenots fled France, it was the Dutch who took them in and turned a profit by outfitting them for their long sea journey to South Africa. When the Jews were made unwelcome in Spain and Portugal, they found a refuge in the Lowlands, setting up thriving diamond-cutting business in Rotterdam and in Belgium. Although their record of resistance to Hitler was not as exemplary as, say, that of the Danes, the Dutch quickly regained their place as Europe’s most open, broad-minded society, where the principle of live and let live has been raised to a fine art. Indeed, Article One of the Dutch constitution forbids discrimination on the grounds of race, religion, sexual orientation or anything else. Where else would you find unions that represent both heroin-addicted junkies and prostitutes?
By any measure, Dutch society has long been among the most liberal and tolerant in the world. Soft drugs a problem? Then stop the harrassment of pot smokers and concentrate on blocking the influx of hard drugs instead. Prostitution flourishing? Legalize it. Want to block the spread of AIDS and venereal diseases? Put condom vending machines in the high schools and hand out needles and methadone to IV drug users. Unwanted pregnancies unacceptable? Make the Pill free. Want to terminate your pregnancy? State-sponsored insurance will pay for an abortion up to the 20th week.
There’s more. Are you sexually dysfunctional? Insurance will pay for visits to a surrogate, as long as you have a doctor’s prescription. Don’t like the equipment you were born with? Then get the government, after proper psychological evaluation, to pay for your sex-change operation. Resistant to turning over your life’s savings to a doctor so he can keep you alive for a last few miserable years? Make euthanasia possible, under strict but merciful controls. Bored on a business trip? Check into a hotel room and find hard-core porno movies on the pay-TV, or check out the signs for escort agencies with names like “Call Girls” that hang from every streetlamp.
The “family values” crowd in the United States would have a heart attack here.
The Dutch don’t care.
“People always say we Dutch are tolerant,” observes Annemarie Grewel, one of the 45 members of the Amsterdam city council and a prominent leader of the Dutch Labor Party. The truth is we’re simply not interested, and that makes us tolerant.”
Grewel, 57, and a former professor of educational psychology and chairman of the University of Amsterdam, has been active on drug-related issues and is considered the leading Dutch expert on the subject. “We tolerate soft drugs for personal use, as well as the sale of a little bit of soft drugs. But we feel it is very important to draw the line at hard drugs; as soon as hard drugs appear you get concentrations of criminals. So we tolerate, but we have not legalized. With the advent of the European Community, it would be very difficult to legalize marijuana and hashish.”
The biggest problem is with Germany. Dutch towns along the German border are frequented by “drug tourists,” mostly German, who are given stiff prison sentences if they are caught with grass when they return home. The Dutch, however, have successfully lobbied the Germans to show some leniency, and have told the EC that they will not accept any interference with current Dutch soft-drug policy.
It is impossible to win a war against drugs without setting any priorities,” said Amsterdam mayor Eduard van Thijn a few years ago. “We have a pragmatic policy. On the one hand, we reject legalization of hard drugs very strongly, because that is surrender. But we also reject a policy of total war, which is overkill.
The Dutch take a similar see-no-evil approach to euthanasia. Passive mercy-killing — the removal of life-support systems to allow for natural death — has long been acceptable. But over the past two decades, active medical euthanasia has become informally allowed under certain conditions: a mentally competent patient must request it; a doctor must confirm that he or she is suffering from terminal illness; a second medical opinion must concur; and the death must be reported to the authorities. The Royal Dutch Pharmacists’ Association has even drawn up a list of the most efficient drugs in order to guide doctors; one preferred method is a shot of barbiturates followed by a second injection of curare. A 1987 movement to legalize the practice fell short of approval, but the Dutch seem content to keep euthanasia, like soft drugs and pornography, in a legal gray area.
If I could sum up the difference,” says Maria Schopman, “it is that the Dutch are pragmatic in their approach to social problems, and the Americans are antagonistic.
Schopman, the director of one of Holland’s leading sex-therapy clinics and for the past seven years the co-host of a Sunday afternoon radio call-in show, Radio Romantica, is sometimes referred to as the Dutch Dr. Ruth.
For example, in Holland it is traditional to leave your shutters open at night and the curtains undrawn. Anyone can look in and see what you are doing, but to us it signifies that we have nothing to hide. And this symbolizes the Dutch attitude toward things like sex and drugs; we don’t hide the problems, we look at them.
