Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (5 page)

�SUBMERGING IN PROSTITUTION

Almost anything is easier to get into than to get out of. AGNES ALLEN H owever much you try to adapt to your new life (or new 'skin' as it feels to you), some incident will occur to shock you into realising how very much things have changed. I was standing on Benburb Street just weeks after I'd started working as a prostitute when a group of about five or six girls walked by wearing the green �niform of my old secondary school. It was the same school I had attended before having been expelled nearly a year before and is situated less than ten minutes' walk from Benburb Street. It was September and the new school term had just begun; so I hadn't seen that sight before, at least not from this vantage point. I stared at them walking by, with a sense ofwonderment mixed with a melancholy that had !10 power of expression I am aware of in the English language, and I felt like those months had been aeons and those girls like ghosts I was seeing from another time. Was it me that had changed? Or had the whole world changed around me? At fifteen, I felt like it had. Of course today I know that it was I who had changed and because of that my perceptions had altered also. A year later I would stand on a corner of Waterloo Road, which was heavily lined with trees, and be reminded of the North Circular Road, which was densely tree lined also and which I had walked twice a day on my way to and from primary school. I would kick those leaves and wonder why they didn't make the same sound as the ones I had kicked on my way to school. And why, when it had been raining, they didn't smell the same, and though of course they did, there was something altered in the essence of that smell: it had lost its innocence. The truth is the leaves on the ground of a prostitute's patch are not the same as the leaves on the path she walked to school because she perceives them differently, and there is a very acute sense of their being changed. They don't look the same. They don't smell the same. They don't sound the same when you step onthem. For me, their magic was gone and they were just musky-smelling leaves, sodden and rotting on the ground. I often felt like everything around me had altered but in small flashes of lucidity I would realise that the world was still the same, it was just me who was different; con.taminated. I realised then that the leaves weren't beautiful any more, because I was looking at them through different eyes. When those moments of clarity came I would feel that all of nature and literature and everything I had loved before I'd become a prostitute was still there and still the same, but not open to me any more because I was different now, and those thoughts were even more hurtful, even more devastating than the notion that all about me was changed and gone. These feelings were omnipresent, but they operated like a tide, sometimes forcefully roaring and sometimes receding to the point where they were but a gentle whispering reminder that something was wrong. I would walk home from the red-light district along the canal-side in the early hours of the morning and the water was like black ink shot through with little flashes of light. The street lamps were not harsh; they burned a soft, warm amber, and the trees that lined the canal were silhouetted against deep-navy night skies. I wanted to love that walk, and some part of me did, but it was in a very sad way, because the scene emitted a peace that I was excluded from. I felt estranged, lost ... utterly forgotten. Some days I still sought refuge in the literature I loved and in long walks in parkland and then something would change with a soundless click and I would be cut off again from any sense of belonging to the world. In my earlier years in prostitution, I could connect best to who I was and what I enjoyed when I was alone. I did rail against the oppressive nature of prostitution; I think we all did to some degree. You'd carry your secret around with you, day in, day out, when in 'respectable' society and you would try to integrate yourself into it just for the day, or perhaps the afternoon. But though nobody else would know about it you always would. Sometimes the veneer would crack. This would happen, for instance, when you came eye to eye with another prostitute in public. If you didn't know her personally and she was in company, you would just look away, an unwritten but much understood rule of etiquette among prostituted women. If she was alone and you didn't know her personally, you would recognise one another with nods that would be barely discernible to an observer and continue on your way. If you did know her and you both got on well, the likeliest outcome would be a day spent laughing and drinking away yesterday's earnings. The thing that filled me with such panic, whenever I allowed myself to think about it, was that I could see no way out. I could see no end to this, but equally, I knew there'd have to either be an end to it or an end to me, because I could not live this way forever. I had begun smoking cannabis at fourteen in my first hostel and I used that and other substances to hide from the reality I could find no way to escape from; and so I numbed myself, as I submerged in prostitution. I say 'submerged' in prostitution because you are wholly immersed in it to the point where you feel that it is the only avenue of life open to you. I know in my heart, though I haven't experienced them all, that this is true of all obviously illicit ways of earning a living. How likely is it that the bank-robber will wake up one morning and suddenly decide �o strive for a life of social normalcy? And how alien a concept would this surely feel to him? The society he would be attempting to integrate himself into does, after all, include banks! Illicit ways of making money will always set those involved in opposition to both acceptable society and those who inhabit