I hardly think I would be educating people if I opened this post with the point that addiction is destructive. This we know. It’s commonly accepted that addiction to certain substances and behaviours have destructive consequences for the addict and those they come in contact with. Because of the dehumanised status of women in general and prostituted women in particular, this knowledge is overridden when it comes to men addicted to sex and the damage they do to the prostituted women they use to satiate their addictive impulse, as was evidenced in the recent Time article by Jim Norton, self-confessed sex addict and purchaser of women’s bodies.

Most men who prostitute women are not sex-addicts, but they certainly share Norton’s dehumanising views. As someone who had her body used by men like Norton for seven years spanning my adolescence and early adulthood, I can say quite a staggering amount of delusion and denial presents in the thoughts and attitudes of the average ‘john’; and it is matched only by the casual misogyny that allows them to use the bodies of women and girls like commodities in the first place. This is exemplified numerous times in Norton’s short article, for example in his assertion that where prostitution is legalised the rape of the non-prostituted female population drops. Apart from the fact that this is unproven, even if it were true, it would mean only that prostituted women and girls are used as the human shields of men’s sexual violence. Anyone who suggests that a class of females should exist to absorb male sexual aggression is, by definition, expressing a misogynistic view. Where is the call for men to stop fucking raping women? And WHY are we content to live in a world where, instead, one class of women are singled out to be raped?

As to the contemptible excuse of ‘choice’, the reality, which most johns studiously deny and ignore (though they know it as well as anyone) is that women and girls do not choose to have the penises of men shoved into the orifices of our bodies eight, ten, twelve times a day because we ‘want’ to, or because we ‘choose’ it; we reluctantly submit to commercial sexual violation for two reasons: because men like Jim Norton exist to create the demand for the commodification of our bodies in the first place, and because the circumstances of our lives have left us with no other viable choice.

Reading Norton’s article made my skin crawl, because it brought me straight back to the days when my own body was used as a sperm receptacle by a relentless conveyor belt of grown men in more socially privileged positions. The casual contempt for women oozing from his article left me with the flesh-creeping, puke-inducing, soul-sickening memory of being ritualistically used by men who did not view me as a human being, and so, as a consequence, did not view their actions as a human rights abuse; but rather some kind of benign caressing, like a slave owner who decides to massage his slave rather than whip her, and tells himself there is nothing wrong in what he does since he is not breaking her skin, just breaking her spirit; and the absence of the whip, in his pathologically selfish and delusional mind, allows him to erase his own malignant role in the master/slave dynamic.

His attitudes reinforced something I first learned as a fifteen-year-old homeless prostituted girl, and it’s this: There are men on this earth who do not give a damn about anything or anyone if recognising its value means getting in the way of their God-almighty orgasms. That is the simple and inhuman truth, and it is exactly why we need legislation to impose upon them the equal worth of female humanity that they will never come to on their own.

Rachel Moran

If you like sex, this is not a letter to you. If you like women, this is not a letter to you. If you’ve somehow put these things together and decided they give you the right to buy what you like, this is a letter to you.

If you’re a misogynistic bastard who gets off on hurting women, this is not a letter to you. Apart from the fact that nothing here would get through, I wouldn’t waste my fucking writing skills on you.

If you’re a man who buys sex and thinks you’re engaged in a mutually beneficial transaction that’s causing no harm, I’m talking to you.

I met many of you. So many. Too many. And I always wondered about you. I wondered, how could you justify this to yourself? How could you tell yourself – and believe it – that I was happy to have strangers’ fingers, penises and tongues shoved into the most private parts of me? How did you convince yourself that I’d be happy about something you’d never, in your wildest nightmares, wish on your own daughter? I wondered, most of all, how could you look at me and not see me?

Let me tell you who you are: you are the ‘good’ punter. You’re the man who has a laugh with the woman you’re buying. You’re the man who strokes her hair. You ask her how her day’s been. How she’s feeling. Why she’s doing this. Did you ever think to ask that of yourself?

You are the ‘good’ punter. If you see a bruise on her you’ll ask if she’s okay. Is anybody treating her violently? Yes. Many men are. Go in the bathroom. You’ll find one above the sink.

The truth, that you’re so desperate to flee from, is that you are just like a gentle rapist. Your attitude and demeanour does not mitigate what you do. The damage you’re causing is incalculable, but you tell yourself you’re doing no harm here, and you use the smiles of the women you buy as some kind of currency; they allow you to buy your own bullshit. I would know; I doled out that currency many times, and we both were that, we both doled out currency in different ways, you and me.

You came along because you wanted to spend what you had to spend, your load, which also meant your money; and you looked at me and you touched me and you fucked me and then you held me. That was always the worst part. I want you to know that. That was always the worst part.

I didn’t want to be held by you. I didn’t want to be cuddled. I didn’t want you close to me, never mind inside me. Your arms around me made me want to puke more than your penis ever did. I shut out that part; it was too horrible. Every moment with you was a lie, and I hated every second of it. And you bought that lie; believe me it was a lie you bought. I know, because I sold it.

In Costa Rica they say: ‘Who is more at fault, the one who sins for the pay or the one who pays for the sin?’ Those words were taken from a book about men like you. Victor Malarek’s ‘The Johns’. Can you see the truth in them?

You can, but you don’t want to acknowledge them. You don’t want to face up to that. It doesn’t fit with your view of what you do. It doesn’t fit with your view of who you are. But I know who you are.

I can see you now. You are the ‘good’ punter. You’ve got your fists shoved in your ears. You are the ‘good’ punter. And you don’t want to hear.

