Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (12 page)

Chapter14 ~

DISSOCIATION AND THE SEPARATION OF SELF International research shows how women in prostitution have worked out an ingenious, complex system ofcreating and maintaining boundaries to protect the 'real self' from being invaded and destroyed by prostitution ... Dissociation, the psychological process ofbanishing traumatic events from consciousness, is an emotional shutting down used by women in prostitution in common with women being raped, battered and among prisoners ofwar who are being tortured 'THE NEXT STEP INITIATIVE', RUHAMA RESEARCH REPORT ON BARRIERS AFFECTING WOMEN IN PROSTITUTION, IRELAND, 2005 T he age-old practice of using an alias is an example of how prostituted women have always actively sought to separate themselves from what they do. Women who use an alias (as all prostitutes do) literally do what they do under another name; this is ~ dissociation at its most practical level. � For women in prostitution, dissociation is a necessary but dangerous thing. Just like the woman in an abusive marriage who continually tells 1 herself that it 'really isn't that bad', the woman in prostitution also breaks away from the reality of her situation, with disastrous consequences for her mental and emotional health. Continually denying any painful lived J reality inevitably causes a person to become separated from their own l self. As a woman feels her psyche being abused she will protect against that and she will use the act of dissociation aR a tool tn dn thM All llhP fails (and she will always fail, because it is not possible to dissociate fully from an influence you continue to be exposed to) the degree of her ability to dissociate from prostitution directly reflects the degree to which she has become separated from herself. She is cut by either side of a two-edged sword. She is, in other words, psychologically polluted by prostitution to the exact extent which she manages to disconnect from it. But if she were not to disconnect from prostitution she would be equally polluted by her proximity to it; she would just find herself polluted in a more presently painful way. (Dissociation just puts these issues on the long finger.) Here is the essence ofthe paradox: to dissociate is to break away from and to turn away from, so the disconnection which is so crucial for maintaining her own peace of mind is itself a pollutant because it forces her to deny to herself the reality of her own experience. Dissociation is essential here; the prostituted cannot maintain her identity or sanity without it, but the cruel double-bind is that, on a psychological level, dissociation is a betrayal of the self. She's damned if she does and damned if she doesn't, on the deepest of levels. Every time a prostitute numbs her inner self against the feel of unwanted hands on her body she both employs dissociation and suffers the separation of self. Sometimes when I would be with a client who overtly got off on violation, if I knew that protest was pointless and very liable to lead to a beating, I would allow my body and mind to go limp. This was my own form of protest, the only one possible here. Since there was no getting out of the situation I would not struggle against being roughly manhandled; I would not partake in the mental push/pull friction necessary for him to enjoy his game of tug-of-war. I would drop the rope from my end. He would still have his climax, but I knew its potency had been diluted. There was no pleasure in this for me; just the small payoff of dissociation that sat alongside the payback of my further disconnecting from my own truth. Without exception, the man would be belligerent and cantankerous afterwards, and sometimes aggressive. There was always the understanding on his part that I hadn't played ball, and the attitude that he'd been somehow short -changed because of it. He hadn't wanted my acquiescence; he'd needed my objection. It bears repeating here that a prostitute has no rights to set the boundaries of her sexual experience, no right to object, and no right even to notobject when that is not in line with her client's requirements. Her body is there to accommodate the sexual experience of another, no matter what anguish it causes her, regardless of what it demands of her, and regardless of how damaging and degrading she may find it to be. The sort of retreat I've described is received as passive aggression and very often a woman will be punished for it. We would often be flung out of cars or spat on in hotel rooms after incidents like these. There were different categories ofviolators, as there were distinctions in fetishists of other sorts. Some of the less overt violators would not need to physically feel a woman struggle against hands gripping her breasts so hard she thought they'd burst; some would gently stroke her breasts and feel her involuntary shrinking from their touch, and they'd get off on that, for some that would be enough. There is clearly a difference in magnitude, but for me it does not alter the nature of the offence. I reacted to these situations always in the same way; I pretended they were not happening. Surely it is obvious that anything that