Sipping her tea in an Amsterdam private club, Schopman could be in appearance Gertrude Stein’s first cousin, but with a bright twinkle in her eyes; there’s a there there. Like almost everyone in the Netherlands, she speaks nearly perfect English, and on the rare occasions when she fishes for a word, her friend Judith Weingarten, an American-born archaeologist, supplies it for her. She is, in her reserved yet warm way, the archetypal Hollander.
“Our figures shows that 25 percent of the Dutch are dissatisfied with their sex lives, that they’ve become dull, unimaginative and predictable,” says Schopman who, along with co-host Alfred Lagarde, did one weekly broadcast from a bordello. Her quarter-million listeners (the population of the Netherlands is about 14 million) are feel free to discuss nearly every aspect of human sexual response, including male and female homosexuality and sado-masochism; “about the only thing we haven’t discussed on the air yet is necrophilia,” she says, only half-jokingly.
At her Amsterdam clinic, the services offered include birth-control related issues such as prevention and abortion; voluntary sterilization; artificial insemination; and sex therapy. American advocates of unlimited abortion on demand, however, may be surprised to learn that Dutch abortion law more closely resembles Pennsylvania’s: a woman seeking an abortion in the sixth to 18th week of her pregnancy must undergo a five-day waiting period to make sure she really wants to go through with it. (After 18 weeks, procedures are decided on a case-by-case basis.) “From a professional point of view,” says Schopman, who is not an M.D., “I think that the waiting period is a bad idea. By the time a woman comes to our clinic, she’s already made up her mind. But it’s the law.”
It is perhaps indicative of how the Dutch handle their personal freedom that both the abortion and AIDS rates remains low in a country where the age of sexual consent, whether hetero or homo, is 16 — for a time, the Dutch debated lowering it to twelve — and where more than half the women between the ages of 15 and 48 are on the Pill. (Since 1987 it also has been possible for wives to sue their husbands for rape within marriage.) When AIDS first struck, Dutch doctors went into gay bars to hand out information on preventing the deadly disease, and across the country, identity-protected AIDS tests are given for free.
A good example of Dutch pragmatism at work is the current movement to legalize the brothels, which range from cheap cat-houses to elegant, gilded palaces of sin. While Amsterdam’s notorious Red Light District, where the girls set up shop in individual windows from which to entice passers-by with their product lines, has long enjoyed de facto legal protection (much like its sister act along the Reeperbahn in Hamburg), bordellos were technically forbidden on the grounds that the women who worked in them could be exploited. Councilwoman Grewel is voting for legalization — which will allow the government both to regulate the industry and to tax it — but is determined to protect the poor, often drug-addicted streetwalkers as well. “I don’t like them,” says Grewel, speaking of the brothels, “but they exist. They’re a reality.”
Just how real can be gleaned on a visit to Yab Yum, the most luxurious and famous of Amsterdam’s bordellos. Located on one of the inner canals at Singel 295, the five-storied, turtle-doved-logoed, Asian-art-decorated whorehouse — fittingly, built in 1680 as a merchant’s mattress warehouse — is an Amsterdam landmark, an opulent, expensive sexual fantasy whose appeal is less sexual than sybaritic. A 150 guilder (about $88) entrance fee, which also covers the client’s drinks at the bar, discourages casual callers, as does the obligatory 350-550 guilder house champagne charge (of which the girls get about half) and the 400 guilder an hour ($240) charge for sexual services.
No one is more in favor of the legalization of the bordellos that Yab Yum’s proprietor, Theo Hueft, a former cosmetics salesman. “You ask for criminals if you put prostitution under a blanket,” says Hueft, echoing the traditional Dutch rationale. “If it’s legal, you can better control the whole process. It’s better for us, better for the government. Twenty years ago, a place like Yab Yum” — the name comes from the Kama Sutra — “was absolutely illegal. Today, Amsterdam without a club like Yab Yum is unthinkable.”
