Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (10 page)

had the pathetic degree ofself-governance that allowed her to put a price on her own body, before experiencing its being used like an irrelevant rag. A woman could understandably interpret this as a step away from total powerlessness. Such a woman Will soon learn though that self-governance exists in such a diluted form in prostitution that there really only exists the shadow of it, and that it is only detectable when measured against a situation where it does not exist at all. Many adults who have been molested as children report their abusers as having bestowed gifts, sweets, outings, cash and other treats to buy cooperation and instil a false sense of culpability in the abused child. This tactic is especially effective in the child of an impoverished household. There is perhaps nothing as pitiable as the image of the child who has become so inured to being abused that he or she would actually solicit that abuse for material benefits, but prostitution is exactly that sad scenario played out by adults. The truth is prostitution is the commercialisation ofsexual abuse. The commercialisation of sexual abuse has created an arena within which this abuse can rage unhindered, precisely because it is unacknowledged and for the very reason that it is unnamed. This book strives to call attention to its true nature, and to assign it its true name. Of course, one of the abiding feelings that comes with abuse and �olation is a pervasive feeling of shame. It blankets everything, shrouds the prostitute in a cloak of it. I know that because for the years I was in prostitution I carried shame with me every day. When I think about that I am reminded of the line from an Annie Lennox song: 'Take this overcoat of shame; it never did belong to me'. If shame was in fact an overcoat that'd be grand; we'd all have the option oftaking it off. Ridding oneself of this negative feeling is not that quick or that simple. About two months after I started working in prostitution I was taken to a sheltered spot in the Phoenix Park in a large builders' van. I am almost certain it was a dark maroon colour, but my mind asks me if it wasn't navy. This bothers me for some reason. It bothers me that I am not~ certain of the colour, and I feel inclined to ask myself why this troubles me. I think it's because I want to take that memory and truly examine it, to fully understand it and present what it means, and I want every part of that to be accurate, although I know this detail is thoroughly irrelevant. What I have no problem remembering is the view from inside the van. In other circumstances I would have appreciated it as very picturesque. The man sitting to my right had pulled the van in tight beside some low.hanging trees, so that their leaves hung down like fronds and framed the windscreen, as if we were looking into a picture. The ground was mucky and I remember noticing the track marks of the wheels. The sky was that crisp clear blue of Ireland in late autumn; the promise of good weather that might be snatched away at any moment. Nature was everywhere and I could hear birds. The man was overweight and had a large beer belly and a lot of stubble. He turned to me and something happened that totally took me by surprise; it had never happened before. He recognised me. He asked where I was from, yet it was not a question. He identified my family and the road I'd grown up on. I felt something inside me uncoil and relax. It wasn't going to happen now. He'd known my dad and my dad had killed himself about a year and a half before. This made things impossible. He would have to turn the van around. He didn't. He grabbed me by the back of the head and mashed his lips against mine. His fingers locked into the muscles at the nape of my neck so that I couldn't turn my head. Instinct made me try to pull away. He tightened his grip. When he'd eventually had enough of kissing me he let me go. He looked like a clown with my red lipstick spread all over his face. My own face hurt from the roughness of his stubble. He took out some money and then he took out his prick and I did what I had to do. A quick glimpse of the woods first through the passenger window; I never even thought of running. I knew rd never have made it further than the trees. The worst part of that, of course, for me, was that he'd known my�ather. The best part of it, for him, was that he knew who I was. ~s soon as he'd recognised me, he experienced a powerful arousal. That 'did it' for him. It was something to do with one-upmanship and dominance and contempt and power. Itwas a sexualised sort of evil. That day I physically experienced how sexuality could channel evil; how people could get off on it; how an essentially evil act could be the source of sexual excitement. That my body was the receptacle of that evil arousal was more damaging than I can express. When I think of it, I am powerfully reminded of what that paedophile said to me walking past the gates of the Precious Blood church. For me, that day in the Phoenix Park, there was a depth of shame that would be difficult to articulate. I felt like the whole universe had so filled up with shame that I would never be able to experience any other feeling ever again. I went straight back down the street and kept on selling myselfthough, because not to do so would have been to acknowledge the enormity of what had happened, and ignoring it was the only way I could protect