Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (14 page)

THE MYTH OF PROSTITUTES' SEXUAL PLEASURE Testimony ofan erotic dancer: "Nobody-not myself, not the other women-enjoys being pawed, poked, prodded and fucked by men we wouldn't give the time ofday ifwe met them elsewhere." PEGGY MORGAN, LIVING ON THE EDGE I remember one evening, in the clinic where I used to drink coffee and .

collect condoms, a particular humorous remark made to a young prostitute by one of the older women. They were discussing an unexpected surge in trade the previous night and the younger woman mentioned how she'd gone home exhausted after it. 'Ah sure: said the older woman, 'you probably enjoyed it!' The entire company, myself included, burst out laughing. The humour-for those it is lost on-was in the absurdity. The truth of the matter is that the nature of prostitution flavours the sexual act as far too distasteful and too sleazy and too bound up with degradation to allow any kind of wholesale enjoyment. Of course this will fly in the face of the fantasists, but the reality of prostitution usually does. A woman's feelings here range between mild distaste and outright disgust and only in unique or very exceptional circumstances ~ will her experience be any different. That is not to say these unique and ,: exceptional experiences do not, once in a blue moon, occur. For some ~ women, they do, and when they do, no-one is more surprised than the ~ prostitute. I would know, because on two occasions those experiences ~ happened to me. When I was sixteen I was released from a court order, the purpose of which had been to keep me detained for my own protection. It did not have the required effect. The reason for this was clear, and I still wonder how the children's court could have been so foolish as to imagine that a few months of detention would have turned my life around when I was released back onto the streets with no viable alternative to prostitution. If they'd had any real dedication to helping me change my life, they would have detained me for a couple ofyears and made it a condition of my future parole that I complete some form oftraining, be it secretarial, hairdressing, etc., and I would have been assigned a parole officer and social worker who'd have ensured I was placed with an apprenticeship or in an entry-level office position. It wouldn't have been rocket science, it could have been done and I know I would have been capable of applying myself to it. Anyway, this did not happen; I was released after a few months and it was at this point I went to live in the brothel on Leeson Street I've previously described. The first car that pulled up on my first night back on the streets was driven by a young man in his early to mid-twenties. He was attractive, not disrespectful in his manner and he was shy, quiet, not speaking to me much on the way to the laneway I used. When we arrived there I realised that I was aroused. I hadn't seen my then boyfriend for months and hadn't had any intimacy. I suddenly realised that I missed it; I missed being held and touched. I told him that I'd changed my mind, that I would do intercourse, so he slipped on a condom and it was all over in minutes. He pulled out his wallet and asked how much he owed me. It was the first time I'd ever done anything sexual without being paid first and I knew why: this was not a job. Nothing would have felt more u~matural than taking money for something sexual that I'd wanted to happen. Also I had never had intercourse for money at that point, I had never sold myself in that way, and I didn't want to be able to say that I had. I told him not to worry about it. No doubt he knew something strange had happened but it was easy not to see his expression in the dark. He dropped me back down to the street and then I went to work for real. What happened that night is not something that could ?e seen as prostitution. An act of prostitution had been intended on both sides but none had taken place. What happened actually transcended the prostitution experience: wilful intercourse with zero mental reservations is not prostitution, and could not, to my mind, be framed as such. My co-workers did not share my views. They roundly agreed that in not taking the money I was: 'A fuckin' eejit!' The second of these experiences happened about three years after that. I was working in escort prostitution at the time. I called to the house of a man who had a beautiful face with a gentle relaxed smile and eyes as brown and shining as polished chestnuts. He welcomed me with a lovely soft English accent and poured me a glass of chilled white wine. I almost never drank on the job and certainly not with a new customer, but for a combination of reasons I broke the rules that night with that man. Everything in his home was warm; the colours, the smells, the textures. It was all amber and mahogany and the scent of cinnamon. The vibe was very gentle, very neutral. I was relaxed and at my ease. That in itself was highly unusual. I have already described how a woman in prostitution knows when she needs to be alert: she also