AMSTERDAM — Although the Dutch are as mired in the global economic slowdown as anyone else, one sector of their market continues to thrive: sex.That’s according to an informal survey conducted by Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa, which asked leading sex shops and other erotic businesses how they were faring during the current financial crunch.

“Sales are going well,” Madeleine Vreekamp of Mail&Female told DPA. “Our turnover is still increasing steadily. In times of economic crisis, consumers focus on quality rather than on quantity.”

One distributor of lubes and libido-enhancement products even experienced 12-percent growth during the last two months of 2008. A spokesman for the company called the increase “unprecedented.”

“And so far our January sales — usually a bad month for our industry — are also going incredibly well,” Mario van der Stelt of Cobeco Pharma told DPA. “We think that in times of economic crisis, sex becomes a popular pastime because it’s basically free of charge.”

The owner of one high-end sex shop said her customers don’t seem to have been affected by economic hard times, because the store’s business has remained “stable.”

“Some 60-percent of our customers are foreigners,” Absolute Danny owner Danny Linden told DPA. “They come mostly from Britain, Germany, the U.S. and Dubai. We serve the top segment of the erotic market and the economic recession is, apparently, not yet felt by these people.”

The area hardest hit by the downturn seems to be Amsterdam’s notorious red light district, which has been under assault by authorities since September 2007 in an attempt to reduce sex-related crimes, money laundering and slave trafficking. Even that hasn’t affected business significantly, though, according to Linden, whose business is located in the district.

“In the last two years, global media outlets have published many stories about presumed problems in the red light district, and about the area being cleaned up by the authorities,” she said. “Our business has been located in the red light district for 11 years, [but] I have never experienced any of the negative things so often printed in global media. I feel very safe over here, and I also think it’s very clean.

“And while some brothels have been closed, the truth is that the red light district is flourishing,” Linden added. “Nevertheless, ever since the negative publicity began, we have received calls from international clients from as far as India, to check if we still exist before they come here.”