myself. My studied avoidance did nothing, however, to protect myself from the shame. It continued to follow me, because that is what the shame of prostitution does. Shame is the psychological cancer of prostitution; a woman develops this internal illness by way of her proximity to it in the same way the men who worked with asbestos on building sites once did. Site workers don't need to fear developing cancer from what they come into daily contact with any more. The world knows better about asbestos now. It is no longer acceptable, thank God. The world is just as enlightened, on a soul level, about prostitution, but does not act upon it because the sexual pleasure it affords men is deemed more important than the duty to treat women equally in humanity. So what we need is a consciousness of enlightenment; we need the acceptance of what prostitution is to reside in the forefronts of our minds, as well as in the deep recesses of our souls. We have a long way to go before we get there. Non-prostituted women, many of them, have been schooled to accept prostitution along with pornography as something they dare not oppose as offensive for fear of being labelled frigid-minded prudes. However adept the world has become at ignoring it, none ofthese social ',, constructs is capab~~ of eradicating the truth about prostitution and pornography as experienced by its participants. No amount of society looking the other way will ever erase the shame at the heart of sexual exploitation. Because shame is such an ever-present and abiding feeling among prostitutes and former prostitutes alike, the process of letting go of it is of paramount importance. What prostitutes must know is that there is no escaping the damaging ravages ofshame while the source ofit is ever.present in their lives; and what we former prostitutes must remember is that it is how we react to the feeling that dictates whether it will improve or corrode our lives. There really are almost no other ways of earning a living I can think of which would induce such personal shame. When a person is treated dishonourably on a routine basis the natural human response is to lose touch with our innate internal sense of honour; shame is simply an inevitable response to these circumstances. The sense of self-respect is removed and it does not leave an empty void; it clears a space which is filled with shame. There is a sense of'otherness' that is inevitably caused in a perso:p by their involvement in prostitution. It is compounded by the attitudes of other people, by the social shunning that is inherent to the prostitution experience. A prostitute will almost never announce her profession to a new acquaintance and in the rare case that she does, she will do so in an attempt at defiance. Shame in prostitution has many sources. Firstly, for me, there was a sense of shame associated with the fact that I was not growing or evolving or bettering myself or my life in any way; in fact, quite the opposite. I felt like a failure and I knew I looked like one. I felt that I had failed in life before I'd even begun and that caused me to feel uniquely pathetic, and, of course, ashamed. I knew that my physical privacy and natural modesty were obliterated and would never be taken seriously again. That did not continue to be true, but it was certainly true for me at the time and it was the cause of a very great deal of pain and shame. I knew that people generally looked on me with disdain; that was part of my daily existence. I made a friend during my mid-teens who was not involved in prostitution. Her mother found out what I did, instructed her to have nothing to do with me, and our friendship ended right there. I found that understandable, but that did nothing to negate the hurt or shame. No matter how much we'd like not to make outside opinions our own, the truth is nobody wants to be thought badly of by everyone they meet. By my late teens I was busy cultivating a dangerous drug habit. I'd had my first lines of cocaine at fifteen, but did not develop a cocaine habit until I was nineteen. The years in between had been spent smoking cannabis and taking ecstasy, the most popular drug ofthe early-to mid.1990S. I was only an occasional user of cocaine during those years, but in 1995, my use of the drug really took off and I was hopelessly addicted not long after my nineteenth birthday. When I look back now I see that everything about the way I behaved back then was designed to buffer me from the reality I was living; yet sometimes, despite these tactics, reality would get a look in. I remember distinctly one bright sunny day, I was nineteen at the time and standing at a southside Dart station looking in over the city. I was struggling in my mind about my life, about my position in the world, and I remember thinking about how I was nineteen and this was supposed to be young, but I felt like an elderly woman. I felt weary from the weight of my own life. I could see the whole of Dublin Bay and the air was crisp and clear. Boats came and went, tiny ones and large ones. Cars drove past the station, and trains drove through it, and smoke rose from the chimneys in Ringsend. There was such a sense of the whole world turning and me not having any part of it; and I wondered, right there on the platform, would I ever have any part of it, and was there any place for me in the world. It was one ofthe strongest aches I've ever felt in my heart, because I was so sure the likeliest answer was 'No'.

