Prostitution Narratives

Stories of Survival in the Sex Trade

Caroline Norma, Melinda Tankard Reist

• Publisher: Spinifex Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781742199832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

For too long the global sex industry and its vested interests have dominated the prostitution debate repeating the same old line that ‘sex work' is just like any job. In large sections of the media, academia, public policy, government and the law, the sex industry has had its way. Little is said of the damage, violation, suffering, and torment of prostitution on the bodies and minds of mostly women and children, nor of the deaths, suicides and murders that are routine in the sex industry. Prostitution Narratives: Stories of Survival in the Sex Trade refutes the lies and debunks the myths spread by the industry through the lived experiences of women who have survived prostitution. These disturbing stories give voice to formerly prostituted women who explain why they entered the sex trade. They bravely and courageously recount their intimate experiences of harm and humiliation at the hands of sex buyers, pimps and traffickers and reveal their escape and emergence as survivors. Edited by Caroline Norma and Melinda Tankard Reist, Prostitution Narratives documents the reality of prostitution revealing the cost to the lives of women and girls. Prostitution Narratives: Stories of Survival in the Sex Trade will strengthen and support the global campaign to abolish prostitution, provide solidarity and solace to those who bear its scars, and hopefully help women and girls exit this dehumanising industry.

TESTIMONIES

Saved by Horses

Linda

My name is Linda. I am employed in the thoroughbred racehorse industry in Australia, as an exercise rider. I am 37 and a recovering addict with occasional lapses. I thank my love of horses for saving me, as I tried many ways of exiting the sex industry and none offered me any hope at all – none of the rehabs or the 12-step groups. I began getting fit in my late 20s. I ran and went to the gym as a way to try to rebuild my health after years of stress, depression and addiction.

I was a prostitute from 18 to 28. I worked in many segments of the industry – from brothels, where I would have to pay the pimps and owners half my money and work very much on their terms – to high-class escort work, where I built my own webpage and worked on my terms, meaning I did not pay anyone to look after me and I kept all the money. Like most women starting out in prostitution, I had to begin at the bottom and learn in order to make the experience survivable, as I could not have lasted long otherwise. The work is very hard. I often saw 12 to 15 men per eight-hour shift. There are drugs everywhere and you are exposed to a very fast-paced, adrenaline-filled environment. The money becomes your sole focus, and most of the women I worked with were addicted to something. At 18 I was addicted to money and freedom. Later I became addicted to cosmetic surgery in an effort to stay young, and after that to hard drugs, which I injected. Being infected with Hepatitis C at 28 meant my retirement from the industry and complete breakdown. I could not work knowing I had a virus that could be spread (I have since received treatment and am no longer infected).

I was affected by depression at about 11, as my family had disintegrated, and my mum had remarried a man I didn’t like. My stepfather watched pornography, and I remember being exposed to porn that I was aroused by, but being so young I was confused and became sick and depressed. My stepfather was abusive and my deepest fear was that he would kill me. My mother basically left my younger brother and me with him after the wedding, as she was not around much. I hated the girls’ school I attended, though my marks were high. I noticed that the only way I could fit in was if I looked ‘hot’. I started wearing a lot of makeup. When I looked sexually attractive my stepfather was less likely to hit me or my brother, so makeup became my mask, my persona. I wore heavy eye makeup and looked anything but myself, dyeing my hair bleach blonde at 14. I did all I could to get out of my house and escape my famiIy. It was hell being at home.

During my time in brothels I asked many of my working girl friends about their childhoods and many were similar to mine: broken, with mum or dad gone, abusive but often not extreme. Looking back on my adolescence I was in a lot of emotional pain. I had little support, no one to turn to, and these realities made me very strong, a trait necessary for surviving in the sex industry. Girls who aren’t habituated to pain don’t last in the sex industry. They might last a month or two and leave, but the women who start young, and stay, have all had a hard time and learn to live with it strategically. I remember being really judgmental and turned off by girls using drugs in brothels, as I never used drugs during my first two years in them and felt superior to other girls – I was educated and not on drugs. In fact, if you had asked how I had gotten into the sex industry, I would have told you it was MY CHOICE! I was a very good liar and able to act like I enjoyed sex, even though 99% of the sex was disgusting to me; sex with unattractive, cruel, joyless and married men.

