Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (15 page)

street prostitution. Although street prostitution is unique among the differing forms ofprostitution in that it is the only single area of the business in which a woman has the opportunity to exercise any level of control, very often the decisions we made would be influenced by factors we had no control over. Very often you would be cold, you would be wet, you would be tired, you would be bored, you would be depressed, and all of these factors would play a part in your decision whether or not to get into a punter's car. Sometimes, while shivering in the cold, I was influenced in getting into cars simply because I could feel the warmth emanating from the rolled-down drivers' window. Many times I got into cars against my better judgement because I had not made enough money. Surely when a woman must ritually forgo her own safety the lack of control is obvious? On the issue of safety: many of the women who work exclusively indoors come to do so in the first place because they believe it to be safer and they continue to believe so because they have nothing to compare it to. Some ofthem at first believe the nonsense they are told when a pimp or madam assures them that their clients are 'screened', but their clients are not screened, and it is not even possible that they could be. How exactly do they contend that their clients are screened? And screened for what exactly? The only way in which a client could be successfully screened for the benefit ofthe prostitute visiting him would be if a full police background check were carried out to ensure that he had no history of violence against women, and that, I can assure you, does not happen. Certainly there are regulars to particular agencies and a. pimp or madam can make an experience-based judgement as to what a particular client's behaviour is likely to be and also, they can authoritatively say that a particular man has no history of violence with their agency. This may be comforting to the prostitute, but there is no guarantee that this will not be the night he chooses to show himself in a very different light. Nor is there any guarantee that he does not have a history of violence in any other agency or in his personal life. To arrive at the home or hotel room of a man you have never met with a fixed idea in your mind as to how he is liable to behave when you are alone is one of the most dangerous things a woman in prostitution can do, and most women figure that out for themselves very early on in their 'careers'. The nature of punters' consumerism in prostitution is a transitory one. They will often ring a different agency .each time they hire a prostitute. This is well-known in prostitution circles and I know it personally because I've come across the same men many times through different agencies. When a man has behaved violently he will not call the same agency again; he will call a different one. For this reason the most unpredictable men you can meet are those who have never called the agency before, and there are brand new clients like these to contend with every day of the week. Unlike the street prostitute, who can call on all�f her senses and faculties in the weighing-up of a decision, the brothel or escort prostitute is stripped of almost all of them if she is working for herself, and absolutely all of them if she is not. When I had to move indoors after the Sexual Offences Act of1993, I found it tremendously frustrating and risky to continually be in the situation where I could not use my senses in order to filter the men who would and would not use my body. It was not long before this new situation proved itself to be as hazardous as I'd sensed it to be. I met many men in this way who I would not have entertained had I met them on the streets. I am not surprised to find that higher levels of violence as compared to street prostitution have been uncovered in 'strip clubs, massage brothels and pornography' by international research.'3 The point to remember here is that the reason a woman working in a massage parlour or escort agency has no choice in the men who will use her is �cause it is simply not permissible for her to turn 13 Debra ~toyer, Lynn Chapman, Rrent Marshall, 'Survival Sex in King County: Helping Women Out', lt93� down potential clients and thus lose commission for her employer. My situation was somewhat different at times, including after 1993, when I began advertising an escort agency myself. In this situation I was able to attempt to filter dangerous or undesirable individuals, but of course, as I've said, I was attempting to do this with a much minimised scope for garnering the details I needed in order to make even a reasonable guess. I had simply to rely on the attitude and tone ofvoice of the man on the other end of the phone. I remember on one particular occasion a man asked: 'How much is she?' in a very smarmy and condescending tone. I knew immediately the type of man I'd have been dealing with here had I been foolish enough to meet him, because rd met the likes of him enough times before. I responded that, 'She isn't actually for sale; she is renting her time by the hour', before hanging up the phone. Arseholes are everywhere in life. They're particularly prevalent in prostitution. It was between the years 1994 and 1996 that I worked for two well-known Irish madams. The thing that surprised me about working for one of these women was that her brothel was like a ghost