Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (7 page)

showers' as pleasurable. One particular transvestite I knew well would ord~r champagne from room service, only to have me urinate into one of the champagne glasses-! would enjoy a glass of Moet and he would enjoy that instead. He would then bring his glass into the bathroom and would lie on his back in the bath, sipping all the while, while rd stand, one foot on either side of the bath, and urinate all over him; his genitals, his chest, his face, and when rd reach there he, d open his mouth and drink more of the same. You,d need a strong stomach in this business. Some people may find all that horrifying and certainly I did not find it pleasurable, but still, the truth is I encountered less perversion within prostitution from the adherents to unusual sexual practices than I ever did from those who would be considered 'straightforward, or 'ordinary, clients, as I have said. It is clear to me that there is something worse, something deeper, something much more fundamentally wrong about a man shoving his penis into a woman and enjoying her powerlessness than there is about a man who lies back in a bath in suspenders and make-up, sipping her urine as if it were wine. The man I am referring to here was a gentle-natured person and someone who I often chatted with over a meal somewhere or a drink beforehand in the hotel bar. I always spent the night with this man and was paid for my time so we would always meet like that, either for a meal or a drink, depending on whether or not we were doing any cocaine together that night. Cocaine decimates the appetite and would have made enjoying a meal impossible. Also, it wouldn,t have been realistic to have the meal first; the urge for cocaine is too strong to take second place to a beef Stroganoff: I had progressed to snorting cocaine at that point and would procure it for certain punters, making a mark-up on it, so that I was profiting from the drug transaction as well as whatever bizarre fantasies I was helping these men indulge. All transvestites have a favourite female name they wish to be called while dressed and what happens between the transvestite client and the prostitute he�egularly visits is that a peculiar sort of bond is formed based on her intimate knowledge of his female persona, which he keeps expertly hidden from the rest of the world. She is, in a very real sense, the only person who knows his name. For the prostitute's part, her transvestite client is a man who will almost certainly never want sexual intercourse from her. (Of course I do not contend that this has never happened anywhere; only that I have never come across it or heard of another woman come across it.) Because of that I was always far more comfortable in the company of transvestites. It was always my experience that a transvestite's primary sexual thrill is to indulge the experience of femininity and of being appreciated as a woman. 4 Some transvestites sought additional thrills, but this was always the primary one. I met many transvestites in prostitution and I believe the reason I never met one who was interested in having sexual intercourse was because that would have cast him in a clearly masculine role. Men in prostitution, never, in my experience, seek to do anything which runs counter to the fantasy they are indulging. Transvestites are no different in that respect. Often our transvestite clients would bring us gifts, like jewellery or expensive perfume. Many of them had taste in women's clothes that far surpassed those of some actual women I have known and often they would bring us clothes as gifts. I had one client who, if I admired something he was wearing, would invariably turn up the next time we met with the same garment in my size. I noticed that while some of these men had gregarious personalities generally, they all did so while dressed. You would see before your eyes the shyness slip away with the application of each layer of make-up, the putting-on of stockings and heels. The transformation obviously wasn't restricted to the physical and was in many ways more emphasised by the attitude that emerged. There was a new confidence there, a new happiness and sense offreedom and, strange as it may sound or difficult as it may be to imagine, the truth is that transvestites were, singularly, the most tolerable company I ever encountered among my clients. As true as that is, the barriers you hold between your private self and 4 � There is not always a sexual edge to this thrill, the psychologists tell us, but of course in the remit of prostitution it was those who did indulge a sexual thrill prostitution are just too strong and too necessary to allow an authentic friendship to form. I spent five years being visited by a particular transvestite who was a basically decent person, but who just could not bring himself to involve the woman in his life in his fantasies to the degree that he felt they needed to be indulged. I found it necessary at times to distance myself from him on a personal level, as he continually issued me with invitations for holidays and trips outside the remit of prostitution that, of course, had to be declined. It was difficult to find ways to do this without having to directly assert that we could never make genuine friends of each other. I would never have said that to him because I simply didn't want to be cruel. There was so little of humanity to be found in prostitution; the tiny speck I saw was fragile and I didn't want to hurt it. However, I knew I could never accept those invitations. It was a slightly saddening understanding, but there were no surprises there. It was just further mundane and depressing evidence, as though it were needed, of the polluting nature of prostitution on human interpersonal relations. Chapter 10 "'-'