it. There are two different and distinct spheres of life in this world; they are the socially acceptable and the socially unacceptable, and you need to have occupied the latter before you can fully appreciate the depth of the distinction between the two. They are so vastly far apart, these two different worlds that occupy the same space. Another ofthe features ofsubmerging in prostitution is to experience a lack of self-worth, because of your position in the world. None of us are built or equipped to feel cheerful whilst we accept banishment and shunning from the rest of society. The standards oflife which we all desire, that ofbeing happy, fulfilled and content, begin to slip away from the woman in prostitution because she does not experience these for herself or see them evidenced in the lives of the women around her. When something is less attainable it is less often reached for. I got to the point early on in prostitution where I saw being happy as simply unrealistic, and I was right. I didn't know any women who were happy in prostitution and I didn't meet any in later years either. There are no 'happy hookers' in my experience. Submerging in prostitution, fot me, involved having my life narrowed down so that everything came back to prostitution, which was by then the central point. It seemed to invade and pervade everything. It dictated my sleeping habits, the clothes I bought, the conversations I had, the things I did not do as much as the things I did. I measured out time not in hours or minutes of the day, but counting down the hours until work: five hours until work, four hours, three.and I would feel the same sickening shudder, intensifying the closer it got to the time to sell myself. When I was on Waterloo Road, the time I'd. go down to the street would depend on the time ofyear, because the punters came out as soon as it got dark. That meant that in summer I could still be working at four o'clock in the morning and I would have my body used by between around six and twelve men. Sometimes I thought, 'What if this is all there is, forever?' When that thought surfaced my heart hammered against my ribs. It felt like a bird against the walls of a room it's flown into by mistake; demented in equal measure by the fear ofwhat enclosed it and the desperation to escape. I first heard the term 'child prostitute' long after I had begun working as one myself, and it is not a way that would ever have occurred to me to describe myself in my early teens. I had no problem identifying with the 'prostitute' part of the term; I knew what I was doing and what it made me, but I never felt like a child at that time. I had always felt older than my years and by the time I was fifteen, I was a young woman in my own mind. It is only now, as the mother of a child older than I was then, that I can see how young I really was. I told all of the men I .met my age at that time. I did this for a reason: because it had the almost universal effect of causing them to become very aroused and to climax easily, which was good news for me because it meant that the experience was over with quickly. There was one man though, who didn't take the bait. Paradoxically, he drove a large white van; the vehicle recognised amongst street prostitutes as the transport of choice ofviolent perverts. Nonetheless, when I told him I was fifteen, he turned his van around pronto and brought me back where he'd found me, arguing all the way that he didn't want to leave me there, I should be at home or in school, and was there nowhere else he could drop me? Thousands of men's faces have merged into a featureless nothingness, but I have never forgotten his. I wonder could he ever know what it meant, what it cost, when he picked me up the following year. I had wanted to be all the things a young teenage girl wants to be. I wanted to be a model and an actress. I'dtold the staff about my aspirations in the first hostel I lived in, Lefroy House. They'd photographed me and tak~JJ me to a model agency near Baggot Street Bridge. I was fourteen at the time and only 5 feet 6 inches tall. I was told to come back at sixteen when I might have grown the two inches necessary to reach the required industry minimum height. I didn't go back at sixteen. By that time I was working as a prostitute just minutes' walk from Baggot Street Bridge and the life of somebody respected, even admired, was a reality that I couldn't apply to myself in my own mind. It was the opposite of how I felt about who I was. In any. case, I hadn't grown the required two inches. I was 5 feet 7 inches at that time, as I had learned from having been measured in the Bridewell garda station the previous year, the first time I'd been arrested for soliciting. Is it possible to call a fifteen-year-old a 'child'? I suppose there would be people who believe that a pair of developing breasts and a clitoris which is beginning to function make up the most significant components of a woman. I am not of that school of thought, and I've always regarded with suspicion anyone who goes out of their way to make a distinction between a sexual interest in pre-pubescent children and young teenagers. As far as breasts and genitalia are concerned, though I had well.developed breasts at fifteen and I presume my clitoris was capable of orgasm, I didn't even know that what was behind that fold of skin was my clitoris and as far as masturbation was concerned, I literally wouldn't have known where to start. But more than that, I wasn't capable ofmaking adult choices and decisions. The really importan~ signifiers of adulthood are not breasts and genitals, as anyone who has reached adulthood should know. Ofcourse now, all these years later, as a mother, I can see that a person of fifteen is a child, end of story-but I still struggle with the image of myself as a child then. It may be that it is too painful to comprehend fully, but since my own child t~rnedthe same age, that image has become much harder to turn my face away from. The