town, mostly because of the high degree of coverage she got from the tabloid press, which maintained all through the 1990s that she was the most prolific madam Ireland had ever seen. That was media hype if ever I've seen it. The other of these women was quite a kind person in my experience, contrary to media reports I later read, which branded her a horrible and ruthless woman to work for. I met her first on a dark winter's evening at the gates of Trinity College. She was operating her business from an apartment on South Great George's Street at the time. I can't remember who suggested the meeting point, but if it was me, I don't know what I was thinking of. I felt so dejected standing there, surrounded by throngs of students on their way home from being educated in the country's most prestigious university, while I waited for the opportunity to sell myself. I told her that I didn't want to have full sexual intercourse and I will always remember her saying to me, in no uncertain terms: 'Nobody is going to try to make you do anything you don't want to do here, love'. This was an unusual practice in prostitution and it has stuck in my mind because of that. She later died a violent and horrible death, and I was sorry to hear of it. But her words, well-intentioned though they were, gave me cause to reflect in later years on the contorted and convoluted notion of control within prostitution. Nobody was going to make me do anything I didn't want to do in that apartment; no body, but prostitution itself demanded I do things I didn't want to do every day. Chapter 18 '"""'

THE LOSSES OF PROSTITUTION

By an image we hold onto our lost treasures, but it is the wrenching loss that forms the image, composes, binds the bouquet. COLLETTE, MES APPRENTISSAGES T he overriding feeling when reflecting on the experience of prostitution is simply this: loss. Loss of innocence, loss of time, of opportunity, credibility, respectability, and the spiritually ruinous loss of connectedness to the self. I could go on and on, but the primary element is always loss. The battle continues forever against the loss of self-worth. There is no magical shift back to your former self on the day you leave prostitution. You do begin the task of reclaiming what is left of your former self, as I have said; but how much is really left? And how qualified are you now, permanently altered as you are, to identify it? I cannot identify all that is left of me after the mental and emotional carnage of prostitution, but I do know that this book, this dissection of the prostitution experience, comes from a place inside me that rejects prostitution on a very deep level, both for myself and for other women; and so I know that whatever it was that drove me to write it is something that prostitution did not manage to destroy. How much is really left I do not know, but this much is left, enough to make this effort, and I am glad of that. The general assessment is that prostitution involves a very private loss, which of course it does, but I do not know how well people consider the numerous other losses it disseminates. This is understandable to me as I doubt I would ever have had cause to consider them much had I not been prostituted myself. Because the business ofprostitution creates and is then carried out in a highly depersonalised environment, the focus of the commodification has no option but to begin to accept the depersonalisation of her own self. Loss connects all the negativities in prostitution. It is both the dom.inant ingredient and the binding agent; it makes up the basic flavour and brings together all the other components of this recipe. The losses to the prostituted individual are limitless. They are limitless not only because they are innumerable but also because there is no cap, no ceiling, no time-frame limit on when they will cease intruding into a woman's life. There also are no socially accepted boundaries which a woman can erect between prostitution and herself. The common saying: 'Once a whore always a whore' makes reference to this. A woman may be a former prostitute of several years, like myself, who worries about the impact ofher history on her child, or she may be a former prostitute decades older than me who worries about the teasing and bullying of her grandchildren. The losses here are of safety and security, dignity, reputation and social status. They are old losses and hold no surprises, but they are horrible losses to see projected onto our loved ones. It is both heart-wrenching and nauseating to see those we love tarred with shame by association here. There is another loss I hesitated to include here; it is the loss of humanity. I hesitated to include it because I do not believe I was ever less than human in my life, but I certainly know I was treated as if I were. In prostitution, men dehumanise women and women dehumanise themselves in order to be able to perform the acts men require ofthem. This does not mean that women are made less than human; it means that they are treated as such and operate in an environment in which they must not only accept such treatment from others, but actively seek it and learn to deliver it to themselves. And yes, there is loss here: it is the loss of the belief in and the experience of your own humanity. And what is the loss of anything if not the loss of connectedness to it? In that sense, I lost my humanity. I lost my humanity in that I lost touch with it. While I never quite forgot about it, I