Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (19 page)

ITHE NORMALISATION OF PROSTITUTION It's hardest to see what's wrong about what seems normal. JANE FONDA, MY LIFE SO FAR I Fi ' or prostitution to be normalised, it must be sanitised. Its inherently ~ l .l harmful nature must, at all costs�, be concealed. It could not be � 'I considered normal otherwise. ! I Several tactics are used to achieve this. The first I will discuss is the not-so-subtle terminology which has been deliberately introduced in recent decades with the aim of attempting to frame prostitution as ordinary work. The terms 'sex worker' and 'sex work' sound unnatural, and they sound unnatural because they suggest a correlation which is ~ unnatural. Human nature is not attuned to an association between sex and work. However, though they inevitably strike the listener as odd, they do not shock with the potency of the terms 'prostitution' and 'prostitute', which conjure up all the mental imagery fitting to a sexually exploitative exchange. The imagery 'sex worker' calls to mind is of a woman in a sanitised situation; a masseuse's table perhaps, with clean cotton sheets and soft fluffy towels. A uniform, necessarily, something akin to a nurse's but with a much shorter skirt. White, of course, and matching spotlessly white tiss-ues to wipe the semen off the floor. Everything is clean in the imagery this �erminology suggests; everything is above-board, and proper, and sanitised: but when we look at the actuality of what a 'sex worker' does, that is when we see the snag. The semen is the fly in the ointment, the singular clue that there is something not quite professional going on here; and its significance is not perceived as diluted by the disinfected imagery that surrounds it. Rather the starkness of this contrast belies the notion of ordinary work here. It might be helpful to imagine what is suggested as rational here in another context. Imagine a woman in the throes of passionate intercourse with her lover, who suddenly gets out of bed, casually flips open her laptop, and sends an email to the office. Work is incongruent with sex, as sex is incongruent with work. There are many aspects ofprostitution that make it incongruent with the term 'work', but one of the most important and telling of these is that it is the only form of so-called 'work' in which a person is both the service provider and the product at the same time. As one prostitution survivor responded to the claim that prostitution is no better or worse than flipping burgers at McDonald's: 'In McDonald's, you're not the meat. In prostitution you are the meat.'23 The term 'sex worker' is a rhetorical weapon in the normalisation of prostitution. No doubt there are those whose agenda would be served if society wholly embraced it, but I have yet to hear a person, conversationally,. with no agenda behind it, say 'sex worker' when they mean prostitute. The term 'sex worker' was received with a knowing snigger among the prostitutes I've known, including myself. We were all very well aware of its objective and equally aware of the pointlessness of trying to achieve it. Prostitutes and former prostitutes are instinctively attuned to these blatant attempts at whitewash. We know that they are not designed to dignify the women in prostitution; we know that they are designed to dignify prostitution itself. Further to that, we know that they are about as useful as tits on a bull, and .we know it from the most reliable source of all-personal experience. 23 Janice G Raymond, 'Prostitution on Demand: Legalizing the Buyers as Sexual Consumers', aoo4. Trying to frame prostitution as legitimate and normal work opposes logic on innumerable levels, one of the most obvious (and almost laughable) being that European Union health . and safety legislation prohibits sexual harassment, violence, and work that causes work.related stress! Needless to say, these negatives and many more besides are so intrinsically entrenched here as to be understood by those in prostitution as occupational hazards. '. . . If prostitution is ordinary work, we should be able to speak about what the skills of prostitution are. According to WHISPER (Organisation of women who have survived prostitution) such skills would include: performing sex acts, feigning sexual enjoyment, enduring all manner of bodily violation, and allowing your body to be used in any imaginable way by another person. Such acts are labelled harassment and abuse when money does not change hands. Prostitution is not recommended as a career option to young girls. Itis not promoted as a career option by guidance counsellors and parents. Work experience at brothels is not recommended, unemployed people are not asked to work in prostitution. 24 The actual reality, which the sex industry tries to obscure, is that those with the power and personal agency to do so would not choose prostitution as a way oflife:25 l The quote above points out that if we are to accept prostitution as ordinary work, then we should be able to speak about what the skills ~ ~ of prostitution are. This addresses a pertinent point in the issue of the normalisation ofprostitution. There are particular skills necessary to the implementation of every job on this earth. That is a fact. If prostitution is to be framed as ordinary work, then we do indeed need to discuss the skill-sets necessary to perform it. I will describe the three which are most frequently used (as in every single day) from my oWn experience. 