Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (24 page)

ITHE LAST QUESTION ...'tis misfortune that awakens ingenuity, or fortitude, or endurance, in hearts where these qualities had never come to life but for the circumstance which gave them a being. WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, THE HISTORY OF HENRY ESMOND T hat every prostitute I've ever known wanted to get out of prostitution is something I deduce from many things, mostly direct comments but also more subtle reactions and attitudes � \ I witnessed while still in prostitution. The responses of prostitutes I've ' run into since exiting the business have been equally revealing. I've yet to .�ave a post-prostitution conversation with any of them who didn't say �omething along the lines of: 'Good for you', 'Fair play to you', 'I'm proud of you', 'I'm glad to hear it: Could the women who say these things be thought to consider prostitution a positive place to be? And if they don't consider it a positive place for me, could they be presumed to consider it a positive place for themselves? Since the first question always seeks to know how a womangets into prostitution it is logical to record here, near this book's end, how I got out of it. I have already explained the mechanics of that, the practical '' steps I took to remove myself from it, but none of these would have ~ been taken had I not felt a deep inner urging to extract myself from that hideous way of life. This urging is truly the first step, though it is not consciously taken, and yet it is one I have never known another prostitute not to take. I always felt myself being reminded by this urging that my current lifestyle was one which I needed to turn away from, which was not right for me, and which was a path I'd never been intended to stay on. It was, in one ofits aspects, a deeply spiritual yearning. I needed that peace back, the peace I'd had in childhood when walking in woodland, surrounded by the beauty of the world. It was the peace of knowing exactly who I was, and being content in that knowing. There is no peace in prostitution. There is no peace in your body or your mind. There is no peace anywhere within you. I think, by nature, I am a peaceful person. I am someone who craves to be at peace within her own self. Since that was not possible in prostitution, I feel that my own necessity to be at peace with myself strongly contributed to myleaving. . Recently, while having a bath, I became very aware of my own nakedness and was filled with a sense of loathing. 'Think of all the horrible places this body has been', I thought to myself, and immediately my mind swam with images of punters: fat, heaving, sweating, or skinny, vicious, belligerent. Rooms, beds, cars, streets, brothels, hotels: the imagery was abundant, and loathsome. For some reason I fought it. For some reason I insisted to mysdf: 'Think of all the lovely places this body has been'. I remembered the touch of lovers, soft, gentle, erotic; remembered affection, hugs, cuddles. I saw myself cradling my newborn son; saw myself walking not long after dawn while the dew. still glittered on the grass. I felt the tension begin to seep out of my body and immediately clasped my hands gently on either upper arm. It was a hug of the self I suppose. I was okay again, safe again to be in my own body. I realised that this place, where we are safe or unsafe, clean or unclean, is not in the body. It is encoded in a much deeper part of ourselves, and when that is triggered by memory its last port of call is in the body. This results in the felt bodily experience of either joy or revulsion reverberating through us physically, and washing over and through us, either healingly or damagingly, like waves. When I think back on my time in prostitution and the women I knew then, one thing marks for me most potently what we were among the memories of our prostituted selves. I see now what�e were with the clarity ofa painful understanding. It would have been too painful, while it was true in my life, to acknowledge with such a blatant comparison; but it was true nonetheless. I am thinking now of the wind-up toys I remember me and my brother playing with as very young children in my grandad's flat. I had a tin penguin and he had a motorbike with a rider attached. We would wind them up at the back and my big penguin would walk unsteadily around the room while his smaller motorbike would whiz around it. When they'd used up all their energy they'd stop, frozen, inanimate objects again until someone (not they) decided it was time again for them to start moving. I see now that's what we were, us young women and girls. Money was our wind-up mechanism. That is how we were controlled and made to behave according to the whims of whoever dictated our movements. That is what we were, both to them and deeply, damagingly, to us; and the interplay of our actions made clear exactly what we were: we were toy humans. And we toy humans played out limitless scenes that were the direct opposite of equality. Those scenes are still played out every moment of every day, for the benefit of the toy masters who do not hold puppet strings, because they do not need them. They hold purse strings instead. I don't imagine the degrading depressing lifestyle of prostitution as being innately suited to any woman and I have never seen the remotest spark of evidence in prostitution to suggest that it may be. In terms of the degree of negativity a woman is able to contend with and process, I imagine that there are differing degrees here as in all of life, so I think another of the reasons I left was because, to put it simply, I hated it too much to stay. I think the thing that most strongly induced me to leave was the perpetual sense of 'wrongness'.to the whole thing; that was a hugely discouraging factor for me. I hated, above all else, the bodily invasion that is integral to the prostitution experience. I knew that as long as prostitution was in my life drugs would be there also and I desperately wanted to be rid of drugs. I would never have gotten off drugs while I was in prostitution. I know that now and I knew it then. I've had it remarked that it must have taken great personal strength to extract myself from prostitution. I don't know about the place of inner strength in that process, where it sits and how much of it can take credit for the end result, but I know with certainty that it was in no way the only factor at work. I think I was motivated as much by the fear of spending a lifetime in prostitution, so in that sense you could say that my leave-taking was motivated every bit as much by fear as by strength. It was a very dear-sighted fear though, I see now, and it indicated an ability to envision a different future. There was also defiance associated with the fact that I was a prostitute and a drug addict and I didn't want to die like that; I didn't want those to be the points that defined or invoked memories of me, but prostitution and drug abuse were so entwined in my life at that point that one could not be without the other. The realisation ofthe urgent need for change is really only transition's (or recovery's) first step, but it is obligatory; it is not a step you can bypass. There are no 'start at stage two' concessions for latecomers or awkward-truth-dodgers and in that sense its importance is not to be overlooked, but that comprehension alone does not assure success; many a drug addict has died with that realisation alive and kicking in their consciousness. I