Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (16 page)

MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT PROSTITUTION I want to bring us back to basics. Prostitution: what is it?Jt is the use ofa woman's body for sex by a man, he pays money, he does what he wants. The minute you move away from what it really is, you move away from prostitution into the world ofideas. You will feel better, you will have a better time; it is more fun; there is plenty to discuss, but you will be discussing ideas, not prostitution. Prostitution is not an idea. It is the mouth, the vagina, the rectum, penetrated usually by a penis, sometimes hands, sometimes objects, by one man and then another and then another and then another and then another. That's what it is. ANDREA DWORKIN,15 PROSTITUTION AND MALE SUPREMACY T here ~re a number of misconceptio~s about prostitution, some . ofwhich, such as the myths of prostitutes' control and pleasure, : I have examined already. However, one question that has always bothered me is this: why is there so much hatred of prostitutes? � Prostitutes are in one of the least enviable positions in society. It �oes not make rational sense that they should be so despised. And yet, -~ they are. I feel that this has to do with a misconception that prostitution :. is a feminine arena and that this is supported by the fact that females .. are the most visible, most documented, most discussed participants 15 Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005) was a feminist campaigner against pornography 'I .o �� o 1"\'l 'I 'I tl ' lf'Ol I I in this arena, because society consistently seeks to vilify the female in all matters of sexual misconduct. But the truth is, no matter what area of prostitution I worked in, there were always far more clients than prostitutes. This is backed-up time and again by international research. In Thailand and Cambodia, studies show that between sixty and seventy.five per cent of males use prostitutes. In Europe, figures range from an estimated ten per cent in Britain to eighteen per cent in Germany. In 2004, it was reported at a conference on legalisation in Alba, Italy, that one in six (or almost seventeen per cent) of Italian men were prostitutors.16 Nine million men were said to be using fifty-thousand prostitutes in that country. This equates to nine hundred thousand men using five thousand women; to ninety thousand men using five hundred women; to nine thousand men using fifty women, and to nine hundred men using five women. The final figure adds up to this: one hundred and eighty male prostitutors for every one prostituted female. From my own Irish experience of prostitution, I would estimate the ratio to be at least forty or fifty to one, perhaps far more, and there is no shortage of prostitutes. Prostitution is a thoroughly male-dominated industry. In fact, if it were not, it would not be a viable one in the first place. . Imagine there were suddenly a single customer for each butcher, baker and mechanic in the world-businesses would immediately begin shutting down en masse. The same is true of prostitution. If it were not entirely held buoyant by the sexual demands of men, brothels would have no viability and no purpose and no reason to open their doors-or to have any doors to begin with. I will try to explain the gender dynamics of prostitution with an analogy: imagine the circles on a dartboard, and the prostituted to be contained within the bull's-eye, and those who use them to exist within the far larger outer circles that surround it. The majority population of Western societies, who do not prostitute themselves or others, of course exist outside both these boundaries. Because those within the central (International Conference, 2004) 'Prostitution on Demand', Janice G Raymond. sphere are viewed from the perspective of the men who use them, it is perhaps somewhat natural for the clients here to view prostitution as a female arena. They are, each of them, seeking to use a prostitute after all. In seeking to satiate their desires, they are not motivated to consider those within their own area of prostitution. They are so focused on their objective that they do not bother to consider the throngs of males around them. It has to be said that prostitutes collude in this. Many times I took great care and witnessed the sanie efforts in other women to ensure that punters did not pass each other in a brothel's halls. It was rightly assumed that this would make them uncomfortable-and perhaps their discomfort deserves closer inspection. What does that mean? What does that say? Why are prostitutors so discomforted by the sight of each other? Do they not like what they see of themselves reflected back to them? Because men far outnumber the women they use in prostitution, there have to be reasons for their strangely blinkered perception. of prostitution as a feminine arena. When I was working the streets there was no obscuring punters from one another. That was not possible. They cam~into vi~ofe~ch other in the most literal sense.and deal~':ith that . 