Chapter12 ~

THE VIOLENCE INHERENT TO-PROSTITUTION Brothel owners and advocates ofescort prostitution are well aware ofthe dangers ofthese kinds ofprostitution, although they rarely admit it publicly. For example, an organization in South Africa that advocates decriminalization ofprostitution, Sex Workers' Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT), addressed the dangers ofescort prostitution by distributing a list ofsafety tips for women. These included the recommendation that while undressing, the prostitute should accidentally kick a shoe under the bed, and while retrieving it, should check for knives, handcuffs, or rope. The swEAT flyer also noted that fluffing up the pillows on the bed would permit searching there for weapons.-A brothel owner in the Netherlands complained about an ordinance requiring that brothels have pillows in the rooms: "You don't want a pillow in the [brothel's] room. It's a murder weapon." (Daley, 2001,m p1). MELISSA FARLEY, BAD FOR THE BODY, BAD FOR THE HEART P rostitutes encounter violence as a matter of routine. I know this as a generality and I know it was true for me too. My own first experience of real violence occurred a few weeks after I'd begun working on Benburb Street. I got into a stranger's car and was taken to an apartment somewhere in the Islandbridge area, about five minutes' drive away. I'd informed him before I got into the car, as always, that I�id hand-relief and oral, but not intercourse. This was agreed upon and the usual fee settled. When we got to the apartment the man experienced a change of mind and decided he'd be having intercourse with me, whether I liked it or not. I wasn't having any of it. Being raped was not something I could have coped with. He became angry and attempted to pull me down onto the bed; I struggled away from him. He then leaned over the side of the bed and slid something out from underneath it. It was a long hunting-style rifle. When I saw the gun I became hysterical. I started to scream. I under.stood that he obviously meant business if he was going to the extreme measure of pulling out a shotgun. I understood too, for the first time, how dangerous he was as an individual. I had never seen a gun before. I ran out of the room and he chased me. I made it to the top of the stairs before he grabbed me. I thought that if I managed to make it down those stairs and to the hall door at the end of them, I'd be free. It never crossed my mind that I was dressed only in my underwear. He dragged me back towards the bedroom. I struggled like a crazy person and strained with all my bodyweight against getting dragged back in there, but he was far too strong for me. I was fifteen years old and weighed not more than a hundred-and-fifteen pounds; he was in his late forties and at least twice my weight. He got me back in the bedroom in no time. I could see that he was flustered. I think he thought that when he pulled out that gun, it was all going to go his way, with no questions asked. He kept telling me to stop screaming and when I saw him put his gun away, I thought it might be a good time to shut up. He took out his penis and told me to suck it. I did what I was told. He started getting dressed and I think he was still experiencing some level of shock because he'd just had a near-naked teenager almost run straight out his front door screaming into the street. That wouldn't have looked good; particularly not with a firearm in the house. As soon as I saw him getting dressed I followed suit. For some reason, he insisted on dropping me back onto the street, probably to ensure I was well away from his apartment building and out of his neighbourhood; and while therewas a sense of relief in getting out ofthat building, there was also a sense oflow-level panic at being with him in his car, which he could have driven anywhere had he chosen to. Still, it wasn't as bad as the apartment. At least I could see people out the car window. I was thinking at least I could try to catch somebody's attention if he decided to drive me off somewhere remote to hurt me. That wasn't necessary. He dropped me on the quays near the bridge that crosses the Liffey at Parkgate Street, a couple of minutes, walk from Benburb Street, and before I got out of the car he let me know what he thought of me. Apparently I was: 'A very silly girl,. I got out ofhis car and walked over the bridge, but the fun and games didn,t stop there. I was shaking with nerves and as I approached the end of the bridge, I spotted an off-licence across the road. The thought that a few cans of cider would calm me down flashed through my mind and I literally broke into a run to get to the other side of the road. I hadn,t looked left or right and didn,t even see the car until I'd already been flung over its bonnet and was lying in the middle of the road. All I remember was a flash ofred-the colour ofthe car, not my blood, fortunately. I was bruised and scratched and my nerves were in shreds, but my body was in one piece and f was, generally speaking, okay. I remember thinking that it had been the craziest day in terms of bizarre and horrible incide~ts and indulging the childish fear that bad luck came in threes. The man who knocked me down pulled his car over to the side ofthe road. A well-intentioned passer-by tried to intervene and told the driver he, d had no business moving his car and the guards ought to be called. I was in no mood for the gardai, told the driver I was OK and, to. my shame, told the passer-by to fuck off. Then I hobbled on home. I forgot all about the cider. Later that day, I was so bruised and sore I got the number ten bus to the Mater Hospital. I learned a couple of lessons that day. One: you never can tell what's coming at you when you accompany a strange man to his apartment, and two: ifyou ever need to go to a hospital, make sure you go in an ambulance. ~~ ~ ~ � Violence is every bit as inherent to prostitution as any other element�f negativity contained within it. If anything is more pervasive than violence itself it is the threat of it. The threat of violence is something I encountered far more regularly than physical violence itself. For every time I was slapped, punched or dragged around by the