All Aboard The Sex Boat: Atlantis
This story from the 1970 Dutch magazine Mascotte has the whiff of public relations puffery about it, as if it’s trying to make a “wild floating orgy” story out of a “booze cruise hired a few sex workers to get some publicity” set of facts. But then again, fifty years of time-gone-by, and Google’s uncertain machine translation, have surely eroded some of the nuance we would prefer to have. The upshot, from what I can tell, is that in May of 1970 some sort of German/Dutch partnership attempted to boot up a floating sex club that operated day cruises on a pleasure vessel named Atlantis. (There have been many ships named Atlantis but I believe we are talking about this one.) Sadly the venture swiftly failed, due to lack of uptake by the fornicating public:
PORN SHIP “ATLANTIS”
The latest in the Danish sex movement is the appearance of the luxury passenger liner “ATLANTIS”, registered under the German flag, but thoroughly Danish in its furnishings and entertainment. On May 1, the boat was presented to the press and every journalist and photographer was welcome to experience the test run. The boat has room for 400 passengers, who are entertained from seven in the evening until well into the night. The management of the festivities rests with the club “TABU-MARITIME”, which claims that the boat is nothing but an ordinary night club, with the only difference being that one is now on the water and the public cannot leave until the boat is tidily again located in the harbour.
These pictures were all taken during the first trip of the boat. The guests were welcomed by two well-known strippers who did their utmost to warm up the guests, although it had already become quite cold by evening that first day of May. The screaming music from the countless loudspeakers blared around the boat, so that the girls did not feel too much of the cold through fierce dance movements, much to the delight of the visitors who already got a foretaste of what awaited them that night.
When this charming lady has finally completed her comic strip on the quay and she can be admired from all sides in Eve’s costume, the huge steam whistle blows, the music sounds loudly and the naked lady is hoisted up as an “anchor” and the party can only really begin to start. All decks are filled with merry folks and open-hearted girls. The bars and salons are fully booked and different groups regularly perform. Dance groups, ballet, small plays, all based on the one theme of sex. Everything is allowed on board and everything must be approved, by the sailors, as well as by the girls working on board. It should just be a casual social gathering, says the owner of Club Tabu, and he wanted to emphasize that it is certainly not his intention to turn the “Atlantis” into a floating brothel. Every porn club in Copenhagen, according to the club management, offers the same program as us, only us on a boat and them in a permanent room. Being completely free brings our guests into a hee! different mood and that sometimes something is done differently than usual…. oh well, and moreover we have the space. There are enough cabins and it is logical that the guests and the girls sometimes get tired. Four to five hours on your feet is a long time, also for the girls!
Under the guidance of experienced sailors, the showgirls were allowed to hold the wheel during the press demonstration and the captain agreed that he had never enjoyed being on the bridge so much. In any case, the girls were not restrained and each really put her best foot forward to animate the guests. The girls here are Anja and Bettina, well-known strippers from the Danish nightlife scene, both of whom can boast of having been proposed more than a thousand times without ever bending their knees. Anja’s ideal is to survive until she has enough money to start a small farm far from Copenhagen and marry a quiet man who knows nothing about her past. Bettina’s ideal is one boutique in a country estate and as she can see it now she is not thinking about marriage. She calmly waits for the commune which is better worked out and hopes to reach the ideal community later with some good friends, but before that happens she first wants to play around herself, something for which the “ATLANTIS” offers her plenty of opportunities.
There is also joy and cheerfulness everywhere at the bars and who will not believe that such barmaids encourage the guests to have a spontaneous round, because who knows, maybe they will soon become tipsy ladies and would like to go to their room for a drink. To recover?
In between all this there were constant shows to admire. A real porn movie was only a weak reflection of everything that was conjured up for the guests on the “ATLANTIS”. Sex in all shapes and positions. The seasoned gentleman who visits a steady girlfriend every week. The shy outdoorsman who also wants to give it a try but don’t know exactly how to do it. The prostitute, who knows the blows of the whip all too well, tries to tell him all kinds of crazy things and fools around with him, so that by the end he no longer knows where to look. Group sex, one man with four women and vice versa, where it’s just amazing to see the possibilities to experience the ses in ways you never thought of. The “ATLANTIS” can simply be seen as the college of love. Anyone who has experienced a trip at the price of about seventy-five guilders excluding consumptions can consider themselves a graduate in the sex field. For him there is really nothing new under the sun or between the sheets!
Just as “MASCOTTE” went to press, we received the message that the “ATLANTIS” is on the bottle. Hardly a good month at sea, the visit was very disappointing. It was expected that about two hundred enthusiastic sex visitors would book every day, but they barely exceeded fifty per trip. It is not yet known what will happen to the staff, but there is a lot from the business side interested in hiring the ladies as secretaries, with love… that is!
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Aye aye, skipper, where do I sign in?
Parenthically, here is Laurie Penny’s essay on a crypto scam which hired sex workers in a failed attempt to give a mood of richness and luxury
Excellent essay, and I am LOL at the gift box for cruise passengers, containing “painkillers, Alka-Seltzer, several condoms, the world’s flimsiest pregnancy test, and a half-bottle of Jägermeister.” That sets a certain tone!
Before I even read the essay, I wanted to say that hiring sex workers to class up a function is a very possible thing to do, but not every sex worker is going to work well in that role and thus, to do it right, the hiring party probably needs to be exceptionally good at casting and screening, and also be willing to spend profligately.
I also purely love the libel-avoiding brilliance of writing that a celebrity “has never been convicted of rape and murder, but—crucially—not in the same way that you or I have never been convicted of rape or murder.”
Reading onward, I am also of a fan of Penny’s malice-aforethought use of the phrase “pump-and-dump” in the sentence describing the men receiving discrete Telegrams with room numbers of (we are to infer) the sex workers on this cruise.
I agree, nothing wrong with sex workers! But at least as Penny remembers it nobody was having a good time (and I suspect the hosts were not paying the workers’ social rates, but something like “free rooms, a daily rate, and anything that happens in a private room between consenting adults is not our business”).
That was my impression as well. Nominal compensation for being present, possible entrepreneurial opportunities, and a generally unpleasant crowd.