On 3 Sep 99, at 18:03, Magenta Raine wrote:

> what is the legal age in holland for mature sex help?

That would be 18.
The problem is that prostitution or other professions in this field
aren't legalised. Eventhough nobody would enforce these regulations,
they do have effects on living-centers, hospitals, old age homes,
etc. Unfortuantely lots of such institutions in The Netherlands
believe they have a right to make this part of their house rules, as
they find it might attract (hard) drugs and crime. For what my
understanding is from my education, pretty much all have regulations
in place that do not allow personel to help you as this might
interfere with the professional help relation you have with these
people. Sometimes there are contacts with external volunteers or
professionals. Unfortunately I couldn't find any sources for you that
you might want to follow up on (they're still in a box in NL).

All I could say is to ask someone you feel comfortable with of the
staff, that offers you the privacy you need. It is very likely you
weren't the first one. If you get stuck on that track, drop me a line
and I will put some effort in tracking down some sources through my
old univ proff and perhaps some online searches (that's really what
i'm limited to from here).

> i thought holland was very much more open to sex than here in the US.

That's what tourist think. It might be true that Amsterdam has a red
light district (where you see more people from Japan than from The
Netherlands self) and where you can smell tourists smoking soft
drugs. But in reality Dutch people smoke 4 times less of the stuff
than North Americans and really don't talk any more freely about sex
than people on this side of the pool. The latter would be my personal
opinion from living in Canada for the last 1.5 years now.

Niels, I admire you for being able to speak up about a difficult
topic like this. I know I wouldn't have been able to.

Jasper