FreeIrishWoman

Oftentimes it is small incidents that call us back, and it is strange how things that would appear of zero relevence to an observer can be those that draw us back so forcibly as to cause tension, anxiety, and sometimes reactions that are simply emotionally violent.

Had there been a fly on the wall of my hotel room this afternoon (assuming it was a thinking fly, that could observe, process and reason) it would have heard a tremble in my voice, a hesitation, something that maybe sounded like confusion, and it most likely would have put that down to social awkwardness, and thought no more, and moved on.

I heard all those things in my own voice, but I know, as the speaker, that there was something up with where those words were coming from. They were coming from a place of deep discomfort. I was sincerely awkward, not quite embarrassed but getting there; I was mildly panicked, in the sense of trying to squirm away from the situation I was in.

I was accepting money.

How is it that I can loan money, or gift money, without a thought, but it is always, to some degree or other, a traumatising experience to accept it? The situation was this: I had been invited to speak at a conference in New York, and my understanding was that my travel expenses would be met. I took this to mean my flights and accommodation, but this morning, on my leaving, the woman who co-ordinated the event called my hotel room and wanted to know how much I had spent on food and transportation. How much had my taxi’s cost? How much had I spent on meals? I felt something rise up in me that could be best described as defensiveness. It didn’t matter, I told her. It wasn’t much. Forget about it.

I honestly didn’t know how much I’d spent on those things, and I still don’t know. I’d been in and out of several cabs and restaurants and I had never thought to keep receipts. I would have needed to eat anywhere, I reasoned to myself, as the woman tried to reimburse me. There was a need to push this money away, a sense of ‘please leave me alone’, and it was far from the first time that had happened.

When I put the phone down I began to question myself. Why had that been difficult for me? Why had it been so awkward any of the many other times it had happened? What was it about accepting money that made living in my very skin so squeamishly uncomfortable for me?

Bingo. There it was. Yes – I get it now.

Jesus… sometimes the answer is so obvious it makes the question ridiculous.

FreeIrishWoman

(Caution – do not eat whilst reading)

There was a lot wrong about Jim Wrong. That’s where he got his name. Of course prostitution is populated by odious characters, but Jim stood head and shoulders above them all. I first met him in a Limerick apartment sometime around 1996. Some of us met him in more recent years. He’s been imposing himself on the women of prostitution for a long time, mores’ the pity… for us.

There was something fucked up about Jim.

It wasn’t just that Jim didn’t wash, although that was true. And it wasn’t just that he didn’t change his clothes – ever – although that was true also. It was more that he didn’t see anything wrong with these things, and instead seemed to delight in his freedom from socially imposed norms, like washing.

Jim was like a dirty oul cowboy that had just come in off the range. He was like a cowpat with shoes and a halo of bluebottle flies, and a big cheesy grin – and a penis.

We might have called him cheddar man, and surely would have, if the first thing we’d seen of his had been his penis instead of his face.

If Jim didn’t get his way he didn’t voice is disappointment verbally, but anally. He was like a human slurry van, slushing his discontent on the floor, on the sink, up the walls. His scalded ring was relentless, as were his scabby scaly filth-embedded hands.

His trousers stank of piss and had the sheen of trousers not washed since they were first bought in the second hand section of The Farmers Journal. Jim was some piece of work alright; Jim was a law unto Jim. I’d heard about him long before I’d met him; Jim was a legend in his lifetime. A dirty bollocks if the whorehouses of Limerick had ever seen one, and Jim could have given lessons in being a dirty bollocks. He was expert in his field – in the middle of his field, in fact, for Jim was a farming man – and no one was ever left in doubt as Jim diligently presented the evidence under his fingernails.

He had every habit a woman wouldn’t want to see in a man whose cock she had to suck, including the slobbering, slavering way he’d shove his tongue halfway out his own head before he’d use the big pink monstrosity to lick his own lips, before he’d slap them together in the manner of the appetised. “Hills have eyes shit” as one woman said to me.

Another woman, a friend of mine intimately acquainted with Jim, said he “was like an overweight Worzel Gummidge that stank of shit”.

Jim exuded a presence that radiated out from him and all around – literally. I had heard a lot of stories about Jim before I first met him; women talk, you know, and there was a lot to be said about Jim Wrong. Sometimes we’d be driving down the road, a few of us on our way to the whorehouse, and if we passed a slurry pit or were caused for any other reason to endure an offensive smell, someone would always remark “here comes Jim Wrong!” and we’d all roar laughing. So I thought I knew what to expect from Jim, before I first met him. How wrong was I? It wasn’t until I’d met our friend Jim that I realized some people are just beyond description.

Jim had a penchant for the new girls. I had been lucky enough, up till the first day I met him, never to have been in the apartment when he’d presented his stinking self. One day, my luck ran out. Ding dong went the doorbell. It was Jim Wrong, grunting and snorting, looking for the new girl.

I pressed the handle of the bedroom door, bracing myself for the sight of Jim Wrong, but the smell hit before the sight did. But one quickly followed the other – it was a classic double-whammy. It was the stench of death but yet it was living – above the shoulders sat, instead of a head, a big busted mattress. Instead of hair there sprouted coils of rusted springs and in the middle of this monstrosity sat a crooked mouth, smiling, more gums than broken teeth, twinkling with the drool oozing from the side of his warped and demented mouth, like the Colgate ad gone mad.

Jim was very pleased to see me – this was unmistakable as his horse-like truncheon busted through his piss-stained jeans. He hurried out of his decrepit clothing.

