Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (13 page)

� Chapter1s~

THE MYTH OF THE HAPPY HOOKER Even where research has shown different perspectives on prostitution, from demanding recognition on a par with other occupations to fighting prostitution, nowhere is the suggestion made that women enjoy prostitution. 'THE NEXT STEP INITIATIVE', RUHAMA RESEARCH REPORT ON BARRIERS AFFECTING WOMEN IN PROSTITUTION, IRELAND, 2005 F reedom is universally accepted as one of the fundamental necessities for contentment in human life. The myth of the happy hooker does not make logical sense, because the distinguishing feature of any free person is that their body is inviolable, while the distinguishing mark of the prostitute is that her body is not. �herefore, it is only common sense to conclude that a prostitute does not experience either life or her body as a free person does; in fact, quite the opposite. Are we to believe that women are generally 'happy' in this circumstance? The quote that prefaces this chapter plainly states that in the research carried out into prostitution, no woman said she enjoyed it. Yet there are women who have publicly claimed that they found it enjoyable. I never met one of those women in prostitution. But the phenomenon is attractive, and has given rise to books and TV series which glamorise prostitution and abuse the young females of our society in much the same way as anorexic images on the covers of magazines. No doubt some young women become curious about prostituting themstlves in the skewed and unrealistic context these portrayals present, and no doubt some go on to do it. I have also read the opinions of some outside of prostitution who view it as an expression of sexual liberation. That opinion indicates either the inexperienced notions of a person wholly removed from the reality of prostitution, or someone who has no idea what sexual liberation actually involves. The only thing prostitution ever liberated me from was homelessness. The idea is unfathomable to most women in prostitution, as the testimony of this French prostitute demonstrates: 'And don't think, either, that prostitutes-because they're prostitutes-are liberated. Just the opposite. Prostitution and sexual liberation have got nothing to do with each other, they're exactly the opposite.'10 In the seven years I spent working as a prostitute I met innumerable prostitutes and I have had friends in the trade for more than half my lifetime, and I have never met . a prostitute who didn't wish she were doing something else. In reading the interviews and writings ofprostitutes and other former ) prostitutes something that strikes me as an increasingly common theme j (though still very much a minority among memoirs, thankfully) is~ the attempt to make prostitution more acceptable or palatable for the � outsider. I don't know for certain why some women feel the need to do .~ that, but I could hazard a guess, and I'd be willing to bet it's accurate: I think denial exists to a very large degree in the minds of most prostitutes 1 or former prostitutes who maintain that they find or found prostitution~ even a reasonably tolerable profession. Denial is easy here; it's telling the;; truth that's difficult. I need to be honest; I have to be. This is not the place to hide or 1 disguise my thoughts and feelings. I've made that mistake once already. i I will not repeat it here. � l As to why some prostitutes colour their trade in unrealistic terms; 1 that will vary from woman to woman. Self-protection and denial are ~ major features in this; but as to their confidence in being believed, that �is pretty universal. Prostitutes know they can get away with describing �1 their trade in any way they choose because the world of prostitution is entirely incomprehensible to those who do not inhabit it, and they know this because they did not always inhabit it themselves. They, once upon a time, found it just as unfathomable as anybody else, and they have not forgotten that feeling, or missed the monumental shift that is the journey from incomprehension to thorough understanding which came through intimate acquaintance. Prostitutes know and remember their state of pre-prostitution naivete because they have memories which function exactly like everyone else's. However, despite the fact that prostitutes are aware of the scope for fabrication and despite the fact they'd be generally disinclined to volunteer details oftheir experience ofthe trade, most ofthem, I believe, would be more disposed towards being honest rather than dishonest if a direct question were put to them in a non-threatening manner and by a non-judgemental person. The issue, and the problem for those seeking answers from prostitutes, is that however non-threatening the question and however non-judgemental the asker may appear, the questions are, by their nature, invasive. They are invasive because they are received as intrusive, as all ques.tions asked of somebody who is reluctant to discuss the subject matter automatically are. It would be imprudent not to assume this while attempting to discuss her history with a prostitute and it would be unwise not to remain aware that her responses may be coloured by the sense of defensiveness she naturally feels. She has been assailed on all fronts, remember, for her involvement in the subject matter at hand. All of society has conspired to tell her how unworthy she is and she will be naturally timid and cautious and reluctant to open up. You would be likely to hear truths, but general truths; edited versions, removed from the personal, with the worst of her experiences deliberately omitted, so that she might avoid the feelings of humiliation and shame associated with reliving them. I have heard the idea aired that women who are desperate enough to enter prostitution should 'make it a means to an