Amsterdam Sex Museum

The Amsterdam Sex Museum is a skinny building located on Damrak Street squeezed in amongst equally thin cafes and coffeeshops. It is so small it is easy to miss it and wander into a café next door while mistakenly expecting erotic art. Contrary to popular expectation, the Sex Museum is unornamented and unimposing – on the outside.

The Sex Museum is open from 9:30am-11:30pm every day. Virtually any time you are looking to learn about the history of American pin-up girls, or Chinese erotic art, you can bring your 4€ and make your way through the museum along with a flurry of other visitors. I arrived at the Museum at 10pm on a Thursday night and the number of visitors there intrigued me. I was already curious about the experience of visiting a sex museum for the first time, and in Amsterdam, and on a Thursday evening, when I thought I would be one of three or four people there. Thus when I found myself having to peer over people’s shoulders to look at the “Marble Phallus-statue” from 500 B.C., and making friends while we laughed at the “Original stone phallus dating from the Roman age,” I was pleasantly surprised with my company. However, the majority of people there came with their significant other(s), which created a bit of an awkward experience as a solo viewer late Thursday night.

The museum sports sculptures, paintings, and photographs depicting sex poses, masturbation, and foreplay from all over the world. Upon entering the museum, a strange, plastic, mechanized man suited in a trench coat and hat greets you with a gruff “Hey.” This motorized mannequin is holding his trench coat closed a little too tightly, and is a little too aggressive with his greeting. Before you can reach for your pepper spray, he rolls forward, busts open his trench coat, and reveals his unbuttoned pants and erect penis. I was concerned this museum would cater to the male gaze, and this aggressor being the first thing I saw did not alleviate this concern, but the rest of the museum did quell this worry and impress me to some extent.

I commend the museum for showcasing a medley of art forms and gender perspectives. Although nearly all of the art pieces were copies, it was still an interesting experience to read about these artifacts, which is what I believe the museum is trading on in addition to its flamboyant humor. I was most interested in the representations of the female body. In nearly everything I saw, there were extremely realistic representations of women’s proportions, which is the absolute opposite of what we see in media today. In the “Plates With Erotic Scenes” from the excavations in Pompeii, it seems as if the artists who designed the pottery took extra care to carve and paint the fat onto both men and women’s bodies. The life-size mannequin of the Dutch “Spy and Courtesan” Mata Hari showcases her curvy body with pride. Even peeking at the old American pin-up magazines behind the glass casing in this Dutch museum reminded me that not too long ago, American media celebrated a fuller female body as well. The Chinese paintings were the most mystifying for me, because although the men and women’s bodies were extremely realistic, and the sexual poses were unrelentingly graphic and fairly amusing, the women all had miniscule feet. In the first painting I saw, I could not figure out what the red devil horn-like objects protruding from the woman’s ankles were supposed to be – until I realized that in China, the ideal body for a woman includes tiny feet. They dutifully represent this in their erotic art.

The flickering fluorescent lighting of the rooms irked me. It made the entire experience a cross between being tossed into a bad pornography, a hospital visit, and a decent museum that has a few really cool things to share. The plastic breasts on the walls and the giant penises were funny, but I think they detracted from what the museum could achieve. Obviously it is a tourist attraction, but it seemed like every time I was nodding my head and enjoying learning about something, I would turn my head and find my space invaded by a giant penis, or, for a change of pace, a centerpiece of penises (or “centerpenis”). That being said, I appreciate the notion of not taking sex too seriously – at the end of the day, the message the Amsterdam Sex Museum sends is that for men and women all over the world, both sex and laughter are unifying aspects of humanity.