Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (9 page)

from any of the prostitutes I've known. We talked about our disgust of their treatment ofus openly, but even ifwe had not, I would have known that my interpretation of malignant perversion was shared by my fellow prostitutes and I would have known it for many reasons, one ofthe most obvious being that while they smilingly rolled their eyes and shook their heads at the mention of those sexually eccentric men they referred to as 'total perverts', their eyebrows furrowed and their vocal tones dropped when they spoke of the violators, who they flatly described as 'animals', 'filth' and 'scum'. Nature intended us to procreate, to cause life itself through our love for each other; but the act of sexual violation expresses hate, through a malignant form of sexual dominance. Not all sexual dominance is malignant. Men's physical strength has long been used to comfort and arouse their women. Any heterosexual woman who's ever had a romantic relationship has had the powerfully arousing experience of being held in the strength of her lover's arms before lovemaking and the wonderfully comforting experience of being held in them afterwards. The urge of sexual violators is to use this physically dominant position in the opposite way in order to create feelings which are the opposite too. To work as a prostitute is to exist in an ever-present atmosphere of sexual violation. Men always violate in prostitution and in my experience the majority of them are aware of it, but it also remains true for those who would not like to believe so or are unaware of it. It is not possible for a man to use a prostitute without indulging in violation. The men who violate in prostitution fall into three basic types: there are men who simply prefer to believe that violation does not come into it, that it does not exist here; then there are those who know it exists but cannot or will not incorporate that knowledge into their behaviour; and then there are those who know full-well that violation exists and who derive a great deal of sexual pleasure from it. This last kind, whether they know it or not, are identifiable to prostitutes because of a sense of themselves which they emit and which is perfectly expressed by a quote from Japanese scientist and author Masaru Emoto: 'A person who loves others will send out a frequency of love, but from a person who acts out evil will come a dark and evil frequency.' 7 People who indulge a wilful propensity towards sexual violation do indeed emit 'a dark and evil frequency'. When you come into regular contact with this frequency, you come to recognise it and to sense it. That capacity for recognition has never left me. To this day I can pick up on it in a person, even in a crowded room. It is a useful skill; it operates in more than one way. Some women have trouble gauging the nature of a man's intentions, but I can always tell, for example, whether a man has civilised intentions and has just said something foolish, or whether there is something darker lurking in his objectives. Prostitutes are exposed, over and over, to the soul-deadening vibration of sexual violation and they develop the ability to identify it, as part of the human capacity for self-preservation. This is a fortunate fact for prostituted women. I am sure it has saved many of us from violence and death. I know there were times it saved me. I can trace my first understanding of sexual violation to my pre-. prostitution life, in a memory from childhood. When I was nine years old, walking through Cabra West on my way to collect myyounger sisters from school, I was passing the railings ofthe Precious Blood church when a drunken middle-aged man who had been walking towards me leaned down and said to me: 'I'd love to take you to bed'. I didn't know what sex was, beyond an instinctual understanding that there was some type of romantic secret intimacy between grown-ups, and I clearly remember thinking: 'There's something wrong with that man; I'm only nine: I passed him quickly. I was fearful and nervous. I felt violated and repulsed. I can still remember the smell of drink on his breath; but what I remember most, what stays with me to this moment_:with thought.defining clarity is the overwhelming sense o(wrongne-s;to what he was suggesting. _ That was the first of three incidences of adult male paedophiles making their intentions clear to me as a child. It was the only one that was not physical, but I concentrate on that one here because I think there is a lot to be explored in what happened that day. There was a lot going on behind his action and my reaction. I feel it represents a recurring theme that, I suspect, has been going on as long as humans have been living. There clearly is, for many people, a particular and powerful thrill in the act of sexual violation. For paedophiles, this thrill is found in the act ofdespoilment; in corrupting the uncorrupted, polluting the unpolluted. It is