knows when she doesn't, but because the former situation is by far the most common, in a converse way, situations like this contain more surprise. He had hired me for two hours and was obviously not rushed. Sitting on his sofa, I realised there was so little tension in me there was almost none; I was not worried about where this was going to go. I was not mentally bracing myself the way I always did. I was not constructing the wall, not fully. I wasn't given to suspect that I was going to need it. The bald truth was that there was something about this man and this environment that was soothing, relaxing, and seductive. When we went to bed I found that I didn't mind his hands�n me. The first indicator was that I didn't feel repulsed, as I always did. His hands were smooth but firm and slow in their movements. They were not invasive, not intrusive, and when he stroked me it was from the base of my neck to the curve ofmy calf; he seemed to adore my whole body with his hands. He did nothing to me physically to signify his domination, which was as unfamiliar as to frame the experience as unique in itself. When he gently parted my legs and entered me, I inadvertently let out a little gasp. Then he muttered in my ear: 'You don't have to pretend you like it'. That was when the nature of the experience changed. This was a very well-mannered man. Apparently decent, he seemed thoughtful. Besides the obvious point of h:is purchasing me, he was not overtly disrespectful (it would not have been possible to feel arousal for him if he was) but as for the way he viewed me and my part in this experience: he thought I wouldn't like it. He thought he knew I wouldn't like it, and, like so many others before him, his arousal was dependent on the fact that I would not. Immediately I understood this and felt my response shut down. The wall had sprung up. I felt very disconnected from my own body, as usual, but not for the usual reasons. This time I hadn't stepped out ofmy body; I had stayed inside it, and found that I wasn't welcome there. It was very surreal, the rest of that sex. I was as far away from myself as I have ever been, and it was such a strange and deeply disconcerting feeling, lying there feeling all the sensations that would have been arousing had I been welcome to inhabit my own body. For those who talk of prostitution as work, know this: the core skill of a prostitute's 'work' is learning to stay outside of herself for her own sake. So as for these two experiences: the first was not a sexually pleasurable experience within prostitution; it was a sexually pleasurable experience which had been taken out of the realms of prostitution, because sexual pleasure was not congruent with it. And as for the second: it could have been a sexually pleasurable experience had I not been reminded how surplus to requirements a woman in prostitution is. Her body is useful-the rest of her is irrelevant, and unwelcome. Only if a woman were a masochist, deeply aroused by her own degradation, would it be possible for her to frame this reality as arousing. As for the overall dearth of a prostitute's sexual pleasure, I have not needed to wonder about that and even if I had I would have been reminded by the bouts of sexual dysfunction I have experienced while writing this book, particularly during periods when I was writing a lot and processing larger quantities of unwelcome memories everyday. The myth of prostitutes' sexual pleasure exists as one� several tactics which are used to sanitise and normalise the prostitution experience.The reasoning behind this is simple: if it is seen to be pleasurable forsome women, then it couldn't be all that bad for women generally,could it? This is nonsense, and like most nonsense, it exists for a reason:framing prostitution as acceptable is that reason. It is not the only tacticused to this end, there are several. The two unusual and isolated experiences I've recounted do notpoint to the existence of prostitutes' sexual pleasure. They attest to theopposite, because the first of the times I experienced pleasure froma man I met in this way, the experience had to be wholly contortedinto its opposite before it was acceptable to me; and the second timeI experienced pleasure it had to, necessarily, be rejected. In both cases,my pleasurable responses were incongruent with prostitution. Femalepleasure does not belong in prostitution, and both male and femaleparticipants intuitively understand that it has no place there. Perhaps my two experiences will be malformed and misrepresentedso as to serve as evidence for those who would prefer to see prostitutionfiltered through the prism of erotica, but a person who draws con.elusions from logic will deduce that such a very tiny sampling does notcolour any experience as a whole. The simple reality is that if you areheterosexual and you meet thousands of members of the opposite sexover a span of several years, you are likely to find at least a very tinynumber ofthem sexually appealing. The fact that I felt this way towardstwo men out of thousands does not attest to any type of enjoymentin the