mind inevitably makes comparisons. I think about how young my son was at fifteen, how ill.equipped to deal with the world. I think how much growing he had left to do, and how fragile his sense ofself was, however well that might have been hidden behind teenage bluster and bravado. Every now and again, since he turned fifteen, I look at him and think of what I was doing at his age, and what was done to me. I think of the repulsive way it felt in my body, how it hurt in my heart and how it warped my mind; and I've come to find that it is not possible to consider how much of my young life was contaminated without acknowledging how young I was at that time. So I find myself forced to confront that, but as stark a reality as that is, there is actually something here that's deeper, more troubling for me, because there was a certain upshot to my having been inducted into this lifestyle, a certain influence that it had: it caused me to believe that this was the only way for me-that I was fit for nothing else. You get submerged in prostitution on all levels, including the things it teaches you about yourself. I see now that to have believed those things was to have been submerged in a lie. Chapters~ ILAYERS OF NEGATIVITY All ofthe women spoke ofattempting to keep themselves separate from the act and identity ofprostitution. 'THE NEXT STEP INITIATIVE', RUHAMA RESEARCH REPORT ON BARRIERS AFFECTING WOMEN IN PROSTITUTION, IRELAND, 2005 I was photographed pornographically. That is a difficult thing for me to write. I have thought about that, about how it would feel for me to look at those pictures now. It would hurt me to see them and to know that others would see them. I know that. But it would also be educational and worthwhile, because I am quite sure I could contort my own face to resemble the dummy image of female sexuality required of me as I shifted from one pose to the next, all the while steeling my mind against an almost tangibly present sense ofdegradation. I think it might be enlightening for people to see that that face can be matched to these words. About six months after I'd first started working the northside red-light district ofBenburb Street, I met a girl there who worked both sides ofthe city. We hit it off, became friends, then flat-mates, and she introduced me to the city's southside streets. Marginally more money could be charged per job, but it certainly did add up over the night. They were also far busier streets in terms of the volume of punters, presumably because men were more comfortable �ing what they did in the dark, and also because the southside district was more widely known and did not carry the same stigma of Benburb Street. There wasn't the same degree ofunfortunates, junkies, alcoholics and such, patrolling the area for business. My new friend had been working on Burlington Road for a couple of years by then, but bringing me there caused a lot of trouble for her. I hadn't long turned sixteen, quickly became very much in demand, and in the matter of a few weeks we had to
consider the threat that our faces would be slashed to such a degree as to render us incapable ofgenerating any business at all. We braved it out for a few more weeks, but with no desire to be maimed for life we eventually agreed between ourselves to take our enterprising spirits over to the next street, which ran parallel to the side of the Burlington Hotel-Waterloo Road. Waterloo Road was empty of prostitutes, though it had at one time been a red-light street. It was an upmarket Dublin-4 residential road and we knew that we would have an uphill struggle there. Business would be sure to slow almost to a stop. Few men went to Waterloo Road looking for prostitutes, but we reasoned that it was in such dose proximity that some of them would have to be driving up and down it on their way to and from Burlington Road, the Pepper Canister, Fitzwilliam Square and the canal area; so what we hoped to do was to turn it into part of the red-light zone again and carve out a niche for ourselves there, where, following the prostitutes' law of proximity, the other women could not reasonably object to us working there as we were not infringing upon anybody's specified space. We knew that we would be making next to nothing until such a time as the punters cottoned-on to the fact that this area was again open for business and we had no idea how long or how short a time that might be. We also knew that we would encounter much hostility and objection from the residents of that street, who would surely not be pleased to see their pleasant residential road being infected with lowlifes such as ourselves, whom they no doubt felt were too dose for comfort already. We chose the natural place to stand, the corner of a footpath at the entrance to a long laneway. This would be convenient for doing business with what are known as 'walkers'; men who walk rather than drive to their destination and intend to do business in the open air. It was also the natural place to choose as we had more than one route to use in order to extract ourselves from the situation if needs be, and I suppose that is indicative of the mentality ofthe prostitute; you're always comforted to have an escape route should things go wrong, which suggests, of course, that you always anticipate that they may. Business did pick up there and it didn't take nearly as long as we'd imagined. Perhaps the women hadn't been gone from there nearly as long as we'd thought. We had been right in assuming that Waterloo Road was a well-traversed route for the punters and it didn't take them long at all to adjust to the restored nature ofthe street; just the matter of a week or two. For the residents however, it took far longer. Now, at this point in my life, I can understand the situation from the residents' perspective. As the mother of a teenager, I would be deeply unhappy if a number of prostitutes decided to stake their new patch yards from my front door. I don't want the danger and the