Full disclosure

THE stock market was invented in 1602 in central Amsterdam, when traders gathered on the New Bridge for the then-disreputable purpose of speculating in shares of the East India Company. Today the New Bridge marks the entrance to Amsterdam’s Red Light District, an area dominated by other trades long considered disreputable but which the city’s liberal government has tried to bring above-board. But even in Amsterdam, sex work has not shed its stigma, as a former supervisor at the Dutch Central Bank (DNB) discovered last year. The Dutch magazine Quote reported this week that the woman was fired last autumn for having secretly moonlighted for years as a self-employed sex worker, out of an address in the heart of the Red Light District.

The supervisor, referred to in the press by her dominatrix name of Conchita van der Waal, offered a wide menu of plain-vanilla and sado-masochistic services from her website, with prices ranging from €450 an hour to €4000 for a weekend. But sex work has been fully legal in the Netherlands since 2000; the problem, says DNB, was not so much the sex as the secrecy. Ms van der Waal was officially terminated for violating the bank's code of conduct by failing to inform her superiors of her freelance employment, and by engaging in behaviour that could make her vulnerable to blackmail. “There is a misconception that we were taking a moral stance,” explains Tobias Oudejans, a DNB spokesperson. “The situation was that employees with access to confidential information should not be blackmail-able.”

This is where the issue gets more interesting. By failing to inform DNB about her side job, Ms van der Waal made things easy on the bank, giving it a clear cause for termination. (Quote later found that Ms van der Waal appeared to have broken the law by failing to register her business with the chamber of commerce or to pay taxes on the income, but DNB says these played no role in her firing.)

But what if Ms van der Waal had told her superiors that she was running a bondage and domination service in her free time? The bank might have sacked her for making herself vulnerable to blackmail—but why, if she herself were open about her activities? DNB's code of conduct also prohibits employees from engaging in behaviour that damages the bank's reputation. But on what moral basis would the bank determine that an employee engaging in paid sex damaged its reputation? A few decades ago, gay people were routinely denied employment for similar reasons. Isn't the Netherlands today supposed to regard sex work as an industry like any other?

Not really. "On the one hand sex work is completely legal, brothels are legal, you can get a zoning permit for sex work for your premises," says Mariska Majoor, founder of Proud, a Dutch sex workers' union. "On the other hand, from a social standpoint, sex work is still really taboo." Ms Majoor, who runs a legal and health information centre for prostitutes in the Red Light District, says she has known Ms van der Waal since well before the scandal broke. She criticises the bank's behaviour and the salacious fashion in which the Dutch media has treated the news, with lurid descriptions of the services Ms van der Waal offered.

For the past several years, Amsterdam has been pushing through a re-zoning effort aimed at shrinking the Red Light District. Known as "Project 1012", the effort has significantly reduced the number of "coffee shops" (legal venues for purchasing soft drugs), brothels and sex-work windows. It was the signature initiative of a rising star in the Labour party, Lodewijk Asscher, currently a deputy prime minister. Amsterdam's mayor, Eberhard van der Laan, describes Project 1012 as a way to crack down on the crime and human trafficking that are still associated with the sex and drugs industries, despite legalisation. But he also notes that the Red Light District occupies some of Amsterdam's most ancient and beautiful real estate, and distorts the city's tourism industry.

Ms van der Waal's very hesitation to tell her employers about her side job is a sign of how stigmatised sex work remains. It might indeed have left her exposed to blackmail. This was especially risky in Ms van der Waal's case, DNB says, because she worked as an inspector of companies in the most secretive segment of the Netherlands' financial sector: trust firms, which establish and administer holding companies for multinationals wishing to take advantage of favourable Dutch legal and tax arrangements. The Dutch trust sector has become extra-leery of scandal in recent years because of widespread publicity about its role in international corporate tax avoidance. One might wonder which of the secretive industries Ms van der Waal worked in has done more harm to the Netherlands' reputation. But even in the liberal Netherlands, some secrets are considered more respectable than others.