1 by srmply d1scountmg the presence of the other, silently dnvmg past each other in the night and never making eye-contact nor commenting ~ on each other, not even when we women would step straight from one car to the next. � i So the punters were wilfully blind to all else besides what they were � seeking, but what about society generally? What about those who exist outside the circles? Why do they so focus on the women in prostitution? This could be explained away by the fact that females are the most , visible participants irt prostitution, but in my opinion we must ask why ' the female participants are the most documented, most noted and most ~ discussed of the participants here. . � .i Largely, I believe, it is precisely because the act ofprostituting oneself l is so inherently alien to humans that people are fascinated by it, but A 1 this ignores the fact that any act of prostitution is an exchange; it is the payment of cash for what has been reduced to a service. In what other sphere of commerce does the sex of the sellers dictate the gender identity of the industry? In focusing primarily and almost exclusively on the women, what's disappeared is that those with direct involvement and responsibility for the existence of prostitution are overwhelmingly male. Detective Inspector Simon Haggstrom, of the Stockholm City Police Prostitution Unit, stated at a government conference in Dublin in October 2012 that in over 6oo arrests he had never encountered a woman paying for sex. We are often reminded by prostitution enthusiasts that there are men and transgendered people in prostitution. Yes, there are, but who's buying them? The demand for prostitution has a gender, and that gender is male. Some of the myths of prostitution are wildly illogical; others are just nonsense: there are some men who frame it in terms of telling us that they don't pay prostitutes for sex; they pay them to leave-as if any prostitute anywhere ever needed encouragement to get out the door! This attitude denigrates all women, as it so clearly identifies their sexuality as all they have to offer. It says, with great resonance, 'we can treat women with contempt in this sphere of life, in a manner that we could not treat all women, however much we might want to'. Women are quick to decode this. I repeated this attitude to several women, including one ofmy best friends, a savvy straight-talking Scottish woman who has never worked in prostitution. She shot back immediately: 'What does that say about the rest of us'? She saw the implication for women directly, and why wouldn't she see it? How could she not? What else are non-prostituted women to take from this, other than that a man who says this would have her leave after a sexual encounter only for the fact that he was constrained by not having paid her? The 'we pay them to leave' idiocy is just one of numerous fallacies that strive to obscure the reality ofthe cash-for-sex exchange. It is an oft.repeated myth of the pro-prostitution alliance that prostituted women do not sell their bodies, but rather their 'sexual skills'. They never tell us what these 'skills' are supposed to entail. So what are these skills supposed to be? Opening your legs? Moving your hips rhythmically in order to get him off? Any woman who's ever fucked in her life knows enough about men's bodies to do the basic job of a prostitute. And if she hasn't? If she has no sexual experience whatever? All the better, as far as the punter is concerned-he'll get a great kick out of putting paid to her sexual na'ivete. 'Skill' here is redundant. It is simply surplus to requirements. Only when a woman is an experienced dominatrix does a prostitute ever have to call on anything that could possibly be described as a 'skill', and it is considered skilful only because it takes practice and experience to understand these unusual sexual dynamics. These are not men who are simply looking to fuck a woman, as most men are. There are two bald truths here: the first is that it doesn't take much skill to get a man off. Male sexuality does not require skilful coaxing to release itself in orgasm. You do not have to be a prostituted woman to know this. Just about every sexually active straight woman on the face of this earth could tell you it'd take a hell of a lot more skill to stop a man's orgasm than it would to release it. Secondly, the men who used us were not interested in our supposed 'sexual skills'-they were interested in using our bodies. They were interested in ejaculating in and on our bodies-that is, in and on us. Their behaviour was dominant, not .l passive. It was proactive, not receptive. Skill did not come into it, on ! l their part or ours. j Another great misconception of prostituted women is that they are generally deficient and inferior mothers. This is true of drug-addled prostitutes, but it is true of drug-addled parents everywhere. In mother.ing as a prostitute, I preferred, not so much given the choice but rather taking it, to keep prostitution far outside the home by providing sex for strangers in cars and brothels and hotels, while keeping my child living in a respectable area, entirely outside the remit of my other life. This will come as a surprise to some. It certainly did to one woman in particular. About four years ago I first went to see a psychotherapist. I had '' been a long time working on this book, but I found it difficult and painful. I foresaw these problems continuing and thought she might be , able to assist me in guiding me through the more difficult emotional repercussions ofwriting it. I began to tell her why I was there and, as was necessary in doing so, covered the most basic points of my past. Very soon in the therapeutic process she alighted on the fact that I had worked as a prostitute. She wanted to know: had I ever neglected my son? Had I ever left him home alone? Clearly this well-heeled, well.spoken woman had listened to the basic rudiments of my earlier years and made up her mind about the kind of mother I was likely to be. These ideas were both deeply offensive and a very long way from the facts. Naturally, and needless to say, our client/counsellor relationship was prematurely and permanently severed. Most of the prostitutes I've ever known were mothers, and of those, many of them were prostitutes precisely because