managed it with some resilience and much good fortune and I count myself very lucky; I've loved some who were not. By the summer after my twenty-second birthday I had to deal with the fact that I'd spent almost a third of my life in prostitution. It was a disturbing realisation. I knew that it was true but I so badly wanted to reject that reality. It felt deeply depressing and utterly pathetic and my feelings urged and spurred me to leave in that they fuelled the impetus for change. It is not enough to desire change. I had spent seven years desiring change. There must also be the will for momentum, the drive for moving forward. Putting these two things together, the desire for change and the will to provoke it-that is the magic formula of action, I've since realised; that is the gunpowder and the naked flame. When I was a little girl my mother had for years a particular poster hung on the kitchen wall. It was ofa climber on the snow and ice-covered face on a perilously steep mountain. The caption beneath it read: 'Where there's a will, there's a way'. I remember her commenting on it and repeating that caption when she was faced with great difficulties, some ofwhich were as pitiable as how to make ten pounds stretch to feed five kids for the whole week. This instinct for overcoming was obviously innate to my mother's nature. It would have to have been, given that she managed to navigate raising five children in the desperate circumstances she was in for as long as she did. I don't know whether I inherited that same impulse or whether she instilled it in me. It may have been a bit of both. In any case, I know it was in large part responsible for guiding me out of prostitution, so I have a lot to .thank my mother for. My parent's illnesses and addictions furnished me with an unenviable childhood and a young adulthood fraught with difficulties, but their wellness, the decent sides of themselves, the positivity inherent to their own deeper natures, was in large part what gifted me with the tools to overcome the inheritance of their misfortunes. This book was, for me, among other things, an exercise in overcoming. I have always felt in response to traumatic or difficult events a desire to overcome or to surmount. I have written this book, in part, in order to satisfy that need. This inclination is a behavioural pattern that I became �aware of early in life. It is generally positive but has not always been for 1 the good. It has certainly been of assistance in helping me navigate my way through difficult times, but it has also kept me captive in harsh l circumstances when I misinterpreted 'overcoming' for 'enduring'. I see that I was, for quite a long time, confused on that point; but I know now that the latter is not always a position of strength and these days I pay careful attention to the distinction between the two. I never felt that I had overcome prostitution simply by way ofhaving left it. That was not nearly enough. I had to dissect it as an experience, for myself. I had to understand its effects on me and on other women and on society as I had seen it and then lay what I had found of under.standing before others to dissect and make sense of what they may. I had to hope, and still do, that the sense others make of prostitution after having read this account will be somewhat enlightened by my experiences. There is, decade upon decade, more and more tolerance of prostitution and other sexually exploitative practices in much of the world. It is my hope that after having read this book at least some people will come to a fuller understanding of the simple immorality of prostitution, the damage of it, the pain of it, and the necessity of eradicating it from our world. IfI achieve that, that will be another level, another layer, of overco~ing. This has not been an easy book to write. The voice in my mind that has been encouraging me to record these things all this time has been telling me; sit down and be calm, be rational, be focused, and be driven. But to be focused and driven to write this book has also been to be troubled and disconcerted; that is the inevitable corollary. It has been rather like attempting to concentrate your vision on a target in the middle of an irrepressible blizzard and feeling confused and anxious as you are caught between the necessity to focus and the fear of being overcome by the storm. I had many moments like this and had to think many times: 'Be calm, be rational, be focused, and be driven'. Some days I have been able to take this sort of advice from myself and some days I haven't. Some days my depression has come back in waves and left me fit for nothing; hardly any days have I been able to work on this book and feel few ill effects. On bad days I've been confined to my home, just crippled with depression, fear and self-doubt, and on others I have felt inwardly calmed by the sort of feeling that assures me I don't need to look in a mirror to know who I am. These feelings are produced by way of a psychological distancing from prostitution. Usually the act ofwriting about this draws you back into it. In later days it has produced the feeling of letting go. I am looking forward to typing the last full stop. I look forward to the feeling it will evoke in me. I know it will be a positive one. Men who buy the bodies of women are aware on an inner level of the wrong they do and some of them struggle with self-loathing because of it. Though they may not know it, this is good news for them: if there is self-loathing here on the part of a punter it comes from a positive source. Most of us feel low about ourselves when we know we've done something lousy. Men do not feel low about themselves when they know they've done something lousy here because they are intrinsically bad: they do so because they are intrinsically good and hate the part of themselves that has brought them to abuse the females who share their world. I know this in my heart. I think some part ofme has always done, and I am glad to know it. Prostitution might have made me cagey, wary and guarded, but it never robbed me ofmy love ofmen. I am glad to know that also. My hate is directed, not towards men generally, but towards prostitution and all the other misogynistic structures in our world which ask questions like: 'What is a woman?' and answer: 'A support system for a pussy.'29 These attitudes are the building blocks of prostitution and similar structures erected and maintained by men and for men. A deeper understanding ofthese things came about after I had gotten out of prostitution, but it was in the sensory understanding of them as they occurred, the inner knowledge I had that I was being abused while I was being abused, that helped build in me the impetus to get out of prostitution. So, in short, I knew I had to get out, because that's what my gut told me; and it never stopped telling me that. There is enough left ofthe authentic me to say what happened to me, and how, and why, and for that I will always be thankful. But does it give me back to myself? There are still parts of me that I do not recognise as my own, though I surely know how they got there. This invulnerability, for example, was never me. It was never part of my original make-up, but instead it has become encoded, rewritten into me, one track laid over another as if on a rewriteable co. 29 These words are taken from a sign nailed up in public outside a red-light bar in Angeles in the Philippines, as reported by Kathleen Barry
in her book The Prosti. tution ofSexuality. , . ,.