forces a person to lie to themselves cannot be positive? In prostitution, because you continually deny your own feelings, you come to have a very traumatic relationship with yourself and something in that causes the real self to become very obscure. There is a sincere danger in that, because when you have become obscure to yourself, you have lost the ability to ask yourself questions. So then in prostitution you have on one hand this need to imagine yourself out of the situation and an unintentional distancing from the essence of yourself on the other. When a woman has negated her own feelings ritualistically there occurs in her an inevitable fracturing; in this way dissociation leads to a separation ofthe self. It is not the sole process by which this severance occurs, but it may just be the most important one. I say so because the breaking away from truth inherent to the process of dissociation is what makes prostitution possible for a woman in the first place. A woman must first dissociate from her natural reluctance of prostitution before she can incorporate it into her life. This necessitates the initial act of disconnection from the self. The very first thing prostitution teaches a woman is this method of personal disconnection; the very first thing she will learn is how to hone it. But this is only reinforcement; the separation ofself occurs prior to the first act and this, for the vast majority of women, is the only way prostitution is possible. It is in the moment when a woman first ignores her natural revulsion and forges ahead anyway that the separation of self begins. It begins with the disregard of her own feelings; and so the separation of self first manifests in the disparity between internal instinct and outward behaviour. It begins in the moment we deliberately divorce what we desire from what we do, and the prostituted are a long way from being the only women who do this. Some non-prostituted women routinely force themselves into a state of shutdown in order to accommodate men's sexual demands, and many more women will have had that experience at least a few times in their lives. Some women will go to very great lengths in order to facilitate superfluous desires which are presented as critical sexual requirements. Many women who do these things do them not in an effort to please themselves, but in an effort to be pleasing, and they are strongly encouraged to do so by a mindset outside of themselves which imposes a straightforward choice between being 'sexually liberated' and 'puritanical: There is no middle ground, apparently; and there is no acknowledgement ofthe true essence ofsexual liberation, which does not in any sense accord with having your sexual behaviours dictated to you. Many women who acquiesce to their bodies being used thus do so under the weight of insecurity issues so oppressing they cause them to crumble in the face of accusations such as 'frigid', 'dosed-minded', 'unadventurous' and, God forbid, 'prudish'-labels which they process as too unthinkable to bear. This is psychosexual bullying, and its consequences are lasting, and severe. The quotes I include below are powerful testimony that women are damaged by the sort of sex that sexually coercive situations produce, and that they respond to that damage by shutting down via the same system ofdissociation that occurs in prostituted women. It is interesting and important to note that this happens as a response to unwanted sex even where no money has changed hands. 'What he wanted, besides having an affair, was to take nude photos of me. I find it hard to explain to myself that I didn't think I could say no even though I didn't want to do what he asked. This is painful to write about, but I do so because 1 want readers-especially women.to know that even an essentially smart and good girl, if she lacks self-esteem and believes a woman is supposed to "go along"' will allow herself to get into some inexplicable situations. I wish I could say this was the last one for me. I had a brief affair with him, every moment of which I hated. Mostly I hated myself for my betrayal of my body, and I felt terrible confusion about why I was letting this happen.' 'In my public life, I am a strong, can-do woman. How is it then, that behind closed doors, in my most intimate relations, I could betray myself? The answer is this: If a woman has become dis.embodied from a lack of self-worth-I'm not good enough--or from abuse, she will neglect her own voice of desire . . . this requires . . . compartmentalizing-disconnecting head and heart, body and soul.' JANE FONDA MY LIFE SO FAR