I tried to discuss the horror of the experience that followed with a woman I know, an ex prostitute herself, who was so disgusted by descriptions of Jim she said “Speak to your fucking counsellor love, I don’t want to hear it”.

We’ve heard ideas about ‘enjoyment’ being found in prostitution. Let us tell you this: any woman who can say she took pleasure out of seeing our Jim has had severe blunt force trauma to the head, most likely delivered by her respectable pimp, causing frontal lobe damage resulting in erratic eye-movement to such a point that she cannot focus on the vision in front of her, and has had so many broken noses that her nasal passage can no longer absorb such an offensive smell, and for that, all we can feel is envy for that woman.

Otherwise she is on a serious amount of medication… or ought to be…

(This was a composite experience written by women, including myself, with experience of servicing the notorious Limerick farmer Jim Wrong.)

FreeIrishWoman

I haven’t written on this blog in months. I’ve been far too busy with the final edits on my book and with campaigning for the introduction of the Nordic Model in this country, and have made trips abroad, and have more to make, so I’ve been kept very busy; but I was sitting idly reading one of those few-euro-off panel of supermarket tokens that came through my door (the ones that annoyingly assume you’re going to make two trips to the same shop in the space of one week) and as I read it I noticed some tiny writing along the bottom that put me in the position of having to write this post. The words read: ‘exclusions apply’.

It’s funny how so many things can come back to prostitution, how many little reminders there are all around us that there is something very wrong with the world. I thought ‘yeah, exclusions sure do fucking apply’, and that got my mind working, and it got me remembering, and so I had to sit down and write out those remembering’s and feelings. 

When I was a little girl I got hold of a brochure somewhere for a fee paying school. I, as the child of working class parents, was ignorant that there was any such thing at the time. I was ‘between schools’ as I often was, for months at a stretch, and I was amazed at the discovery of this wonderful solution. Here was a school where you could ride horses, learn to play the piano and choose speciality subjects, rather than have everything you’d learn dictated to you by the teacher. The uniform looked like something off the covers of the Enid Blyton books I so adored. I was mesmerised and brought the brochure home to my mother to share the wonderful news. The sound that came out of her would have been a laugh but for the fact that it came out her nose. A derisory sniff, laced with contemptuous undertones – that’s what it was. I heard that noise from her several times down the years, but I would be an adult before I’d know how to describe it.

That attitude, that ‘there is no place for you here’ certainty reminds me forcefully of the total social exclusion I would experience just a few years later as a fifteen-year-old prostitute. It was the experience of existing nowhere on the social scale; too inexperienced to seek employment, too young to draw the dole, too under-qualified to advance myself within the educational system. ‘Nowhere’, I have come to find, is the loneliest word in the English language, and for me, at that time, the most appropriate. There is a common, and noble, idea enshrined in our constitution; it is that all the children of the nation must be treated equally – but the lessons of my life taught me different. They taught me that exclusions apply.

If you are poor, if you are from a background of dysfunction, or parental addiction, or childhood sexual abuse, then you are cannon fodder for the brothels and you are of ‘equal worth’ in name only; and the men who use your body will tell themselves and others that you are there because you want to be, while at the same time protecting their own daughters (some of whom are older than you are) from the same things they do to you. When it comes to the women and girls in their own lives, these exclusions are most forcibly rejected and NOT allowed to apply.

I am in a place in my life now where I am very glad, and grateful, that I have overcome the carnage of the past in a way I could not have imagined while I was living it. But I remember, and always will, the loneliness of standing on Waterloo Road in the dark and the rain, while strangers drove by and had a good gawk at the ‘whore’ standing on the corner; and I remember, with the passion of a very great sadness, sitting, some years later, in a penthouse apartment’s uppermost room, which was composed almost entirely of glass. I would sit there smoking cannabis at night, in that room that looked like it was a conservatory perched on the top of an apartment block, and I would look out at the night sky and all the stars that were in it, and I would wonder how, in all that expanse, this stylish whorehouse was the only place for me.

I know why today: it is because exclusions apply, and as long as we accept that a separate class of women and girls should exist for the purposes of sexual exploitation, they always will.

FreeIrishWoman

The issue of child prostitution and its supposed alter-ego, adult prostitution, are personal to me because I’ve experienced both, having been prostituted between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two.

I sometimes think of what those who knew nothing of me would have thought of me, as they caught glimpses of me, on the different stages of those seven years.  Who doubts that the majority would have looked at my young teenaged self and wondered what sort of world we lived in?  And who doubts, if they’re honest, that many would have looked at my young adult self and wondered what sort of women populated it?

This is the dichotomy of adult and child and they are viewed as very separate, very distinct, so that there is a clearly perceived line between these stages, these ages, but in fact it is not a line.  It is a bridge.  It is a bridge that spans the in-between; that gap that connects the points in the lives of so many women who were prostituted first as children then as adults.  I lived that bridge in my own prostitution life, when I was turning from a child into a woman, and I was used sexually for money on most of the days that made up my adolescence, as I was before in childhood and afterwards in early adulthood.  And here is the crux of the matter: it was all the same nightmare to me.

People chose though, before and after those in-between years, whether I was blameless or blameworthy.  In the interim, while I existed in the in-between, each individual who looked at me or fucked me had the privilege of making up their own mind.  Many did, and most chose the latter.

After that, when I was identifiably a woman, it was not a case of ‘most’ anymore, but ‘almost all’ – because almost all those who looked at me in my young adulthood decided that I’d chosen what was happening, and saw it as what I was doing rather than what was being done to me.