negativity of prostitution enveloping my home like that. I don't want to live with the fear that one of the men seeking out these women might happen to be a dangerous pervert who also entertains a penchant for children. I don't want to have to worry about the hygiene aspect or the pure revulsion factor of people throwing used condoms on the footpath outside my front door, as some prostitutes and clients unfortunately do. Personally I never did that, and nor did the girl I worked with. We always put them down the shore. It was the best compromise for the sake ofthe neighbours that I could come up with, as carrying them on my person all night and disposing of them in my bin at home was not something I was prepared to do. So yes, I can understand why_some of the residents so vigorously objected to our presence there: I just wonder if it ever occurred to them that some part ofus vigorously objected to our presence there more than they ever could. We'd only been standing on Waterloo Road a couple of days and, I suppose, when the initial shock of our arrival had sunk in, the sense of outrage and affront quickly surfaced and was made apparent to us. The middle-aged lady who occupied one of the houses nearest where we stood came out and commanded us, in a tone which wavered right on the edge of hysteria, to move on and get away from her home. We just looked at each other and laughed. I suppose that woman thought that we were taunting her or that we had no respect for her, or both, but actually neither was true. It just felt like such a ridiculous demand to us, from beginning to end, that the most natural thing to do was laugh. It was ridiculous because the petitioner and the petitioned were from two different worlds and the former had assumed it permissible to stake a demand without any dialogue at all. We had several visits from her before we eventually told her to fuck off, and her attitude really was a study in how a person ought notto conduct themselves in order to get what they want. If she had approached us on that first night and explained in calm, measured and respectful tones that she entertained legitimate fears, I know for certain that, laneway or no laneway, we would have moved to the opposite end of that street. We had considered working the other end, the Baggot Street end of Waterloo Road, before we had settled onthe entrance to the laneway dose to that woman's home. The other end of the street was not much less viable as a working spot, because there was a large building with a short laneway leading to an underground car-park, which was always empty at night, but we had decided that the police spent too much time driving up and down Baggot Street and that we would be less expose~ to their scrutiny at the opposite end of the road. But yes, I know that had that woman approached us with an acceptable degree of respect and laid out genuine concerns, and certainly if they had included fears for children, we would have moved on for her that first night. Had she spoken to us respectfully, we would have so appreciated having our human worth acknowledged that we would have done anything she asked, and done it gladly. Instead she spoke to us as ifwe were nothing, and that was her mistake. Prostituted women are routinely paid to be treated as if they are nothing, and I have noticed that (obviously as a consequence) they generally cultivate an attitude that aggressively rejects that treatment in any other situation that presents it. People feel that street prostitution is the 'lowest of the low', that you can't descend any further down the ladder than to work the streets, as I did. But I discovered a surprising aspect to it and later, when I came to research international studies into prostitution, I found that the prevalence of violence in non-street prostitution and other areas of the sex industry is reportedly higher than in street prostitution. For example, one Seattle study found that women in strip clubs, massage parlours and pornography had less control over the conditions of their lives and seemingly faced greater risks of violence than women involved in street prostitution.3 There are no surprises in that for me. My experience reflects that directly. I was always aware while working in brothels or escorting that I had scarcely any control in the matter of which men I would or would not see. This was different from the situation of working on the streets, where I'd had the opportunity to see each client before I got in his car. In street prostitution, there is some minimised degree of selective choice. Oftentimes your choice will be influenced by other factors, such as how busy or slow a night it might be, how much money you need to make, how dreadful the weather is, etc.; but ultimately, you do have the opportunity to make an assessment of a man's demeanour and what this might mean for you. Not so in massage parlours or escorting. If you are working for yourself, you cannot adequately assess a man down a phone-line, and if you are working for someone else, you do not even have the chance to try. For this reason the greatest autonomy to be found is in street prostitution. This is in contradiction to the most commonly held belief about prostitution, which depicts. street-walking prostitutes as the most unfortunate of their ilk. They may be less fortunate in other ways, such as in the rates they are paid, but when it comes to self-governance, nowhere can match this area of prostitution. This is one of the reasons why the Sexual Offences Act of 1993 was so traumatic for street-walking women. It robbed us of our autonomy, the little we had to begin with. Incredibly, the bill didn't seek to criminalise the act of prostitution itself, for either the male or female participants. What it did was criminalise the act of soliciting for the purposes of Debra Boyer, Lynn Chapman, Brent Marshall, 'Survival Sex in King County: Helping Women Out', 1993. prostitution. Soliciting is the legal term for loitering with