24 Although this can become obscure where prostitution is legalised, as we have seen in the case of Germany. 25 Ruhama research report on prostitution as so-called free choice, Ireland, 2006. When a man has agreed upon a sexual act and the fee he is prepared to pay for it, very commonly, in fact more often than not, he will not be satisfied to stay within the boundaries of the agreed sexual exchange. This will result in him shoving his fingers, roughly, suddenly, and without lubricant, into your anus or vagina. It will result in his snatching off the condom just before he orgasms so that he can ejaculate into your mouth and/or over your face/breasts. It will result in his grabbing the back of your head and shoving it downwards as he thrusts his penis down the back ofyour throat to its fullest possible extent. In these situations there is intense nausea, and the resulting skill necessary to prostitution is the ability to control your reflex to vomit. Sometimes these attacks are prolonged in order that the paying client can revel in the deeply pleasurable satisfaction he derives from your degradation. In these situations there is an intense urge to cry, and the resulting skill necessary to pr~stitution is the ability to restrain it. In any given week there will be many times where there is the urge to panic, to flee the situation. This is the natural flight response experienced by all humans in threatening or sexually repulsive situations. In prostitution, it cannot be indulged. The resulting skill necessary here is the ability to psychologically dissociate from your surrounds; to cut yourself off from your immediate reality; to pretend that it is not happening. To summarise: The ability to control your reflex to vomit. The ability to restrain your urge to cry. The ability to imagine your current reality is not happening. These are the skill sets of prostitution. These are the skill sets necessary to perform what some people would like to see normalised as 'sex work'. Obviously because I have suffered and survived the realities of prostit.ution but also I believe it is because I love words and writing that I find it so hard to stomach the message of those who try to misshape the prostitution experience through the deliberate distortion of language. Luckily these messages are prone to .contradiction. Many groups deny the intrinsic harm of prostitution while at the same time advocating a 'harm-reduction approach'. If prostitution is not violence towards women, and if it is not harmful, then what harm is it they are proposing to reduce? How can any group commit to combating harm if they strive to deny the harm exists in the first place? That discrepancy was birthed at the starting point, in the moment the harmful nature of prostitution was denied. Another of the tactics in the normalisation of prostitution is the attempt to divide prostituted women into two separate camps: those who are supposedly 'free' and those who are 'forced'. 'Forced' referring �o those women who have been enslaved bodily; who have been duped, often trafficked, forcibly detained, raped by their pimps and then sold as sexual meat to a succession of strangers. And 'free' of course indicating those women who have supposedly exercised free will and are happy as larks with their lot. It would be useful to question why, if prostitution is a choice for women which can be taken with such ease, so many women have to be deceived and enslaved in order to do it. The prostitution experience ofthe trafficked woman most commonly involves force followed by the trauma of commercial sexual abuse. The prostitution experience of the non-trafficked womah most commonly involves coercion followed by the trauma of commercial sexual abuse. Both ofthese situations are reactionary. Both result in sexual abuse as a result ofsomething that preceded them, and both share the consequence of a woman having sex with strangers that she has no desire to have. Precisely because these women's situations have been so divided in the popular consciousness by way of focusing on the differences that set them apart, attitudes towards them have been correspondingly divided. The woman who has been physically forced may be the focus ofpity and�ompassion. By distinct comparison, the woman who has been coerced by life circumstances is the subject of criticism and derision. It is not the end-place, then, that frames the nature of the attitudes towards them.it is the route by which they got there. A woman is derided as a whore if, like myself, she came to prostitution from a place of homelessness paired with male manipulation; but had I been duped to go to a foreign country under the promise of a non. existent au pair job and physically confined once I got there, I might have found myself the recipient of a very different attitude. This is difficult for me to know. Its very unfairness makes it difficult, because it is the woman who was not physically forced who has a far greater weight of inwardly directed shame to deal with. It is a shame that rests on the charge of her perceived culpability. Had I been forced I could comfort myself with that knowledge at least. I could partake