The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (15 page)

Equally telling are the statements deposited with a public notary in

1710
by the crew of a VOC ship accusing their captain, Adriaan van

Doorn, of entering into a relationship on board with a married woman who was returning to Holland with her family. He already had a repu- tation as a ‘whorish person’ and he kissed and caressed the woman ‘in full view of the crew’, causing great unrest among the men.The sec- ond mate openly reviled his skipper as ‘a scoundrel and a thief ’ and the first mate,‘a God-fearing soul’, sighed more than once: ‘It’s a miracle that we with our ship and all on board have not been punished by heaven for such an odious affair.’
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Syphilis, or the great po
x
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The brothels had been closed before, prior to the
R
eformation, espe- cially during outbreaks of plague, a disease named in the Bible as God’s punishment for human sins.
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Venereal diseases suggested a particularly direct link between sin and sickness; they were your own fault, a just

punishment for whoring. Syphilis might even leave a public stigma of lasciviousness, since in the first two centuries of the epidemic it took a particularly acute and visible form, with pustules not confined to the sexual organs. Both the pox and its treatments left visible marks, and ‘poxy’ had connotations of illicit sex.

Sufferers were treated with mercury ointments, hot air, and warm poultices in what was known as a ‘grease bed’. The mercury fumes made them sweat and salivate profusely, their bodies supposedly ridding themselves of harmful substances. Sweat cures were a ghastly business, as horrifying descriptions and illustrations make clear, and the mercury poisoning that resulted was as bad as the disease itself; both the infection and its treatment made noses rot and teeth fall out.The pain and disfig- urement caused by mercury were as much a punishment for sin as a cure for sickness. A simple and effective dose of salvarsan or penicillin might not have satisfied the seventeenth-century moral sense.

The municipal authorities paid for sufferers to be admitted to the former Plague House (
Pesthuis
) outside the city walls for treatment; sometimes prostitutes were discovered on their arrest to be ‘riddled with pox’ and taken straight there without any further legal proceedings. Most people avoided this facility for the poor and hid their infection, or pre- tended their ‘great pox’ was ordinary smallpox. An extensive under- ground industry of ‘pockmasters’ and quacks profited as a result. They treated sufferers in their own homes, offering total discretion and charg-

ing a considerable fee.This was also a source of additional income, even a second career, for brothel-keepers of either sex, who would advertise their services within their trade. In
Den desolaten boedel der medicijne deses tijds
(The Insolvent Estate of the Medicine of Our Time), a
1677
pam- phlet with the subtitle
In troebel water is ’t goet vissen
(There’s Good Fish- ing in Murky Waters), a physician and an apothecary complain about a member of the ‘despised pox-quacks guild, which advertises its detesta- ble work in taverns and whorehouses, in piss corners and bog houses. . . . These are signs that Amsterdam is the Academy of Whore- dom.’
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There were substantial sums to be earned.The Confession Books record prices of twenty to forty guilders or more for a ‘grease cure’.

By the eighteenth century, men of the higher social strata in par- ticular seem increasingly concerned about the risk of syphilis. One indication is the gradual, secretive introduction of condoms. In
1764
James Boswell refrained from bedding an Amsterdam prostitute, even though they had already withdrawn to a separate room, because he was not confident she was healthy and had no condoms with him (‘I had no armour, so did not fight’).
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Brothel-keeper Helena Havelaar had a surgeon come to her bawdy-house to examine and treat her girls for venereal diseases, even though in
1760
treatments cost her fifty guilders and in
1761
no less than
120
.
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Clearly some customers must have been willing to pay a premium in whorehouses where the prostitutes’ health was regularly monitored, although we now know that confidence in such examinations was misplaced.