Hueft, 58 and a fixture on Dutch TV talk shows, has long been active in improving the image of Amsterdam’s brothels. Each of his 60 girls — on any given night, 25 are on duty to service 30 to 35 clients — is medically checked once a week and, with the advent of AIDS, condoms are strictly required for all customers; each one of the eleven rooms at Yab Yum is furnished in Chinese antiques and comes equipped with its own Jacuzzi whirlpool bath, which is also an compulsory part of the foreplay. Except for a short Christmas break, the club is open all year from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m., seven days a week. “We have no real competition,” says the bespectacled Hueft, professorily attired in a dark business suit, polka dot tie. “When you go out to eat, you can have a hamburger or you can go the finest restaurant in town. That is the difference between us and the other houses in Amsterdam.”
The women who apply to work at Yab Yum, most of whom have never before been prostitutes — an international collection of university students, secretaries and housewives — are screened by Hueft’s Swiss girlfriend, Monica, to whom they apply. They must be at least 18 years old, and the determining factor is less their physical beauty (taken for granted) than their language skills (about half of them are Dutch, and nearly all speak English), their ability to carry on a conversation and their general comportment; Miss Congeniality does well here.
If the Netherlands seems the land of enlightenment to long-suffering American liberals, it has not become so without paying a price. Even today, American visitors who arrive in Holland expecting the neat, orderly Dutch landscapes of Cuyp and van Ruisdael are in for a disappointment; the area around the city’s Centraal Station is notorious for its drug addicts and cheap prostitutes, and dirt and graffiti adorn many public streets and buildings. In fact, for a time conditions got to be too much even for the Dutch, who realized their hard-won social freedoms were being threatened; in 1988, under van Thijn, the Dutch started to clean up their act and today Amsterdam is notably more salubrious, if not as squeaky-clean as the German cities across the Rhine.
Further, it would be wrong to think that Amsterdam is Holland, just as New York City is not the United States. Parts of the Netherlands remain almost preternaturally neat, and are as politically conservative as anything in the American heartland. The Protestant farming village of Staphorst, 80 miles northeast of Amsterdam is synonymous with Dutch reactionary conservatism, representing the views of about 300,000 members of the Dutch Reformed Church scattered across the country; this “Staphorst factor” rejects most of the Dutch welfare-state trappings and consistently polls about five percent of the vote in national elections.
But it is not just the Dutch equivalent of the Amish who are starting to react against some of the social extremes. Martha Hawley, an American expatriate who works at Radio Netherlands and whose 14-year-old daughter was born in Holland, is beginning to have second thoughts. Hardly a Pat Robertson type, the unmarried Hawley is nevertheless concerned — concerned about her personal safety in Amsterdam and concerned about the effects of Dutch license on her teenager. “By the time kids reach puberty here,” she says as we stroll to a restaurant on the fringes of the Red Light District, “they’ve seen everything.”
It’s true. Walk into, or even past, any Amsterdam pornography shop and you will see, openly displayed, images of almost every conceivable sexual situation and perversion, including water sports and animal acts (but no child pornography, which lies beyond the pale even here). Despite the government’s ban on hard drugs, dealers walk the streets, chanting their list of wares, New York City-style: cocaine, ecstasy, cocaine, ecstasy. If the atmosphere is not as threatening as, say, the South Bronx, it is inimical enough to keep even an experienced journalist like Hawley out of the area.
Later that night, boarding a tram at the Centraal Station, I am accosted by a fellow passenger holding a bouquet of Christmas-tree cuttings and humming to himself. He seems friendly enough, but there is something unusual about him.
“A girl gave me these at the station,” he says in a British working-class accent, although he is clearly Dutch. “I told her I just got out of jail today.”
I remark on the quality of the arrangement, but he is intent on telling me his story. “I was in jail for 16 years. I sure hope I still have a place to live. I’ve got the key, but who knows what I’ll find when I get home.” He laughs loudly, bringing stares from the other passengers.
“I shot a policeman,” he explains without being asked. “I shot him in the head.” Again, the laugh and a shake of the head, as if he can’t quite believe it himself.
As I step to the door to get off at my stop, he calls out to me: “Good luck mister, and be careful on the streets. The crime has really gone up around here.”
As I make my way back to my hotel, I think of something Martha Hawley had told me, a famous Dutch aphorism that every first-year student of the language learns, and which admirably sums up the whole social ethos here: Doe maar gewoon, dan doe je al gek genoeg.
Which, translated, means: “Just be normal, that’s crazy enough.” It seems an apt, pragmatic symbol.
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