Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (23 page)

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J .~ ,1 to do this. Many women conceal the fullness of their experience from themselves. It is a predictable reaction to a painful history. I believe this is a natural tactic in women and I understand their motives thoroughly because I practised exactly this type of avoidance technique for the first couple of years after I left prostitution, but I believe today that it is a damaging and useless tactic. It is useless because you cannot expunge the past; you can only understand it-and it is damaging because it is only in confronting the past that a woman can loosen prostitution's grip on her present day self. Those memories will not stop coming and ifyou do not turn around and face them they will come after you forever. This is a process best conducted with the aid of a therapist, in my experience. There is a lot to work through. The psychological impact ofprostitution is incalculab~efor the women involved. Disturbances manifest in many ways, for me personally, and among those I witnessed, there was the heightened propensity to inflict violence paired with the heightened capacity for enduring it. I have my own theories about this. Violence,in my opinion, stems from unexpressed grief, and I strongly suspect that violence reflects the parameters of the cage that contains it. The structure which detains and deforms grief is simply the human inability to express it, and our inability to grieve is itself a negative influence in our lives. No group I can think ofis less able to express their grief than prostituted women; apart from being paid to keep that to themselves, it would be very dangerous not to do so. That the inability or unwillingness to express grief is a negative thing is borne out by the fact that it gives rise to negative consequences. Griefis released when it is expressed. Its purpose is to be released. When it isn't, and instead is forcibly contained, it deepens and worsens and eventually manifests as violence, which is either inwardly or outwardly directed. But this inability to express grief is just another necessary component of the prostitute's armour: had I been able to grieve each incidence of�rostitution directly after it happened, I would never have been able to continue in prostitution. Coming to terms with the level of my own unexpressed grief and the damage it has caused was itself a monumental aftershock, and one I am still grappling with. I was, in my pre-prostitution life, always the girl who pushed the boy's hand away. Refused to go up the laneway, or when I was cajoled into it, kissed tentatively and shook with shock when he moved his hand to my breast; to let him go lower than that was unthinkable. So it was with a very great deal ofbelated shock that I began to trace the outlines of my experience, to try to connect the dots between who I had been to start out with and who prostitution had forced me to become. God knew what he was doing when he made it impossible for us to see the future. I am being in no way melodramatic when I say that if we could, I believe my fourteen-year-old self may well have committed suicide. To experience an aftershock is to have some part of you triggered, whether it is your memory, your perception or your insight, to cause you to recognise and reflect with the jolt of a sudden, usually discomfiting, understanding. This book is going out at a very pertinent point in Irish history. We are deep in recession and have an exceptionally high unemployment rate. Homes are being repossessed every day. For many families, it is not a matter of cancelling the summer holiday-it is a matter of cancelling the future as they'd planned it. In circumstances like these, destitution is the proverbial wolf at the door, and there comes a point when you have nothing to sell but yourself. This is an aftershock for me, to know that I am now living in a country where women, probably in great numbers, have had prostitution recently cross their minds. And if they have, I know exactly what they'll have thought immediately after it. They'll have thought, could I? Could I really stand it? And they will have felt shudders at the very thought of it, but many of them will have kept on thinking about it anyway, because it's either think about that or think about the stack of unpaid bills in the kitchen next to the letters from the bank about the mortgage arrears; So what would I say to those women? Firstly, what I'd say I would say gently. There are no lectures to desperate women that I feel entitled to give. I know what destitution feels like, and I know from the lessons of my own life that the fear of its imminence is outweighed only by the agony of its arrival. What I'd say is. what I wish someone had been there to say to me: please do not do this. You are considering selling the last thing you have of value, but just remember, the last thing worth selling is also the last thing worth holding on to. You can buy other things for the price you'll get for your sexual self, yes, but then how will you ever know that you wouldn't have found other ways to buy them? But this sale you are contemplating is beyond the laws of capitalism. No matter what happens in your future, no matter what way things turn out, you will never accrue the means to buy back what you have sold here. There is no buying your way back from this. There is no currency that can ever re-forge the broken link between a woman and her private essential self. I have read a lot about prostitution in the closing months ofwriting this book. It has been interesting to educate myself as to the social politics ofwhat happened to me. But also I know that there has been something else going on here; there is a two-pronged reaction to all this research. At times I have felt