prostitution experience; it attests to the opposite, because there were surely many more men among them who would have presentedas appealing had I met them in any other way. It was the context in which I met them that negated their appeal. This is just more evidenceof the way prostitution pollutes human interpersonal relations. Thevast majority of men are immediately discounted as unappealing to prostituted women, because of the manner in which they are presented to them. It is only in exceptional and very unusual circumstances that something may happen to cause a woman to feel differently. Women's actual responses to prostitution are sometimes recognised, inadvertently, by the proponents of prostitution: 'Descriptions of the psychological harm of prostitution sometimes come from its advocates. For example, the NZPC11 wrote in an unpublished flyer that people in prostitution know they should take a break from prostitution: "when every client makes your skin crawl, when your jaw aches from clenching your teeth to prevent yourself spitting in the bastard's face ...[or] when you can't stand what you see when you look in the mirror."' (NZPC flyer by Michelle, circa 1994) MELISSA FARLEY BAD FOR THE BODY, BAD FOR THE HEART Women who need to be administered such advice are clearly not living a lifestyle liable to cause sexual arousal. The myth ofprostitutes' sexual pleasure is somewhat related to another social myth that goes something along the lines of'women in prostitution desire to be rescued by a man'. Where this myth is entertained in prostit.ution, it is by men and not women. We are keenly aware that ifwe are to be rescued, the ones doing the rescuing can only be ourselves. This myth was exemplified by the film Pretty Woman, which sees the lead character rescued from prostitution by the love of a man. I do not find this film offensive, although it caused a great deal of offence in prostitution circles. I feel the way I do because the film does not seek to colour the prostitution experience as generally enjoyable. Julia Roberts' character is clearly unhappy in prostitution and relates the fact in a tearful scene. I did think, though, that if the filmmakers wanted to depict the reality of prostitution, we should have seen Julia's character with more than one john. As for the fact that the prostitute here is depicted as falling in love with one ofher clients: I do not contend that that scenario is impossible, 11 New Zealand Pro1titute1' Collective. only that it is highly unlikely. It is possible to fall in love anywhere in life, but there are some areas where you will find an extreme dearth of love in the human experience. Prostitution is one of them. I remember when I was fifteen and had been working as a prostitute for just a couple of months a forty-something man picked me up in an ugly dark-green car. I remember that he looked at me with his eyes bugging out ofhis head and was practically salivating at the sight ofme. We drove to a spot of his choosing (this was in the days before I learned better than to allow a man choose where we would go) and when he stopped the car he turned to me and poured out what was on his mind that had him so excited. He said that he had seen me on Blessington Street a year or so before and that he'd 'got a hard on' looking at me. (The bed-and.breakfast accommodation I'd been housed in a year before had been on Blessington Street. I had been fourteen years old at the time.) He said, 'I couldn't believe my luck' at having found me on Benburb Street a year later. I sat in that car as he groped my breasts, pulled his prick and shoved his fingers into my vagina, and I willed myself to become numb as I tried to blank out what he was doing, along with memories of the year before, and thoughts of how naive I'd been then, and of what a dirty fucking bastard he was to be behaving like this now and to have been thinking like that then. I cannot number the experiences I've had, but I can very clearly put a shape on my responses to them. The bottom line is this: when a man, who has paid you twenty or two hundred euro for the pleasure of . watching you squirm, twists your clitoris with the fingertips ofone hand while simultaneously shoving his fingers up your vagina and biting and licking your nipples with his tongue and teeth, you will experience many things. You will struggle to block out many internal responses. Arousal will not be among them. Chapter 17 '"'-' I THE MYTH OF PROSTITUTES' CONTROL Testimony ofa sex buyer: "I guess the big thing is the control aspect ofit. When you're with a prostitute, you have control ofwhat happens. You get to have control over what you do, when, how, in what order, and I like that." M FARLEY, E SCHUCKMAN, J M GOLDING, K HOUSER, L JARRETT, P QUALLIOTINE, M DECKER, COMPARING SEX BUYERS WITH MEN WHO DON'T BUY SEX 0 n no level and in no area of prostitution did we have true and full control. Nor were we assumed by the men who paid us to have any or to be due any. The same line of thinking was held by the authorities. At sixteen years of age I presented myself at Donnybrook garda station.