In the rooms, you have to pretend to like the sex. The brothels are so competitive that it is not enough to just lie there. To get clients to return, every girl has to not just have sex, but to really pretend to like the whole experience. When I started I thought I could just lie there until the whole thing was over. But you quickly learn to pretend, usually by your second or third time. Also men cum quicker if you put on the act. I think this is important because it proves that it’s not real sex. How can you really enjoy sex with strangers 10 times in a row? The most common physical experience is pain. The best way to avoid pain is to use lube and act and make the client cum quickly.

The only thing I looked forward to was the money and the hope of getting away from them, taking off my makeup and being free.

I got my first shift in a brothel half by accident. I was 18 and had been accepted into law at university. I had left home, just been fired from a job, and was living in a small cheap bedsitter looking through the paper for jobs when I came across the ad for ‘models’ . . . offering ‘$2000 per week’. At the interview I was amazed at how beautiful the place was, with massive statues and spas. My family survived on social security payments, so I envied nice clean beautiful places. They showed me all the beautiful rooms where it became obvious I would be having sex with strangers. I was not a virgin, I’d had plenty of sexual experiences. Not boyfriends really, just sex with boys, but always a letdown. Like so many other girls I secretly thought, “Why not get paid for it?”

My experience of sex with boys before the brothel was always awkward. Many times I got myself into situations where I was going to get raped anyway and so had sex. Many of these guys didn’t want to use condoms. I learnt how to do sex through watching porn. I looked like the attractive women in porn, so I knew that you had to moan. I knew how to pretend, since I felt numb and dead sexually around men. I could simply act. I knew that women in porn were acting because penetration had always been painful for me, and I knew I was normal! I slept with three men on my first shift. It was humiliating, they were so much older than me. However, none of them objected to condoms which was good. I was very young and attractive and that helped me have some power in the rooms. When you’re young, you are always popular . . . really popular! This experience was in Canberra, where the brothels are very quiet. When I later travelled to Sydney and Melbourne I saw that many brothels weren’t so quiet. I would sometimes have a line of men waiting to see me; the brothels would be packed and there were sometimes 30 clients. I worked at the Gateway Club on Parramatta Road, and also at the Penthouse and Tiffany’s, among the busiest brothels in Sydney. The going rate was about $150 per hour (that was my cut) so I could very easily make $800–$900 per shift.

I later worked at the supposedly upmarket Madam Fleiss where the pay is higher. But in my experience escort work is very dangerous, as apart from a phone number and a credit card, you have no idea who you are going to be meeting. Also the owner was a complete perve, he didn’t give a shit about the girls, and he had rules like you have to kiss the client and do oral without a condom. Sometimes when I was getting undressed he would take a pic of me and post it on his website. The more risks you took at Madam Fleiss, the more you got paid. So if you provided a basic service like I did, you’d get a smaller cut but you’d get an extra few hundred dollars for agreeing to sex without a condom.

I guess I learnt to condition sex to money. After that first night in Canberra, I didn’t go back for six months. I went to university, got a boyfriend. He wanted me to watch porn with him. I started to hate him, my depression was intense, and I just felt used and like a sex object for everyone. My family had heard of me having worked in a brothel and I got a reputation for being a ‘hooker’ even though I was at university studying. That first experience tarnished me in the eyes of others. It would not have mattered whether I did well at uni, I would always be thought of as a prostitute it seemed. I broke up with my boyfriend and started going out with a second guy, who stole my money one night and left me homeless. It was at that point that I started to think about going to Sydney to get some more money. I was homeless and desperate and scared. I drove to Sydney, answered a new ad in the paper and began working in busier parlours. The atmosphere was fast and I met many girls who were really nice and the brothel itself was always beautiful. I often stayed at the houses of other working girls, where I was slowly introduced to ways of coping. I took medication for Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and sleeping pills. I earned $4000 in two weeks. I bought a stereo system for my car, later a sports car. I was able to save $20,000 in about two to three months at the brothels. This was starting to become normal.