The ‘done to me’ aspect died, you see, along with my adolescence in the perspectives of other people.  The problem was it didn’t die, and I was still alive, living the ‘done to me’ reality every day.

As a fourteen-year-old girl, a full year before I ever started prostituting, I first realised that some men felt an actual entitlement to my body.  This was perfectly expressed by the extreme belligerence they’d display when I rejected their advances.  They would be so angry.  ‘How dare you?’ said their actions.  I couldn’t make any sense of that attitude.  It was literally like someone was speaking in a foreign language to me, and it was a foreign language in a sense; it was the language of sexual entitlement.  I became fluent in the language eventually, but fluent in the sense of someone speaking a language not of their origin; someone who can understand it audibly, but will never be able to write it.

At that time though, I couldn’t imagine how anyone could think it was okay to walk up to someone on the street and wrap your arms around them, or grope somebody, or growl what you’d like to do to them into their ear.  But I had all these experiences as a fourteen-year-old girl and I’d had three approaches by paedophiles as a pre-pubescent child, and still I could not fathom why and how this was supposed to be acceptable in the view of these men, why this was supposed to be okay.  I remember one man’s surprise and affront as he told me “You’re very standoffish!” after I pulled away from a physical embrace I didn’t initiate, ask for, permit or fucking want.

These experiences came thick and fast from the age of fourteen, when I began to be more noticeably developing breasts.  It is little wonder I became fluent in the language of male sexual entitlement.  Facial expressions, aggressive stances, weary sighs, protracted silences – all these too make up part of that language, all these are used to communicate the idea that you’re expected to consent  when a man decides he will have rights to your body.

So I’d had some schooling, in that sense, as to what prostitution expected of me.  What I didn’t know was how bad it was going to get.  I couldn’t have known that before I experienced it.  It was unknowable.  Well, I soon found out, and what I found out didn’t get any better on the day I turned eighteen and it didn’t get any better on the day I turned twenty-one either.

They bother me, these stupid irrelevant lines that are drawn that attempt to divide the lived reality of the prostitution experience based on whether a female is fifteen or seventeen, seventeen or nineteen, eighteen or twenty.  They are diversions to the central matter at hand; they divert from the core issue.  They disappear the fact that this is wrong, not only by degrees that deepen with the youthfulness of its target, but by its nature, so that all those who’ve been paid for sex they do not want have suffered sexual abuse.  There is a shelf-life for women in prostitution, but there is no shelf-life for the nature of prostitution.  Its abusive core does not morph into something else on a person’s eighteenth birthday.  Not that many men wait that long in the first place.

And on that note, people need to start querying what is the criterion for fuckability according to sex-buying men?  What is their divining rod for ‘of age’?  Is it a pair of breasts?  My experience of prostitution is that it is any pair of breasts, regardless that they’re still developing; and this we’ve got to see as a form of sexual selfishness that has decayed to the point where it’s putrid.  It is also a nonsense of a position, because if a pair of breasts at any stage of development signify completed womanhood then every females adulthood actually began at the onset of puberty; not began to form, but began in full. Every woman was a woman before she was a woman, by that ludicrous standard.

I am sure we will have a lot of indignation from sex buyers on this point, but as a fifteen-year-old child with developing breasts I was abused by a multitude of these men every day; men, some of whom would never have considered themselves paedophiles or predators or abusers – and I saw the same men pay to use the bodies of other adolescents with breasts, one of them just thirteen years old, so I can assure the reader that these men assured themselves wherever there was the presence of breasts there was the absence of childhood.

Added to this, men who buy sex are obsessed with the act of despoilment; they are, as a group, blatantly obsessed with the desire to fuck the youngest girl they can find.  The upshot of this of course is that there is great commercial value placed on youth in prostitution.  I have thought at length and written a little about Prostitution and the Commercial Value of Youth, and I know both that this exists as a reality in prostitution and that is speaks with great clarity to the putrid sexual selfishness I’ve just mentioned.

So adolescents are fair game in prostitution; I’ve made my point, but it’s important also to look at an uncanny resemblance here: adolescence is the physical reality, the mirror image made flesh and form, of that place where a woman is halfway between being prostituted and being trafficked. That point where women go to other countries knowing they’ll be working in the sex trade, but not knowing what that reality really means, or not knowing that they’ll be charged four and five figure sums for the privilege of their prostitutions organisation.  This is another of prostitutions in-betweens.  They exist in various forms, and very often these mid-spectrum situations are misrepresented and then misappropriated so that they can be used to gloss over the reality of the sex trade.  For example those women who are working back thousands of euros/dollars/pounds of money they supposedly ‘owe’ are not classified as trafficking victims, although that is what they are.  The sex industry calls them ‘independent escorts’ and ignores and erases the misery of their lives.

In the same way, people who live prostitution during the transition between childhood and adulthood must be mislabelled and filed away, inconvenient as they are.  They must be either a child or an adult according to the sex industry, and also, disturbingly, to some anti-trafficking groups.  Some groups decide to find a way around this by subdividing adolescence into stages where those from twelve to fourteen are deemed worthy of sympathy and attention, while fifteen to seventeen-year-olds are brushed to one side with the gut-churning excuse that they have so much more ‘personal agency’.

