Amsterdam’s chamber of commerce thinks the city’s red light district must retain its ‘eroticism’ because it is such a boost to the tourist trade.

In a new report out today, it says it will be bad for the city’s economy if any more brothels and sex clubs are shut down as part of the council clean-up.
Will big money tourists really stay away if the red light district gets smaller? And if they do, should we really care?
There is something rather pathetic about wanting to attract even more people to gawp at the sad young women – very few of whom are Dutch – selling their bodies to drunken English louts.
Prostitution is a fact of life and Amsterdam deals with it in a matter of fact way.
But what the chamber wants is a more upmarket erotic industry. It wants chandeliers, champagne and whores who supposedly love their job – not the seedy sex trade with its forced prostitution, violence and organised crime.
Yab Yum, the city’s most famous upmarket brothel which has been closed down because of its suspected criminal connections, was an ‘exclusive hang-out for well-heeled businessmen and tourists’, to quote the Herald Tribune.
But it would be churlish to suggest that the chamber’s backing for a spruced up red light district is because city officials and business leaders are missing one of their favourite locations for entertaining?