I had been assaulted by a punter and went to the station with the intention of lodging a complaint; this was in 1992. I explained the circumstances to the young male garda at the front desk. He laughed at me. I left, and I never approached the gardai again. I had assumed, in my teenage naivete, that since I had been assaulted, I was entitled to legal recourse. It was a demeaning and revealing shock to understand this garda's position, which was that it was either not possible for a prostitute to be assaulted or not relevant if she was. There was a sense of abandonment in this understanding, a sense of being socially disowned. If prostitutes are not protected by society's laws, how can society expect prostitutes to be bound by them? There is a great deal of entwinement between the way a prostitute is treated by society and the way she relates to society in return. Prostitutes are disqualified and excluded by society's authority structures and encouraged to remove themselves further until they exist entirely outside of the remit of social control; the only exception to this is when the authorities step in to see to it that they are punished. We were afforded no protection in law, but we regularly found ourselves at the rough end of it. Not only had we no control, but we quickly learned to have no expectation of it either. I had not been sexually molested the night I called to the garda station, just dragged around by the hair and slapped, as was almost customary, but I was sick of it at that point. I had gotten the registration of the car and was determined that this man would not be allowed to get away with venting his hatred upon me, but he was, of course; and that night in the garda station was just one of my earlier lessons in understanding that, and that it was also almost customary. In those times a prostitute had to have been murdered or at the very least taken to the edge ofdeath before anyone in authority would take the time to recognise that a crime had taken place. In recent years, though, the situation has changed. The police began working with Ruhama in the years after I left the streets and set up a panel to coordinate with the women in order that their complaints would be heard. This is a positive thing as far as I'm concerned, but I have no personal experience of it. The only experienc;e I had of the gardai in prostitution was of being harassed when I didn't need them around and ignored when I did. I don't know if the liaising body that was set up after I left the streets is still in existence, but I hope that it is for the sake of the women who still work there. As I've already said, the only thing approaching control to be found anywhere in prostitution, in my experience, was either in the selection and rejection process on the streets or the behaviour of women who exclusively saw a number ofregular clients they'd built up over the years. I was in the former position for my first two years or so and the latter position towards the end, so. I can attest to that. However, these two scenarios offer only a modicum of control, and even so, the majority of prostitutes exist outside of both these circumstances. Control is not only diminished for the prostituted woman within the confines of her working hours. On a practical level, the prostituted woman is unable to frame her experience of many facets of her life, including relationships, in the way a non-prostituted woman takes for granted. She has a much-reduced level of control over her future in that prostitution is very difficult to get out of; and she has no control whatever over the lingering effects of the past, in that all those who know of her involvement will view her through the skewed and negative prism ofwho they presume her to be. Nor has the prostitute any control over being consistently vilified as the central point of society's sexual ills. She has no control whatever of the public perception of her, besides of course concealing that she is a participant in this way of life that is so wholly and generally disrespected. This duplicitous concealment is the only weapon she can use to protect herself from the judgement and contempt inevitable for the women in her sphere of life. Beyond any of this, her lack of control does not stop at the end of prostitution, if she �aches an end. I myself wrestled with a much.reduced level of control here, fourteen years after the fact, in that I felt I could not speak publicly as I wanted to, without the use of a pseudonym. My decision-making wrangle was strongly influenced by negative perceptions over which I had absolutely no choice or control. I'm glad I did the right thing by myself in the end. I'm glad I chose to write under my own name. Prostitution is essentially an issue that centres on the misuse ofpower.male power. It is universally accepted that those in command of greater fiscal resources are in a dominant position over those who are not, and.the reality of women's entry into prostitution