Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (11 page)

ISURVIVAL STRATEGIES

Hoigard and Finstad (1992) describe how women use "ingenious" strategies to survive prostitution: shutting off their feelings, thinking about other things, holding back on bodily reserves which are not for sale, hurrying the buyer by feigning sexual excitement to cut down on time. Others, such as Barry (1995), see the illusion ofchoice as an important survival tool and a means ofholding on to some degree ofhuman dignity ... Survival strategies work sometimes, but not all ofthe time, and not forever. These survival strategies come with a price and there are long-term consequences for physical, mental and sexual health as the survival strategies become internalised. 'THE NEXT STEP INITIATIVE', RUHAMA RESEARCH REPORT ON BARRIERS AFFECTING WOMEN IN PROSTITUTION, IRELAND, 2005 W en I worked in prostitution, we would often discuss the actics we employed to mentally endure the process. I emember one particular discussion where a few of us shared what measures we put in place while actually in the act, in order to make it halfway mentally sufferable. It was a small group but the coping strategies were vast in their diversity. One woman fantasised about killing her clients; another about the colour of Smarties. She had a little tune she used to hum in her head. It sounded like a child's nursery rhyme and the words went like this: 'Smarties, Smarties, red and yellow Smarties; Smarties, Smarties, brown and purple Smarties' and on and on till she could think of no more colours and she'd return to red and yellow again. I laughed as I imagined that infernal mental rhyming going on and on and I told her I didn't think I'd be able to stand it. Clearly, there are ways for women to psychologically minimise the impact ofthe prostitution experience, such as separation, disengagement and outright denial. The overall network ofsurvival strategies employed by prostitutes comprises strategies both physical and mental and they include anger, self-deception, substance abuse, the rejection of truth, defiance and other attempts at control. These tactics evolve from a deep.run refusal to submerge fully in the prostitution experience. I liken these women to the drowning woman who, though she hasn't a hope in hell, cannot help, by reflex and instinct, but struggle against the tug ofthe tide. As for myself, I employed the oldest trick in the book, common to prostitutes and victims of other forms of repetitive sexual abuse-! pretended it wasn't happening. A primary survival tactic was simply to deny the reality ofthe situation, especially in any sort ofpublic capacity. I once gave an interview to a reporter in which I did just that. I was about seventeen at the time. A friend and I had been collecting the free condoms handed out at a local clinic and one ofthe health workers there told us a reporter was interested in speaking to some of us, so I said I wouldn't mind talking to her. A couple of days later a few of us met her in a Baggot Street bar. She focused on me, I think, because I was very much the youngest of the group and she probably found that shocking. She asked me why I did it, and I belligerently told her: 'For the money', communicating with my eyes and tone that it was a stupid question and inferring that she must be stupid for having asked it. She asked if I didn't care what people thought, and I responded that I, 'Couldn't give a shite'. She asked me then if I really didn't care, or if it was just a front, a way of protecting myself? I looked her straight in the eye and confidently lied: 'No, I really don't care'. I remember her face and her eyes and how I saw budding in them the surprising new understanding that some women were quite content working as prostitutes and attached no sense ofstigma to themselves; but �he was wrong; she'd been duped. I can understand why some women lie to themselves and others about what prostitution truly entails; I've done it myself, and the comment that reporter made all those years ago was accurate; I was protecting myself. I was protecting myself from her and her questions. I was protecting myself from the truth. I think though, that I was wrong that day. I shouldn't have done that. I was too young to understand the responsibility I had to be honest, especially to somebody who would repeat my words in the media. I think it does a disservice to society and to humanity actually, to pretend that the act ofprostitution is anything other than what it truly is: a degrading and exploitative exchange. Thoughts like this were far from my mind though, when I was busy protecting myself from the reality of prostitution. My conduct with that reporter was a classic example ofthe prostitute's defence mechanisms of defiance and denial combined and it certainly was an example of a survival strategy. Surviving in prostitution is not possible for those who have a consistent, consciously held view of the self as vulnerable. It is necessary to lie to yourself here, and sometimes in lying to yourself, it is necessary to lie to others. Anger and defiance are also closely related, of course, and they often appear together in response to humiliating incidents. The most obvious ones I can think ofwould have been street -walking women vehemently returning the verbal abuse hurled at them from passing cars. The survival strategy here is in the attempt to protect dignity which is under attack. I find these saddening and pitiable memories, because I see them now for what they really were: attempts at preserving a wholesome sense of self and struggling to stay psychologically healthy in the most thwarting and hostile of circumstances. Alcoholism and other substance-abuse problems were widespread, as I've said. As survival strategies go, they were probably the most obvious and certainly the most useless. Yes, they provided temporary oblivion, removed the women from their current reality, but ofcourse, due to their nature, they worked only for a time and with a very serious payback. A few years ago I called to the home of a woman I've known since we were both in our teens. She has been stabilised on methadone since her early twenties, but every now and again she will relapse and return to abusing heroin and benzodiazepines. I knocked on her door and when she opened it, she had the two