in the blameless mentality of the victim, free of guilt or accountability, with no questioning shadows flickering at the back ofmy mind and no internal voices whispering, 'Could you not have found another way?' I could offer a short retort to anyone who dared say (and there are very many who dare say), 'Well, nobody forced you to do it!' The woman who was trafficked can say: 'Well, actually, somebody did _force me to do it'-she can outwardly direct her recriminations and she can look outside herself, rather than inside herself, for answers. Women like myself who were forced by nobody need to find our voices and assert that this does not mean we were forced by nothing. It is a very human foolishness to -insist on the presence of a knife or a gun or a fist in order to recognise the existence of force, when often the most compelling forces on this earth present intangibly, in coercive situations. My prostitution experience was coerced. For those of us who fall into the 'free' category, it is life that does the coercing. People concentrate so much on the differences between prostituted women and trafficking victims that they forget there are far more similarities than differences. Probably the most fundamental of these is that while the trafficked woman had her sexual autonomy stolen from her, the prostituted woman had hers bought; and so both sets of women have lost their sexual self-governance. While individuals and organisations argue about whether the issues of trafficking and prostitution should be dealt with separately m: together, the punters have already made their minds up. They use both sets of women, and they make no distinction. There are some men who, bizarrely, think that because they buy sex from �men, they have a right to speak on behalf of those women. 'She's happy', 'She enjoys it', etc. The men who use women in prostitution do not have the authority to speak for them. They are seeing the situation from the alternate perspective, and this will never lend to understanding. Ifyou are looking down one end of a funnel and I am looking down the other, I am never going to see that funnel from your perspective; not as long as I keep looking from the opposite end. j Some men frame their view of prostitution based on their own .j behaviour within it. If a man is prepared to restrain his sexual impulses � to fit within the boundaries of the woman whose body he's using, he may well form the opinion that her experience of prostitution is shaped by similar expressions of restraint; that his behaviour typifies what she (' �commonly encounters. Ifhe assumes so he couldn't be more wrong. Men who curtail their impulses to fit within the bounds ofwhat a prostituted :! woman deems permissible are the exception, not the rule. , No man should measure the prostitution experience by his behaviour . alone. Prostituted women do not process their experience by the behaviour of one man: they process it by the behaviour of thousands. Nevertheless, there are male users of prostitutes who say they know prostitution is not damaging and who use their proximity as supposed evidence to support this. They ignore a vital fact: proximity means nothing here. It is a matter of perspective, not proximity. The same is !' true of all the experiences of life that separate the people involved into two polarised camps. Prostitutes' clients have no business speaking on behalf of the women they use. They simply do not know what they are talking about. ''~, Another of the lies geared towards the normalisation of prostitution )1 (and this one is not modern, it is very old) is the notion that the presence '�non. of prostitution directs male sexual aggression away from the prostituted female population. Susan McKay, former Chief Executive of the National Women's Council of Ireland, rubbished this myth when , ~ 1 ~~ :! 'There is an argument that the existence of prostitutes acts as a safety valve for male sexual aggression, thus protecting other women. This disregards the rights ofall women to live without sexual violence, but it is also untrue. Studies show that men who use prostitutes regularly are more likely to become violent to women with whom they are in a relationship. Men who use prostitutes are not men who respect women: The rape-prevention theory has persisted because
it is very useful to the proponents of prostitution, and it is very useful because it is a multifaceted tool; it has a number of viable functions. Firstly, of course, it advises that prostitution is a necessary evil. It does this by portraying prostitution as the only remedy to a frightening and horrible alternative. By way ofthis fiction, prostitution is framed not only as a social necessity, but as a calining influence and, therefore, a desirable one. In Simone de Beauvoir's book, The Second Sex, a quote from which prefaces this book, the author makes reference to an attitude I had never known existed in America's Deep South. I had often wondered as a child how American whites had justified slavery to themselves. It seemed incomprehensible to me that there could have been rational justification expressed, and I was right, because the justification they espoused was not rational. American proponents of slavery attempted to vindicate it by maintaining that it afforded them the opportunity to '. . . maintain the most