ITHE MYTH OF THE HIGH.CLASS HOOKER [F]rom the perspective ofa woman in prostitution or a woman who has been in prostitution-the distinctions other people make between whether the event took place in the Plaza Hotel or somewhere more inelegant are not the distinctions that matter. These are irreconcilable perceptions, with irreconcilable premises. Ofcourse the circumstances must matter, you say. No, they do not, because we are talking about the use ofthe mouth, the vagina, and the rectum. The circumstances don't mitigate or modify what prostitution is. ANDREA DWORKIN, LIFE AND DEATH B ecause I've worked in every area of prostitution, I can say that no area has a monopoly on degradation and no area is free of it. The perception exists that street-walking prostitutes are unique among their kind in that they are the only women in the business who suffer daily degradation. They certainly suffer the consequences ofbeing regarded as the lowest of the low, but it would be very wrong to assume that degradation is restricted to the red-light zones. There are no such restrictions in prostitution. Contrary to this misinformation, it is just as possible and just as customary to be humiliated in a five-star hotel. Some of the worst experiences I've had in prostitution took place in Ireland's most exclusive hotels. Indeed, sometimes when you are dealing with a particular type of man, with a particular type of mindset, you are far worse off finding yourself with him in environs of opulence: some 1.1 f 11 .1 1 ,.., 1\. � .._ ..._t_ �.. I � to feel yourself privileged to be there, regardless of how immaculately and expensively dressed and made-up you may be. The sense of the male being the dominant force in a money-for-sex exchange only ever comes close to fully disappearing in the case where a man expressly requests it in order to fulfil a desire to be dominated, and even in that case, as I've said, they still enjoy the control inherent to the status of the paying customer. Some men I've met in very expensive hotels or on call-outs5 to extremely affluent houses were among the most difficult people a prostitute could meet. There was a sense of entitlement with those men that actually increased with every pound they paid you. The attitude was clear: 'I have paid you two hundred pounds-therefore I will do whatever I feel like doing to you and you will keep your mouth shut about it'. Ofcourse, in some men this attitude was simply a reflection of their general arrogance and inhumanity; in the majority of men who treated me this way though, it was clear that they got off in the sexual sense on humiliating me, on making me feel powerless, on giving me to feel and understand that I was there for one reason and one reason only-so that my body would be used as a receptacle for their sperm. After I began working indoors in 1993, I found that it was not safer as far as violence was concerned (though it was certainly safer in terms of avoiding arrest) but the degradation was just the same and often worse. I cannot think of anything less 'high class' than some of the experiences I had at the 'upper end' ofthe market. The truth is there is nothing classy about the exchange of money for sex and the environs where it takes place are powerless to influence that. I often met men who would have assumed that I was an escort, because they met me under those circumstances, and that I only ever worked in that sphere of the business; what they didn't know was that I was often to be found on the streets or in massage parlours, and that they were paying me several times more than I'd been paid for the same service the day before. I met plenty of women who did this sort of 'double.jobbing', who worked different areas of the business at the same time. What I didn't come across often were women like myself who worked all areas. Almost always, the women I met who worked in more than one area of prostitution worked either on the streets and in brothels, or in brothels and escort agencies. Working a crossover on the entire range of the scale, as I did, was unusual; so I believe that through simple diversity of experience I've got a fuller picture of prostitution than many of the women I've known. The women themselves bought into the supposed hierarchical struc. ture of prostitution, with prostitutes in escort agencies looking down their noses at street-walking women and those in massage parlours comforting themselves with the fact that at least they weren't out on the streets, at least they 'hadn't sunk that low'! I knew one woman, a lovely girl, who worked her own one-woman escort agency out ofan apartment on an upmarket avenue in Ballsbridge. Her advertising costs were three-hundred-and-fifty pounds a fortnight. Her rent was a thousand pounds a month. Her mobile phone bills were higher than her advertising costs. This was in 1993. (Mobile phones were brand new technology in Ireland at the time and were the preserve of businessmen, drug dealers and prostitutes.) She spent a fortune on taxis and on clothes and shoes befitting her 'escort' stature. She broke even some months and when she did, she refused to work in any other area of the business to supplement her escorting income. 