Please note that since writing this blog post, Siempre Tapas has closed down
If you want to read about tapas, I suggest you skip straight to paragraph four. For those of you who like to follow my rants, ramblings and random thoughts (half of which don’t relate to food), let’s turn to my second favourite subject: sex.
Last weekend gave birth to Amsterdam’s very own Annual Burlesque Festival; being the pleasure-seeking type of gal that I am, I got tickets with five friends for the Friday night. Corseted and stockinged to the hilt, we caned several bottles of prosecco, marvelled at the trapeze skills of one Lydia Darling and fell in love with Ginger Blush. I could expound on my fascination with burlesque for hours, but instead I’ll get to the point: Boylesque. Yep, you guessed right: boys who do burlesque. Ours was a trained ballet dancer – a proper little Adam Cooper. When Boylesque’s bits appeared, covered by thin lycra dancer’s tights, my (male) friend shouted, ‘it’s a sock!!’ The girls refused to believe this, and screamed for more.
Two days later I found myself in the red light district – showing round friends I had visiting. Needless to say, we decided to go to a sex show. Now, you may find this hard to believe but I’d never seen a sex show before and, since my motto is to try everything once, we set about trying it. (Mum, if you’re reading this, don’t panic: I can safely say that I will never ever put myself through that again.) Unlike the burlesque/boylesque, the sex show was soulless, joyless and utterly, utterly un-sexy. I can’t blame the overweight middle-aged couple who were having the sex; it’s not a crime not to look like a conventional porn star. But to have sex on stage on repeat, every hour, every day, in front of bemused Japanese tourists, lairy stag parties and the odd curious feminist, on a background of pneumatic-breasted wall paintings and an incessant Enigma soundtrack, would be enough to destroy the libido of Hugh Hefner himself. It was so bad that I wrote the notes for this blog posting during the performance, if only so I didn’t have to continue to watch. I’m annoyed that I put money into perpetuating a system that is neither about tolerance of the oldest profession, nor the personal choice and safety of those that work in it. But then again I couldn’t have drawn this conclusion without experiencing it.