pretended, because I was paid to pretend, that it was of no consequence. There are areas of life where it is necessary to buy into certain untruths. My environment told me my humanity didn't matter, and I needed to believe that. Why? -Because it is easier to detach from an irrelevance. There is also the loss I've mentioned to prostituted women as a group. Sadly, and in a sense paradoxically, one ofthe biggest losses to prostituted women as a group is derived from the fact that they are a group. It is in the fact that they must acknowledge and accept that they are collectively removed from the rest of society, and behave as such, and comfort each other in the knowing of it. For my own sake, I believe I was lucky to have the company of other prostituted women. They understood me. They didn't judge me. We couldn't judge each other; but our very connection as a group solidified our separation from the rest of society. Yes, certainly we would have�een worse off had we been removed from society individually, but, in a physical sense at least, we were not, and our coming together as a group was a natural convergence. There were positives and negatives in this, and of the negatives, the principal ones were defined by loss. We shared a collective lack of social standing and a dearth of respect from the world. We understood this, intensely, painfully. This was particularly obvious to me during my street-walking years. Besides the men who'd , come there to seek us out, I don't think any member of the public ever walked by us without a wary glance and a quickening of the step. Had any of them any idea what a normal casual 'Good�vening girls', would have meant, I wonder? To be excluded as part of a group may not sound as horrendous as being excluded as an individual, and if those two methods of exclusion worked independently of each other it would be true that it is not, but the truth for all those who are excluded as part of a group is that they are excluded as individuals also. They are debarred and expelled on both counts. This is not only true of prostitutes; it is true of the members of all socially excluded groups. Prostitution clearly promotes the depersonalisation of sex, which can never be good news for women-any women. Prostitution has a ripple effect. It creates the illusory view in the minds of men that women are not human beings as men are, but simply the walking carrier of a product, and that they serve one principal function, whether or not they are paid for it, which is to be used as vessels for the sexual release ofmen. They are effortlessly and imperceptibly relegated from the realms of the human. They are not people on a par with their male counterparts. How could they be, when their principal function is as something to be fucked? Prostitution obscures women's humanity from society generally, but it also causes women specifically to lose sensitivity to their own humanity by way oftolerating the prostitution ofothers oftheir gender. When women tolerate prostitution they are actually tolerating the dehumanisation of their own gender in a broader and more encompassing sense. Countries with male-majority governments are implementing the legalisation of prostitution with frightening rapidity throughout the western world. Where is the female revolt towards all this? There is no widespread female revolt because female sexuality has so long been viewed as a commodity that woman have begun to believe in the necessity of a separate class of women to provide it. Ifa woman tolerates this treatment ofher fellow women, ifshe accepts it under the banner of'liberalism' or anything else, then she must also accept that she herself is only removed from prostitution by lack of the circumstances necessary to place her there. Should these circumstances ever occur, her body, too, would be just as welcome for mauling, sucking and fucking by the clients of the brothels and would be just as reviled by the men who are on the look-out for a wife. The acceptance of prostitution makes all women potential prostitutes in the public view since there are only two requirements for a woman to work in a brothel: one is that circumstance has placed her so (and who knows when that can happen, to any of us?) and the other is that she has a vagina, and all women are born meeting at least one of these requirements. It bears repeating: ifthe commodification ofwomen is to be accepted then all women fall under that potential remit. If a woman accepts prostitution in society, then she accepts this personal indenture, whether she knows it or not; and yes, that is a loss. As with women, not only participation in prostitution but even tolerance ofprostitution causes men to lose their sensitivity to feminine humanity. Tolerance of prostitution clearly cannot exist in any man until he has formed the view that the commodification of women is tolerable. I think one of the major losses to men, possibly the largest of them all, is the casual attitude they are encouraged to develop towards sexual intimacy, which allows them to slip their penises into female flesh with as little consideration to the female involved as if they were satiating their urges on mute and immobile non-living things, and sadly, in many ways, this is just what prostitutes must train themselves to be. Mute. and immobile, docile and non-complaining, prostituted women are programmed to behave like non-humans. But how does this influence male-to-female interpersonal relations: generally, given