end'. A means �to an end ... but what end? Here is the problem with that: there is no end, and even ifthere were, most prostitutes are in no position to chart where that end might be, never mind influence it. My first instinct on hearing that was that I'd have liked to be able to reason this out, buteven ifi couldhave done, there are some conversations just not worth pursuing. I do not mean this in a disrespectful manner directed at that person. I mean it simply as I state it: you cannot argue the shape of an experience with someone who has not lived it. You can discuss it, you can examine it; you can offer your experience, listen to and consider the sometimes illuminating suggestions of someone looking at it with the fresh eyes of an outsider, but you cannot argue the structure of it. You cannot argue the composition of its nature, because the argument you're presented with will be naturally composed in its entirety of assumption and conjecture. This brings the debaters to an impossible impasse, but when I think of both positions I am reminded of an old Irish saying which translated to English reads: 'The wearer knows best where the shoe pinches'. However, I did continue to think about what had been said after.wards, the assertion that prostitution could be 'a means to an end'. The suggestion played on my mind. There was a minimalism to it which was superficially plausible but just not practicable in prostitution. Its simplicity bothered me and I was annoyed about this evidence that there was such confident ignorance about prostitution in the world. We have, most of us I'd imagine, come across in contemporary literature or film the image ofthe prostitute who 'works her way through college'. In Ireland, while I was in prostitution, those women amounted to such a tiny figure that I never met one myself. I would predict they present in higher numbers in countries where third-level education is very expensive. I can certainly say that had I lived that depiction of prostitution, had I prostituted my way through law school, for example, I would never have shared my classmates' sense of confidence and self-. assurance upon graduating. What I would have felt instead was a lifelong fear of discovery and exposure; the fear ofsociety judging me as a whore in a suit. The bottom line is this: it is impossible to make prostitution a means to an end because the changes that take place as a result ofit alter the end in itself. Sometimes we would offer each other suggestions as to how our daily lives might be made more tolerable along practical lines, but as for any sort of inner contentment, I very rarely heard prostitutes offer each other any advice of that sort. That does not surprise me as a prostitute's job being a miserable business was the accepted assessment of matters. What I haveencounteredis moreevidence attesting to the unhappiness of prostitutes than I can convey; and I have no doubt that when I have completed this book I will have failed to identify most ofit, as much ofit now, at the distance ofmore than a decade, has merged into a generalised sense of dejection made up of a mish-mash of miserable memories; but here is one offering: the practice ofprevarication, the act of evading our circumstances that we would sometimes indulge. I clearly remember when we would be working a shift in the brothel together, two or more of us, there was no better-loved practice than knocking off the phones, kicking off our heels and indulging in alcohol and Chinese food. You might want to do that in most jobs, you might think, and you'd be right, but there was something deliciously appealing about doing so in prostitution; it was not about taking leave ofbanality.it was about returning to being human. So we would do that, but only very occasionally, for a number of reasons: firstly, often we hadn't the power to do so because we were caught in the trap of someone else's employ. Other times we would be visiting some other city and only had a set amount of days to make our money and go. Oftentimes, business would be very slow and we wouldn't have made enough money to take a night off, and that is another ofthe myths of prostitution: that the money is always plentiful enough to offset the degradation of the lifestyle. It isn't. Quite apart from the fact that no money on earth would compensate for the degradation and humiliation inherent to prostitution, for a variety of reasons (including seasonal, surprisingly) there are sometimes spells with not enough business to go round. The only thing that approaches the degradation and the psychic stress of a brothel full of clients is a brothel empty of them, filled as it is with the dismal atmosphere particular to a group of women waiting around for the opportunity to be used. So we�idn't very regularly take the disobedient pleasure of a night off, but when we did, the mood and tone changed to its absolute opposite. We were like undomesticated creatures that had escaped from the enslavement of an enforced captivity and spent the night as though revelling in our first moments back in the wild. This was something I experienced with too many different groups of women, all unknown to each other, in too many different locations and at too m~ny different times for it to be shooed away as some kind of coincidence. It was no coincidence. When the same human behaviour is exhibited in very similar circumstances over and over again, there is a reason for that. The reason here is this: women in prostitution are unhappy. This too I offer into evidence: the nights I shut down the brothel when I was alone; or at least it must have seemed shut to those trying to : gain admittance, though I did not so much shut up shop as abandon my post. I didn't knock the phones off, as we always did when there was a ; conscious decision made to take a break from being prostitutes