When, I would like to ask the senior members of these groups, did my personal agency begin?  Because by their criterion it seems to me it began at the stroke of midnight as I entered my fifteenth year, which makes me feel like a very sorry version of Cinderella; except the slipper in this fairytale was never going to fit because it had been shattered, and believe me, Prince Charming was nowhere to be seen.  I had no more personal agency at fifteen than I had the year before, in fact I had significantly less, because at fourteen I had only six months of homelessness behind me; at fifteen I had a year and a half.  In homelessness your desperation increases with time, not decreases.  If people think ‘personal agency’ always increases with the forward march of time they are lucky people who’ve never had to deal with the miserable conditions of their own lives intensifying with time, and they’re obviously so detached from that life experience they’ve never even considered it.

By drawing distinctions between trafficking and prostitution, between under and over eighteen, some well-intentioned anti-trafficking organisations acquiesce to the perpetuation of a system known to be extremely violent and damaging while continuing to stigmatise and blame most of its victims.  This stigmatisation maintains the disempowerment and marginalisation of the same population these groups want to help.  It also empowers the predators who prey on our most vulnerable, whether under or over eighteen.

FreeIrishWoman

Someone asked me recently was I not pissed off that, after ten years of working on my memoirs, another former Irish prostitute who had just begun blogging had secured a book deal for her own book, which was to be launched before mine.  That was a fair question and I could see why it would be asked, but it was not a question that could be answered with a yes or a no.  It strongly necessitated a ‘no and here’s why’ answer, so I decided to blog about the ‘why’ part.

The book my friend was referring to is due out in the autumn of this year, about four months or so before my own and will be titled ‘Secret Diary of a Dublin Call Girl’.  It is currently being written by a young Irish woman known on the internet as DCG (Dublin Call Girl)

I first came across Dublin Call Girl’s blog in January of this year.  I came across it because, in the aftermath of completing the book, I didn’t know how to disengage from the subject.  Also, in a climate where prostitution was heating up as a political issue, I didn’t want to.

I was directed to a group-blog called Survivors Connect Network, and what I found there were blog-links to the writings of prostitution survivors from all over the world.  DCG’s blog was among them.

The first thing that struck me about her writing was that she used soft and evocative language; heartbreaking language, that moved me to tears more than once.  As a survivor of prostitution, that says a lot.  It says that she captured the prostitution experience in a very profound way.  The small things; they are often the things that set us survivors apart from the rest of society.  The things we think of, the things we remember, the things we struggle to forget; the things we can’t get through a single day without being assaulted by.  They were all there.

I was so glad.  My heart sung with joy to find this evidence of another Irish woman exploring her prostitution past, in the face of this psychological tsunami so few of us can push past to tell our truths.  I was so thankful that this young woman had chosen to defy the pain that assails us, and to call attention to it, and to put it before the public, at the cost of a pain that is beyond the comprehension of so many to fully understand.  I felt a deep and sincere affection for her.  I still do.

I started an email communication with Stella Marr, who is an American domestic sex-trafficking survivor and the founding member of Survivors Connect Network.  I told her that my book was completed and trying to find a home, but that I didn’t know how long that would take and because the issue of prostitution was now politically current in Ireland I felt I wanted to join the debate in the meantime.  I told her also that I intended to go public with my identity when the book came out, but that until then I’d like to keep my identity to myself.  She encouraged me to begin an anonymous blog of my own, and I thought that was a good idea, so I did.

As I did, I continued to follow the blogs of other women, paying particular attention to DCG’s, as she is a fellow Irish woman.  As her blog unfolded and her story was laid out, I came to understand something I’d like to put before the readers of this blog now.  It is that my story and hers are different in every way two women’s stories can be different, except for the most important way, which is the conclusion we both draw from them.

To being with, we are from different social classes.  She identifies as middle class whereas I am from a working class background, raised in council housing.  My family was severely impoverished and I came to prostitution through homelessness and destitution.  I can only assume, from what she writes, that DCG’s early upbringing was the opposite, and unlike me, she came to prostitution though the grooming of sexual abuse.  Many women mirror my entry point and many women mirror hers.  A lot of women, tragically, mirror both.

Our stories are also different in other ways.  I was prostituted from the age of fifteen to twenty-two, throughout most of the nineties.  She was prostituted from twenty-one to twenty-six, through the latter half of the noughties (I hate that term, but we have no other).

I worked in all areas of prostitution; the streets, brothels, massage parlours and escort agencies.  She worked privately, in escort agencies, advertising online, which was an area of prostitution only taking off the same year I left it.  I consider myself lucky to have missed that, especially for the sake of the creepy punters online ‘reviews’, where punters review every aspect of the women they have bought – pouring verbal contempt and scorn all over them.  This contempt repulses me beyond measure, and I have the deepest sort of sympathy for the innumerable women who’ve endured it.

Our prostitution histories are different also in the sense that, unlike DCG, I didn’t come to understand prostitution as something that was damaging retrospectively.  I lived every moment of it as sexually abusive right there, as it was happening.  This would obviously have made the experience of it more painful, but I strongly suspect it makes the memory of it less so.

On the subject of survivor memoirs: not in spite of how different, but rather because of how different, the memoirs of prostitution survivors compliment each other and are mutually strengthening, in a profoundly significant sense.  This is because they cause people to understand that a woman or girl can come to prostitution through a myriad of circumstances, at any time, at any age, for many reasons, or for a mish-mash of reasons.  Our different stories assert this.  They emphasise and state and declare it.  These are our truths.  They are different truths, but they all end up in the same place – that mind-shattering reality of having your heart broken and your legs open on a brothels bed.

The fact is that the blogs and books of every survivor who honestly lays down her story do not detract, but rather affirm the writings of other women.  For all these reasons and other reasons besides, it is essentially important that the stories of survivor women stand alongside each other; just as us women must do and should do.  We are all living the survival of the same pain and those of us who choose to speak out live all the same fears, are subject to all the same threats, suffer all the same traumas and are targeted at all the same points of our obvious vulnerabilities.