that these men are fathers, brothers, husbands, sons: and partners to women themselves? Men also suffer loss to their owttl humanity here; huge, undocumented, unexamined loss. When I was fifteen or sixteen and working on Benburb Street a man; somewhere in his forties brought his teenage son down to the street to bu~ him his way out of his virginity. Itwas a gift, in this man's understandina-: He stopped the car beside me and explained the situation. I wasn't sellin. intercourse anyway at the time and told him this. Probably because ' was around his son's age, whereas all the other women were much older~ he asked me would I give his son oral sex instead. I couldn't do it. Th~ was something inexpressibly sick about what he was asking me to d�I couldn't have articulated what exactly about it bothered me so much since I gave blow-jobs to strangers every day; I just knew that I felt a very strong instinctual sense of revulsion, stronger than usual. I know today that it was this up-dose-and-personal view ofa father training his son to treat women like meat that made me so repulsed. I couldn't be a part of that, and I wasn't. I walked away. Thinking about that day now though, and thinking about the teenage boy in that car, I can't help but wonder about what sort of man he has become. If the view of women a father passes on to his own son is that they are simply things to be bought and fucked, I have to wonder what sort of husbands boys like that will grow up to be? What sort of partners? What sort of fathers? This desensitisation of men towards sexual intimacy with women is itself a very great loss to them; I believe it stops them functioning in their relationships to anything like the fullest extent of their potential. If a man has been taught to think of women as less than human, then he has, as a consequence of this skewed indoctrination, lost a human being for a partner. If women are so devalued in his eyes, then he has been robbed of the company of a woman he can value. It is not the only loss men suffer, however. Any man who's ever discovered the pain offinding the body ofa woman he loves being treated as a receptacle for other men's sperm will know the pain I am referring to when I say that many men have been wounded by the existence of prostitution in this world. The same is true for any man who has formed an unhealthy reliance on prostitution as a sexual outlet. How can a man's self-esteem be anything but damaged by the understanding that the only way he can experience sexual intimacy is to buy it? How can his sense of self be subject to anything but loss in this circumstance? A certain segment of society maintains that prostitution is all fine and dandy as long as it is populated only by those women who wish to frequent it. This view ignores the vast spectrum of realities which exist outside this fantasy. It also clearly infers that those women and girls who do not wish to prostitute themselves should simply ignore prostitution as an option and go on their way. But the fact is, when you are fifteen years old and destitute, too unskilled to work and too young to claim unemployment benefit, your body is all you have left to sell. That is the reason why prostitution and other areas ofthe sex industry are populated in the main by young women and girls from lower socio-economic groups. Combinations of the losses of prostitution are reflected here: they are the losses of opportunity, autonomy and viable choice. Since the truth is that the women in prostitution are overwhelmingly made up of those who feel they have no other viable option, how can prostitution possibly be framed as an area of life that should only be populated by those who wish to frequent it? If prostitution were open only to those who sincerely wished without reservation to sell their own bodies, prostitution would be dealt such a hammer-blow it would all but disappear from the face of the earth. There are simply too many forms of loss involved in an individual experience of prostitution to document. The losses of prostitution are another area that could easily make up a large volume on their own. As for my own losses, there is one loss that stands above all others and could �e used an as umbrella term to describe the prostitution experience in its totality. In that sense the story of what happened to me could have been written much more concisely than it was. The summation of my experience of prostitution was simply this: I lost myself Because everywhere in prostitution there is inevitably loss, there are many ways of measuring it. It's measured for me most clearly, I think,�n the way I lost the connection to the fluidity of my physicality. When I was a girl of fourteen and living in my first hostel we would all routinely get dressed up and go to the nightclub La Mirage, which was situated just; minutes from where we lived in the centre of town. Probably because ll was the youngest the older girls would have fun dressing me up and; making me up and teaching me how to dance. Once I got the hang ofit 1 enjoyed dancing and thought it was great fun. I remember a very blissful feeling that I now know came from the experience of fully owning and being present in my own body. Then I became a prostitute, and I never~ danced after that. Today, at weddings or parties or celebrations of any kind, I make my excuses and sit at the table. Sometimes I invent dizziness or tiredness or sore ankles. Then I become embarrassed, and go to the bathroom, and then outside for a cigarette, and then up to the bar, whether my glass is
