Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (21 page)

Chapter 23 "-'

I DEPRESSION AND SUICIDE

Suicide is a significant consequence ofprostitution. C STARK AND R WHISNANT, NOT FOR SALE 0 f course, with a history like mine, I suppose it is only natural that, down the years, I would have had my struggles. with depression. Those years started very early actually, from that first suicide attempt aged eleven, and I now perceive that I was in a state of depression for all of my adolescence and much of my childhood. Depression affects the sufferer negatively in numerous ways. You can become so paranoid and withdrawn that it is a huge psychological effort to mix in society, even if it is as simple a thing as buying something inconsequential, like a cup ofcoffee or a packet ofcigarettes. Eye contact can be excruciating. But those moments are, thankfully, in the minority for me and it has been years since I've suffered from them badly. I usually carry myself with a confidence that doesn't require effort. But my post-prostitution life has operated in cycles; at times I did not like to be alone. I would think too much and often my thoughts were not kind to me. There have been long stretches of time when I did not like or enjoy my own company. Sometimes, there was the near panic.filled desire to get out and away when I was in company, only to come home and dislike my own company even more. There was sometimes the sense of running and running, ceaseless running, and no matter where I arrived at, not being contented anywhere at all. For quite a stretch after I got out of prostitution, I was ashamed of the lack of people in my life, but most of my old friends were either dead or dying of drug addiction and, in both cases, couldn't keep me company any more. In more recent years, I have made new friends, but for a long time after I left prostitution, I told myself that I didn't make friends easily, and a part of me didn't even want to. At the same time, though, I often felt isolated and lonely. I am glad I am over that now. It's no way to live. I spent over three years in counselling and I first made the decision to go there because I could no longer deal with the fact that, at a very base level, I was still desperately unhappy. These were feelings that kept on resurfacing and had done over and over ever since I'd gotten off narcotics and could no longer numb them that way any more. Not all days are good days but I don't feel miserable the majority ofthe time any more and very often, I thank God for it. One of the saving graces about psychotherapeutic counselling is that it makes you much more self-aware. I am much more connected to my feelings these days and I'm much better able to come to terms with some of the things that happened in the past. It's a pity it took me so many years to go to therapy; it's something I think I should have done earlier, but then, as my therapist said to me one day: 'Don't "shouda" all over yourselfl' What I did in the ten years between the time I left prostitution and cocaine and the time I entered therapy was to keep on moving forward in practical terms, securing an education and employment and a home, but what I failed to do for all that time was to try to remove the awful sadness that had dogged me all my life. Perhaps I came to that when I was ready. I believe that words are powerful however we choose to use them. Great pain can be caused by the telling of an innocuous lie, but I believe another thing: words are at their most powerful when used to deliver truth. The problem and the conundrum for prostitutes is that the power behind the truisms we tell ourselves is as often negative as it is positive. We sometimes tell ourselves, while still embroiled in the business, that our experience is hateful and as true as this is (unless we use it as the impetus for change) it can do nothing to brighten our daily existence. The very truth of our situation is damaging and so if we tell ourselves the truth, we are victims of our own honesty. 'II '~ ,\ j This puts a woman in a situation whereby she can either begin to practise lying to herself (done usually by omitting to acknowledge the exactness of her experience) or sink further and further into depression. Most women choose the former for as long as they can get away with it, as I did. The truth, however, becomes more and more difficult to evade on a conscious level, and it has been impossible to evade on a subconscious level right from the start, because our inner selves always intuitively sense what is right for us and what is wrong. Depression dogs the prostitute from the start, because the core of her knows and feels this damage to the most private part of herself. The truth has been there right from the start and depression arrived right -alongside it, as it did for me, on the first night I prostituted myself and went to sleep weeping. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is the guide most commonly used by psychiatrists and other mental health professionals in the diagnosis of depressive disorders. I was shocked to read the list ofsymptoms. I was shocked because, during my last episode ofdepression (which was post-prostitution) I experienced and exhibited every last one. Had I been asked, I would have said that I was depressed, but had I been asked to quantify that on the scale used to measure this illness (mild, moderate to severe), I would never have thought to say that it was severe. I would have thought that it was moderate, middle.of-the-road depression. That is frightening to me. It is frightening to realise that I vastly underrated the depths of my own despair and it is saddening to understand why: I had felt so bad for so long that I had come to normalise those feelings. For example, I was chronicallyindecisive. I would sometimes consider going to the shop and then allow the whole day to pass without my going. When night time came and the shop had closed, I'd feel lousy about my inability to make it there. That is another of the crueller aspects of depression, that way it has of causing the sufferers to berate themselves for exhibiting its symptoms. In this way depression multiplies, but it doesn't feed on itself; it feeds on the person it inhabits. When a person is in the grip ofsevere depression, they are not mentally capable of making the distinction between shame-based feelings which have their roots in reality and those which arise as a symptom of their illness. Nor are they capable of identifying negative feelings which arise from outside the remit of the illness as distinct from those which are actually induced by it. During my last bout of depression, I didn't feel guilty about being depressed; I felt guilty because I couldn't make it as far as the local shop and my house was in chaos. That my perceived 'laziness' was symptomatic of my illness didn't occur to me. All I knew J was that I felt lousy about myself and here was more evidence that I �was quite right to do so. The very nature of depression dictates that the 1 depressive will give credence to any negative feeling, no matter where it J comes from. I believe that depression is widespread among prostitutes and, while .