they were mothers. Many of them did what they did to cope with the constant year-round financial demands of childrearing, and of course, the more children a woman had the more tightly her children's welfare was entwined with her involvement in prostitution. Of the women who prostituted themselves with the main aim being to take care of their children, the majority were single mothers. The reality ofa woman's prostitution does not automatically make her a neglectful or abusive parent.Although any person living an emotionally unhealthy life is not best positioned for parenting, prostitutes certainly are not automatically neglectful or abusive towards their children. I've known women to stand out in the freezing cold and the driving rain until the early hours of a bitter and dreary morning frantically trying to earn the money to buy their children school shoes and uniforms and books, and I know for a fact they were there, because I was standing alongside them. There were a small number of women who only appeared on the streets sporadically, a few times yearly, and always in the run-up to Christmas or Communion season or the new school year, and you could bet your life those women were mothers; that much would have been obvious even if they hadn't told us what brought them out, which they did. The other prostitutes weren't abusive towards them, because even though they didn't have a regular patch, we all understood what was going on, and for my part, I felt sorry for them, because they obviously hated prostitution so much they could only bring themselves to do it out of desperation for their kids. You wouldn't try to move women like that on if you had any decency or solidarity, and these qualities are more common among prostitutes than many people might suppose. They are borne, I think, in the shared understanding of what it is to struggle. Those mothers who prostituted themselves at Christmas and Communion time and the new school year made bigger sacrifices for their children than most parents can understand, and whatever other label people might ascribe to them on account of their activities, 'bad mother' would not be an accurate one. When mothering as a prostitute, you feel in touch, embroiled in fact, in a great negativity and your child, on the other hand, is someone you know to be completely innocent; so you feel that you yourself are a buffer between your child and the world of prostitution. Of course you could logically be framed as the link between your child and prostitution, but you powerfully reject this. You feel that you are the thing that separates these two opposites. There is a great weight of responsibility in this and you take it very seriously. You will never, ever, bring a client into physical proximity to your child. It is your job to be a parent. It is also your job to be a prostitute. But in being both you have a third job: to keep the other two apart. The importance of this is commonly accepted in prostitution. I've known prostitutes who'd gladly stab a client who approached them in the company of their children. This is why, for the vast majority of prostitutes I've known, it was so very hard to understand why some women introduced their daughters to the business, but very occasionally, some women did; I've seen it happen on one occasion myself. I met this woman a long time ago, when I was just starting out on Benburb Street. She would have been in her late forties and her daughter was thirteen years old. The girl looked her age, incidentally, and there was no shortage of men using her body. It was distinctly disturbing, watching her getting in and out of those cars. I was
only fifteen at the time but even so, I clearly remember being horrified that her mother had taken her down that street with her. The woman clearly didn't have all her mental faculties. She seemed to have the intellectual age of someone younger than her daughter. Her speech was infantile and erratic. Yet what she'd done was shocking to me. It still is. Another misconception of prostitution is the presumption of a general unwillingness among prostitutes to conform to society.-But what exists here is not unwillingness; it is inability. I know many people would have assumed that I didn't hold an ordinary job because I didn't want one, and they'd have further deduced that I didn't want one because I was lazy and couldn't be bothered to work. That assumption couldn't be any further removed from the truth, but people tend to simplify and negative assumptions are also a human proclivity. We're all prone to them; I know I am. The truth of the matter was that I desperately wanted a 'real job'. I wanted the social validation of a job. I wanted the authentic place in society I felt such a position would afford me. I desperately craved that sense of normalcy and of social legitimacy. In fact, I felt absolutely starved of it, but I could never tell-anyone that, because to do so would have been to lay bare a lack I could only just manage to admit to myself. It is a silently devastating understanding, to know yourself as an outcast. However, the most glaring misconceptions about prostitution come from the clients of prostitutes themselves. I once read the confession of an English Tv script writer who'd spent nearly twenty thousand pounds on prostitutes in times past and had chosen to speak publicly about the experience. He described how he'd never had any confidence with women; how he_'d been mocked as a teenager in his first attempts to meet females and how the pattern had continued throughout his twenties with his having been stood-up innumerable times. Also, whenever he did become close to a woman, he'd be told he was 'too nice' or that