You can imagine how addictive the money is and how a normal job like a cleaner, nurse, or even being a receptionist would be unappealing to someone trying to leave the industry but cannot adjust to a comparatively low income. Also some women are addicted to the attention. I know I was. I loved being picked over everyone else when I was young and post-surgery. That’s why I think the legal age for prostitution should be raised to 25, not because I think it should be legal at all, but because young girls have absolutely no life skills on exiting when they start young. Eighteen is too young because you have not yet experienced life and you really can’t make such huge decisions at such a young age, there are also no exit programs for women in the sex industry who want to get out.

I liked that none of the men could see the real me. I was always an aberration of myself, wearing tonnes of makeup and acting sexy, to get the bookings over other girls. I liked that I was very popular and that other girls were jealous of me. I liked that I could always demand that the client wear a condom. What became very obvious was that I had to stay young and beautiful to get booked. I noticed the older girls and the Asians would often get abused and cry after their bookings. One of my friends was an attractive 36-year-old Australian woman and she got choked in a booking. Her client had also shat in the spa; it was terrible. I had a lot of power only because I was young and pretty. The guys can cum quicker when you’re young, they feed on vulnerability. I slept with hundreds of men in those first few months and I don’t remember any of the faces. I recall bursting into tears a few times because I was tired, sore and over it. I would return home to Canberra when I couldn’t take it anymore, and then return when I had more energy. The nature of the work depletes your energy. You have to pretend to be sexy while you are in pain. I was always afraid of getting raped anally, as men, especially the young drunk ones, would try and slip it in.

The violent porn broadcast throughout most brothels put us all in danger. A lot of men wanted re-enactments straight from pornography. It was harder to get booked unless you agreed to re-enact porn and offer anal. Most of the gang sex is requested by military men and by Lebanese and Chinese men, but rarely white Australian men, except the military! What people don’t understand is that the foreign men have been exposed to heaps of degrading Western porn and they think Western women are asking for it since the Western men also abuse Western women in porn. With regard to popular American porn, one girl told me that a lot of the gang scenes are by military also, they call the scene a ‘mission’ and take heaps of Viagra and cocaine to last, and if the girl is lucky she will get Xanax or heroin to help with the pain.

What has always surprised me about men who pay for sex is that they are often physically unattractive, yet they feel no shame in taking off their clothes, where I would only be bought on the condition that my body was perfect. They would take off their clothes and just lie there . . . so it was always up to me to initiate the sex. I developed a routine that felt safe. I would first massage them . . . then put the condom on, then I would suck the condom, then they would have sex with me. But doing this routine eight or nine or ten times is exhausting. You are trying to hold back everything that makes you human, like saying, “I’m not enjoying this, I don’t like you and I don’t like being here.” A lot of them seem hypnotised, like they don’t know that the whole thing isn’t real. A lot of them say ‘I love you’; a lot seem normal, but not many realise that you are there because you were initially desperate and then you just got lost in the money or drugs or whatever. It’s inconvenient for them to think about our circumstances.

Most men (you would be surprised how ordinary they are) are married, but you do see a lot of military men, police and even priests. I saw priests, particularly in Canberra, and in private work, which takes place during the day, not at night like the brothels. I saw about ten priests in Canberra and Sydney. One would tell me he ‘forgave me’ after we had sex! Police clients were common, and they were always aggressive and self-righteous.

A fair percentage of private clients in Canberra were newsreaders, politicians, public servants, and embassy men. The politicians and media people had a thing for anal sex and little girl role play. With diplomats their people would call me (they’d solicit me through my newspaper ads) and offer me big money if I agreed to meet them somewhere and have a chat. So I would meet maybe the handler or bodyguard at a café. Once we had done some small talk, the handler would call the official and say that I was “OK, young enough, pretty enough.” The guard would tell me that I was to call the client by a different name and I had to sign a disclosure saying I would not talk of this incident publicly. On the night of the escort I would be driven to an embassy and told of a special route that I had to follow to gain access to the building. Sometimes I was literally crawling over balconies and through windows to get into the bedroom.