�I am certainly not medically qualified to diagnose it, I don't believe a person always needs to have been medically trained in order to recognise 1 its symptoms, particularly when they've had a ritual recurrence of it in their own lives. What I saw around me in prostitution was a consistent� very low mood and what I saw almost as regularly was the abuse of alcohol and other mind-altering drugs. Depressives are notorious for�elf-medicating with alcohol and other substances. A 2005 Ruhama research report on barriers affecting women in prostitution states: 'Studies in Ireland have found that 38% of women . involved in prostitution have attempted suicide and 25% suffered from :, diagnosed depression and were in receipt of medical treatment: It is my personal conviction that the twenty-five per cent ofprostitutes recorded ., as having depression in Ireland is a significant underestimate of the true ' figure and that many prostitutes have not been diagnosed simplybecause ! they have not presented their symptoms to a doctor. I have good reason j to think that. Any talk of doctors during my time in prostitution usually . centred around STI health checks, and in the cases where it didn't, it would involve some other physical ailment, such as trips to A&E to have . bones set, since some clients were apt to break them. That was where our health concerns began and ended. It was about keeping ourselves functioning physically; nothing to do with keeping ourselves functioning mentally or emotionally. In my experience prostituted women did not even consider their mental health and this never surprised me. It is a situation that exists, I believe, because women know going to a doctor for antidepressants while they're in prostitution is about as useful as being treated for lung cancer while you're smoking your brains out. As long as you are in proximity to it, this is not a malignancy you can ward off with a packet of antidepressant pills. There is an inconsistency in the figures relating to depression among Irish prostitutes and they are worth taking a closer look at, because there is evidence here that depression is much more widespread than has been diagnosed and documented. Irish statistics prove that thirty-eight per cent of prostitutes have attempted suicide while only twenty-five per cent have been diagnosed with depression and received medical treatment for it. It's clear that there is a disparity between the number of prostitutes who have been diagnosed with depression and those who have attempted suicide. People who are not depressed are not usually given to attempting suicide, are they? And given that only a portion ofthose with depression actually attempt suicide, this obviously indicates that the percentage of prostitutes suffering from depression is significantly higher than the number of those who have tried to kill themselves. Horrifyingly so, I am sure. Chapter24 ~

THE DAMAGE TO RELATIONSHIPS AND SEXUALITY Consider the fact that I learned what sexuality meant from johns and pimps before I could find out what it might mean with the girl I loved. This lesson is not erasable. My body remembers all ofit. TOBY SUMMER IN LESBIAN CULTURE: AN ANTHOLOGY BY JULIA PENELOPE & SUSAN WOLFE I have found the act of sexual intercourse to be profoundly more pleasurable when experienced between two people who are in love. I didn't experience the depth of that disparity until I was twenty.two, and I had been having sex for seven years at that point. I can only imagine how much more intensified that ecstasy would have been had I not worked as a prostitute prior to that. He and I went on to have a loving relationship and became engaged , to be married. The marriage did not happen, but we are still friends to ,: this day. I will say, though, that I remember going asleep that first night I slept with him in what I can only describe as a state of exquisite shock from this powerful new discovery and waking up the following morning in exactly the same mental condition. It was as though every voluntary sexual encounter I'd ever had within relationships had been experienced in drab shades ofgrey and now I?d been made aware that in fact they were supposed to have been experienced in this vivid and glorious technicolour. It wasn't that I hadn't loved men before; I had, but I'd grown to love them, slowly and over time, whereas with this man I had fallen in love in the most rapid, passionate and classically romantic sense of the term. I understood the place of the word 'fallen' in that term, then, for the first time, because falling is exactly what it's like: you are in a state of freefall where you cannot exercise any control whatever over the intensity of your own feelings, nor would you want to. Of course the thing about falling is that you eventually hit the ground, as he and I did, but it was worth the fall. The sex though, that happened in those first three or four months, were spiritual experiences; of that much I am absolutely sure. I cannot say how exactly, or why, I can only say that they were; there was so much more going on there than the satisfying of a physical urge. It satiated an urge that was outside of and above my physical self and yet pulsated through me at the same time. It was a more pleasurable pulsating than I could ever have imagined prior to having experienced