they 'didn't want to ruin the friendship'. Of course his confidence continued to plummet. Eventually, at thirty years of age, he came across an article in a magazine about the escort business and for the first time began to seriously consider paying for sex. Now, twenty thousand pounds I can understand; what I couldn't understand was the fact that this man spent two days preparing for his first visit to a prostitute by going to the gym, having a session on a sun.bed, having his hair cut, buying new clothes and reading all the papers so that he'd have something interesting to talk about. He admitted (with shame, he said) that he had been using prostitutes for about a year while feeling that his time with them had been 'relatively harmless and mutually beneficial' before anything happened to cause him to think otherwise. The transformative incident came in the form of a comment from a prostitute who said that she was pleased he was there, because it meant she was now able to pay her gas bill. 'The words were like a slap in the face', he said. 'In a year of visiting escorts, this was the first incontrovertible evidence I'd heard that not every girl did escorting because they enjoyed it. Some of them were doing it because they had to ... the truth is that up until that point, I had been genuinely convinced that all the girls I'd seen were selling their bodies entirely of their own free will.' I was thinking: 'Sweet Jesus, that man was just on some other planet!' I also thought though, that as it is so very far outside the norm in prostitution, there was something endearing in his naivete. I would expect that the prostitute he visited thought so too, at least before he put his penis inside her. He made only one more visit after that, to another woman. He noticed she became tearful as she was undressing on the bed, so he excused himself and left. 'This, I realised, was my greatest fear: he said. 'Not catching a sexually transmitted disease, but meeting a sex worker who didn't want to be a sex worker.' What men of this mindset don't realise is that the women they pay who do not become tearful or make comments about their utility bills are inured enough to the nature of prostitution to make a, well-educated guess about what a man needs, and they give it to him, as they have been paid to do. Men of the demeanour of the screenwriter above, who hold benign views about prostitution, will be dealt with in such a way as to ensure that his notions about prostitution remain intact. Why? Because of the oldest rule in commerce: you must cater to the consumer's needs. Nonetheless, the man who wrote that article caused me to think about some of the gentler, more respectful men� met in prostitution. They were in the minority, but I did meet men in prostitution who would have been surprised and maybe a bit distressed to know how unhappy (was, how sickeningly awful I was caused to feel by their touch on my skin, how revolted I was by the proximity of their lustfulness, before they'd put a hand on me, even. I was never a consummate actress when it came to portraying the happy hooker, it was just a stretch of the truth too damn far, but, with this gentler sort of man (and a prostitute can always discern the nature of the man she's dealing with) the pretence was a good deal easier. For this reason, it is an unfortunate certainty that the men who'd be most receptive to the reality of the prostitution experience are the least likely to be made aware of it. As much as a decent man might want to believe that prostitutes are not damaged by their visits, I'm sorry to say there is just no evidence I've seen anywhere to support that. As for my own self: I always used to find it depressing that however obviously decent a man might appear to be, he still clearly had not grasped that he had no business doing this to me and that he had no business supporting this industry that I shouldn't have been in either. It was an industry in which I met decent people and I met lonely people, but I was decent and lonely too, and I now know that what happens when two people engage in the sex-for-money exchange is that they largely ignore each other's humanity and put their own considerations in priority above that. If I had to apply one term that most suited the majority of the men who ever paid to use my body, it would be this: wilfully oblivious. But prostitution has taught me this: life is not black and white. It is not made up of honourable men and perverts. As a species, the urge to violate is strong within us. It is up to us to be stronger than it is. Of course, the liberalists will tell us that mqrality and prostitution do not even belong in the same sentence, and of course I will dismiss that for the nonsense that it is. One thing I have found interesting is that, while adults seem more easily duped, young people who've never had any involvement in prostitution are often uncannily adept at decoding the simple wrongness at play here. Once, just months into my prostitution life, I was visiting people I knew in the city centre where word had gotten out among the residents of the adjoining council flats complex that I was a prostitute. While walking past the flats from my friends' house to a chipper, I was set upon by a group of local girls around my own age and beaten, not badly, but I was shaken, sore and disturbed. When they had finished and were walking away one of them turned and screamed back at me: 'Your body is your own and no one else's!' I felt then that they did what they did because they found me objectionable, but I know now that they did it because they found prostitution objectionable, and that I was merely a representation of it. It is utterly