empty or not. I'll order peanuts and crisps and bacon-fries. I am waiting. Waiting for others to stop doing the thing I can't. How come I can have sex but not dance? Surely lovemaking should be the first thing to go? I don't know why. I can't give myself an answer I don't have. I only know that when I'm expected to dance, my body can't move. I freeze and lose touch with my physical self. Maybe my having worked as a stripper compounded it, but I had stopped dancing before that. The sexualised out-of-body 'dancing' of stripping was possible only because I did not have to connect to myself in order to do it. So who knows? I don't. All I know is there is loss here, and that this is just one of the ways I can measure it. You cannot expect a woman to experience the commodification of her own body and suffer no physical consequences of that. It is beyond obvious that the degradation of the body will produce a negative effect that manifests in the body. Perhaps what we lose as a result of this is individual to all of us. Perhaps we experience loss in the body at the point where we most deeply connect to our own physicality. For me it was dancing. For another woman it might be sex, or the ability to physically give or receive affection. There is loss here-make no mistake about it-loss like a fracture, the deep and abiding kind; the kind that will never fully heal. I think it is important to keep thinking about these things, but they are sometimes musings without conclusions, which can be mentally frustrating. At other times I can sense when I have arrived at an accurate understanding; I know the truth when I feel it. I cannot have been what most women could not have been, given time and place and the slow methodical drip-drip-dripping that is the wearing down ofa particularly persuasive circumstance. Whenever prostitution touches the point where the lives of a man and woman intersect there is a loss of civility and a deep and irreversible fracturing of human interpersonal connections. This is the case whether or not they come together to engage in a prostitution act. It was true of the three relationships I had while in prostitution, but none more so than the first of them, With the man who actually introduced me to it. I have always known (and this is not an exercise in charitable thought but rather the recognition of a reality) that the ex-boyfriend who first brought me to Benburb Street is not a monster nor an evil person by nature, but simply somebody who was emotionally damaged enough to do such a thing. There is no excusing an act like that, but it is important to try to explain it, and excuses and explanations are not the same thing. Really, how could such an act, the encouragement of a fifteen-year.old girl into prostitution, be carried out by somebody who could be considered mentally well with a healthily functioning sense ofright from wrong? It couldn't, in my view; and how damaged must a person be in order to do that? The truth was, he was detached from the enormity of what he was suggesting because he'd been a rent boy himself. He, too, was operating from a position of loss. I had heard rumours from friends of his that he had been a rent boy before we met and at the time I didn't believe them. (I also knew better than to put it to him.) He was a very masculine young man and the idea seemed far-fetched to me, but I see the truth of it now looking back because I can piece together the other parts of the puzzle that support that. He was homeless, as I've said, and the friend's house we were staying in turned out (when it's occupier arrived home after a few weeks in prison) to be the home of a gay man of around fifty years old who always called him by a name that was not his own. I guess my 'boyfriend' had had enough of what he was doing and in bringing me down to Benburb Street he was passing the baton from him to me. I bumped into him in recent years and we had an uneasy association ; that lasted a few months. We each seemed to circle around the other, neither of us knowing how to deal with each other or whatthe present.day rules were. I didn't bring up the subject of Benburb Street; he did. He brought it up by way of denying, unprompted, that he'd ever had anything to do with that and tried to lay the responsibility at the door of the other homeless girl I mentioned in earlier chapters, who hadn't even been present on the day. I looked at him as he repeated his denials. He was edgy, uncomfortable, rushing through the words in his hurry to get to the other side. His were the eyes of a man trapped and they made me think of how eyes might look if you looked into them behind the wrong side of prison bars; fearful, panicked, deeply unsettled; half full of the fear of the trap, half of the desire to escape. I remembered, while looking at his face, the things he'd said that day on the way down to there; 'Don't do positions'. 