it and the satisfying of it gave me to understand the true meaning of terms like ecstasy, rapture and bliss. For me, there was a powerful romantic love entwined with a very great depth of caring in that relationship. This, for me, is the ultimate intimacy, and it is as far removed from prostitution as it is possible to imagine. It is no coincidence that I left prostitution a few short months after making this discovery. There were several factors involved in my leaving, but a crucial one was that continuing to experience the opposite of joy through my sexuality was too much to bear. A history like mine can be detrimental to romantic relationships. It fractures even the possibility of every relationship before it begins. It fractures your worth, as partner material, in the eyes of the men that you meet. I can accept that, up to a point. Few men would wilfully go looking for a former prostitute as a mate, just as few women (including myself) would deliberately go looking for a former gigolo; but I tell myself that if a man, after having gotten to know me, still held fast to his prejudices, well then he'd be the sort of man I wouldn't want to share my life with anyway. Prostitution doesn't just hinder the likelihood of a woman settling down; it actually hinders her ability to do that. But it does not always impede her desire to conduct a normal healthy loving relationship; for me at least, it increased it. This is because when a woman regularly experiences the sleazy, disrespectful and debased side of male-to.female sexual relations it can create in her a longing for the respectful, principled sexual love that can and does exist between men and women. In short, a woman begins to yearn for prostitution's opposite; and she does this because she misses the romantic sexual gentleness a man who's in love with her can provide. This is especially so ifshe has had profound experiences of that in her past. The reason for that is simple: we all miss what's missing. Most older prostitutes will tell you that nothing a man did or requested her to do would surprise her any more, and some have lost all their faith in men and in relationships as a result. Psychological scarring is inevitable in prostitution and one of the most common forms of it is in a fractured capacity for relationships, but psychological damage so severe that a woman is wholly incapable ofconducting a relationship on any level is, thankfully, not the norm from what I've seen. It seems to be assumed that embittered, aged prostitutes are incapable offorming or maintaining relationships and are generally found among street-walking women. But I met many women during my street.walking days, decades older than me, most of whom were returning to husbands and male partners at the end of each night. A general distrust of men is a natural consequence ofprostitution and this distrust usually runs very deep, but that is not the same thing as hatred. I think most women experience the recognisable human desire to 'settle down'; to strive towards a place with her mate where they are both enveloped in the security of commitment, which acts . both as a comforter in its own right and as a buffer against loneliness. I am, like many women, someone who craves devotion and particularly the respectful sexual loyalty that monogamy brings. I think that mutual commitment is coveted by both genders, but I suspect that it is more strongly desired by women. Many females seem to desire commitment to a degree that transcends want and is so suffused with requirement as to be actually experienced as need. The influences that encourage women to think and feel this way are far outside the scope of this book, but let me just say that prostituted women are no less inclined (and are probably more inclined) than any other group of women to need companionship to counterbalance the loneliness of their working lives. The problem for prostitutes is that they are not pegged on the lowest point on the scale of desirable partners; they are not placed on the scale at all, so they do not play out the fear of rejection, as some women do, only in their minds; they live out the authentic reality of romantic rejection in their daily lives. It is not hard to see why. Germaine Greer, in her 1969 classic, The Female Eunuch, made the case for women's sexuality having been unnaturally downgraded to being merely reactive and responsive. It is true that it has been and it is true that social conditioning has been responsible for it. It is also true that in no other group of women has sexuality been so hobbled as in prostitution. Where sexuality has been hobbled, intimate relationships inevitably share in the handicap. One of the principal handicaps of the formerly prostituted woman is the conditioning that causes her to keep on slipping into. the role of the pornified objectified female-the subject of the sex:ual encounter, rather than an equal participant. This is a disabling tendency that has been learned by relentless repetition. It is detrimental to true intimacy and it must firstly, painfully, be identified, before we can ever even begin to work towards its eradication. Reclaiming my own sexuality in the aftermath of prostitution has been an ongoing process. For me, it was initially a matter of reclaiming my sexual autonomy. On leaving prostitution, I had simply been programmed to be sexually pliable. This is necessary in prostitution. The woman who is not sexually pliable leaves herself open to vicious violent assault; but the upshot of this unnatural programming meant tha_! it would never have occurred to me to refuse my partner sex, regardless of what sort of mood I was in or how I felt about it. I didn't even ask myself how I felt about it. I was so young and so sexually inexperienced when I became involved in prostitution that those formative years of sexual growth and learning were spent absorbing a very skewed and unnatural depiction of adult sexual relations. It wasn't simply a matter of my experiencing sex within the client/prostitute dynamic and superimposing that image above the one that ought to have existed in my mind; my sexual schooling was much more subtle than that. I was not stupid; I understood that this was not normal natural sex, but the way