The sex industry done well at spinning prostitution as a positive good for all involved. This piece in The Irish Times cuts through the gloss and shows what life is like for many prostituted women (and there’s no reason to believe these experiences are limited to Ireland). Here’s an extract:
The release last week of the annual report from Ruhama, the charity for women affected by prostitution, triggered a mild flurry of curiosity about the lives of one of the most contentious groups in society.
Last year, these women “reported horrific levels of sexual, physical and emotional abuse”, said the charity’s chief executive, Sarah Benson. They were punched in the face, in the stomach, were kicked down stairs, beaten for refusing to have sex with men, were locked in, were refused food, were burned and bitten.
“Women were told by buyers that they were ‘ugly’, ‘not very good’, that they ‘should at least try to look like you’re enjoying it’ while their bodies were used in whatever way the buyer wished,” said Benson. Which means “turning yourself into a public toilet”, in the words of one former prostitute this week.
The notion of a mutually pleasurable, damage-free transaction – as promoted by the industry and supporters of legalisation – sits wildly at odds with the reality of these engagements. Were it not for the wreckage they leave behind, the self-delusion of the average sex buyer would be laughable. Read the full article here
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“Marie agrees that there are women who freely choose prostitution for the money. The problem for those women, she says, is that they discover only in later years how degraded and broken they have become because of their choice.”
I worked in the sex industry in Australia for almost a decade, and this is generally what I experienced and witnessed. In the city I lived in, prostitution was legislated and there was a large amount of legal brothels where a lot of girls worked. Girls aren’t working there against their will, as such, but if anyone thinks this means they are not extremely affected by what they do, you are definitely mistaken.
The problem is that girls get into the industry when they are quite young. I was 18 and I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I didn’t understand the adverse affects, from minor to major, that I will have to deal with for the rest of my life. I often read articles where girls talk about how much fun the sex industry is, and I wonder where on Earth this fun industry is. I never saw a working girl who wasn’t hard or broken by the job. I saw girls come in to a parlour normal, and leave 6 months later completely changed by what she had endured.
When you are in the industry the beating, the degradation, the physical and emotional abuse becomes a way of life until you don’t even think about it anymore. You learn to switch off and this becomes a necessity as the days, months, years go by. There is also often a feeling of being stuck, that you are unable to leave because you aren’t good enough to work anywhere else, or you have been a working girl for so long that you have no resume to speak of and wouldn’t be hired for anything anyway.
Also, a huge, huge percentage of girls I met when I was working came from a history of sexual abuse, both as children and as adults. This might give you an idea of the collective mindset of the industry. And just because I worked in legal brothels, don’t think I didn’t witness and experience everything listed in the article. I did, and I experienced assaults that are far worse than what was covered there. It would make your jaw drop to hear of what supposedly normal, suit-wearing family men are capable of when they think there are no consequences.
I am a firm believer that there is no such thing as a healthy, happy sex industry. The normalisation of it in the media and in fiction is disgusting and we all need to be held accountable for what we allow to happen to our young girls. Every single time I read anything positive about prostitution I want to scream because it’s irresponsible and, in my lengthy experience, completely false. I hope to one day live in a world where our gender is treated with the love and respect it deserves and this will never happen while the sex industry still stands.
Just wanted to support ‘Ex Workers’ comment. Hope you are ok and I am with you on this.
Warning: Massive sarcasm to follow:
Oh, come on Melinda – you don’t seriously expect us to believe that women working the sex industries are completely empowered by those choices, do you?! I mean, seriously – having people purchase the use of your body as though you were a living, breathing, thinking, feeling blow up doll so that they can disregard the ‘thinking, feeling’ aspect of your humanity sounds completely empowerfulling to me! I mean, those women – THEY’RE the ones with all the power. Those poor men, with their poor hard-ons and their inability to demonstrate any sort of humanity to women who are working in these industries – THEY’RE the *real* victims here, you just can’t see it!
Ex-worker, thank you so much for sharing your experience. I hope that you’re healing, and are supported.
Ex-worker, thanks for sharing here. Really important that people hear the truth.
I had a different experience to Ex-worker, above. This is probably because I entered the industry as a 32 year old woman who had had plenty of experience with all kinds of relationships, and I never worked in a brothel or for an agency, I worked independently. I agree that sex work is very not suited to young women, though sadly it is usually young women that clients clamour for, and usually the most abusive and horrible clients, too. Before I became a sex worker, I was never abused in my life beyond the random street harassment nearly every women encounters. As a sex worker, I was never assaulted. I left the industry basically because I was bored and found it tedious to pretend to be nice to people I’d only just met on such a regular basis!! I want to emphasise that this is a pretty privileged position; I was not forced to do anything and I had the ability to work independently and the choice to leave or not leave the industry, and years of experience in being assertive at people and no mental health issues which might have lessened my ability to cope. I knew a few women who really did like the work and like me they were older and worked for themselves, and we are in a tiny minority.