'Don't let them near your tits'. And, absurdly, 'I'll give you the real McCoy when you get home'. I didn't argue that day, many years after the fact, and I didn't respond either, to accept or reject his protestations. I simply told him: 'I'm not ready to talk about that now'. Instead I thought about his denials and eventually settled on the idea that I was glad he at least had enough shame now, after all these years, to deny culpability. And I am reminded here of a quote I've come across by Edmund Burke: 'While shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart'. I interpreted his denials as having made his shame apparent, and shame does not exist in a vacuum; it is not an unsupportable emotion; it cannot, in most cases, stand without a sense of guilt. Guilt and shame don't go hand in hand, but rather one obscures the other. If shame were a glove, I believe, guilt would be the hand inside it. I took all this in while I was looking into his eyes and I saw a pleading in them, the wriggling away from blame. I had never seen that before, not in those eyes, but still, I didn't respond. Guilt and blame are old coals and, for the most part, the dust has settled on mine. His were still aflame, I perceived, while my own didn't seem worth raking over. Do I forgive him? Not in the traditional sense of the word. He feels guilty, so much so that he cannot accept the share of blame logic apportions to him, and while he cannot accept his own responsibility he cannot ask for forgiveness, and so it follows that while he cannot ask for it, I cannot grant it in the conventional sense; but that does not mean there is no forgiveness 'here, and I do feel some sorrow on his behalf. His shame is different to mine. The weight of my shame relates to an inwardly directed injustice and I believe it is testament to the psychological wounding of my pre-prostitution life that I have always experienced that sort ofshame as much more bearable than its opposite. That is to say, I have always felt it more endurable to let myself down than anyone else; but that is exactly the sort of unhealthy thinking pattern that helped lead me into prostitution in the first place. I am learning the dangerousness of these thoughts in counselling today and doing my best to eradicate them. However, I know the feeling of having shamefully failed somebody else; I am acquainted with its heaviness, and I would not wish that weight on him, or on anyone. There is an attitude I've come across that wonders how can we forgive when there has been no apology? That an apology is a request for forgiveness and forgiveness the acceptance of an apology; that the two go hand-in-hand. One cannot be without the other, and that forgiveness cannot come without a total acceptance of responsibility and a strong sense of contrition by the offender. This does not reflect my experience of life, so I can't believe it is true in all cases. Firstly, I think a genuine apology has no purpose other than to let the listener know that the speaker is sorry. There aren't (or ought not to be) any requests attached to it, not for forgiveness nor anything else. I've also come to understand that sometimes the 'strong sense of contrition by the offender' is expressed by the very violence with which they abdicate responsibility. Sometimes the lengths a person will go to in denying culpability directly reflect the measure of responsibility they charge themselves with in the privacy oftheir own mind. It is a cowardly way of dealing with the matter, for sure, but guilt and shame can make cowards of us all. An attitude of contrition by the offender makes forgiveness easier, but who ever said forgiveness was supposed to be easy? Sometimes forgiveness takes a lot of introspection and the practical application of compassion, and maybe that's what's required in the absence of an apology. Although I know forgiveness has happened here independent of either an apology or a request for it, I would be deeply moved if one day my former pimp asked me to forgive him, though I know he never will and it's kind ofsad in a way, because unless he happens to read this book his refusal to accept culpability means he'll never know he was long-ago forgiven. It's a strange cocktail offeeling to care for and despise someone at the same time, but I have done a lot of thinking over the many years that have passed since the days I felt that way and I have come to understand that if you say to somebody with your actions: 'It's okay to disrespect me', then you are not well positioned to ask them with your words: 'Why was I disrespected?''4 There is culpability here, and it exists on both sides. I had to come a long way within myself before I could accept (suffering as I do from a particular human condition that affects us all-that need to categorise as either guilty or blameless the participa11ts in any volatile situation) that I was culpable, I was blameworthy. I was guilty of betraying myself, and that, I have come to understand, is every last bit as bad as hurting someone else. As for my ex-pimp and boyfriend, since the need for clearly identifying and separating the subjugators from the subjugated is so inherent to the human psyche it will not surprise me, in fact I fully expect that some people will be horrified to know there still exists between us a sort of sad but abiding affection. To this day I would still offer him my help were he in serious enough trouble to require it, and I know I could expect his also. There is a strange caring still there. We are old friends who scarcely ever see each other, who can scarcely look at each other, who share a history too hurtful to talk about; too shameful to accept on his part and too painful to dissect on mine. It should be clear that there is loss here; complex, confusing, disturbing threads of loss. 14 This truism cuts to the heart of prostitution: when you make yourself available for abuse it is so much the more difficult to identify your abuser as an abuser, and vour abuse as abuse. Chapter 19 "-'