democratic and refined relations among themselves: Among themselves? Where is the justification in that? In the same way, the notion that prostitution protects the general female population serves to support prostitution by focusing on those outside of it, while giving no conscience-driven thought to those within it. In any case, both sets of women are lied to, because the notion that prostitution protects other women is false. It doesn't. It does the opposite. It operates in a manner that is subtle and sinister and the only reason the non-prostituted women of the world don't know this is because what's happening is happening elsewhere, behind closed doors. It is true that there are men who indulge the fantasy of raping women, and there is no shortage ofthem. It is also true that many ofthe men who entertain these desires act out their fantasies on the bodies of prostitutes. What is nottrue is that prostitution is capable of containing these sadistic propensities within the walls of its own institution; it is no more capable of doing that than a prostitute is capable of containing it within the walls of her own vagina. The notion that prostitutes prevent rape is a fallacy; they do not prevent it. They are like magnets to whom are drawn the first physical enactments of these fantasies, but nothing stays as it was in its initial inception. Everything evolves and grows. Rape fantasies are no different. Those men who do not rape prostituted women outright, but rather pay to use their bodies as instruments for their rape-fantasy enactments, will be somewhat gratified by what they do, but they are all-the-while very well aware that they've had to hand over money in order to do it. This counteracts their sense ofcontrol, which in turn dilutes the potency of their rape-fantasy experience. Since the thrill of sexual violation is defined by a sense of control, the most extreme sexual violators strive for the most potent sense of control available to them, and they do not interpret that as being found in the prostitution exchange. I know this because of the amount of violent perverts I met over the years and the one thing that was common to them all was their belligerent and bitter resentment of having to pay to enact their fantasies. When the malignancy of their fantasies reaches a more potent level these men will not pay to enact them; they will simply rape prostituted women. Then there are men who wouldn't bother indulging these fantasies on the body of a prostitute because they wouldn't view a prostitute as being rapeable in the first place. (Here, again, more evidence of the prostitute's perceived insignificance.) And so enacting rape fantasies ori the bodies of prostitutes is enough for some rapists, but not all. For some, because raping the body of a prostitute is not quite real enough, they can and do move on to what they regard to be 'the real thing'. These men bypass prostitutes and rape non-prostituted women, and the supposedly saving powers of prostitution can do nothing to stop this. These are frightening prospects for non-prostituted women, but many prostitutes and former prostitutes, including myself, have seen the faces of rapists and sexual abusers publicised in the media who were once particularly vile clients ofours. I was not at all surprised when I first saw the face of one of my paying abusers in the newspaper. How could I be, when I know prostitution is a training academy for misogynists? The truth is prostitution cannot, by its nature, quell or contain perversion. In an atmosphere where malignant sexual domination thrives and cannot be discouraged, it should be clear that perversion cannot be quelled or cont~ined. It can only be fed, and what is fed grows, and what grows unchecked increases in amount and intensity until it is too large to be contained in the confines of what once housed it. Prostitution does not, because it cannot, contain the perversity of sexual violence; it can only feed and unleash it out into the rest of the world. In de Beauvoir's quote, one line interested me most. It was'... man vents his turpitude upon her'. It interested me because I didn't know what turpitude meant, so I went to the dictionary. When I sourced its meaning I realised I knew everything I wanted to know about turpitude except its name. The term describes 'depravity' and 'wickedness' and has its origins in the Latin term 'turpis', meaning 'disgraceful' or 'base'. What is happening in countries that legalise prostitution is a shift away from the expectation ofdecency and towards the acceptance ofturpitude, and this is done by denying the principal elements of prostitution, which are disgraceful, depraved, wicked and base. Since prostitution is stylised as tolerable through the denial of its principal elements it is clear that it is made permissible only by way of the denial of its own nature. This aggressive rebuttal of the nature of prostitution is the mantra of prostitution enthusiasts, but what the proponents of prostitution do not realise is that their position strongly ratifies the position of the anti-prostitution movement. Refusal to recognise the presence of depravity etc. as integral to prostitution only confirms the wrongfulness of prostitution. If there is nothing wrong with prostitution, then why deny the presence of the fundamentals that make up its