for one : night. I suppose that disparity may hold some clue as to the meaning �of my behaviour, because, as I remember, there never was a conscious J decision made on my part. Just sometimes I would listen to the phone j ringing and ringing and some part of me would refuse to answer it, 1 1 and when that happened it was never a one-off thing; it would alwayS continue for the night. It would not have been possible to predict when this shift of mood would occur, but when it did it was absolute, sudden and total. I have �at behind a locked door, more than once, with a would-be client who'd arrived for his appointment knocking on the other side. It might suit the melodramatic to picture me crying, but I never was. I was thinking 1 absolutely nothing; perhaps when the mind is concentrated in an effort i not to think and feel there is simply no room for thoughts; I don't know. What I do know is that there was nothing but coldness and the sound of knocking and the blank pastel nothingness of the opposite wall. This severance of the self from feeling is a prostitute's practised art. It allows for the 'acting' sometimes described as integral to a prostitute's work. Very often she carries this learned ability outside ofthe individual acts and applies it to her general attitude towards the work itself. This is necessary. It affords her the capacity to believe she feels nothing, as I believed on those days I sat in stony-cold silence to the reverberations of a would-be client's knocking. I refused to allow it to invade my mind deeply enough to thoroughly chill me, that sound that so signified someone else's urge for an encounter I did not want to have. It was a monolith in my mind, and I couldn't afford to have its shadow cast over me. It was too big. It would have obscured me. So I had to silence the part of me that recognised its danger and enormity. But yet as much as I thought I could feel nothing, I must have felt something, because I knew that if I could have opened that portal between myself and feeling, the first thing I'd have felt, because it was the feeling nearest me, would have been this: I would have felt unhappy. In everybody's life there will be that sound; that one sound, whatever it is, that slows their heart down and makes their soul take notice. That sound will be different for everybody. For me, it will always be the hollow-knuckled knocking on a wooden fire door. There is, as a consequence of prostitution, an inevitable encircling of the self as we try to make the shapes fit the structure of what is left of our understanding of sexuality and of our selves. We do this by asking ourselves questions, and we answer the questions we ask, sometimes slowly, the information leaking in a measured drip drip; and yet those answers are rarely surprising, as if we really knew them all along and were not lacking knowledge, but acceptance. At other times awareness comes so quickly that the question and the answer seem almost to arrive together, so that we know they are related, a part ofeach other, intimately linked, rather than some sort of opposites. But slowly or quickly, the enormity of this acceptance cannot but be painful. To realise that we have sold our own freedom is to arrive at an agonising understanding. I believe that, in some women, a
natural'evasion of this painful realisation goes a long way towards their supporting the myth of the happy hooker, and that in many more women the same natural evasion goes a long way towards their not contradicting it. But we prostitutes never lied to each other when it came to the bus.iness ofprostitution. We never tried to misrepresent the basic shape and nature ofthe experience with which we were all intimately familiar, so it is strange and quite nauseating for me to read accounts of prostitution bywomen who depict it as radically different from the experience myself and every other prostitute I ever met lived. One of the realities that make up this experience is that attractive men less often hire prostitutes and physically ugly men more often do. I would like to hear how these supposedly happy hookers reacted to the sense of physical and sexual revulsion so integral to the prostitution experience. For example, I remember one particular man among many who was morbidly obese. When it came to sexual function, this man had two problems combined; or rather he presented two problems for the women he prostituted: he had a very small penis and a very large amount of fat concealing it. He asked me to give him hand-relief. I had to go burrowing through folds offat to find his elusive penis, and when it was found (and it was eventually found) I was just thankful he hadn't requested a blow-job. I would have needed one of those umbrella-handle-shaped snorkelling devices wedged into the corner of my mouth. His flab wobbled like jelly as he shook with this rare excitement and his genitals stank as a result of never being exposed to the air. I had to breathe through my mouth because I couldn't stomach the smell, but the thought of drawing that stink into my lungs made me struggle not to vomit. How happy, I would like to know, are these 'happy hookers' in situations like this? Sexual revulsion is a daily experience in prostitution; It is something that was acknowledged by us all as absolutely routine, and, tellingly, something I have noticed about the accounts of women who say they enjoyed prostitution is their absolute silence on the matter. What I would like to know is: what is it that is operating (or not operating) in them that makes them immune to the experience of sexual revulsion? They certainly encounter situations liable to provoke it daily. Sexual disgust is as usual to the prostitute as encountering coffee is to the waitress, so what is it that we are to believe makes them impervious to this central aspect of the