hair I was threatened with those actions, subtly or overtly, countless times. There always seemed in prostitution to be a sense of navigating your way through the negativity-of making your way from one end of the night to the other with the end-goal always being to come out in one piece. The physical act of violence is by no means the only thing that happens in prostitution to induce high degrees ofterror. I'm reminded of one man in particular who picked me up and brought me to the Phoenix Park a couple of months after I'd started working on Benburb Street. He had a jolly middle-aged-man sort ofattitude and, bizarrely, reminded me a little bit of Santa Claus, with his white beard and protruding belly. He drove me to the foot of the Papal Cross, and that was where his demeanour changed entirely. It became apparent immediately that this man was mentally unhinged, as he sat there telling me that he was Jesus Christ and pointing up at the cross, saying that he'd died on it for me. He wanted to have intercourse and tried to bully me into it, which was par for the course at that stage, but his line of reasoning was very unique in that he raged that he was the son of God and so how dare I refuse him? I was struck speechless by this lunacy and hadn't the first idea how to defend myself against it. He threatened to kill me and told me he would dump my body in the Dublin mountains. The man was so unhinged that he was not in control of his own actions, and it was horrifying to know that whatever happened in that car would not only be beyond my control, but beyond his also. He forced me into sex acts and robbed me, but still, I got out of that car in the sure knowledge that I was lucky, because I got out of it with my life. That man did not hit me nor need to hit me to put me in a state of terror. The past experience of violence acts as a guarantee of the legitimacy of all present and future threats. The woman knows from experience that the threat is not idle or unlikely, but the opposite; entirely probable; believable, and to be taken with utmost seriousness. The threat of violence, therefore, is an act of psychological abuse; some conclude just as mentally damaging as physical violence itself. In the lives of prostitutes (and unlike the actual act of violence), the anticipatory fear ofviolence is without end. Itcannot conclude because it is not an actual event. It does not present clearly defined stages; it exists perpetually, far beyond the violent event that first sparked it into existence and the others that punctuated your prostitution experience to continually authenticate your fearful expectation of being hurt. This state of fearful expectation is broken only by violent events themselves, which, as they continue to occur, reinforce the prostitute's sense of anticipation. You now understand that violence is certain to occur. You don't worry that it will, you worry when it will; and watchfulness is broken only in the moments you experience what you'd been watching for. The more pliable a woman is, the more she is willing to have her body used and abused according to the whims of her client, the less likely she is to encounter physical violence. This, I believe, explains why some women experienced higher levels of violence than others. If I'd ever met a woman in prostitution who claimed not to have encountered violence (and I never did), I'd have had to assume that she had zer.o boundaries. But most of us, regardless of what we do for a living, are repelled by the immediate reality of having our bodies molested; and we react to that, because we are humans, and punters react violently to our reactions, because they do not correlate with the fantasies they are paying to indulge. Prostitution inured me to violence to such an extent that these days I don't even get particularly panicked while getting attacked. I came face to face with this discovery a few years back after having been attacked by a large group of drunken people when out one night. Dissecting my feelings afterwards, while describing the experience to a friend, caused me to discover that I had been scarcely at all fearful during the event. I relayed for her the way I'd been affected after the fact, on a psychological level, by having had to spend eight weeks with my hand in a splint in �rder to heal my severed tendons, as I'd been stabbed with a broken bottle �n the hand and head. Luckily, my head-wounds were all sustaiQed on the side of my head, several inches back from the hair line. I must admit to having vanity enough to be grateful that I had no visible scarring to the face. I think most people would feel that way. The deepest part of the negativity in that whole experience for me was the state of depression I slid into while operating with one hand. I couldn't type. I couldn't clean my house. For the first week or so I couldn't even clean myself; my sister had to wash me in the bath. Having my mobility impaired was so depressing. It got me very down, but that was honestly the only thing that stood out to me as awful in the whole experience. The beating felt like nothing. It still does. Punches, kicks and lacerations are not a major problem for the woman who knows what is happening and what the outcome is going to be. It's a natural human thing, isn't it, to not be unduly stressed when we know what the outcome is going to be and that it is not going to be fatal? Of course you actually don't know what the outcome is going to be here (you could very easily die of a broken neck or excessive bleeding etc.) but because violence has happened so many times before and ended in the same way each time (recuperating in a state of lingering but transitory pain) I thought I knew, and behaved as such. This is an example of how inured to violence prostitutes become and an example also of how the experience of prostitution continues to affect the psyche of those who've ever been involved in it. Some prostitutes, unfortunately, lowered their already debased circumstances by physically attacking each other. Thankfully I never involved myself in meting out that practice (personally I felt we'd enough to be dealing with), but I was a victim of it more than once. I was slapped, threatened and had my