lived experience? In fact, the notion of prostitution as free of a depraved nature is so glaringly fictional that most women who've never spent a day in prostitution can see straight through it. The offer of money for sex to most women would be met with a swift smack in the mouth. This is true because women do not need to think about it; they instinctively sense the deeply derogatory nature of the proposal-and those who must strip prostitution of its true nature in order to frame it as acceptable are fooling nobody who would not prefer to be fooled. The depraved nature of prostitution can be found in every single element of it, from those that are so obvious a non-prostituted person can see them, to those that are apparent only from the perspective of personal experience. For example, elsewhere in society there is a universally accepted rule, which is that it is not acceptable to encroach upon a stranger's personal space. This is not so in prostitution. Not only do prostitutes not own their own bodies but they have no rights to the space that surrounds them. This is another area of social normality from which they are excluded. Often when I was working on the streets prospective clients would walk up to us and stand so close that we could smell the sweat off their skin. They would stand within inches of us, centimetres even, and peer and leer at us as if inspecting something particularly enticing that they might be choosing from a supermarket shelf; a rib-eye steak, for example. �ll aspects of our physicality would be inspected, but particularly the breasts. This behaviour on behalf of men was simply a consequence of our commodification and their interpretation of it. Their attitude expressed that we were not regarded as people; we were things to be bought, and like anything else that's for sale, we were liable to be held up to the scrutiny of intense consumer inspection. Also, as with a slab of meat, there was no consideration as to how sensitively that commodity ought to be scrutinised or inspected. In brothel prostitution women are sometimes expected to line up while a punter inspects them to decide who he's going to fuck, and the dehumanising attitude is no different indoors and is in fact often worse, because there are no 'normal' members of society around to be appalled by it. If prostitution is to be normalised then we must normalise all of the abnormal attitudes and interactions contained within it, but the base reality is that it is not normal to treat people like this. The attempt to normalise prostitution is therefore an attempt to normalise the abnormal, and because these abnormal ways ofinteraction cause human suffering, it is also an attempt to endorse the immoral. For the normalisation of prostitution to be rejected its tactics must first be recognised and understood. These tactics are deeply ingrained in the communal psyche. Prostitution is often referred to as 'the oldest profession', as though, like a wise and aged individual, legitimacy were conferred on it by its years. It is a tactic in the same vein as trying to whitewash the prostitution experience as 'sex work', and it is in the same vein because they both share the same objective. Make no mistake, behind these depictions is deliberate intent: it is the intent to marry prostitution with respectability, and here is the reason for that: what's respectable is acceptable. There has also been an attempt by some to include prostituted women with gay men and women in order to frame the prostituted as a sexual minority. This is erroneous, because prostitution has nothing to do with sexual orientation. Any attempt to frame it so is akin to suggesting that an impoverished person in the developing world is engaged in a sexually expressive activity as they sew clothing for those in more affluent parts of the world. This tactic constitutes an attempt to influence thinking in relation to prostitution while relying on the false premise of a moral high ground, and to alter the political landscape in relation to prostitution by assuming the rights of legitimate sexual minorities, to which it has no rightful claim. At an extreme level, pro-prostitution groups have caught on to the idea and have even taken this fiction so far as to march in Gay Pride Festivals! It is a wonder they are welcome to do so. It is a wonder the gay community cannot see how it is being used. This attempt to reframe the prostitution experience is found in every endeavour that is complicit in the normalising of prostitution, so it is useful to have so stark an example of what to look for. As for the prostitution advocates who march in Gay Pride Festivals around the world, they know as well as I do that what they're doing constitutes a deliberate and calculated alignment with sexual minority groups, with the hope and the intention that the legal and civil rights currently being conferred on those groups will rub off. Quite simply, the pro-prostitution lobby is trying to pull a fast one here, and it is lucky, both for those who know the truth about prostitution and for those who want to know it, that their efforts so clearly constitute a round-peg/square-hole scenario. I can absolutely assure the reader that, not only did we not see ourselves as a sexual minority, but the suggestion never even raised its ridiculous head. 'I ,I l l '1 J.