In several countries governments too began to worry about the spread of syphilis, especially among soldiers and sailors, since it was af- fecting their military capability. In France from the late eighteenth century onwards prostitutes required a licence, which they could ob- tain only by agreeing to weekly examinations for venereal disease.
39
In

the Dutch
R
epublic state regulation of vice was unthinkable and phy- sicians who proposed similar schemes for the promotion of public

health were taken to task.Although prostitutes were subjected to med- ical checks in the years
1811
–
13
when the Netherlands was annexed to France, these were abandoned as soon as the French left, and when the national government appealed for their reintroduction,Amsterdam re- fused, arguing ‘that if regulations regarding debauchery were intro- duced on behalf of a public authority, debauchery itself would be made legal’. In the nineteenth century, many people were of the opinion that it would be wrong to recognize the existence of the trade and that it

was not the task of governments to strip illicit sex of its rightful pun- ishment.
40
In the course of the century, however, most other Dutch cities introduced an official system of licensed prostitution in conjunc- tion with medical tests. Amsterdam did so too, only covertly.
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Women as born whore
s
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Guilt-ridden attitudes to sexuality and the grave consequences of for- nication made prostitution a serious problem, indeed a crime.A crime presumes criminals.The Church regarded all those involved in whor- ing as guilty, men and women alike, and the law did not distinguish between the sexes, reserving the harshest punishments for the organ- izers and for adulterers. But that was in theory rather than practice. In this male-dominated society, the true culprits were identified as whores and their bawds, in short: women.

In the seventeenth century especially, attitudes to prostitutes were unforgiving. The authorities placed whores in the same category as thieves, regarding them as perpetrators, certainly not as victims. In court prostitutes tried to vindicate themselves by saying they had been seduced, deceived, then abandoned, but contemporaries set little store by such arguments. Prostitutes were more harshly penalized than brothel-keepers. The whores in the Spin House were jeered at and mercilessly ridiculed. In paintings and drawings, prostitutes are de- picted as active seductresses, their bawds as shrewd accomplices, whereas their clients are shown as victims who have foolishly suc- cumbed to temptation.
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They have fallen prey to the
Bedrog der hoeren
(
1750
) (Deceit of the Whores):

The crocodile beguiles its prey, As by a woman’s tearful cries, So likewise will a strumpet lay

A path that leads her to her prize, Just as the whore flatters and weeps, Her cunning heart its secrets keeps.
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The image of the whore was in fact an extension of the contemporary image of women in general. Women were lascivious beings, lewd creatures, deceitful, calculating, and capricious.
45
This was how women were commonly depicted in semi-pornographic popular literature of

the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
46
Take
Het leven en bedryf van de hedendaagse Haagse en Amsterdamse zaletjuffers
(
1696
) (The Life and Operations of Today’s Fashion-Plates in The Hague and Am- sterdam), in which a group of highly placed young ladies (
saletjuffers
or fashion plates) form a club whose members pledge themselves to com- mit as many outrages as possible.Whoring is but one example.The text is a nightmare about women at their most threatening, attractive girls from good families who are in fact rotten to the core.The frontispiece shows the origin of their evil disposition: beside them a devil works a pair of bellows.With these ‘bellows of sin’, as they were called in ser- mons, he blows evil thoughts into the women’s ears.

The devil was often portrayed in this way in the frontispieces of books like these. The second volume of
D’Openhertige Juffrouw
(
1699
) begins with a depiction of a devil with a pair of bellows standing behind a seated whore, who is counting her money with a satisfied look (see p. ii). This image of a man led astray by a woman, who is in turn a mouthpiece of the devil, has its origins in the Bible of course. In paradise Eve tempted Adam to do something that was expressly forbidden, and on earth Eve’s daughters use their seductive tricks to rob men of their good sense and prey upon them. The notion that a seductive woman making eyes at men had a devil behind her was nothing new.
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Every woman is a whore at heart and therefore a potential prostitute. That was the central message. An apparently virtuous wife might turn out secretly to be a whore, as in
De ongelukkige levensbeschryving
. So might one’s own mother, as in
De Amsterdamsche lichtmis, D’Openhertige Juffrouw
, and Nicolaas Heinsius’s picaresque novel
Den vermakelijken avanturier
(
1695
) (The Amusing Adventurer).The ease with which they become whores demonstrates the essential wickedness of all women.