the sexual equivalent of picking a lovely young bloom and pissing on it. This is the nature of violation. It is the physical expression of an absolute lack oflove. Itis clearly a contemptible and despicable urge; yet for some it thrills, it affords sexual pleasure. My mental response on that day, that immediate instinctual under.standing that there was 'something wrong with that man' proves to me that there is something in humans that recognises the unnaturalness of sexual perversion regardless of whether they have ever come in contact with it. This capacity expresses itself in a sense of revulsion. It was operating so strongly in me that I was filled with it, even though I didn't have a fully formed idea of what sex was. The way that paedophile communicated his urges proves to me that he was exactly aware of the inappropriate nature of what he was suggesting and that he experienced a very dark and negative arousal by way of it. His speech was low-toned, deliberately imparted so as not to be overheard, and laced with leering and lechery. I do not for one moment think that sexual predators regard their actions as natural;, I think that they know exactly how unnatural they are, and that it is that unnaturalness they are getting off on. It is the sense of taboo, the 'something wrong' that excites them. I remember a comment made to me by a young man, a stranger, years ago while I was in my late teens. I wasn't working that night, was in a different part of the city from where I either lived or worked, so he had no way of knowing I was a prostitute. He tried to speak to me on a darkened street and I sensed immediately that he wanted to violate�e. I wouldn't entertain him, walked away quickly, and he was,clearly affronted by this. 'Do you want to get raped?' he sneered after me. Of course, that was taking verbalisation several steps beyond vulgarity and into the realms ofthe overtly threatening and because ofthat, and many other things besides, I have learned this: you do not have to put your hands on someone to violate them sexually. You can, with your eyes or your motions or your words, destroy a person's sense of sexual safety. You do not need to be or have ever been a prostitute to understand this. What woman hasn't had the experience of being made to feel deeply sexually uncomfortable by a lewd comment or a leering lecherous look? Our sexual serenity is a fragile, delicate and multi-faceted thing whic:h isn't just damaged by touch: it is damaged by expressed thoughts, urges and intentions, and when this happens, what has occurred is a violation of the sexual spirit. This is the true level of sexual vulnerability and an accurate yardstick by which to measure the tsunami of sexual violation a prostitute must process. For me, prostitution is the only sphere oflife with which I am familiar where a person is routinely assumed to be without human feeling. In prostitution, you are treated like a blow-up sex doll come to life, with no purpose but to bend over and take it, literally. There are three general mindsets common to the men who use women in prostitution. The view of the prostituted as non-humans is the first of these and it is unnervingly common. It would be impossible to put an exact figure on these things, but I would guess it is an attitude present in at least thirty per cent of a prostitute's clients. I say so because this is roughly the ratio of men who looked at me in stupefied astonishment when I objected to being roughly manhandled; their expressions communicating the slow-dawning realisation that this was in fact a human being they were mauling. The second scenario, where a man is conscious of your humanity but wilfully chooses to ignore it, is probably the most commonly held attitude to be found amongst the men who use prostitutes. I would say it accounts for around forty per cent. This has been my experience. For these men, their blinkered attitude is necessary. It allows them to do what they do. The final thirty or so per cent are those who reduce themselves spirit.ually by indulging their desire to reduce the humanity of women. They are the vilest of all prostitutes' clients, and they make up a disturbingly sizeable minority. So violation happens here in one of three ways: when the violator is not conscious ofthe humanity ofthe person he intends to violate; when the violator consciously chooses to ignore the humanity of the person he intends to violate; or when he is fully engaged with the existence of that humanity and takes pleasure from reducing its relevance to nothing. Prostitutes are routinely violated in all of these ways and in each of them the significance of their humanity is eradicated. But this last way is the most potently damaging element in the prostitute's experience of violation and in the experience ofviolation generally. It is the voice that communicates with actions. It says: 'You are nothing'. One evening, several years ago, and in a state of inebriation, one of my sisters said to