'So the Ideal American Girl bought into every myth the guys could fling at me-about Bloomsbury, sexual liberation, not being a . puritan; about keep-on -doing-what-you -don't -like-because-the.more-you-do-it-the-more-you'll-like-it; about D. H. Lawrence's ideal quartet (two women, two men, all possible sexual permu,tations). I never questioned whose needs and self-interest these models served. The first threesome ... was followed by encores, and by foursomes, ~ \ , ~~ ~;: >! and by various numerical combinations with other people (always with Kenneth present)-ordeals my memory still can neither purge itself of nor fully grasp. I know I partly dissociated my consciousness in order to survive them, an attempt to compartmentalise and contain the experience of violation.' ROBIN MORGAN SATURDAY'S CHILD In her book Fonda describes different instances of having been sexually coerced as a younger woman, including how she had regular threesomes with her husband and other women, which she had no desire to have, for the sexual benefit of her husband. She talks, just as Morgan does, about the damaging effects these experiences had on her psyche in terms that I could only compare to the impact ofprostitution abuse, the two are so startlingly similar. Sexual coercion is very easily employed, especially upon those who have been pre-schooled by previous experiences of abuse. It causes a crack in the structure of the self, which continued sexual coercion goes on to widen. When it does there follows a shattering of the self, the 'terrible confusion' Fonda speaks of, and the physic fragmentation and disconnection so common to the findings of prostitution research. Over time it becomes second-nature, this process of fragmentation, until it is almost unnoticeable to the prostituted woman, and maybe, many years after she has first employed it, she will finally learn to fully recognise it. I say this because it was true for me in prostitution and I saw it everywhere I looked, and because I wouldn't have known in my teens that the duplicity, loneliness and confusion I was experiencing and witnessing came about as a result of an unnatural separation of self. One of the ways I protected myself in prostitution was to separate myself, to literally split myself into two characters; the authentic me, and the imaginary version. Of course, the former was reserved for the people who did not pay me for sex and the latter created in order to distance me from those who did. If a client asked me what my favourite fruit was (and I've been asked stranger questions than that) I would answer with any fruit I could think of, but I would never admit to my true preference for mangoes. If I was asked my favourite colour, I would attest to adore the first colour that came into my head, any colour, except green. Sometimes a client would ask these questions in a deliberate attempt to get to know 'the real you', and in those cases you would be very much aware of his intentions and very much on your guard against them, protecting your identity by swathing it in a tissue of omissions and out.right lies. At other times he would ask these probing questions for purely practical reasons, such as ifhe had the intention ofbuying you a piece of jewellery, but even ifI actually preferred a bracelet with green gemstones, I would always lie about my genuine preference because keeping that to myself was more precious than any jewels he could give me. I have never in my life met, nor even heard rumour of, a prostitute who was generally content to allow her clients into every facet of her private life. Some women I met were a good deal more comfortable with that than I was, a tiny minority even forming relationships with their clients, but even in those cases, from what I saw and heard, there always remained some measure ofconcealment. A prostitute generally removes herself from her lifestyle mentally, since she cannot remove herself from it physically, and this is a trait that is utterly inherent to the behaviour of prostitutes. This extreme reluctance to merge the truth of her identity with her client's perception of it is actually the strongest evidence of a woman's rejection of her own participation in prostitution. Of course, however successful a prostitute is in her attempts to conceal her authentic identity from her clients (dissociation) that same authentic sense of self is altered by her participation in prostitution (separation of self). This happens both because she is influenced mentally and emotionally by what she does and therefore alters her own self-image accordingly, but also because perceptions ofher held by those outside of the sphere of her world are altered dramatically by learning of her involvement in it. Knowing the latter (and usually through bitter experience), most prostitutes will keep the facts of what they do to themselves. This is an attempt at avoiding those judgemental attitudes; it is also clear evidence that she expects to be judged. ,4 1,, 1 ~.1 It is a cruel and confusing conundrum for prostitutes, who must come to understand that the maintenance and protection of their own identity is supported by the lies they tell their clients, while the dignity of that same identity is defiled and diminished by the truths uncovered by those who are intimately familiar with it. She is left struggling to keep hold ofwhatever aspects ofherself she believes worth holding onto, and whatever they may be, their validity is under constant attack. It is little wonder that so many prostitutes suffer with crippling issues of negative self-image and diminished self-esteem. These feelings, of course, do not disappear upon leaving prostitution. They linger long after it. At times, since I got out of prostitution, I've asked myself, who am I any more? Am I still myself? What is there left of me now? That