biggest, most brutal-looking black eyes I'd ever seen. They were every shade of black, blue, grey and green and were so swollen they were closed into two tiny slits. I was shocked to see her. She looked as though she had two golf balls shoved behind her eyelids. She let me into her house and walked slowly up the stairs. I followed behind asking what in the name of God had happened to her. Because I hadn't been able to see into her eyes in the condition they were in, it wasn't until I saw how slowly and clumsily she was walking that I realised she was stoned, very stoned. My heart sank. She had been doing so well. She sat cross-legged on her bedroom floor and started riffling in slow-motion through a make-up bag, looking for concealer, it turned out. She then took her blouse off and pulled on a skimpy-looking top. I saw that her body was covered in huge horrible bruises. She started applying her concealer so clumsily that at times she missed her black eyes completely. 'Where are you going?' I asked. 'I'm going down the street; she eventually slurred in response. i j Every time I spoke, there was an interlude of at least ten seconds j between my words and hers; it took her that long to mentally process -~ ~ what I was saying and to formulate a response. Her reply left me hor..l ~ rified. I couldn't believe she was going out to prostitute herself in that condition. I couldn't believe, beyond anything else, that she would actually be capable ofmaking any money. Though I'd often seen women working the streets with black eyes and bruises, her injuries were in a l ~ different category. She looked as though she'd been kicked by a horse. Eventually I drew it out of her that she'd been beaten up by several l women outside the methadone clinic a week before, that she'd been l working every day since, and no, she'd had no problem making the ~1 ��hundred euro a day it cost to buy fifty benzodiazepines. She'd been ,j working for the money for drugs all week and today would be no l different. There was a lull in our conversation as I struggled with my feelings. She broke the silence, eventually, by saying: 'You'd better hang up the phone now. You'll use up all your credit: I said: 'I'm sitting on the end ofyour bed'. There was nothing for it but to get into my car. I cried the whole drive home. It is a strange truth that, after everything I had been through myself, it was the experience of another woman, many years after I had left prostitution, that brought my opinion of prostitutors lower than it had ever been. I recount my old friend's experience here because it is a potent example of how the survival strategies of prostitution can turn into monsters against which the women of prostitution will not even begin to struggle, because for many of them anything is preferable to prostituting themselves without that buffer between themselves and the men who use them-and men do .continue to use them, even when they look like they've been kicked by a horse. The attempt at control in which all prostitutes engage is one of the more common survival strategies of prostitution. The myth of control, the belief of control, is a separate issue, but is also a survival strategy. It is, however, a strategy which is constantly under erosion from the daily realities of prostituted women. It is possible to believe yourself in control when it is necessary that you believe it, but it is not possible to hold onto this belief when the circumstances of your daily existence work aggressively to contradict it. I may have considered myself in control for days or weeks at a time, but this was brutally interrupted whenever I was beaten, sexually assaulted or robbed. It was more subtly interrupted on a frequent basis any time I found myself doing anything I didn't want to do, which was hourly, rather than daily; but the mind is a complex and stubborn thing and it believes what it needs to believe in order to navigate any difficult environment or circumstance. For this reason I silenced the more subtle contradictions to my self-held myth of control. I remember doing it, and doing it deliberately. 'Just get it over with', was the mental rebuke I used to silence my surfacing feelings of distress in any given situation. I couldn't afford to look at them; that would have been to acknowledge a loss of control. It was necessary for us to believe that we were in control because to accept that the opposite was true would have been to internalise the full awfulness of our present situation, and the conditions of prostitution are damaging enough without a deep and thorough acknowledgement of their character. It is enough to feel them without accrediting them with the fullness oftheir destructive power. Ignoring them, shutting out the viciousness oftheir nature, is perhaps the prostitute's primary policy of defence; her principal survival strategy. Since women enter prostitution in order to rectify a situation of financial hardship, it is very obvious to see where the belief of control comes in here. The prostitute is now able to feed her kids; she is able to pay her bills; she is able to meet her mortgage repayments. There is a sense of imposing order and a consequential sense of control here, and in this most basic of ways she has achieved control, but here is the crux, and it is a cruel one: only as long as she stays in prostitution can she maintain it. What many women (and I certainly include my younger self in this) fail to realise is that they have not, in fact, achieved control of their own finances: they have passed control of their finances into the hands of prostitution itself, so that although their financial problems are alleviated, those economic issues are no longer controlled by themselves: they are controlled by prostitution and they themselves, as women, are controlled by prostitution also. Itis a straightforward swap: prostitution for poverty. In order to rid yourself of the first you must invariably contend with the second. This is not financial freedom; it is not fiscal control. This is imprisonment in prostitution. It is a form of sexual slavery and it is the reality for the vast majority of prostitutes. Those who have had a very high level of education and have excellent job prospects are unlikely to be found in prostitution in the first place, at any of its levels; these women are so rare in