me: 'Did you ever get raped or abused, or anything like that? You know you can talk about things like that to me'. If a gag is applied to a prostitute (and I surely know that it is), when I see the image ofa gagged woman in my mind's eye, I see that society has taken one end of the gag and the prostitute has taken the other and they have conspired together to tie the knot. It was still firmly affixed the day my sister asked me if I had ever been raped (though I was several years out of prostitution at that point) so I could not freely express the first thought that came to my mind, which was: 'Every day'. I remember one particular experience in a Limerick apartment in the summer of '94� was eighteen at the time. The man who'd paid me was on top of me, missionary position, thrusting violently. His face was somewhere between red and purple, split also between anger and�lation. He was ,doing his best to hurt me, and it worked. I tried to move a little, to manoeuvre myself so that it'd hurt a bit less. He realised what I was doing immediately and held me fast to the bed in the same position while he kept going, even harder. He dragged out of my hair, my throat; my breasts, then orgasmed in a frenzy of hatred and afterwards got dressed, threw me a look of pure contempt, and walked, wordless, out the door. That was one time, but there were many such times, and there is no need to record them all here. Drawing parallels between 'conventional' sexual abuse and violation and the sexual abuse and violation of prostitution is something many people would be wary of. It's a sense of caution born of the fear of ridicule. I can't afford to shy away from ridicule here; it would prevent me from telling the truth. The traditional view of abuse victims is one of people who in no way solicit their abuse, and yet we women related our experiences to each other, over and over, in the language of the abused. In discussing the sexual acts imposed upon our bodies we used expressions like: 'disgusting', 'horrible', 'stomach-turning', 'revolting' and 'sickening'. In referring to particularly abusive clients we commonly used expressions such as: 'bastard', 'scumbag', 'dirty pig' and 'filthy animal'. I have heard these words from innumerable women; but in all this descriptive terminology one word I seldom heard spoken was the word 'abuse', and I know why. It was because of a secondary dynamic that actually compounded our abuse. It was this, and it was the most heartbreaking: being, by way of our 'profession', unable to lay claim to our experiences of having been abused. What you are actually doing when you prostitute yourself is sanctioning and accepting payment for the sexual abuse of your own body. You go through all the negative feelings associated with sexual abuse, but in the sanctioning of it you have effectively gagged yourself. You have literally sold your rights of expression; it is a twin prostitution really, and its second component is at least as damaging as the first. Having to internalise and conceal the routine occurrence of abuse in ones own life is also a form of abuse; enforced silence is abusive, and how could it not be? Let's take sex out of the equation for a moment and imagine: if a whipping is the torture imposed and a gag applied to keep the victim silent, does the whip sting the skin any less? And if a woman says: 'Here, whip me for money' and hands over the whip and stays still for her whipping, does that sting the skin any less? And if she feels (because the world tells her) that she cannot, in talking about it afterwards, lay claim to having been assaulted since she accepted money for that assault, does that make her assailant, who paid money for the joy of hurting her, any less abusive? The prostituted woman lives with the silence of how she is wronged every day. Modern societal views have applied her gag and a resulting psychological damage among prostitutes is not only commonplace, but inevitable. It is accepted among prostitutes, usually without question, as just another layer in an emotionally arduous life. We didn't often collectively examine to any great depth the reality of our circumstances. We didn't get into protracted discussions about the psychology of it, but we did discuss the feeling of having been abused, without labelling it as such. What we didn't discuss were the mental consequences of that abuse. Our daily reality was this: we had enough to be dealing with in trying to stay alive with none of our bones getting broken and none of our mental screws coming loose. We did talk, as I've said, ofcourse, and we did share our situations and our thoughts on our situations, but my very deepest thoughts, I kept mainly to myself. There were parts of prostitution that were just too painful to dissect openly, J so there's nothing to say the prostitutes I knew weren't doing the s~e j thing. And yet we talked incessantly and discussed most aspects of our 1 daily lives, working and otherwise, and in all that talking I never, ever, l came across a