job? Dissociation works to somewhat mentally remove a woman from these sort of physical realities, but it certainly does not work so thoroughly as to blind her to them. The accounts of women who claim to have enjoyed prostitution do not explain any of this. They do not explain it since they do not mention it, and they do not mention it because they know it's beyond explanation. Their reason for silence here is obvious: it would not be possible to depict prostitution as . pleasurable or even moderately tolerable were the fullness of its ugliness laid bare. I actually find their silence on the matter a little heartening; though it in itself is disingenuous, they are not so disingenuous as to pretend such disgusting experiences could be painted as pleasurable. That does not mean I condone that they omit them (and I know they do not do so for lack of having encountered them), but I do take some small comfort from the fact that women who contend they enjoyed prostitution simultaneously do not present the experience. as it is really lived. It is therefore not truly prostitution they are defending; it is an incomplete version of it. I think a woman would have to be cut off from her own reality to the point ofpsychosis to consistently fail to recognise and react to something so odious and so central to her job description, and I do not contend that supposedly happy hookers are psychotics, not at all: they are not women who fail to recognise the true state of affairs, they are women who refuse to acknowledge it, and that is a different matter altogether. The first step to being a happy hooker is, of course, consenting to be one. Consent to prostitution is viewed as a one-dimensional thing; in reality, it is anything but. Consent here is over-determined. I have never come across an example of prostitution in any woman's life that was not an attempt to get out of a situation, rather than to get into one. In other words, the plethora of women I met over the years were attempting to remove themselves from financial problems; not simply entering prostitution because they'd developed a penchant for designer handbags. The assumption of choice leads to the conclusion of consent, but choice and consent are erroneous concepts here~ Their invalidity rests on the fact that a woman's compliance in prostitution is a response to circumstances beyond her control, and this produces an environment which prohibits even the possibility oftrue consent. There is a difference between consent and reluctant submission. One woman I met during the later years of my involvement in pros.titution, in an escort agency, had entered prostitution in her mid-thirties because her marriage had broken down and her husband had left her with several children and a mortgage to worry about. He'd always been the provider while she'd stayed at home to raise the children. It was not destitution but the fear of destitution that drove that woman into �rostitution. Her fears were very real. Were her choices? I remember that woman very clearly because her story was so different to mine. In many ways, we really were at polar ends ofthe same spectrum. She had been married since her early twenties and, prior to prostitution, had not ever had sex outside of relationships. She hadn't ever had brief flings or one-night stands. She was actually in much worse psychological shape than I was; that was clear to see. She was new to the business when I met her and was timid and quiet in her manner but over time became more talkative, eager to form some sort ofbond with the other women. She was clearly lonely, scared and overwhelmed by the . situation she found herself in. In a display ofthe Pavlov's dogs syndrome I've felt myself and witnessed many times, she'd gulp and shudder when the doorbell sounded and visibly attempt to calm her nerves before she walked into the bedroom. It wasn't long before she figured out that a few vodkas could assist her in that, and I can tell you that true consent ': certainly did not exist when she lay down on that brothel's bed and , opened her legs for man after man after man-men who, no doubt, very often convinced themselves that by fucking a woman who had expressed all-hallowed 'consent' this meant there was no possibility that they could be abusing her. I didn't work with that woman for very long. It was never my habit to stay too long in one place, but I can make a reasonable guess at what happened to her because I've so often witnessed tlie same scenario. I'd be willing to bet she stayed in prostitution, because she had no viable choice but to do so; and I'd be willing to bet that she, like so many before and after her, began to become desensitised to prostitution by simple dint of having to. At that point, when her hands and voice had stopped shaking and men found it easier to believe they were having consensual sex, did that make the sex more consensual? Ofcourse it didn't. She'd just have gotten inured to it and, like the rest ofus, more adept at concealing her vulnerability by hiding the non-consensual nature of the sex. What the proponents of prostitution conveniently ignore is that lack of opportunity is lack of choice. I have seen this played out in so many lives that I fully understand there is no point talking about choice without identifying the presence or absence of viable choice, because when a woman cannot choose between two or more viable options, she can hardly be capable of truly consenting to the single 'choice' that she has. In other words, if a woman has no viable choice then she may as well have no choice at all. The myth of the happy hooker rests on ignoring and disregarding the ambiguous nature of choice in prostitution. As long as any choice is reframed to have no relation to the context in which it's made, then we might be said to choose anything, and be happy about it. Chapter16~