THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2019 21Pay cable’s freedom to titillate no longer
offers the same competitive advantage it
once did, thanks to streaming porn. Last
year, the network retired its late-night
adult programming, including reality
shows like Real Sex as well as soft-core
erotic movies. At the same time, the rev-
elations of #MeToo have made networks
more tentative about shooting sex that
could be interpreted as exploitative. Nina
Noble told me that, in her view, The Deuce
probably wouldn’t have been green-lit
post #MeToo—even though the show’s
objective is not to revel in exploitation
but to shine a critical light on it.
Financial and cultural pressures have
already had an unmistakable effect on
how sex is depicted in film. In an essay this
spring, The Guardian’s film editor, Cathe-
rine Shoard, described a new “age of cine-
matic abstinence.” In June, the Washington
Post film critic Ann Hornaday declared
that “the classic sex scene—once a staple
of high-gloss, adult-oriented, mainstream
movies—has been largely forgotten and
ignored,” as studios now favor films that
are either violent or kid-oriented.
For the moment, at least, HBO seems
intent on finding a way to make sex safe
for the small screen, and the small screen
safe for sex. Rodis now advises about two
dozen intimacy coordinators at the net-
work, who work on shows across the net-
work’s lineup, including High Maintenance,
Succession, and Westworld. I asked her
what she believes is at stake in her efforts.
Suppressing such an essential aspect of
the human experience would be negli-
gent storytelling, she told me. Imagine if
we treated sex like the ancient Greek play-
wrights treated violence, “where every-
one just went offstage, and then someone
came back and said, There was a killing!”
The costs of such an approach would
not be merely artistic, she added. Depic-
tions of sex on-screen have a power ful
ability to shape our attitudes toward inti-
macy. “Sex scenes are not just a vehicle
for someone to get off,” Rodis said. “Sex
has so many narratives, and it’s so com-
plex and it’s so important. People who
are growing up with the internet and just
seeing a certain type of pornography? I
think we owe it to them to show forms of
sexuality that are not the top 50 videos on
Pornhub.” Put another way, the severing
of sex from art would impoverish both.
Kate Julian is a senior editor at The Atlantic.
T
HE DUTCH HAVE
suffered some
brutal occupations,
from the Roman empire
and Viking raids to Spanish
and Nazi rule. But now
they face an even larger
army of invaders: tourists.
In the era of cheap
flights and Airbnb, their
numbers are staggering.
Some 19 million tourists
visited the Netherlands
last year, more people
than live there. For a coun-
try half the size of South
Carolina, with one of the
world’s highest population
densities, that’s a lot. And
according to the Nether-
lands Board of Tourism
& Conventions, the
number of annual visitors
is projected to increase
by 50 percent over the
next decade, to 29 mil-
lion. Urban planners and
city officials have a word
for what the Netherlands
and quite a few other
European countries are
experiencing: over tourism.
With such an influx of
humanity comes a decline
in quality of life. Residents’
complaints range frominconvenience (crowds
spilling from sidewalks
to streets) to vandalism
to alcohol-induced
defilement (vomiting
in flower boxes, urinating
in mailboxes).
Amsterdam, with its
museums, guided canal
tours, and picturesque
architecture, sees much of
this collateral damage. To
combat it, the city recently
passed various pieces of
legislation, including a
moratorium on new hotel
construction in much of
the city; new fines (140
euros for public urination
or drunk and disorderly
conduct); new restric-
tions on Airbnb rentals
(30 nights a year per unit);
and a combination of
bans and restrictions on
new tourist-centric busi-
nesses, such as bike-rental
outfits and donut shops,
in the historic city center.
Guided tours of the city’s
Red Light District will be
banned in January 2020,
and thanks to new govern-
ment regulations, many
of its cannabis “coffee
shops”—the first of whichdates back to 1967—have
closed. There’s even talk
of charging day- trippers
to step foot in the city,
a bold policy recently
enacted in Venice.
Perhaps most telling,
earlier this year the Dutch
tourism board officially
shifted its mission from
“destination promotion” to
“destination management.”
Overtourism may have
pierced a part of the Dutch
psyche that once seemed
inviolable: its gedoog-
cultuur, or culture of
per missiveness. Ko Koens,
who studies sustainable
tourism at Breda University
of Applied Sciences, finds
the anti- tourist sentiment
expressed by his fellow
citizens both curious
and troubling: “There’s a
certain irony that many
left-wing people who
condemn xenophobia
nonetheless talk about ‘the
Chinese’ and ‘the English’—
if they’re tourists, that’s
seen as okay,” Koens says.
Tony Perrottet, the
author of Pagan Holiday:
On the Trail of Ancient
Roman Tourists, says
anti-tourist sentiment
can be traced at least as
far back as the first and
second centuries A.D.,
when wealthy Romans
visited Greece (where
they complained about
the food), Naples (where
they complained about
the guides), and Egypt
(where they defaced the
pyramids and the Sphinx
with graffiti). “The struc-
ture of tourism historically
is that you have resentful
locals, and rich, obnox-
ious, clueless intrud-
ers: the Greeks and the
Romans, the Brits and the
Americans, the Dutch and
Germans,” says Perrottet,
who lives in Manhattan.
“But I sympathize with the
Dutch. God, there’s noth-
ing more annoying than
getting stuck on
Fifth Avenue between a
bunch of tourists.”Illustration by RAMI NIEMI
- BIG IN ... THE NETHERLANDS
The War on Tourists
Outnumbered by drunk and disorderly
visitors, the Dutch fight back.BY RENE CHUN