woman for whom selling her body caused her to be happy. 1 Some of the consequences of having sold our bodies, the financial relief 1. and the other forms ofpractical relief that came with that, were welcome; '! but that, as anyone with half a whit ofsense knows, is not the same thing. 1 It is a game of computation, prostitution. Is it better to have sex with 1 'I this man in the dark, whose face I scarcely look at, who I won't remem-' her tomorrow; or is it better to accrue rent arrears or fall short of the money I need for my child's communion? This game of'weighing up' is exactly what brings most women to the streets and to the brothels and 1 yet, those who exploit their desperation are often presumed by society to be innocent of abuse. But exploitation is abusive, and in almost any other situation I can think of, it is unquestioningly regarded as such-is that not so? I remember watching Oprah Winfrey discuss her sexual abuse on her TV show several years ago. I was stunned by her candour. The gist ofwhat she said was that the thing people often didn't realise about sexual abuse was that it didn't always feel bad, it sometimes felt good, and that when it did, that compounded the psychologically abusive nature of sexual abuse because it induced much guilt, shame, and confusion. She used her own experiences as an example of this, which really was something I found impressive: that such a public figure would be prepared to open this intensely private aspect of her past for the sake of communicating a message she knew needed to be heard-and it did need to be heard. One abuse victim I knew at the time was moved to tears on hearing what was said repeated to her. �at day, after listening to Oprah, I thought about the message in her words and considered again the clouded and obscured nature of sexual abuse within prostitution. That voice of shame that whispers in the ear of some abuse victims: 'You can't say you were abused because you got enjoyment from it', is not dissimilar to the voice ofblame that tells every prostitute: 'You can't say you were abused because you got paid for it'. In my early days of prostitution, in my early teens, before I learned to deaden any display of emotion while with a client, I met men who positively revelled in the obviousness of my unwillingness. Was that not abuse? And later, when I had learned not to show my disinclinations, but just to present myself as unnaturally dead and cold as a shop-front mannequin, did their abuse morph into something else? People are entitled to make up their own minds, but remembering those men and those times, there is nothing clearer to me than the abusive nature of their urges. I once had a conversation with a non-prostituted friend ofmine who had been sexually abused as a child. I told her how when I'd been fifteen I'd always told the men who used me how old I was, because I found it had the effect ofcausing them to become very aroused, therefore getting them off quicker, therefore getting me out of there quicker. I said this to my friend and she said to me: 'Do you not realise that was sexual abuse? Those men knew how old you were and far from being horrified, they were actually turned on by it and exploited your poverty in order to exploit your body and you were fifteen years old at the time-that's abuse: I had this conversation the best part often years ago, before I had been in a place to fully label my experience as sexually abusive, although I had always felt that, like most prostituted women, I was afraid of the ridicule involved in assigning it its own name. There are several images of the prostituted woman that society is used to. One is of the teenage addict being used sexually in a needle-strewn alleyway. Aconverse stereotype is ofthe thirty-something escort; a woman poised, self-possessed, professional; a woman in control. Prostitution is neither one nor the other ofthese extremes. The truth is that prostitution j Jl is a composite experience and these are only two of its parts. It is a blend 1 of both, and many others besides, and the degree to which humiliation ;: and power are experienced in prostitution (either generally or in any : specific area of it) can never be calculated as an average, because we j can never compile witness testimony to calculate the degree of it: it is j different in every single act of prostitution that has ever taken place. What I am certain of is that the sexual humiliation ofprostitutes i~ not simply underrated by many non-prostitutes (both men and women alike) but rather is unappreciated entirely; because it has not been experienced . by them, it is simply not understood. It is understandable that it may not , be appreciated on a quantitative level, but it is heartrending to know that �it may not be recognised as existing at all. To anyone of that school of :; thought I would just say this: humiliation on a sexual level doesnot' con-)I tain itself within the sphere of the sexual; it leaks out all over a life, most .