Our sincerest warm wishes for each other are a healing balm that should be poured liberally and continually, with love and without restraint.  So to answer the question I was asked the other day: stupid jealousies and resentments should never get a look-in here, because, besides anything else, you can’t be in competition when you’re on the same team.

FreeIrishWoman

This is a short post to inform those who have recently begun to bombard me with hate mail and ignorance in some of its other boringly blatant forms, that their efforts are wasted.  Those posts will not be displayed here.  There are plenty enough other areas of the internet that are infected with such bile; I am hardly about to allow my own blog become one of them.

As to the lies that have been circulated about me recently, well there is not much I can do about those.  In all honesty, there’s not much I would do if I could.  They are fairly obvious, most of them.  For example I am said to be just out of prostitution, despite that anyone who bothered to read this blogs ‘About’ page would know I am out of prostitution fourteen years.  This lie was constructed in order to query what business I have not being semi-literate.  Because, you see, former prostitutes are supposed to be, apparently.  Strange that this notion was constructed by a current prostitute! 

There are many others, each one less worth repeating than the last. They all have the same aim, which is to discredit me and everything I experienced and witnessed throughout seven years that spanned prostitution’s entire social spectrum.  These are common silencing tactics from the pro-prostitution lobby; all of us survivors experience them.  Well, as I said to a good friend of mine recently – none of this BS is going to keep our arses off interviewers’ seats or our books off the shelves.  Roll on next spring when my book is published and I will be making my identity public, for the primary reason that I damn-well intend to stand over my own experiences, and I will not be silenced by anyone.

FreeIrishWoman

Trafficking and Prostitution are two areas that are very easy to separate; and they would be, as they are inhabited by two groups of women whose experience is characterised by two different kinds of coercion, two different kinds of force. 

In one group, trafficked women, we will find the young Eastern European woman who has been tricked onto an international flight under the pretence that she is to be an au pair, only to find herself gang-raped and imprisoned in a brothel.  We will find the African teenaged girl who has been kidnapped and sold within the female slave trade, sometimes with the added psychological violence of voodoo rituals to incapacitate her mentally as well as physically.  In Canada we will find young women and girls of native descent trafficked to brothels in numbers far disproportionate to the females of the white population, because their lives are deemed less valuable, because the western world has decided them to be so.

I will focus for a while on the situation here in Ireland, with which of course, being an Irish woman, I am most familiar.  Our national television broadcaster, RTE, aired the documentary ‘Profiting from Prostitution’ in the spring of this year.  It focused on what was going on in Irish brothels, along with how they are organised and run.  It also included interview evidence from numerous women; some trafficked, others having ended up in the brothels by what I call ‘the traditional route’.

Some of the video footage was truly shocking.  One Asian woman babbling, seemingly out of her mind on some substance, was not in a position to have a conversation, never mind involvement in any kind of sexual exchange.  The only thing she said that made any kind of sense was “Work here, live here. No go outside”

A young African woman described in broken English her years of sexual slavery in Ireland, beginning when she was only twenty years old: 

“I went to Waterford.  After Waterford I went to Kilkenny, then Enniscorthy, then Navan.  She (the pimp) would text me the address of the place where they would tell me to go this day.  I have to do it because, I don’t know, it’s what I have to do because I was so scared.  I don’t want her to come and kill me.  I had nobody to run to”.

Asked how the clients treated her, she responded:

“The first man that came, I was crying to the man.  The man called the woman that I refuse him sleeping with me.  Anything could happen to me, so I don’t have any choice.  Whenever they come, I always tell them my situation, crying to some of them, but some of them, I don’t cry to them.  Some of them, the way they treated me, violence, calling me names, ‘bitch’ ‘whore’, you know, things like that”.

“When I look at myself in the mirror in the morning I cry.  I don’t even eat.  I was thinking ‘what kind of a life is this?’  Men coming in, going out, coming in, going out.  So I said, this is not the kind of life I want for myself, you know?  I don’t even know what is going to happen to me.  I don’t know where to go; it was what I had to do because I had nobody to run to”.

The words of that African girl haunt me for two reasons.  Firstly, because I feel such compassion for her.  Secondly, because I so identify with her, because the truth was, neither did I.  I will include some text here from a blog I wrote this spring, which best explains the constraints of my own choices:

‘Many people think of choice as I might have done, had I never worked as a prostitute.  For many, choice is something perceived akin to standing in front of a deli-counter.  Choose this, choose that, pick out your preferred option.  The men who choose which woman they’d like to fuck as they stare at those lined up for their consumption understand choice in just this way.  Their concept of choice is rooted in the privilege of a genuine alternative.  Their concept of choice itself is limited.

‘Choice does not always present as balanced; it does not always offer a different-but-equal alternative.  When I think of my choices they were simply these: have men on and inside you, or continue to suffer homelessness and hunger.  Take your pick.  Make your ‘choice’.

‘People will never understand the concept of choice as it operates in prostitution until they understand the concept of constraint so active within it.  As long as the constrained nature of this choice is ignored it will be impossible to understand the pitiful role of ‘choice’ for women within prostitution.

‘I’m going to reveal something very personal now, and I’m going to do that simply to illustrate how warped the concept of choice was in my circumstances.  I had a conversation recently with my sixty-something relative who is currently spending a few months visiting Ireland, after having lived forty years in America.  She reiterated something I’d heard many years ago in our family.  It was a conversation my paternal grandmother had with the psychiatrist treating my parents in the local mental hospital.  My grandmother (and this was before I was ever born) had made an appointment with the doctor, very upset as she was that my manic-depressive father and his schizophrenic girlfriend had just announced their intention to marry.