Since classical antiquity, generally accepted medical theories had held that women’s sexual appetites were more powerful than men’s. This was blamed above all on the womb, an organ imagined as a hun- gry animal that had to be appeased with semen and pregnancy. Men too craved sex, but women, fickle by nature, were less able to control their lusts. Theologians agreed that women were the more sexually voracious. Active and uncontrolled female sexuality was especially threatening given the nature of male lust. Once a man’s passions had been aroused by a woman’s seductive arts, his masculine wisdom and piety went out of the window, and he lapsed into foolishness and sex- ual servitude.This attribution of guilt for dangerous and reprehensible

sexual lust contributed to a general misogyny. The reverse also holds true: fear and abhorrence of women encouraged men to lay the blame for illicit sex at their door.
48

Misogyny, or at the very least contempt for women, has a long his- tory, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the image of women as sexually insatiable and predatory was particularly vivid.The sexual demands of women are so excessive that on several occasions the protagonist of
De Amsterdamsche lichtmis
only narrowly escapes

death by exhaustion.
De Verreesen Hippolytus
(
1679
) (Hippolytus
R
esur- rected), a collection of stories about how women have always been the

ruin of men, warns that they can never be sexually satisfied.They will leave you half dead.
49
This motif was not confined to literature. In Breda in
1663
the English traveller (and future Member of Parliament)

William Lord Fitzwilliam asked his landlord

if there was not a clapperman or bellman belonging to this town, as there are in all the towns of the Seven Provinces. He answered us that there had been one, but a matter of a year ago he was cast off, by reason that good wives would not let their husbands in quiet and rest. At what hour soever, soon or late, the bell- man did call, they did put their husbands in mind of their conjugal duty, so that thereby a good old burgomaster and some other old citizen, having married young wives, had been almost undone.This he confirmed with his own experi- ence, although he and his wife could make up a hundred years and above.
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Whether or not it was believed, the story is typical of the period.

The idea that women are highly sexed is actually contradicted by the very existence of prostitution.Why would a woman demand pay- ment for something she was so eager to do of her own free will? Only in the early years of the
R
eformation was this question directly ad- dressed, as part of a counter-argument against prostitution as a neces- sary evil: if even men could not live without prostitutes, why were there no brothels for women, weak and lascivious creatures that they

were?
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An implicit answer can be found in popular literature.Women were not only lewd by nature, they were deceitful, cunning, and mer- cenary; prostitution had more to do with swindling than with sex.

Sex was a battleground, writers suggested, and in the struggle for power men often found themselves on the losing side simply because they were so naïve and trusting, in short, because a man’s character was better than a woman’s. Moreover, the very existence of prostitution benefited women.The mother of the protagonist of
De Amsterdamsche lichtmis
gives her first lover three guilders out of pure gratitude, a sum

any prostitute would be happy to receive, but she quickly realizes she can ask for payment. In the sea shanties of the time, a man who man- ages not only to seduce a woman but to make her pay for sex has performed a heroic deed. Women in the tropics were believed to be extraordinarily libidinous, so the sailors would surely have no great difficulty in achieving this; it was one of the attractions of a journey to the East Indies.
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VOC sailors complain in their sea shanties about the infidelity of the women they have left behind, while at the same time taking the blame, since before leaving they had initiated their wives into the pleasures of sex.
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3
Women are particularly eager to make love once ‘their appetites have been whetted’.
Den verresen Hippolytus
, whose subtitle promises revelations about ‘the nature, characteristics, intemperate passions, un- chaste love, and vanity of women’, claims they are possessed by ‘such raging lecherousness . . . that, once the bonds of chastity have been bro- ken, they race like unbridled horses to quench it, no matter how’.
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While still young they can charge money to have their sexual needs fulfilled but, the author points out with some glee, this trick no longer works once they are old. The mother of the ‘outspoken damsel’ (
D’Openhertige Juffrouw
) starts out by operating as a paid whore but later has to hand over money to satisfy her lusts, and no small sum either, since ‘for stopping an old leak one deserves to be paid double’.
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