is another ofthe prices ofprostitution, that incessant introspective questioning. In prostitution, you are not just selling a quick fuck up a laneway or a long, unmercifully lingering one in a hotel bed. When you take that money what you are really being paid for is the deepest and most unspoken part of the contract: a lifetime of looking inward and wondering who you are. I am taking the long way back, because there is no short way; and it is sad to find myself on a journey that takes me in a direction I want to go, but which I know will never end. This is not melodrama; it is fact. How could it be possible to complete a journey when you do not know the landscape of your destination? How would you know when you'd arrived at the sense ofselfthat would have existed had you never become a prostitute? How would you recognise that state ofbeing, having never experienced it? You wouldn't, any more than you'd recognise a city you'd never been to, and anyway, it's probably just as well because you're never going to get there. The you that you are is the one that exists; you're never going to know the you that would have existed in some parallel universe you can't access. What I do recognise (and this is a great blessing) are the little mile.stones along the way that indicate further removal away from my prostitution 'self' and the self I should/might/would otherwise 'have been. I haven't got there, but I move towards there, and there is clear progress in the moving. They are not always dramatic, these milestones; in fact the journey is usually marked by mundane and commonplace things. One day you'll find yourself standing at a supermarket checkout handing the cashier a store loyalty card and it'll hit you that you never would have considered applying for one of those before; not because of a lack of fiscal conscientiousness, but because as a prostitute you just didn't live in that world. Propriety, normalcy, participatory routines . . . I was scared of and unfamiliar with these things., in equal measure, for the longest time. And I was scared because I was unfamiliar and I continued to be unfamiliar because my fear kept me at a distance, and my childhood sense of social disconnectedness entirely supported the sense of otherness that made it possible, even predictable, that I would remain in prostitution for so long. One question I asked of myself in prostitution (and it came back again and again) was 'Who are you when nobody's looking?' By 'nobody' I meant both the public and the punters alike, everybody. I had no idea why I asked this of myself, but I believe today that it was an instinctual grounding exercise; that it was something I asked myself in order to hear the answer. I think it was an answer I needed to hear in order to remind myself that I was a good person, because the 'who I was' when nobody was looking rarely reflected anything negative. When I was alone, I usually read literature or listened to calming music or bathed in the light of scented candles. Often I'd do all three; play music down low while soaking in a lavender oil bath with my favourite book in my hands. I enjoyed being alone. I enjoyed being with myself. I realise today I asked myself that because I liked who I was when no-one was looking. The opposite of this is also true; I usually didn't like what I saw of myself or how I felt when I was in company. When I was among people who didn't know I was a prostitute, I felt negatively about myself because I compared my prostitute-self with their non-prostitute-selves and felt dirty and worthless by comparison. When I was with other prostitutes I was sometimes happy, less often miserable, but quite often depressed by our common ground, and when I was with clients I seldom felt anything other than psychologically sick. As the years went by and the separation of self became more solid.ified, the question remained the same but the tone with which I put it to myself changed. There was a sense of sadness to it, and a low-level urgency, a panicked sense of trying to recall. In those days, I would ask myself, 'Who are you when nobody's looking?' You begin to slip away from yourself in prostitution, especially ifyou throw drugs into the mix. I think towards the end that question was, in essence, a struggle against the natural separation ofself which becomes so inherent to the working prostitute. It was asked in an effort to remember who I was. This feeling, this woundedness from having experienced a fracture of the self, calls on the capacity to further separate and divide. The aim is positive. Itseeks to safeguard a healthy self-perception; but it is damaging because it involves a further splintering. The aim is irrelevant, because its fulfilment causes a woman to become locked in a very great struggle. It is a perfectly balanced struggle, firstly because it is the most natural thing in the world to move to protect oneself from accepting a negative self-image. We are not made to function healthily whilst feeling badly about ourselves. It is natural, normal, even necessary to struggle against that; to deny that others are justified in viewing us in the negative way that they do. But the tragedy is in the futility of the struggle, because while