prostitution that I have only ever read of them in the media and entertainment depictions of prostitution and in a tiny amount of prostitution literature (if you could call it that). The truth is, at this base level, there is no personal control in prostitution, but there is a very great need to believe so, and there is a very great number ofwomen who adhere stringently to that belief. Their delusions are utterly understandable to me, and they would be, since I once adhered to them so ardently myself. I see now the control fantasy in the fullness of its frailty, and it is a pitiable and embarrassing thing to consider. The 'I'm the boss' attitude only every worked while I was loitering on a street corner or making my way through a hotel foyer. It dissolved like a Disprin when the car or bedroom door clicked shut behind me, and it didn't always even make it that far either. Very often, I would carry the full weight of the situation's reality with me and I would feel it constricting my insides like heavy coils of rope before I'd come anywhere close to taking my clothes off. 'Just get it over with; I would say to myself. 'Just get it over with' is not the mantra of a woman in control. We also used humour to make the situation more bearable and we also leaned on each other for practical and emotional support. In all of our survival strategies, I can now clearly see, there was the strong impulse to extricate ourselves from the situation. Whether it was in the psychological sense, by dissolving ourselves right out ofthe situation, or whether it was in physical ways, like spraying perfume on our nipples to prevent them being chewed and bitten. There was always that same sense of creating distance. It manifested itself in so many ways. This compulsion to remove ourselves from the fullness of the experience should not be surprising; it is a very human impulse to create distance between the selfand a toxic environment. My latter years of prostitution involved seeing a number of regular clients I'd built up over several years, as well as seeing new punters; my regulars included transvestites and men with inclinations towards being dominated, whom I had been very accommodating towards because I appreciated their passivity and timidity of manner. Although I hadn't identified it as such at the time, this
was a bona-fide survival strategy. I know if anyone had asked us what survival strategies we employed we would have mentioned the short knives some of us carried in secret compartments of our clothing, or we would have said that we relied on our senses to keep us safe, but I doubt many of us would have been able to identify that we lived our lives employing survival strategies subtly, by instinct. I really don't think I would have been able to point that out then. It is important when reflecting on survival strategies to remember that they usually did not work in the longer term, and even where they did they worked only partly, so that they afforded some relief, but never total release. This is so because survival strategies help a woman to avoid mentally engaging with the process fully; they cannot assist her to avoid engaging with the process at all. The truth, though, is that some days were harder than others. I'm remembering here the necessity of a very practical disconnection. One day a particularly horrible client visited our brothel in Limerick, where we worked sporadically for a couple of years in the mid-to-late-1990s. He was renowned for the disgusting unwashed state he'd always turn up in. A fouler man in terms of personal hygiene I have never met in my life, and that really is saying something. He turned up this day and requested to see a new girl. I was the only one there he'd never met and I was horrified to be picked to deal with him as I'd heard so many horror stories about his indescribable filth. Nervous as I was, I couldn't have imagined how bad it was going to be. This man was so unclean I could smell him the moment I opened the �bedroom door. When he peeled back his foreskin there was so much cheesy-smelling gunk under it I had to struggle not to vomit. I ca~not remember how things panned out with that client, I have probably blanked it from my mind, but I remember one thing for sure: he was not satisfied with my performance. He made his protest in a manner that was impossible to miss: he shat all over the bathroom. :>' I opened the bathroom door some time after he'd gone and the mess he'd left was a sight to behold, just as he'd intended it to be. He'd shat all over the toilet seat (which was down) and all over the side of the bath and there was shit smeared on the side of the sink and toilet. He'd shat all over the floor. He'd shat, in fact, on every surface available except for the walls. There was so much shit it seemed he must have been relieving himself of a three-week constipation. The message of this protest was, of course, that we were only fit for cleaning up his shit. It was sufficiently contemptuous in his view and very much in line with his perception of us prostituted women as lesser humans. Etiquette in prostitution would dictate that you would be expected to deal with, or at least help with, any mess or damage a client of yours had the nastiness to create, but there was no way on this earth I was cleaning up that man's shit. I closed the door, walked away, and point-blank refused to deal with it. There were other times I'd have to rely on what I've come to think of as the 'unplugging technique'. This was necessary because there were times when you could be halfway mentally present and then there were times you'd have to plug yourself out of the situation just like a phone charger being plugged out of a socket. An example of this would be the times one particular regular client of the brothel visited. This man was as ugly as they come and he had a face the colour and likeness of a big beef tomato; As he'd peel off his clothes, he'd be ogling me and making the most inane and skin-crawling comments, often referring to the genitalia, like: 'Let's share a banana split-you have the banana and I'll have the split!' The overwhelming natural response a woman must contain in these situations is: 'Oh would you ever just go and FUCK OFF!' Sometimes you'd be close to choking on the unsaid words. That's when you'd unplug yourself. I did a lot of that.