I am not out to claim the sex industry is some fun-fest and that all sex workers love their jobs, because this is patently untrue. Just that not 100% of sex workers are abused, downtrodden, exploited; I don’t appreciate being told I must be in denial if I say I didn’t have a bad time — I have had other non-sex work jobs which were genuinely horrible. Like I said though, myself and other women from similar situations are a privileged minority and usually the only voices the media wants to hear. On the occasions when I have spoken to people about my time as a sex worker, I try to use that to emphasise that it was a rare experience. I remember one instance where a few sex workers I knew were interviewed for a feature article in a newspaper and they tried to steer the conversation back to “we’re lucky and we need to use our position to help the women who are being abused, etc, help us help them” but the published story was all “sex work is fun for everyone”. Sigh.
I don’t think sex industry laws in Australia are good. They make it hard for women to actually work safely independently or in a co-operative fashion, like making it illegal for two women to work in the same location without registering as a “brothel” and paying tens of thousands of dollars in fees and meeting regulations. It’s like the laws were dreamed up by people who thought “ok, we will grudgingly allow legal sex work only we will punish those dirty whores while we’re at it”. Gee, who do you think those people were. Personally I would not shed a tear if brothels and agencies were banned and getting rid of those who make a profit off others’ sex work would cut out a hell of a lot of exploitation and abuse. Allowing women to work together as a cooperative would increase safety. At the moment in most states you can’t even hire a receptionist or security guard to work with you.
I like Sweden’s laws, where it is not illegal to be a sex worker, though it is illegal to buy sex or be a third party profiting from it. I’m not sure how it’s going but it seems like it would help lessen the fear abused or trafficked women have of coming forward because the police can’t arrest /them/, and at least in theory the abusers and exploiters would be more easily prosecuted.
Hi Other Ex-Worker, apologies if this sounds harsh but your comments above are the exact type of irresponsibility I am talking about. If you really did enjoy prostituting your body for the sexual gratification of strangers then good for you, but understand that this is not the general experience. (I would also say if you never encountered abuse or degradation you are lucky, not privileged, because private workers are just as susceptible to this as any other kind of workers. I am fully aware of the sex worker hierarchy, but in my opinion it’s all a bit bogus – the job is the same no matter where you’re performing it.)
I encourage you to consider that each time you talk about the sex industry a positive way you are normalising it for others – men are thinking that it is positive for women and women are thinking it might be a good job for them to try.
I would implore you as an Australian female to invest yourself in the future of the young women of our country and not steer them, however inadvertently, towards the sex industry because, despite what you say, it is not a healthy job for women and ALL women, of every race and nationality, deserve a better life than that.
Ex-woker, that is what I was saying – that my experience is not the general experience. Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. I don’t go around enthusing that my time working was all empowering or something and encouraging young women to get in to it. It was a job, /I/ didn’t find it degrading, just boring mostly, but I am well aware that’s not how the general experience goes and, as I said, the times I have spoken about my experience, I make this clear to people. It is not irresponsible to state honestly what my experience was.
Perhaps I can make something of a comparison: One of the few anti drug campaigners whose message I thought actually effective was a former heroin addict who pointed out that the anti-drug message is often undermined by only ever talking about the awful aspects of taking drugs. When some young person goes and tries that drug, and experiences euphoria and so on, it makes it easy for them to dismiss the entire anti-drugs message because they’ve only ever been told by adults, teachers, etc, that drugs are terrible for you. Which they probably will be at some stage, but until then… So when she spoke to young people, she told them that yeah, your first or first dozen hits might well be effing fantastic, but it’s probably not going to end well. Her honesty was appreciated.
I’m not on speaking tours on My Life as a Hooker. I’ve spoken about my experience to less than five people (and now the internet, so…) and to so few not because I am ashamed but for the same reason I don’t talk about how I used to work at KFC when I was 15, it’s not interesting. I sincerely doubt anyone is going to get the idea that sex work is some kind of great job from what I have to say, as opposed to articles written by journalists who only want to hear about the “empowerful” Belle du Jour fantasy. Here, have a free message from me, young people of Australia: Don’t get into sex work, it will more than likely be Not Good; and when someone like me who didn’t even have it so rough tells you that, it means you should listen very hard to those who did. The money will probably be fun at first, and possibly even some of the sex, but it’s likely not going to last for you. Not going there in the first place is the best idea.
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