There’s something particularly primal about a British bachelor party, or “stag do,” as they’re called; something old and deep-rooted, perhaps not fully understood but immediately recognizable by both participants and onlookers. There are the traditions: the costumes, or “fancy dress,” for the groomsmen (jailbirds, wrestlers, Smurfs); the ritual drinking; the ritual singing; the ritual drinking again. There’s the desire to humiliate the groom, who dons a onesie and a pacifier, or a foam imitation of genitalia, and follows his friends, bleary-eyed and stumbling, through the cobbled city center of a major metropolis in whichever E.U. member state they’ve chosen as their destination.

In Amsterdam’s main red-light district, or De Wallen—where the streets are long and filled with coffee shops, bars, and brothels with sex workers standing in the windows—the stag dos have become unavoidable. Lads. Lads. Lads. Because prostitution and certain recreational drugs are legal there, the city has become a tourist destination for partiers from around the world. This is partly by design. In 2004, Amsterdam created a slick marketing campaign to draw tourists (slogan: “I amsterdam”). Between 2005 and 2016, the number of yearly visitors to Amsterdam rose from eleven million to eighteen million. Today, some thousand guided tours pass through the red-light district each week—at peak times, twenty-eight groups an hour, according to the city. But there’s now a perception, real or not, that tourism has crossed a threshold, that a phenomenon that was once manageable, even desirable, has grown legs and stumbled drunkenly into a canal. The government has changed course, raising taxes on tourists in Amsterdam and attempting to divert them to other Dutch cities and towns (Zandvoort! Muiden!). The popular “I amsterdam” sign outside the Rijksmuseum, once a celebrated selfie backdrop, was removed. When I visited last month, the streets of De Wallen were strung with festive banners warning people not to pee in the street or drink alcohol in public spaces.

Earlier this year, the city of Amsterdam announced plans to ban guided tours of the red-light district from walking on streets with window brothels, beginning in April of next year. It’s part of a larger attempt to limit tourism in De Wallen, but the government also seemed to be motivated by an urge to prevent the women working in the area from being objectified by tourists. “We are banning tours that take visitors along sex workers’ windows, not only because we want to prevent overcrowding in the Red Light District, but also because it is not respectful to sex workers,” Udo Kock, a deputy mayor at the time, said in a statement. “It is outdated to treat sex workers as a tourist attraction.”

Femke Halsema, Amsterdam’s first female mayor, has also raised the possibility of covering the brothel windows with curtains, or moving the brothels out of the area altogether, and putting them in more discreet buildings in another neighborhood. Part of her rationale was her concerns about trafficking in the Netherlands. “For a long time, there was a sentiment of sailors around the red-light district who, after months of sailing, go to a ‘stout’ Dutch woman,” Halsema told a local newspaper, in July. “The situation now is that predominantly foreign women, many of whom we do not know how they ended up here, are laughed at and photographed.” She also mentioned the inconvenience for residents and business owners in the area. “It must be quieter, cleaner, and more livable,” she said. When I spoke with a longtime sex worker in Amsterdam recently, she noted, more bluntly, that the government is increasingly hostile to her business. “It’s getting chilly for sex workers,” she said.

The city of Amsterdam announced plans to ban guided tours of the red-light district from going down streets with window brothels, beginning in April of next year. Photograph by Patrick Zachmann / Magnum

On a rainy day in September, I visited the Prostitution Information Center, or P.I.C., a resource center for tourists and sex workers that was founded in 1994 by Mariska Majoor, who once worked the windows in the district and has since become a fierce advocate for sex workers in the Netherlands. In the window, there was a mannequin in black lingerie, a chalkboard advertising tours of the red-light district, and a sign reading “Don’t save us, Save our windows!” Inside, a collection of items were for sale: T-shirts (“Sex Work is Work, Fight the Stigma”), postcards, and copies of Majoor’s book, “When Sex Becomes Work,” which includes tips for practitioners. (Chapter 3, “The Window Brothel”: “Learn to ‘expand’ your field of vision. Don’t just look at the people who walk close by your window but learn how to spot people who are coming in the distance.”) The P.I.C. is run mostly by sex workers, and, when I visited, a woman who asked to be called Jacqy (to avoid being outed to friends and neighbors) and a colleague were busy organizing a celebration of the center’s twenty-fifth birthday. They offered me licorice tea (“an acquired taste!”) and I waited as they spoke in Dutch about hiring an accordionist for the party.

Jacqy is nearing middle age and tall, with a booming laugh. She has been a sex worker for more than twenty years and started visiting the P.I.C. just six months after it was founded. She leads a tour of the red-light district one afternoon a week. (The P.I.C. has been offering tours of the area for close to twenty years.) “A lot of people want to go to this area,” she said. “It’s old, it’s historic, and they like the drugs and the windows.” But the demographics were changing, with more tourists coming to take in the spectacle. “In the old days, you would go here to use it: drugs, or sex, or both!” she said. “Nowadays, people just come in to see it.” There are more groups from abroad, who treat the area “like a Disney park.” There are more stag and hen dos. “It’s at a stretch, let’s put it that way,” Jacqy said.

The city has taken steps to limit the freedom of tours: guides are required to carry a permit, to cap their groups at twenty people, and to position them so that they don’t block sex workers’ windows. “You have to make sure people are not taking pictures, are behaving respectfully, not shouting and pinpointing,” Jacqy said. She thought that these were good rules (though not often enforced). But the prospect of banning the tours worried her, partially because they bring in business. Other measures, like covering the windows with curtains, carry the suggestion that sex work, while legal, is somehow shameful. “It’s not just about tourism, it’s also a moral issue,” Jacqy said. “People are saying it’s no longer of-this-time that sex workers are on display.” The issue was often discussed in condescending tones: “They say they are put on display, like this is not a human being who can think for him- or herself.”

Sex-worker unions and activist groups oppose the city’s proposals and see moving the windows as an existential threat to the profession. Photo by Ana Fernandez / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty

The new policies, and the more existential threat of moving the windows out of De Wallen, has given rise to groups like Red Light United, a union for sex workers in Amsterdam that was founded this year to resist the changes. Red Light United claims that more than ninety-three per cent of sex workers in Amsterdam are against moving the brothels, and that “any measure aimed against tourism is a measure against sex workers in the Red Light District.” It argues that the city should crack down on photography in the area instead and work with sex workers to introduce a “quality label” to “separate the good from the bad tour guides in the area.”

That evening, around 5 P.M., I joined Jacqy’s tour, which met inside the P.I.C. Our group included a woman from New York, a Canadian woman, and a British man—a social worker—who had wandered into the P.I.C. earlier in the day. Jacqy zipped up her jacket, grabbed an umbrella, and led us out the door. “During the tour, no pictures, and we will have to behave,” she said. “No spitting on the windows! I don’t think you will, right?” She laughed.