The Sex Museum

The Sex Museum

by | Feb 2, 2022 | Society

I visited the Sex Museum in Amsterdam.

It is positioned as the Venus temple and the world’s first and oldest sex museum. The museum is hard to miss. It is located on Damrak street, in the heart of Amsterdam about 100 metres from the Dam square, normally filled with tourists and pigeons and a 6 minute walk to the centre of the red light district. The Sex museum pops out like a flasher on a street  that is dominated by the mundane sight of supermarkets, tour operators, eateries souvenir and forex shops.

This is typical Amsterdam where sex work is decriminalised and has earned respectability as legitimate work. 

During the regular Corona press conferences to announce new restrictions and regulations, sex workers enjoyed legal recognition. I watched the news with a mix of amazement and amusement as sex workers held their own in the recurring anti-lockdown protests and presented their counter proposals of how to handle their corona hygiene protocols. For most of 2021, one could visit a brothel, while museums and cultural theatres remained closed. 

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Let’s Talk About Sex Shaming

Let’s Talk About Sex Shaming

by | Apr 23, 2018 | Society

Let’s talk about sex was a hit song from the American all girl hip hop trio, Salt-N-Pepa released in 1990. For the conservative nature of the times, it went straight to the banned list. But anyone alive and young during the 90s remembers Salt-N-Pepa for this song and not because of the safe sex message. Talking about sex in the 80s was stuff of taboo. We only talked about what was wrong with sex in public and regurgitated borrowed notions of what we imagined was great sex from popular media in private. The 80s and 90s were incredibly traumatizing times for young people in the blossoming stage of their sexuality. The ‘killer’ disease AIDS was ravaging lives in Africa and the dread of sex went viral. The HIV virus had weaponized sex to kill and the 90s gave birth to a sexually repressed society burdened with the shame of sexual desire.

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