Amsterdam, the Body, and the Space Between Permission and Presence

Walk through the centre of Amsterdam after dark and you'll pass one of the oldest, most visible relationships any city has with sex. Red-lit windows in a neighbourhood called De Wallen, named after the medieval walls that once ringed the settlement, sitting a few streets from a church built in 1306. Nowhere else does the sacred and the commercial share a postcode quite this openly.

The area's connection to sex work traces back to the 13th and 14th centuries, when Amsterdam's rise as a major trading port brought a steady flow of sailors and merchants through the harbour, and sex work followed the money the way it always has in port cities. By the 17th century, over a thousand women were estimated to be working in the trade in Amsterdam alone. The relationship wasn't consistently open, though. The Protestant Reformation brought an outright ban on prostitution in 1578, pushing it underground rather than eliminating it, and Napoleon's occupying army briefly reversed that ban after 1795 before Dutch authorities tried, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to reinstate it once the French left.

The red lights themselves have a fairly mundane origin, evolving sometime in the early 20th century as sex workers who had once stood in windows wearing uniform clothing started using red-lit signals to stand out from growing competition. Window prostitution was formally legalised in 1911, part of a broader Dutch pattern of regulating rather than prohibiting behaviour the state had decided it couldn't realistically eliminate. That pattern reached its fullest expression on the 1st of October, 2000, when the Netherlands formally legalised brothels nationwide and recognised sex work as a legitimate profession, with sex workers registering as independent entrepreneurs who pay taxes, hold licences, and access the same health and social support systems any other worker would.

This is worth sitting with for a moment, because it says something specific about how this country decided to relate to sexuality generally: not through suppression, and not through glamorisation either, but through a fairly unromantic instinct to regulate what already existed rather than pretend it away.

De Wallen tends to dominate outside perception of Dutch sexual culture, but it's really just the most visible edge of something running much deeper through the culture. The Netherlands has one of the lowest teen pregnancy rates in Europe, alongside consistently low rates of STIs and some of the highest contraceptive use among young people found anywhere. Researchers studying this outcome point repeatedly to the same underlying factor: comprehensive, mandatory sexuality education, which in Dutch schools begins as early as age four, not with anything explicit, but with open conversation about bodies, relationships and boundaries as an ordinary part of growing up.

What differs from most countries isn't really the age children start learning, it's the framing. Dutch sexuality education tends to be built around connection, respect and communication as much as risk reduction, rather than fear-based messaging about danger and consequence. Studies comparing Dutch adolescents to peers from other countries have found they report more sexuality education overall, engage in more open classroom discussion, and go on to demonstrate better sexual health outcomes, alongside being more assertive communicators in relationships generally. Dutch parents, for their part, tend to discuss sex and relationships with their children more openly than parents in many other cultures, treating the subject as a normal part of family life rather than something requiring euphemism or avoidance.

Put those two things next to each other, and a clearer picture starts to form. This is a culture that decided fairly early not to be squeamish about sexuality's existence, and legalised, regulated sex work is really just the most visible expression of a broader civic comfort with sex as a fact of human life rather than a shameful secret to be managed through denial.

Here's where the story gets more complicated, and more relevant to the work I actually do. Cultural openness about the fact of sex was never the same thing as depth in the experience of it. A society can normalise sexuality, teach it clearly, regulate it fairly, and still leave an entire dimension of it completely untouched: presence. Intimacy. The felt, embodied experience of actually being with another person, rather than simply being informed about or permitted to have sex with one.

De Wallen, for all its historical significance, runs largely on transaction. A window, a negotiation, an exchange, over in minutes. This isn't a criticism of the sex workers themselves, many of whom have fought hard for the professional recognition and safety the legal framework provides them. It's an observation about what the transaction, by its nature, was never built to include: slowness, emotional safety, the kind of touch that asks nothing except presence in return. A culture can be sexually informed and still be touch-starved in the deeper sense, comfortable discussing mechanics while remaining largely untrained in intimacy itself.

This is precisely the gap tantra work moves into, in Amsterdam specifically and in cities like it more broadly. Where the wider culture has already done the difficult work of removing shame and denial from the conversation around sex, something openness alone doesn't automatically provide is depth. Permission was never the same thing as presence. A person can grow up in one of the most sexually liberal cities on earth and still never once experience touch that asks for nothing beyond simply being felt.

Tantra work in Amsterdam isn't positioned in opposition to the city's sexual openness. It's really more of a continuation of it, taking that same cultural willingness to look directly at sexuality and pushing it one layer deeper, past mechanics and permission into presence, breath, and the nervous system itself. Where the wider culture teaches that sex is natural and shouldn't carry shame, tantra adds something the standard education was never built to include: how to actually be present within it, how to read a body's signals rather than just its consent, how to slow down enough that touch becomes communication rather than performance.

This matters more in a city like Amsterdam specifically because the usual excuse doesn't apply here. In more repressed cultures, disconnection from the body can at least be partly explained by outside shame, by religious or social conditioning that made touch itself the enemy. Amsterdam mostly lacks that excuse. The permission has been granted, publicly and legally, for over a century in various forms. And yet disconnection persists anyway, because permission was never actually the missing ingredient. Presence was.

I see this constantly in the people who come through my practice here. Many of them grew up with reasonably healthy, shame-light relationships to sex as a concept, yet still arrive disconnected from their own bodies, unfamiliar with slowness, unpractised in staying present through vulnerability rather than rushing past it. Liberal culture solved the permission problem. It rarely solves the presence problem, because presence was never really a permission issue to begin with. It's a practice, the kind that has to be learned somatically, through the body, not simply granted intellectually through an open-minded upbringing.

There's something almost poetic about doing this work in a city built on this particular contradiction, a place that legalised sexual transaction over a hundred years before most of the world would consider it, and simultaneously built one of the most emotionally literate sex education systems on earth, and still, underneath both of those achievements, has residents walking around just as touch-hungry and disconnected from their own bodies as anywhere else. Amsterdam proves something important by simply existing this way: that permission and presence were never the same project, and that a society can solve one almost completely while leaving the other nearly untouched.

Tantra, practiced here, isn't rebelling against the city's history with sex. It's finishing a conversation the city started centuries ago and then, understandably, assumed was already complete once legality and education were sorted. They weren't the whole story. They were the groundwork. What gets built on top of that groundwork, presence, slowness, embodiment, the capacity to actually be with another person rather than simply be legally and socially permitted to touch them, remains its own separate practice entirely, one this city, of all cities, seems particularly ready to finally take up.