understandable to me, in emotional terms, that those young girls would see an example of prostitution and be angry enough with it and object enough to it to lash out physically and hurt the person who represented it for them. It's not that I condone anyone attacking people, but I understand why they and any female would aggressively object to prostitution itself and I wouldn't hold it against them that they, as young girls, misdirected their anger. Prostitution is objectionable to females. I of all people know that. The immorality of prostitution is often laid bare by the very tactics used to conceal it. Thankfully these are usually irrational enough as to be ridiculous, which makes them obvious. and easy to identify. One of the most astonishingly illogical arguments in the modern pro-prostitution movement is the attempt to frame the 'right' to prostitute oneself as a feminist principle. The practice of women being liable to seek, wholesale and as a feminist entitlement, the 'liberty' of laying themselves open to abuse of a sexual, physical, spiritual and psychological nature from men exists only in the minds of those who do not (or will not) grasp the basic . premise of feminism, which is the promotion of female equality, sexual self-governance included. Sexual self-governance is only possible for anyone where they are not influenced to make decisions regarding their sexuality based on circumstances beyond their control. Quite clearly, the necessary conditions for authentic sexual autonomy do not exist in the prostitution experience. They do not exist in a cursory glance at it and they do not exist in the lived experience of it either. The rights and entitlements of this pseudo-feminist theory do not relate to women and they certainly do not relate to feminism; they relate to the entitlement-driven and all-too-often priapic nature of male sexuality, so it should be blatantly obvious who this theory is designed to serve. Men's use of women in prostitution is an evidently significant issue of gender and unequal power relations, so it is amusing to me to consider what the original instigators of the women's movement would have felt about the 'rights' of women to be prostituted being framed as a feminist ideal! Men who use prostitutes strongly argue against the immorality of their exploitative behaviour and some will try to create distinctions between prostituted women in order to do that. Social scientists and many human rights groups accept these distinctions as if they were fact. These academics and human rights groups create a divide in their minds between those women who have been trafficked i.e. sold into sexual slavery by someone else, and those who have sold themselves into sexual slavery because ofa lack ofviable choice. In a moral sense, there is no distinction; and yes, this is a moral issue, as human rights issues always are. The libertarians tell us that we are to exonerate prostitution of immorality. I think we ought to really think about what that means, because what it means is that we are to remove from our consciousness anything that tells us that the purchase ofhuman beings for sex does not conform to acceptable standards of human behaviour. What it means is that we are to accept that an estimated 40 million17 women and girls are consumed in prostitution globally and not only are we to be okay with that, but we are to consider it altogether outside the issue of morality, so that there is nothing not to be okay with in the first place. The idea that we are to exonerate prostitution of immorality is an idea that, as its objective, seeks us humans to behave as non-humans, 17 Accordin11 to aouth�at Aaian charitv. the Blind Proiect. www.theblindoroiect.com. and to accept being treated as non-humans, and not to betray any sign that we are bothered by it; not, in fact, even dare own there is anything to be bothered by. It is a peculiar, disturbing and creepy lesson, yet it is an interesting lesson for me to consider, because it seeks to teach me to remove myself from mysel� It seeks to teach me to behave exactly as prostitution did. Women in prostitution are mischaracterised as essentially immoral and have been for centuries. Added to that is the fiction that they generally find prostitution more tolerable than 'normal women, would, and this is used as evidence to back up the theory of their character deficiencies. The truth is that prostituted women are not essentially immoral; and they have not made an easy and painless transition rooted in autonomy, as the decision to sell the flesh on one,s bones never is. It is prostitution itself which is corrupt and the women who are abused in it and by it are expected not only to bear the burden of its corruption on their bodies, but on their characters as well. This is a slur and an injustice, because the act of prostituting oneself has nothing to do with a woman,s nature; it has to do with a woman,s circumstance. Finally, one of the most ridiculous pro-prostitution arguments I have ever heard concluded that because prostitution is the only area where women are routinely paid more than men, it is the onlyarea where women reach and exceed equal gender parity. This ludicrous opinion disregards the reason for the relatively high rates of payment in prostitution, which �exist because if they did not, women simply would not do it. l This is not some magical arena of life where men decide to treat 1 women as economic equals; women in prostitution are paid in an ~ hour what other women are paid in a week or a day because it is the .~ only way of ensuring they will allow themselves to be used as human �masturbation devices. Their higher pay does not reflect gender parity; it l