due to financial hardship has been uncovered in prostitution research globally, in country after country after country, again and again and again. Therefore, it is obvious that there is exploitation here. The exploitation element is indisputable, and the most succinct description of exploitation? An abuse of power. Women are quite obviously not in control in this area. Ifthey were, men would hardly be capable of abusing a power they didn't have. The belief that prostitutes are in control has no basis in reality, but it has two practicable functions, related but distinct: to sanitise and excuse the economic and sexual abuse of women by men, and to obscure the core ofprostitution's true nature: the commercialisation ofsexual abuse. Sometimes prostitutes themselves collude in the myth of prostitutes' control. I have already described how and why I have done this myself and how other women engage in it. So yes, we sometimes claimed that we were in control, and we said so to ourselves and to non-prostituted others; but I have noticed that we never said so to each other. Some lies are embarrassingly obvious; but we did make that claim elsewhere and we said so not because it was true, but because we had to. We said so because we needed to. We said so because the pretence ofcontrol was less painful and less shameful than the acceptance of sexual powerlessness. This doesn't prove that we weren't victimised: it proves that we didn't like being reminded of it. For a long time, I was ashamed of my own collusion in the fantasy of prostitutes' control and angry with myself because of it, but I don't feel that way towards myself any more, or at least, I am trying not to. I understand today why I misrepresented my feelings and I know I ought to forgive myself for having obscured the truth in order to protect myself from it. Sexual abuse induces shame. That fact is universally recognised. To be ashamed privately is painful. To be ashamed publicly is torturous. The pretence of control conceals and assuages these shameful feelings. The nullification ofpublic shame is the main aim ofprostitutes' pretence at control. A lot of prostituted women do this and I understand their position utterly-but the bitter truth needs to be exposed ifprostitution is to be accorded its true nature, and the truth here is this:�rostitution is defined by a lack of control. If prostitution were an arena of life in which women had control, we would hardly have had to endure the innumerable sexually abusive experiences which depended on the lack of it. These situations were breathed into life by our powerlessness and, more specifically, by men's decisions to capitalise on it. The countless clients who derived great pleasure from our lack of control were not mistaken in their interpretations of the situation. They were very well aware of our powerlessness and very much aroused by it. The only thing approaching positive I could say about them was that at least these perverts made an honest appraisal of the situation, though I very much doubt they would have publicly declared it. A great many of the men who use women in prostitution get off principally on the power element and it is not necessary for most of them to beat a woman in order to do this. There is no doubting the intensity of the sexual thrill men derive from the elevation of their power status in prostitution, although the majority of them will deny it. These denials attest to their reading of their own actions as wrong, as is so often the case when a person deliberately omits the driving force behind their own actions. This deliberate omission of prostitution's power-imbalanced nature is an extremely common fiction among the buyers of sex, but it is not the only one. There are a minority of men who use prostitutes who will espouse the belief that prostitutes are in control because they believe it (and among these I do not count those who simply want to believe it; they belong in the former camp). Some men will cite examples to back up their certainties. Usually these will refer to the fact that most prostitutes try to impose physical boundaries on the sexual act. It is true that they do. I avoided vaginal intercourse for the first two years of my prostitution life and anal intercourse for all of it. That is very unusual. I met many women who would never perform anal sex; that was not at all unusual. One particular young woman I met in my first months on the streets would not perform oral sex, ever. She just could not stand to do it and she could not understand how I was of the opposite mindset. I clearly remember her wrinkling her nose up in disgust and shuddering when I told her that all of my jobs were either hand-relief or oral. There was always something a prostitute was unwilling to do, some threshold over which she would not wilfully allow a client to go. These were our choices,�r our attempts at choices, because we all suffered outright sexual molestation, which obviously in those instances