I had one booking at Madam Fleiss, the guy was unshaven and really rude and disgusting, he wanted anal, and I refused to do it, so he called another girl, and she said, “Oh my god it’s [name redacted]” . . . I had no idea who that even was, I was 19, but he was a complete dick. To this day I can’t watch his movies.

I had to sleep with many disabled men. I was working with four other friends at the Gateway Club in Sydney. Management told me that if I didn’t take this one client who was physically and mentally disabled, I would be asked to leave the establishment. They threatened to segregate me from my friends if I didn’t see him. The client had been waiting a few nights to see me, his carer would wheel him in as he had no legs. I’d try to make out I was too busy to see him but management threatened me. I felt sick in the room having to get on top of a man who was clearly mentally disabled, plus he was really physically disfigured. I guess I felt like I was a perpetrator of sorts because I couldn’t really understand if he wanted this interaction, he seemed too mentally disabled to be engaged by the experience. I can’t even remember if he came. I have slept with many men with missing limbs, but it’s worse when they are mentally disabled, and there are a lot of these sorts of men who are brought in by their carers.

I had a pimp rape me in Melbourne. He pushed me into a room and stuck his penis in me without a condom. I was so angry about it. I drove back from Melbourne and had a car accident that night. But there always seemed to be another reason why I had to return to the sex industry. What I didn’t realise, because you can’t see it when you’re going through the experience, is that it would ultimately be impossible for me to get out of the sex industry. I had become conditioned to money equaling sex; I had become used to earning well over $700 per shift; I had never worked for a normal wage and I was only 20. I could only work for a few weeks or months before I’d get exhausted and have to go back home or back to a boyfriend’s place to have time out of the brothels. The only way you can really last in brothels is to do drugs. I experimented with cocaine and uppers many times, and they did give you the energy to get through those shifts.

At 20 I was a regular user of valium to keep my anxiety at bay. I was also unable to sleep a lot of the time. And some brothels required you to work during your period. Doctors and prostitution go hand in hand. Brothels often have their own doctor to send girls to. A girl in the industry can basically get whatever drugs she wants off a doctor, like Duromine for energy and weight loss, and also Xanax and morphine are dead easy. There are many products you can buy for vaginal pain, like numbing cream. Most girls use a combination of numbing creams. The best numbing agent is Xanax and Valium, with alcohol. I’ve seen many women spaced out on heroin, the ultimate number if you can try and hide the effects from clients. I’ve never used heroin, but if I’d been forced to stay I would have. Xanax worked the best for me and it’s taken me ten years to slowly wean myself off it.

Time between clients was spent perfecting makeup, shaving and sometimes talking to the other girls, who were usually pretty busy. The few times I did try to get a ‘normal’ job were hard. I started hairdressing, but when the other hairdressers found out what I used to do, I had to quit. I also started my own business selling wigs and hairpieces, but retail would exhaust me quickly, and I found myself swinging between prostitution and retail. I also had bad panic attacks in my own shop and would be forced to leave. I was using pills to sleep and sometimes I’d snort speed for energy. Looking back I think everything I had to do in the industry was causing me health problems.

I opened a small business at 22. I was having a lot of problems dealing with people. I couldn’t concentrate, I’d get panicky and I started using pills like Xanax and Valium to deal with anything that stressed me out. I was starting to feel like I just couldn’t deal with reality and I was working a little bit in the private market in Canberra, seeing clients. I could charge sometimes $500 per client, and when my website went up I could sometimes charge $800. The only difference was the marketing of myself – I was doing the exact same routine as I did in the brothels. I kept having severe relationship breakdowns, with men stealing my money. These men acted like pimps. I guess I used them as body guards to look after me. Even in motel rooms, I’d have a boyfriend stay and pay him to look out for me. I began to see that you could make a lot more money privately, and you didn’t h...