‘She wanted to know what could be done.  How could this marriage be stopped?  How could these two very unwell people be allowed to go ahead and marry?  The doctor told her that mental illness could not be used as a reason to curtail a persons civil liberties and that was his view of the matter.  But what, my grandmother wanted to know, would happen to any children born into that union?

‘I wish I could go back in time and give my grandmother a hug for having the compassion and the foresight to think of where that situation would leave us.  She was right to worry.  It left us in state care, one after the other.  And as a young teenager it left me homeless, hungry, and prostituted, in that order.

‘The constraints of my own choices began even before I did.  And if we were to shift this situation into the deli-counter analogy, there is no young girl standing there deliberating on what choice to make.

‘There is only a young girl standing waiting for what’s already been selected and pre-wrapped for her, and she can take it or leave it.  Those are her options.  That is her ‘choice’.’

People will say (and rightly say) that the trafficked child or woman and the destitute child or woman constitute two different situations.  Yes, they do – but what is so often ignored is that they also constitute two different situations that culminate in exactly the same place; with both sets of women lying with their legs open on a brothel’s bed.  In both situations, choice has been severely constrained.  In both situations, the fear of one outcome leads to another.  In both situations ‘choices’ have been made that lead to women’s bodies being sexually accessed against their will, which is lived as sexual molestation, in both cases.

In the case of the trafficked woman, she can ‘choose’ to keep kicking and screaming and ignoring the threats against herself and her family.  Nobody sees this as a choice that she might be maligned for not making.  In the case of the woman who is either in destitution or in fear of destitution, she can keep kicking and screaming mentally, and ignoring the reality of the economic threat against herself and her family, but people do see this as a choice that she is maligned for not making.  The bald-faced reality however is that both women are caught in two different versions of the same bind, and both women pay the same price for it.  The difference is that the latter group of women pay an additional price – it is the price of a socially-assigned culpability.

I will return now to the situation in Ireland.

Irelands best known online escort agency ‘Escort Ireland’ was proven in the documentary I’ve mentioned to have advertised women trafficked internationally by one notorious criminal gang, who were busted by the Police Service of Northern Ireland in an operation codenamed ‘Apsis’.  The operation would have been better named ‘abscess’, in my opinion.  This situation would be better expressed by the likening to a pustule or a boil. 

The documentary tracked the movements of prostituted women nationally through the Escort Ireland website and in doing so revealed a disturbing pattern of constant motion from city to city and town to town, where these women, advertised as ‘independent escorts’, were shown to be anything but independent and in fact were being prostituted under the direction and control of international pimping gangs. 

The women documented were very racially and ethnically diverse.  They had been trafficked from South America, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia.  This left the viewer with one incontrovertible fact: the women whose bodies feed this trade are black women from Africa, brown women from South America, lighter-toned women from Asia and white women from several countries in Eastern Europe.  What links all these women from various ethnicities and nations?  Well, it’s the fact that they’re women, of course, which means that what we’re seeing here is gender-based slavery.  We are so used to thinking of slavery as being something that is imposed by one race upon another that we are now witnessing slavery being imposed by one gender upon another – without the capacity for recognising it for what it is – without the social competence to assign it its true name.

About six weeks after the ‘Profiting from Prostitution’ documentary another Irish documentary was aired.  It was called ‘Ireland’s Vice Girls’, in an unfortunate editorial decision.  The content, however, was revealing and important.  Again, several women were interviewed, each with a different background, some having come to prostitution through trafficking, others through what’s commonly understood as ‘personal choice’.  What stayed with me after the documentary was the response of one woman, one of those who had supposedly made this ‘choice’.  Her attitude towards prostitution and the men who used her within it was starker, more marked and more undeniably fixed than anything expressed by any of the trafficked women.  She said ‘If I ever had to do one more punter, one of us would be leaving in a body bag’.

The woman who said these words spent ten years in prostitution, and I must ask, do these sound like the words of a woman who made some kind of benign and autonomous choice?  Does a woman who’d rather kill or be killed before she’d return to prostitution sound like a woman who was ever involved in it through true autonomous choice in the first place?

People view prostitution and trafficking as distinct because they want to, because they need to, or because they’ve been taught to – or perhaps a combination of all of the above.  But women like myself understand, though our personal lived experience, that these are not two different individualised experiences.  They are not distinct and separate and wholly apart at all, and the only real difference of note is that a woman prostituted through destitution or the fear of it can never say ‘I was forced’.   She can never say that because the world will never accept that, and she, consequently, must deal with a far greater weight of shame than the woman who can say she was physically forced.

I think we need to really examine, as a people, what we understand about the concepts of choice and force, and I think that until we do, we will never be able to decipher that murky hinterland with which the vast majority of prostituted women are intimately familiar; that place that bridges the gap between wanting to and having to; that place where so many women must occupy before they make a decision that is not a decision, a choice that is not a choice.  It is a place that is imbued with a certain heaviness; the weight of an oppressive and secret force.

It is currently largely unrecognised – but it needs to be recognised.  It needs to be unmasked.  It needs to be understood for what it is.  Because, as I have written in my memoir ‘It is a very human foolishness to insist on the presence of a knife or a gun or a fist in order to recognise the existence of force, when often the most compelling forces on this earth present intangibly, in coercive situations’.