'What are you �oing on the streets?' she used to ask me. 'What are you doing in this fucking apartment?' I'd ask her in return. It seemed so pointless to me.for some periods of time she was whoring herself just to maintain a situation in which to whore herself. The whole idea was supposed to be about making a half-decent living, I'd say to her, for God's sake. Still, she managed to save teo thousand pounds in the time she rented that apartment, but her money was earned in fits and spurts during peak-time periods and I could not understand how she tolerated the dead-end intervals. The problem was that she was paying the same overheads an apartment full of women would have split between them, but she was compulsive about her independence and the privacy of her space. I was the only other woman who ever worked in her apartment. I was the person she'd always call if a two-woman job was required, and I sometimes did some of her clients in her apartment as well, usually during periods so busy that two men would be booked for the same time. We were close friends and I'd sometimes walk from the red-light district to her apartment at the end of an evening's work. She didn't try to hide her distaste for my street-walking work and I couldn't have cared less. I knew that if she'd started out on the streets she'd have had an appreciation of the differences between the different forms of work and the pros and cons contained within each. On the streets, I was not at the mercy of someone I'd had no chance to sum up before I entered into a contract with. In indoor work you don't know who or what you're dealing with until the door has closed behind you, and by the time the door has closed behind you, it's too late. Business was brisker on the streets. You often had the opportunity to make your money and go. There was much less of the waiting around inherent to escort work, which I found uniquely depressing. It gave you�too much time to think. I approached my work differently from my friend in other ways, too. I had a mobile but had it blocked for outgoing calls. It was strictly used for clients to contact me. I bought that phone when the laws changed in 1993 and street-walking prostitutes began being hounded nightly by the police. I rented an apartment in Terenure for a short time and opened an escort agency ofmy own. I was seventeen at the time and I'm quite sure I was the youngest person advertising an escort agency in Ireland. It was a very simple thing to do and only required an apartment, a mobile phone and an advertisement in the back of In Dublin magazine, but when I had to deal with the reality of the ridiculous overheads, I soon got rid of the apartment and advertised for call-outs only. I worked mainly in the brothels and escort agencies of others from then on and did my own call-outs to homes and hotels. If I'd get a request for a call-in on my . agency line I'd use a bedroom in the brothel of one of the women I was associating with at that time. I'd pay them a fee for the use of the room, which was common practice. I'd made money myself that way when I had my own apartment. ::>''1" The consequences of the new laws took a lot of getting used to. An understood street rule had always been that the encounter was over when the client climaxed, but now we found ourselves alone in rooms with men who were paying bythe hour andwanted every minute oftheir money's worth. I found this new form of prostitution more dangerous and more degrading, not less. And so, because of all this, I developed a very a-la-carte approach to prostitution. I never bought into the nonsense that some forms ofit were somehow'better' in a social or moral sense than others. There was no true distinction that I could find there. Ofcourse society would clearly tell you which was the most and least acceptable ofthese, but I had notbeen raised with an affinity to social structures or to compliance with social norms and I knew that such notions were nonsense here anyway. I measured the different forms of prostitution against each other in the only sane way I knew how, which was in terms ofwhich was more dangerous, stressful or profitable. I found through experience that in terms ofdanger, stress and profit, each had their own pros and cons, but in terms ofdegradation, that was universal. Itwas to be found in differing degrees only with different men, not with different environments, and it was to be found everywhere. One thing I never went in for in prostitution was calling myself an 'escort' or a 'call girl'. I find these terms derisory and ridiculous, 'call girl' particularly so. What this term seeks to do is to focus on the fact that a prostitute must call to your door and ignores entirelywhat goes onwhen it shuts behind her. It does not even seek to fraudulently repacka:g~"\he