~ particularly so if it is repetitive and ritualistic. Drug and alcohol addiction, l the annihilation of confidence, the shattering of self-worth, physical self-1 harm, suicidal ideation; all of these are well-recognised as the�fruits' of l .. �sexual abuse. All of these I have seen in abundance in prostitution. Regardless of what anybody says, it is clear to me that when a person :; needs to practise and perfect a state of mental lock-down (as prostitutes so commonly do) in order to stand the sexual acts they are endurin.g, that person is being abused. There will be prostitutes out there who will not like the sound of this. I am certain of that. I am certain of it because I would not have liked the sound of it myself while I was in prostitution. I'm sure also that there'll be some former prostitutes who'll not appreciate it either. There is a fantasy some women in prostitution indulge in: that they are exceptionally strong, in control of all of this, far above being abused. I know this because I once indulged in it myself, or tried to, and I would not have liked having it pointed out to me that I was being abused while it was happening. It would have been too close to the bone and, moreover, it would have made the myth of my own 'control' much more difficult to believe. That myth is important to the working prostitute. It enables her to continue to function within the sphere of life she is in. It is very saddening for me to remember myself and the women I worked with tentatively trying to communicate our experiences ofbeing abused to each other on the one hand, while actively participating in the myth that we were in control on the other. So when my sister asked me that question, I had great trouble honestly answering her. Rape, here, is seen as a clouded issue. If rape describes the violently enforced entry of a penis into the vagina or anus, then no, I have never been raped. If it describes the violently enforced entry of the fingers or any other object into the vagina or anus then yes, I have been raped many times. If it can describe a situation where a prostitute has sex for money and is robbed afterwards, on those occasions I was also raped. But I wasn't sure how to answer that question. Like most people, I didn't know where the parameters lay. Should I have told her that I was sexually assaulted each of the numerous times I had fingers and objects forced inside me against my will and outside ofthe agreed contractual exchange? Or any ofthe other innumerable liberties strangers had taken with my body for their own pleasure? Did they constitute sexual assault? I had already been paid. Those men wanted some extra 'fun' for their money. It was more than I had signed up for. It was more than I had been paid for. Ithurt like sexual assault. It damaged like sexual assault. It degraded like sexual assault. It was sexual &ssault. I know what happened to me, but in the eyes of society and in the eyes of the law, where are the parameters here? But if I'd insisted on that much and said that, yes, I'd been sexually assaulted each of those times, there was a voice in my head that told me I'd have been leaving out the biggest part of the picture, which was that sexual exploitation was sexual assault. I drew a breath, gathered myself, and explained that prostitution was sexual abuse-paid sexual abuse. This truth had been incubating in me for a long time but this was the first time I had clearly expressed it to another person. It was an important conversation. I felt a loosening of the gag. There are those who would say I was not sexually molested because I had been paid that day in Limerick in the summer of'94; but I do not believe that sexual assault can be explained and described along those clear, uncomplicated and, I believe, incorrect socially defined lines. The parallels between the sexual abuse inherent to prostitution and the sexual abuse found elsewhere are too blatant to ignore. Probably the most basic of them is this: as a prostitute, you do not get to frame the boundaries of your own sexual experience. Such luxuries are not possible for the woman who has commodified her own body. Such luxuries are redundant when you have been paid for. An important point to remember is that prostitutes accept money before each experience; therefore they do not and cannot know exactly what it is they are accepting money for. You make your arrangement with each man, but you very often have to deal with a situation far removed from anything you agreed upon. Besides any of this, I felt the same sickening nausea and rising panic that is inherent to conventional sexual abuse in each prostitution experience I ever had, and I felt that regardless ofwhether or not a man stayed within the agreed sexual boundaries. There were days when, God forgive nie, I wished I had been a 'bona fide' abuse victim. At least then I would have been allowed to lay claim to my own feelings. There are few