FreeIrishWoman

(The preceding piece was originally commissioned for the website prostitutionresearch.com and was first published there on 31st May 2012)

People who argue that prostitution would be free of coercion, trafficking, the exploitation of minors – and everything else that prevents it from being some kind of all-above-board consenting-adults-only autonomy party – are people who ignore one vital aspect of prostitutions reality. It is the commercial value of youth.

Just as in some actual industries, like modelling or professional dance, youth is highly prized among attributes. Unlike modelling or dance though, youth in prostitution is prized far above beauty and the fluidity of movement. In order to be most highly in demand in prostitution, you don’t need to be the prettiest flower in the field; you just need to be among the youngest. And what you can or cannot do with your body is irrelevant; it just matters that it hasn’t been on the planet for very long.

One of the commonest questions that comes through on any brothels phone line is ‘What age is the youngest girl you have?’ I could not count the times I have been asked that question, and I defy anybody who has answered a brothels phone to tell the blatant lie that it is not the commonest question they’ve been asked too.

The commercial value of youth is so profoundly built-in to prostitution that women routinely lie about their age in order to generate more business. The clients know this, of course, and even as women are shaving a few years off clients are adding a few on. ‘I’m twenty-six – I’ll tell him I’m twenty-three’ / ‘She’s twenty-three? – that means she’s twenty-six’.

Nobody’s fooling anybody here, and the only thing the whole pathetic charade is any good for is the revealing nature of what’s going on behind the pretence. What it reveals, of course, is that men who buy bodies for sex usually want to buy the youngest body they can find.

Last year it was reported to the BBC that prostitutes as young as thirteen were working the streets in Swindon, in the English county of Wiltshire. “Come here at the weekend and you’ll get 13-year-old girls to 19-year-old girls out here”, one prostitute told reporters.

When I read reports like these I just sigh. It tires me to pre-empt the shock people will express. It tires me to imagine that shock, whether it is genuine or not, because if it is genuine then that proves we have a long way to go in educating people about the reality of prostitution, and if it is not, well then, here is yet more in a tsunami of evidence that there are those who do not want the reality of prostitution understood.

Whenever any evidence of teenaged prostitution is revealed the pro-prostitution lobby move immediately to put forth the preposterous assertion that this town is somehow different or unique. The attitude is always either ‘thirteen-year-olds, good Lord, who ever heard of such a thing?’ – or ‘thirteen-year-olds, good Lord, we could clear up this situation if we legalised prostitution!’ – as if somehow the demand for adolescent bodies would vanish if only we’d make the sale of adult bodies okay!

Usually, however, they will simply deny that adolescent prostitution is widespread, or that adolescents are much in demand in the first place.

‘How do we know this is true?’ will come the query from the pro-prostitution lobby. It is not a query in the genuine sense of the word. A real query seeks an answer. This query seeks to obscure the same answer it purports to be seeking.

This will seem strange and confusing to some people. It is neither strange nor confusing to me; I’ve been exposed to the tactics of the pro-prostitution lobby for too long to be surprised or confused by these sorts of seemingly tangled and nonsensical tactics. What people need to understand is that they are not nonsensical. These are obscurest policies and they are purposeful and predictable, and when you understand their purpose you will have no problem predicting them too.

Their purpose is consistently the same; it is to deny and refute the sick and twisted nature of what actually goes on in prostitution. The truth they don’t want to you know is that men who pay for sex will most often opt to pay for a fifteen-year-old over a seventeen-year-old, a seventeen-year-old over a nineteen-year-old, a nineteen-year-old over a twenty-one-year-old, and so on and so forth.

Now, let me be very clear about this – I will be called a liar for having asserted the above. It will be said that I am trying to demonise punters, that I am telling lies about their preferences and proclivities. I wish I was. In my first year in prostitution, when I was fifteen-years-old, I was used by countless hundreds of men; I truly couldn’t say how many. I saw up to ten men a day so you may do the maths for yourself (the thoughts of doing that calculation disturbs me). As I stated in my Examiner article back in February, men were so obviously aroused by my youth it made them climax very quickly, so I soon learned to tell them how old I was in order to shorten the whole ordeal. I made it a policy; it was one of the first things I said when I got into the car – not that I needed to bring up the subject because it was usually one of the first questions asked of me.

In all those hundreds of men, one man, just ONE, turned his van around and brought me back to where he’d found me.

So yes, those who advocate for legalised or decriminalised prostitution will do their damnedest to obscure the truth about the high commercial value placed on young bodies in prostitution, all the while squawking ‘Where’s the evidence? Where’s the evidence?’ – like some kind of belligerent and demented parrot, with all the repetitiveness and severe comprehension issues you’d expect. All beak and no brains, in other words.

This is to be expected; of course the pro-prostitution lobby don’t want you to know that girls who are post-puberty by only a year or two are routinely lusted after, sought out, highly prized and then abused for enough years ‘till they’ve lost much of their commercial value. If that was widely known, it would do a great deal of damage to the autonomous, sexually-liberated, empowerment fantasy depiction they are consistently trying to peddle.

As for ‘Where’s the evidence?’ – I don’t need to ask that question. When I was a fifteen-year-old prostitute I was FAR more in-demand than I ever was as a twenty-two-year-old, even though at twenty-two I was slim, pretty, and an extremely youthful woman; but therein lay the problem. I was a woman.

There is huge emphasis placed on the commercial value of youth in prostitution. ‘The evidence’ is in every brothel and red-light zone in the land, and I know that because I lived the evidence.

I know it because I was the evidence.

FreeIrishWoman