that it led me to feel about myself and also about sex was so suffused with negativity that somewhere in ,,' my mind the link was forged between sexuality and duty (the 'just do 1 if mentality) and though my conscious self was not utterly submerged 1 beneath it, I was wholly unexposed, for a long time, to the link between :j sexuality and loving. I was aware enough of it to miss it, but enough unused to it not to go looking for it either. And so my feelings didn't enter the equation. In this, I had taken the most fundamental reality of prostitution with me into my personal life. It took me several years to set about breaking that habit; and in fact it needed to be pointed out to me before I even became aware of it. I also had the unfortunate tendency of taking my arousal from my partner's arousal; that is, I would very rarely become aroused in my own right but rather would become aroused by feeling his arousal. I would quite ., literally feed off his feelings in the sexual sense and I did that because very often something inside me was absent and I would have, for long stretches of time, no independent sexual functioning of my own. Thankfully, one of my post-prostitution partners worked up the nerve to say to me, 'I never know if you're enjoying sex. Because you say yes all the time, I never know if you want it or not'. I went over our sexual encounters in my mind (we'd been together about nine months at the time) and I saw that in each of them I had reacted to him in the same way. There was. no variation. I had always responded positively to his advances, and always with the same degree of intensity, regardless of my mood, the extent of my passion, or complete lack of it. So how could he have known if I was enjoying sex, or even if I wanted it? He sensed something of the wooden doll I had�een made into and felt compelled to remark on it. What that comment caused me to do was to start spending time observing my own sexual behaviour and responses. As soon as I had shone a spotlight on them, I found that I was behaving like an automaton, or a car with only one gear. The first thing I began to do to rectify the situation was to say no to sex when I was not in the mood. Rather than allow myself to be coerced I'd simply say: 'No, I'm not in the mood: How strange it was to find that I (usually a fairly determined woman who does not allow herself to be talked round) had spent all the years ofmy post-prostitution life relating to my partners in a way that negated all my sexual autonomy! It was a tremendous relief to begin to give voice to my true sexual feelings, and giving them voice first made them become real to me and then made them become my own again. It brought me back in touch with my own sexuality, and of course, it made the encounters when I said 'Yes', all the more meaningful also. As well as that, it allowed me to initiate sex in a new way, with the heightened level of confidence that comes from being utterly sure about something. But I am still moving towards my sexual self by increments. It is, and probably always will be, an on-going process. The damage to female sexual autonomy that Greer speaks of is amplified many times in the sexuality of the prostituted woman. Not only has she been socially conditioned to overlook her own sexual autonomy, as women generally have been; she has been trained, in the name ofself-preservation, to actively refute and deny even the possibility of its existence. This is because the notion of female sexual autonomy in prostitution is a dangerous thing. It counteracts the majority of male fantasy and is known to provoke reactions ranging right the way through from mild annoyance to extreme aggression and all the way to murderous rage. It is safest to refute that it exists, and where it does manifest it is only in a bawdy caricature, in the cases where a dominatrix is required, at the request and for the pleasure of a man, ofcourse. I could not always contain my sexual autonomy, as I have already explained. Pulling away from clients who mistreated me was something I felt compelled to do at times, and when I did, I always paid for it. This also damages the sexual psyche. It trains the mind to continue with sexual activities regardless, even if they have become painful or in any other way unpleasant. This, too, manifested in, and further damaged, my personal sexual relationships. I do not want to talk in this work too much about partners and lovers, because this book is not about them, but it is important to say that I have felt profoundly comforted in the emotional sense by experiencing monogamy in my post-prostitution life. I've only had sexual encounters with four men in the last fourteen years and all were in relationships, two of them long-term. I agree with the findings of international prostitution research which conclude that: 'It is impossible to preserve yourself and your emotional life when you are involved in prostitution'.26 Women do conduct relation.ships while in prostitution (as I did and as I witnessed others do), but they are inevitably affected by the polluting dynamics at play. These dynamics do not stop operating on the day a woman leaves prostitution and the influence they exert does not entirely end any time afterwards. This continuing pollution can also be seen in woman's non-intimate female-to-male interactions and relationships. For example, with women, I am a very tactile person. IfI see that a woman is at all upset, I am moved by compassion to comfort her physically. I will, almost without thinking, rest my hand on her arm or her shoulder or her back. I find these gestures from women comforting also. They are welcome to me because they are soothing and consoling and never cause me to feel anything but a sense of being reassured; but the same gesture from a man who I am not very dose to will cause me to jolt with discomfort and reel from the sense that my body and physical space have been invaded. It is a sad truth that a man's benign and gentle intentions usually have no mitigating power for a woman here. They are more often no match for the brutal force of the lessons prostitution has taught her. And as for intimate acts, oftentimes during personal sexual experi.ences in a woman's post-prostitution life