lonelier, emptier, more desolate feelings than looking, after a particularly abusive client has left, at the hush money he has paid for your silence over what would be considered rape . in any other circumstances. Prostitution and rape are commonly distinguished by the1 logical fact that to buy something and to steal something are two different things; but when we consider that the sex bought in prostitution is the same type of sex stolen in rape, sex that is, as Kathleen Barry puts it: '... disembodied, enacted on the bodies of women who, for the men, do not exist as human beings, and the men are always in control'-it is �hen that we understand how deeply traumatising it is for the woman whose body is so used. When we understand that the sex paid for in prostitution shares so many of its characteristics with the sex stolen in rape, it makes sense that so many prostituted women make clear parallels between the two experiences. One woman described her experience of the sex of prostitution very succinctly when she referred to it as: 'Paid rape'.8 Canadian campaigner and former child prostitute Trisha Baptie describes it as 'pay-as-you-go rape'. Another woman described it as 'like signing a contract to be raped' and I wrote an article for the Irish Examiner in 2012 where I described prostitution as 'being raped for a living'. That was first said to me by another former prostitute. Many of us describe our feelings towards the sex of prostitution in these ways. I have found it to be especially common that prostituted women with prior experience ofrape and sexual assault make this same link. A woman I knew, who had been sexually molested by her stepfather at thirteen, was one of many women I knew who made that same association. She never used the word 'rape' to describe her understanding and she never needed to; her actions did the talking for her. She and I were close, we were friends, and she told me about the particulars ofher abuse and how it affected her. Her stepfather had always taken the opportunity to abuse her during the day, when her mother was routinely out of the house, working. Unsurprisingly, she came to associate daytime sex with degradation, humiliation and trauma .. She had a long-term partner most of the years I knew her and she confided in me that she would only ever have sex with him at night. She could not bear to be touched intimately by him during the day. This was the cause of some conflict at first but he came to understand that she was resolute about it and to a.ccept that she would never be sexually available to him during the day. Q '\linl�n,..., 4..oa1n�t Wnft"'�nt Vnl 11\ l\Jn 1n ()rtnh.-r '1nn..t On the other hand, in her workinglife, she could function as a prostitute during daylight hours. She worked Dublin's twenty-four-hour street from the late morning till the late afternoon and did call-outs to homes and hotels in daylight hours. She experienced prostitution as sexual abuse, and sexual abuse had to be kept in its place. This was how she functioned. This was how she separated herself from her abusive daily reality. That she equated prostitution with sexual abuse was pathetically clear. Recently, while speaking to a close friend about my experiences of prostitution abuse and about how I was forbidden from accurately naming them, I broke down sobbing and immediately apologised for my tears. She asked me what I was apologising for. I was apologising for the expression of my own feelings, as though I had no right to them, or certainly no right to express them. The indoctrination of prostitution is very strong. It instils a sense of shame and culpability in a woman to the point where she cannot feel free to lay claim to her own�eelings, any feelings, and this remains true in the psyche of a woman who has ever been prostituted. It is necessary to struggle against this indoctrination. This entire book has been constructed in that struggle; and I will k,eep on struggling until I have managed to break fully free, and if I never manage to do that, then I will never stop struggling. Many of the women who come to prostitution from a position of having been sexually abused in childhood or adolescence have an internalised view of themselves as sex objects. For this reason, for those women, the leap from one world to the next is tragicallyless monumental. There is, however, still a leap involved, because the experience of pros.titution is exactly like no other, though the survivors of childhood sexual abuse in prostitution have documented the similarities involved. In some ways, and for some women, prostitution will understandably be experienced as the more positive ofthe two. As my friend who preferred to work during the day time described it to me: 'I may as well have been charging for it as having my stepfather take it for free.' In her, and I suspect in many women like her, there was an appreciation ofthe contrast between her prostitution and pre-prostitution life, hecause at least in prostitution she