hair torn out a number of times on Benburb Street and Burlington Road by women much older than I was, who wanted to run me off the streets. Knowing as they did that I was in my early teens, I honestly don't see how they could justify that. In any case, it didn't have the desired effect. All it did was make me embittered and angry and hardened to it. As a prostitute, you would almost always avoid a man with drink on . him, but you would sometimes make exceptions to that rule ifyou knew the man, or if he was not too drunk. Drunks were a regular exasperation. This was unavoidable if you arrived at a home or hotel and a man was drunk when you got there, but you had only to make the mistake of getting into a drunken stranger's car once and, if the experience was bad enough, you'd be very reluctant to get into another. For starters; it's a very disconcerting experience to be driven by somebody under the influence of alcohol, and of course, the more alcohol involved, the more disconcerting the experience. Assuming you arrive at your location in one piece, you can almost always be sure of a row over money, with the man either forgetting, or choosing to forget, the agreed-upon fee. Should this matter be amicably resolved (and it usually won't), he will almost invariably have trouble either achieving or maintaining an erection, and you, as the women paid to ensure that he does, will certainly be assigned the blame when he does not. At this or any other point, you may find yourself being attacked by an angry drunk in a car which has been locked from the inside. I have had this experience more than once, but one particular night stands out in my mind. I was only sixteen and still fairly naive. He pulled the car so tight alongside a stone wall that there was no way for me to get out. I knew instinctively, the moment he did that, in a laneway not narrow enough to necessitate it, that I was in for a rough time. I heard the click of the electric lock and something inside me flipped over. We turned to look at each other and what passed between our eyes was simply the acknowledgement ofthis new situation, this altered state of affairs. He told me that a blow-job wouldn't do, he wanted to have sex with me. I told him I wouldn't do it. He grabbed me by the hair at the back of my head and smashed my face into the dashboard. I'd had that experience before. His fingers were still tightly entwined in the roots of my hair; I pulled my head around to the right, far enough for our eyes to�
meet again. I asked him, in my coolest most sensual voice: 'Now, bow am I supposed to suck your cock if you're carrying on like that?' He stared in my eyes for a few moments while he processed this idea, apparently it aroused him, because he pulled down the zip of his trousers and let his erect prick bob out. He kept the same grip while he guided my head down onto his penis and held it there until he came. For a long while after that I wondered why he didn't rape me, but I was only sixteen then. Later I would understand why. He didn't need to demean me that way because he'd gotten all he needed from watching me demean myself. Every night on the game is a learning experience. What I learned that night was to lean close enough in the car window to smell their breath, and to always use a Janeway with hedges. Talk about trying to reduce the levels ofviolence in prostitution is point.less and inane. Ifphysical violence was never encountered in prostitution, if nobody had ever raised a hand against a woman in the history of prostitution, violence would still be inescapable for prostituted women, because prostitution is violence against women. My views of violence in prostitution are very much aligned with those of the women who penned this piece: 'We, the survivors of prostitution and trafficking gathered at this press conference today, declare that prostitution is violence against women. Women in prostitution do not wake up one day and "choose" to be prostitutes. It is chosen for us by poverty, past sexual abuse, the pimps who take advantage of our vulnerabilities, and the men who buy us for the sex of prostitution.' MANIFESTO, COALITION AGAINST TRAFFICKING IN WOMEN CONFERENCE, 2005 We could never have removed ourselves from the most fundamental form of violence inherent to prostitution, at least not while we continued to work as prostitutes, bu,t we did our best to evade other kinds ofviolence. As far as physical violence from clients was concerned, I was always very cautious about avoiding that, but cautiousness can only get you so far in this game; there is only so much violence that can be avoided. However, I did go out ofmy way never to put myself in situations which screamed of danger from the off, such as meeting more than one man at a time. I knew one girl, a close friend ofmine, who did not have such reservations. She worked in escorting at the same time I did and one evening a call came in on the agency phone line, which was diverted to her mobile. It was a request for two girls to go to a well-known southside hotel. I begged and pleaded with her not to go to the hotel where a number of men were waiting for her-twelve of them. They were celebrating the outcome ofa sporting event and were looking forward to having a good time. She was celebrating nothing but was looking forward to the twelve hundred pounds she was expecting to come home with. She asked me to go with her. We would earn six hundred pounds each, she reasoned. I declined. I think I have made as easy a peace as is possible with the knowledge that as long as the world continues to accept prostitution, women like she and I will always be judged. It is an uneasy peace, but it is a peace; and I believe it is possible for me because I know people do not understand what it is they are judging us for. That night my friend was to perform a strip show and then service the men individually in a separate room; at least this was the arrangement they came to on the phone. It didn't work out that way. And I am sure the reader will understand what I mean when I say I never met the girl who left that night again, although I spent several years in touch with the one who arrived back the next morning. ~ .~ :.!i, '-,' Chapter13 ~