it is paramount for the prostitute to separate herself from the publicly accepted image of the prostitute, it is also impossible. Every police officer, every fire fighter, every teacher and tradesman and professional the world over will understand what it is to be regarded as a member of a collective staff group. At some point you understand that you cannot escape being perceived by others as they see you and you begin the secondary struggle, which is not to see yourself as they do; and it is a struggle because it does not feel logical to consistently deny the image of ourselves as we are universally perceived. It is an inward exertion, and because it can never be overcome, it can never end. Sometimes the truth of my past and its contrast with the image of my present -day life reminds me of the little holographic pictures I would find in cereal packets as a child. Tilt it this way and you see one image; tilt it in the other direction and an entirely different picture will emerge. I feel this way about the transition from being a prostituted woman into being a non-prostituted woman. I am not that woman any more, but she has not disappeared either. She is the other side of me and her re-emergence is only ever a dirty look or a whispered word away. It is beneficial to imagine her as a mirage, someone who never would have existed if life had not been tilted in a certain skewed way. I remember standing in the dark one night in the car-park ofa Galway hotel. rd just finished a particularly demeaning job and was waiting for the taxi rd called on my mobile phone. This great wind picked up and I had the eeriest sensation that it was blowing right through me. I felt very benumbed and very lonely and as if, strangely, I wasn't even there. Looking back on it, I felt as I imagine a ghost might feel. Afterwards, I wondered why rd felt so disconnected from myself in response to an experience rd had many times. I both wondered and responded at the same time. It was one of those rare moments where the conscious meets the subconscious. I knew that I had beaten the feeling down each of the many times rd almost previously felt it. I knew also that somewhere inside me I had always known this and needn,t have wondered at all. At times I have been asked of prostitution, 'What does it feel like?' The truth is I learned to operate a certain part of my psyche so that sometimes it didn't feel like much of anything at all. There is a switch governing the release or restraint of emotion with which most people are unfamiliar because it might have to come into play only a limited number of times, sporadically, over the course of their lives. But in prostitution the use of this on/off function in the governing of emotion is so pervasive that it is very unlikely a woman would not eventually become aware of it. It is not lost on the men who buy women in prostitution either. As one of them reported 'it's like she's not really there:9 I believe it is thanks to this psychological mechanism that the ability to enjoy some degree of'normal' sexual functioning within relationships remains intact for most prostitutes. If you were to be fully engaged, mentally and emotionally, in every act of prostitution over the course of several years, intimate relationships would no longer be possible. Conversely though (and this is much commented on among prostitutes who have taken part in Irish and international research) there are times when it is not possible to switch back on, even when you want to; times when, basically, the switch has become faulty and is no longer under your control. In this way, the prolonged practice of'shutting off' sexually can have lasting negative implications for romantic relations. Also at times, there is overload, and a situation or multitude of situations is too much to be managed by this emotional control switch; or at other times your
control switch has been overused to the point where it no longer functions on automatic, you can temporarily be unable to restrain emotion and you then come to the painful awareness that you've been deliberately blocking yourself from experiencing trauma. These can be sad and scary times. Many times I've heard prostitutes make comments along the lines of: 'It's just as well you do be miles away in your mind' and 'He was a horrible rough smelly fucker, but it was only my body in the bed, the rest of me was floating out the window into the clouds-you know yourself'. Remarks like these confirmed for me then that other prostitutes dealt with the job in the same way that I did, but also I see now that the Dublin colloquialism 'You know yourself' was repeated so often that, as a group, we obviously expected a general understanding ofthe situation, and we expected it because we didn't see what other way it could have been perceived to be. We all practised dissociation; each of us found our own ways to remove ourselves from what we were doing. We all shut down in similar 'Comparing Sex Buyer� with Men Who Don't Buy Sex', Me~issa Farley et al, 2.009. ways and for identical reasons and we all suffered the same price for it too. We were alienated from ourselves. It was a common, shared, col.lective experience, this separation of self. 'l 1 1 I