overwhelmed by the horror of it all, just paralysed by the magnitude of the tsunami before me. At other times, when reading text relating to aspects of prostitution that are less traumatising to me (or perhaps I have been inured to) there has been an inevitable removal from the personal. I have to question whether this is dissociation sneaking in the back door. Sometimes I find myself spliced somewhere in the middle, in a land even I struggle to understand. For example, it is put forward statistically that 'only' one in fifteen Irish men are purchasers of fem~le sexuality. I do not know if I am supposed to feel cheered by this. Obviously this situation is preferable to its opposite, but if one in fifteen women commodified the bodies of men, I do not suppose that this would be a statistic expected to put men in good spirits. In this country, where 'only' one in fifteen men buys women, it is worth remembering that these are the pool of men from which a prostituted woman must draw on to frame her view of males, given that these make up the vast majority of the men she interacts with. It should be clear, then, that prostituted women have seen the worst of what men have to offer, and they have seen it far more often than not. When this is your reality you will naturally withdraw from men generally. You will recoil from little pleasantries. Your eyes will narrow in suspicion at the man who offers to carry your shopping bags. You will shy away from the elderly man who says 'good evening' in the park. You will withdraw from small kindnesses, and men will feel you withdraw. We, men and women, have lost each other in all this. Is it�ot pitifully obvious that we have lost each other? The perspectives that I have put forward in this book are put forward by me as a woman, and most specifically as a formerly prostituted woman, but it has been amazing for me to read the evidence of other people (mainly women) whose writings communicate that they feel the same way. It is amazing because for quite a long time I had seen no evidence that any non-prostituted persons could understand the wrong ofwhat was happening to us. These, too, are the aftershocks of prostitution-to find with surprise that though certainly we were alone, there were non-prostituted others out there thinking of us and writing of us. I had no voice. I knew I had no voice; what I didn't know was that there was a whole movement out there trying to speak for me. It was comforting and relieving to find that the writings of these women were so often in line with my own. For example, since early on in the writing of this book I realised that I preferred to use the term 'prostituted woman' as opposed to 'prostitute'. I didn't know why exactly that term felt more appropriate for me; I just knew that it did. Now I know why: .a woman can only be a prostitute when she has been prostituted by somebody else, and it hardly makes logical sense to refer to the former while ignoring the latter. I think about how that would work in other areas of commerce. Is a butcher still a butcher if nobody buys his meat? No. He is an aspiring butcher-nothing more. Awoman must be prostituted in order to earn that title; a woman must be bought ., before she is made into what she is. } i �This comment by Australian academic Sheila Jeffreys, which I came across long after I'd started using the term 'prostituted woman', clearly reflects my own thinking: 'The term prostituted woman brings the 1 perpetrator into the picture: somebody must be doing something to the woman for her to be "prostituted':' It was with the pleasant shock of relief that I found evidence, in reading writings like these, of the existence of those who really are able to understand my experience of prostitution. And so I find, in the closing chapters of this book, that in fact I owe a debt-and now that I have a voice, I hope this book goes some way towards repaying it. Does it qualify as an aftershock, I wonder, to find in my readings that there are those outside the prostitution experience who recognise the link I always felt between prostitution and slavery? I think that it does. I was not accustomed to aftershocks presenting in positive formats, but it was, again, with the shock of relief that I found I was not alone in this thinking. Prostitution, to me, is like slavery with a mask on, just as it is like rape with a mask on, and we were no more recompensed for the abuse ofour bodies by our punters' cash than slaves were recompensed by the food and lodgings provided by their slave masters. The function of food and lodgings was to keep enslaved people alive (physically present) in order to be used for the benefit of their abusers. The function of cash paid to us was to keep us cooperative (physically present) in order to be used for the benefit of our abusers. No dpubt there are those who willfind any likening ofthe prostitution experience to the enslavement experience a very contentious one. No doubt there are those who would fear insulting the descendants of enslaved people by doing so. I hope that this is not the case, because I have no desire to add insult to injury, but I must speak my own truth. The truth is there was something in prostitution that always called to my mind the essence of slavery as I understood it. The dehumanisation of people was a prerequisite of slavery, and slavery then went on to be both a cause and a consequence of the dehumanisation of the enslaved. I experienced this double-barrelled dynamic in prostitution. I see that, again, my thinking has been in line with that of some feminist theorists all along, as quotes like the ones below have shown me: 'Consent to violation is a fact of oppression. Any oppression. All oppression . . . If, for example, consent was the criterion for determining whether or not slavery is a violation of human dignity and rights, slavery would not have been recognised as a violation, because an important element of slavery is the acceptance of their condition by many slaves.' KATHLEEN BARRY THE PROSTITUTION OF SEXUALITY 'Barry explains that 'consent' is not a good divining-rod as to the existence of oppression, and consent to violation is a fact of oppression. (1995, p. 65). Oppression cannot be effectively gauged according to the degree of 'consent', since even in slavery there was some consent if consent is defined as inability to see, or feel entitled to, any alternative: SHEILA JEFFREYS THE IDEA OF PROSTITUTION Barry and Jeffreys lay out one element of the link between the system of prostitution and the system of slavery here. Others contend that prostitution actually developed in and from the slavery of ancient times and that makes sense to me, because these are the only two areas oflife I am aware ofwhere one person exercises total dominion over the physical body of another. Feminist historian Gerda Lerner, in The Creation of Patriarchy argued that prostitution was the result of slaveholding and Jeffreys comments that: 'If prostitution did in fact originate in slavery, then it is not at all surprising that there are so many past and present parallels between them.'27 Regardless of whether it actually originated in slavery or not, it is widely historically recorded that prostitution abuse was an element of the lived experience of slavery. Black American feminist Vednita Carter expresses a view on the subject that is particularly interesting to me, and it is not one that is liable to be mistaken: 27 For a more thorough dissection of the parallels between prostitution and slavery, see chapter six of Sheila Jeffreys' The Idea ofProstitution�d Kathleen Barry's Female Sexual Slavery. ~ j .1 il 'J l il l

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'[S]trip joints and massage parlours are typically zoned in Black neighbourhoods, which gives the message to white men that it is alright to solicit Black women and girls for sex-that we are all prostitutes. On almost any night, you can see them slowly cruising around our neighbourhoods, rolling down their windows, calling out to women and girls. And we got the message growing up, just like our daughters are getting it today, that this is how it is, this is who we are, this is what we are for. 'Many people have said that prostitution is tolerated by the black community. They are wrong. We do not tolerate prostitution; it has been imposed upon us. Ithas been imposed upon us since the days of slavery, when the master came out to the field and chose whichever Black woman he wanted to have sex with. Light -skinned slaves, known as 'fancy girls', were sold at high prices in the marketplace and later 'rented out' or sold to brothels. 'Today, middle-class white men from the suburbs drive through the ghettos of America to pick out whichever Black women or girls they want to have sex with, as if our cities were their own private plantations. No, prostitution is not tolerated in the Black community any more than African-American slaves tolerated it on the plantation; it is imposed upon us: VEDNITA CARTER MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER AND LAW, 1993, VOLUME 1: 81-89 The words above are taken from a speech presented by Vednita Carter (formerly Nelson) at the University ofMichigan Law School in October 1992. In that speech, she also queried: �'How can mainstream feminists claim to care about Black women and racism when they fail to speak out against the white men who pay for the right to sexually abuse our daughters and sisters, or against the police who target these same women for arrest and imprisonment, while their abusers, the johns that prey on our community, go free?' My answer to her would be that they can't. Any white feminist who fails to speak out against the white men who so abuse black women cannot, with any credibility, claim to care about black women or the particular racially-related form of sexual abuse for which black women are singled out. One ofmy post-prostitution aftershocks was experienced in considering the way other women are hurt in prostitution. When you are prostituted in a mono-racial society (as Ireland was at that time), it is unlikely that you will deeply consider the hurdles facing other women in multi.racial societies. Those issues, quite simply, are not your issues. You have enough to contend with in what you're dealing with yourself. But in my post-prostitution life, and especially during the writing of this book, I have had cause to consider the experiences of other women and have been horrified by much of what I've found. Carter's words chill me, because they lay out so clearly the systematic nature of prostitution as it specifically relates to African-American females, and it is a cold and brutal system that embodies the essence of the double-bind. A black American woman may turn one way to escape from prostitution only to have society, through many ofits structures, conspire to turn her around and send her right back where she came from, and to do so because she is black. The system which ensnares black women is doubly cruel, doubly coercive and naturally doubly difficult to escape from, and this is so because black American women's prostitution experience is lived, as Carter says, in: 'That very difficult, tight space where Black women attempt to survive-that space where racism and sexism intersect'. It should never be ignored that prostituted black women report the majority of their clients to be white. To do so is to ignore the context in which their bodies are abused; it is to ignore the racist/sexist nature of their double-bind. In prostitution, you lose ownership of yourself through the mechanism of having been bought and sold, but you cannot turn to the slave-master with a bitter accusatory stare because society has constructed the belief that if you were to look in those eyes, at least one of them would be your own. It does not matter, says the world, that prostitution was chosen for you through poverty and all the.spin-off social disadvantages that come with that; you chose it, says the world, so if you want to blame someone, go blame yourself. And you buy into this to a great extent, because it is such a prevailing concept; and you do not rail openly against your having been bought because there is such strongly implied personal culpability in your having been sold, and, though you feel it in every fibre of your being, you consciously are very far removed from identifying with prostitution's enslavement element, because the world says you have sold yourself, and who would ever sympathise with a slave like that? There are other systems of oppression that work in tandem with sexism to copper-fasten prostitution as inevitable in many women's lives. The position of prostituted Thai women sickens and appals me. The impoverished circumstances of these women have turned parts of Bangkok into an open whorehouse. Much of the world turns a blind eye to the ritualistic sexual abuse ofThai women and girls, which is indulged by local men and by western men for the price they'd pay back home for a daily paper. While all the prostitution I ever came across, by its nature, owed its existence to economic constraints, in Thailand a massive percentage of their country's economic viability is dependent on sex tourism. It is a horrifying situation. To know this is an aftershock to me. To really consider what this means, as a former prostitute, is to be reminded ofthe presence of a monster and to be near struck-dumb by the immensity of its size. The 'monster' I refer to is normalised prostitution and industrialised prostitution is just one facet of it; examples of this are to be found with abundance across the globe. Industrialised prostitution services the sexual appetites of men at military bases in developing countries worldwide. Taking the Philippines, for example, it is customary to subdivide prostituted women into regular prostitutes and 'three.holers'-those women who are described so, as Kathleen Barry reports after having spent time with them-'because no orifice of the human body is protected from sale and customer intrusion.' Often the young women and girls who find themselves put to work as 'three-holers' will not have heard the term before living the soul-destroying reality that it applies to them. 28 There will probably always be aftershocks I will have to process and deal with. One of the more recent ones was my reaching a point where I began to interpret my prostitution abuse on an intellectual, as well as a deep, personal level. This was a new way of understanding; sometimes it meant being removed from the emotional and sometimes it meant being violently pulled back into a sense of immediate trauma. It was always beneficial, but often disturbingly revealing. I had always felt prostitution's malignance, but being able to decode and comprehend its structure and the way it operates is to reach an understanding of its dynamics on a level that both terrifies and saddens in an altogether new way. The deep fear of what lurks beneath the mask morphs into the starker and more immediate fear of what is beneath it, because you can see that clearly now, and if anything it is worse than your senses had forewarned you. I am thinking now of the point of payment and what that is seen to mean, as opposed to what it really means, for the prostituted woman. The cash transaction is the legitimiser, as I have said, and this is true as far as the rest of the world is concerned; but the world's legitimiser is the prostitutes' silencer: it is the veil behind which women are abused every day. This explains to me why I never saved anything I earned in prostitution and why I, in common with so many other former prostitutes, was as poor coming out of it as I was going in to it. The concept of 'dirty money' from the perspective ofthe prostituted comes up time and again in prostitution literature, and I can certainly relate to that. Another ofthe great aftershocks ofprostitution for me was to come to find that the reality of my prostitution experience would be aggressively denied and that prostitution itself would be equally defended. To come to find that the money we'd been paid was seen to have, as Catharine l8 See chapter one of Kathleen Barry's The Prostitution ofSexuality. MacKinnon wrote, 'a magical quality' which 'dissolved' our sexual abuse; that it was supposed to evaporate the psychic anguish of having to imagine ourselves elsewhere while reams of contempt -driven strangers masturbated on and inside us. These opinions, naturally, disgust me, and when I hear them my mind presents me with a flurry of images to contradict them. They are very great in number and each as horrible as the next, but as I sit here now and type, one stands out from the rest. It is an image that has returned to me many times since I first saw it. It is the look in the eyes of a fellow-prostitute hunched down on all fours while a man kneeling behind her is ramming himself into her. I had walked in on them in the brothel, not knowing anyone to be there, and she was positioned on the floor facing the door I'd just walked through. Her eyes met mine just for a moment before I closed the door, but what passed between them in that split-second was a depth ofunderstanding that couldn't have been better conveyed in a full-length conversation. It was the moment when I saw my abuse in her eyes and she acknowledged hers in mine. That look was a sharing of the purest disturbance, and it was a moment of connection that has never left me. It was the acknowledgement of the prostitution experience. Chapter 26 '""