the intent to prostitute oneself or to seek to engage in prostitution. Therefore, the act criminalised the participants of one section of prostitution only: the street-walkers. It targeted street-walking prostitutes and street.walking prostitutes alone. This had the obvious (and I believe, intended) consequence of driving prostitution indoors. The consequence of this was many women, including myself, could no longer make a living on the streets. This caused an inordinate level of suffering. In my own case, I had to start having paid intercourse for the first time. I was seventeen years of age and had managed in prostitution without giving up this side of myself for over two years, but that was not possible any more. You cannot explain to a man down a telephone that you will do certain acts and not others, when he knows he can call the next number and get whatever he wants. It was possible for me on the streets, because I was slim and young and pretty and many men were content with oral sex or hand relief from me, but this was no longer possible. The Sexual Offences Act of1993 robbed me and many others of the right to have some level of control over our already disempowered lives, while not only allowing brothel prostitution to persist, but encouraging it to expand. For me, having to have sexual intercourse was the worst of the 'layers of negativity' I experienced in prostitution. I did it only sporadically for about four years, because I simply found the sense of violation too traumatic. Often, I would sit for hours in agencies hoping for a call from someone who wanted to be dominated or to be catered for in some other unusual request. I could not deal with intercourse, mentally or emotionally and I think this was compounded by the fact that I'd managed to avoid it for so long. There was such a sense ofdefeat in it and I could feel it driving me into a deep depression. Sometimes after sitting for hours I'd eventually agree to intercourse if nothing else had come through on the phone lines. As time went on I gathered transvestites and men who were into s&M and bondage as my regular clients; men whose penchants I found tolerable and who other women routinely referred to as 'total perverts: This was for me, strange as it may sound to some, a bona fide way of disconnecting from the layers of negativity that suffocated me. I was sixteen when I first arrived at a Leeson-Street brothel after having returned from spending five months between a juvenile detention centre and a foster home, where the courts had placed me for a probationary period. I'd been arrested from what the media termed a brothel in the early summer of 1992. It was actually the home of the girl I worked the streets with and we both occasionally serviced clients there. My arrest had made the front page of the Irish Press. The headline was 'SIXTEEN.YEAR-OLD TAKEN FROM BROTHEL'. I was just thankful the guards hadn't raided us a couple of months before, when I'd still been fifteen. I'd imagined there'd have been worse legal repercussions for me then, in that I'd have found myself under considerably closer scrutiny by the children's court, and I was probably right. It was beyond me by that time, after a year in prostitution, to imagine living my life any other way because I could see no alternative that would offer me any sort of security or independence, and I thought I was no good for anything else anyway. It is strange how the sense of institutionalisation sets in so quickly in prostitution. In this way, prostitution can be likened to the prison experience. A weight of sadness settles on me when I think of the way I reacted when my foster parents invited me to stay after those court-appointed few months. They invited me to live there, to make a home there. To go to the local school. To have a life. I just knew, somewhere inside myself, that I couldn't do it. The family had a hobby farm and I'd spent that summer collecting eggs from the henhouse and feeding milk at dawn to an orphaned black baby lamb. These things felt too pure for me, or rather, I felt too dirty for them. I felt that I couldn't stay, because I didn't belong there, and the thought of sitting alongside girls my own age in the local school made me imagine myself a drop ofoil in a bowl ofwater. I made arrangements in private to stay at the brothel in Leeson Street, which I knew ofbecause I'd done a few indoor jobs for the pimp who ran it just before I got arrested. I said I was going to stay with a friend of mine, which wasn't a million miles from the truth, because a friend from my hostel days was staying in the brothel also. When I arrived on Leeson Street I felt, along with other things, at least a sense of belonging. I was used to being out at three and four in the morning. I was used to nobody telling me what time to come in or how much alcohol or drugs to take or not take; I was used to being unrestrained in certain senses. That feeling ofunrestraint was the feeling of home to me, and it was the only home I knew. The brothel had steel steps leading down to the basement entrance and there was a sign on the wall depicting an old-fashioned tripod camera with a black cat, whose tail curled round one of the leg stands. I can't remember what colour the door was, but I remember the dull thud of my heart when I knocked on it. The pimp was far from the most odious person I ever met in prostit.ution, but it still would be difficult to speak of him in non-offensive terms. He was, in short, an arsehole. He was somebody who had stumbled upon prostitution and saw it as a way to make easy money. He was an upper-middle-class man in his late twenties, complete with Dublin-4 accent, who hadn't a shred of the harsh life experience common to the women and young girls he endeavoured to exploit. He was simply ill.prepared for the world he had immersed himself in and I resented him dreadfully. If I sound embittered, it's because I am. If there's one thing more degrading for a woman than selling her