nullified any choices we attempted to make. Often a man would molest a woman in exactly the way he knew she least wanted to be molested, to maximise his own sadistic pleasure, of course. It was not difficult for a man to ascertain this: in the 1990s, all he had to do was ask her what she was willing to do or not to do either on the street, over the phone, or when he was alone with her in a hotel or brothel's bedroom. These days it's even easier; he'll know her boundaries before he lays eyes on her, because it will say so on her profile page posted on the brothel's website. So yes, some men who try to justify their use of prostitutes will use the fact that women say no to certain sex acts as evidence that it is the women who are in control here, but it is flawed evidence. It is either misguided on the part of a man or it is a clumsy attempt at lying. I can say from my own experience and from witnessing the experiences of many others that prostitutes attempt to create boundaries on the sexual act based on personal sexual thresholds over which it is simply too sickening to go. This meant for me only that a penis in my mouth was less sickening, not that it was not sickening at all; and since we did (and we certainly did) accept for ourselves that which was sexually sickening, could we possibly be said to have been in control? Accepting the sexually sickening on a reduced level is part of the lot of the working prostitute. I could not count the times I've heard this discussed in prostitution. These boundaries exist as an attempt to create a barrier between the prostitute and the intolerable experience of having her body used in every imaginable way. It is a typical strategy used by prostitutes to remove themselves from the fullness of their reality; it is dissociation manifesting in a physical sense. To use this strategy as evidence of prostitutes"control' is to misunderstand and misrepresent the reason for the existence ofthese boundaries. We did not attempt to erect boundaries in prostitution because we were in control of it; we attempted to erect boundaries in order to be able to stand it. If you need to erect barriers between yourself and a situation in order to be able to stand it, that is a situation in which you are most assuredly not in control. The argument has been made that prostitution ought to be condoned in response to prostituted women's right to 'self-determination'. This is a term we should pay close and careful attention to when used in this context. Self-determination is the process by which a person controls their own life, but there is a significant difference between controlling your finances and controlling the totality of your life. There have been countless studies conducted globally that show women's desire to extricate themselves from prostitution, but to keep things closer to home, I will cite the Haughey and Bacik analysis, 'A Study of Prostitution in Dublin'.'2 In this study, twenty-nine out of thirty prostituted women stated that they 'would accept an alternative job with equal pay'. The authors of this study noted that the single interviewee who did not agree with that statement appeared to be under the influence of some substance at the time of the interview. That sounds about right to me, given everything I've seen in prostitution. The survival strategies of defiance and denial were most commonly practised by those who were so injured by prostitution as to have to block out their reality with alcohol and other mind-altering drugs, and I certainly number my younger self among them. Let us suppose though that the thirtieth woman in this study was being honest, since we have only the interviewer's opinion to suggest otherwise. Even in that case, we-still have clear evidence that the overwhelming majority of women interviewed would rather earn their money in some other way than prostituting themselves, if they possibly could. What this proves is that those women were practising financial determination in prostitution, only because they could not practise it in any other way. Financial determination is only one facet of self.determination. Another popular pro-prostitution fantasy is that prostituted women ought to be able to use their bodies as they so choose; the problem with that theory is that it is others who use the bodies of prostituted women as they so choose. That is the intention and the purpose and the function of prostitution, a.nd there isn't a whit of bodily autonomy within it. 12 Conducted with funding from the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Re.form, Trinity College, June 2.ooo. It is saddening to me now to look back and see how we used to scramble for any little bit of control we could exert. It is saddening because it speaks so clearly of how little there was to be found, and of how much we wanted to find it. In describing this it would be useful to look again at the most universally recognised, yet least understood of all areas of prostitution: