Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (22 page)

she will be assailed by intrusive memories of physically similar_acts within prostitution. This damages 26 Relayed in 'The Next Step Initiative', Ruhama research report on barriers affecting women in prostitution, Ireland, 2005. her ability to be intimate with her partner. I have had this happen in all of my intimacies with men since leaving prostitution. Sometimes he'll put his hand on your breasts, or his lips to your nipple, or his hand on your thigh, and you'll be nearly overcome with a flood of unwelcome and uninvited memories, each of them mirroring what you are now experiencing~ They don't knock on the door of your mind, these memories; they let themselves in. You cannot prevent them, and this is one example of the lasting damage of prostitution in the lives of the women it touches. An example of this would be the way I experienced a near inability to give one of my post-prostitution partners fellatio. For a good chunk of that relationship, I just could not go down on that man. It began as a faint sense of unwillingness that would have faded away on its own if it had been allowed to. Instead it rapidly escalated in response to his constant persistence. I felt trapped. It was, in fact, very little to do with his penis and everything to do with the feeling of having to; the feeling of not getting a say in the matter; the feeling of having no choice. I'd imagine having the emotions of my prostitution life recalled will always be traumatic enough to provoke these sorts of sexual shut -downs, but, as I have since discovered, they are sometimes avoidable. After that experience (and mainly because of it) I told my next lover that I had been abused in that way, and that consequently I found it very difficult to give fellatio if I felt compelled to do it. He told me that was all he needed to know and that he'd never pressure me on that point. He never did. The issue ofblow-jobs never even came up until I approached him, and when I did it was out of the pure desire to pleasure him. It was such a relief to experience again the deep arousal I had occasionally felt during that sexual act, and I know it could only have happened because the man I was with was patient, caring and understanding. It could only have happened, in other words, with a man whose behaviour did not imbue in me the feeling of having to. It takes a measure of maturity for a man to know how to bring out the best sexually in a woman whose body has been abused. I was lucky to become involved with a man like that. Thankfully, I continue to find men erotic and arousing. For me, there is nothing more sexually seductive than watching a beautiful man sleep. I have had it asked of me: might this be true because the fear of danger is negated for me while a man is sleeping? I don't think so; or rather if that forms any part ofit I think it is a very small part. I've always felt that there was some hidden vulnerability in masculinity that becomes exposed when a man is sleeping, and this is both deeply alluring and endearing to me. It is alluring on a sexual level and endearing on an emotional one, and because these two things combine here, sexual arousal and emotional connection, I know that my sexuality and capacity for relationships has not been damaged beyond repair. There are big hurdles though, before a relationship can even begin. Firstly, forming the wrong relationships out of a simple lack of self-love is one of the major stumbling blocks for formerly prostituted women; I have experienced this is my own life and seen it in the lives ofothers. My first post-prostitution relationship was with a man who I was deeply in love with, but who could not have a functional relationship due to his chronic alcoholism. I persisted in trying to make things work, in trying to make something healthy flourish with someone who was simply too sick to be in a relationship, and I cut lumps out of myself emotionally in the effort, before I eventually walked away. The second of my post-prostitution relationships exemplifies how formerly prostituted women are drawn to damaging emotional situations probably more clearly than the first. He was simply incapable of receiving love, never mind returning it. The result was a relationship that was relentlessly emotionally traumatic. We spent several years together but any expression of loyalty or devotion to me would have been to capitulate to me, in his strange and unfathomable mentality. I was consistently placed last in his life, in ways that were publicly degrading and demeaning and seemed almost designed to be so. There was a consistency of contempt that is sickening to me now, more in the memory of my accepting it than anything to do with its being levelled against me. There were enough of these incidents to compose a small book in itself, and ofcourse they are not worthy of that attention. I was affronted beyond belief and ripped my own mind to shreds trying to make sense out of these situations, all the while I could not or would not grasp that he was simply emotionally violent. Moving out-that was his favourite thing. We only lived together for eighteen months but I could not count the times he moved out. Folding clothes, throwing books into bags, stacking letters and papers, packing ornaments; he loved the ritual. Every action that communicated 'I'm leaving you' had both a deeper message and a real objective. The message: you're not worth staying with. The objective: cause maximum possible hurt. Itwasawonderweevergottothepointofmovinginatall,aspretending I did not exist was another favourite of his, practised with dedicated regularity. After every single row he would not call for one week, two weeks, three. He dragged it out for five weeks on one occasion, after I'd dared to question a smutty message from an Australian woman that had popped up on his computer screen. When he eventually decided to make his reappearance in my life, he questioned, with genuine perplexity, why I had lost twenty pounds in weight. Weeks later he mentioned, quite casually, as though there was nothing in the world wrong with it, that he had contacted the sister of his Australian laureate, who he was also exchanging emails with. I said nothing, and was ashamed of myself for saying nothing. Tolerating contempt is shame-inducing, but I see today why I kept silent. I couldn't go through another five weeks of his manipulation by withholding. He practised it with ruthlessness and regularity and I responded to it, for about the first half ofour time together, by obscuring my very self; by superimposing a meek and agreeable character over my own, like a child trying to be pleasing in order to avoid a beating. Eventually instinct began to draw me back towards my sense of self and then followed the most serious tremors in the fault line our relationship was built on. I simply would not accept being left to sit alone, wondering what sort of relationship this was supposed to be, while he was out five nights a week. He could not bear his interpretation of my emerging self, or the requirement for basic respect that came with it, which he translated as 'being dictated to: I ask myself now how could I have gone back, again and again, knowing as I did, better than anyone, the deliberate emotional cruelty I would be subjected to? How do we rationalise an internal acceptance of emotional abuse? The bog-standard 'I loved him' is embarrassingly inadequate here. It is more truthful, and so of course more essentially painful, to admit it had little to do with my feelings for him. The aching truth is sometimes freeing and the truth here is that that relationship was only sparked by my love for him. It was sustained by my lack of love for myself. So that is one of the damages of prostitution-you've been trained to regard yourself as dirt, so you don't expect love from those who are supposed to love you. As skewed as your mind may be, you hold onto something of logic, and something inside yourself asks, who would find something worth loving in a piece of dirt? So that is what we formerly prostituted women sometimes do; we find ourselves in toxic relationships with others who slowly poison them in an active or passive aggressive manner and we often do a good deal of the poisoning ourselves. We doom our own relationships by entering the wrong ones to begin with and we torture ourselves by being drawn to situations where we recreate the familiar feelings of being alone, insignificant and disrespected. When those feelings intensified in me to the point where I could no longer stand them I responded in the one way that was sure to accelerate our demise: I drank like the day before Prohibition.. Of course you move on and you learn and it is unlikely that I will find myself dealing with those dynamics again. Certain red flags are identifiable to me now, but the point is they would have been identifiable to a woman with a healthier view ofherself to begin with. A woman with a healthy view of herself does not spend years of her life with somebody she thinks is her best friend, only to discover that he hasn't behaved like any kind of friend. Looking back now I see why that relationship was always going to end. When you long for commitment and devotion, the evidential manifestations of love, and are wretchedly disappointed by their absence, there is no way forward from there that I can see or imagine. And yet there was no accepting that then, because that I didn't just love him: I adored him. So there are all these hindrances and hurdles before a formerly prostituted woman can even begin a relationship, and if she has found someone with whom she can form a worthwhile bond, that is not the end of the obstacles either. Telling him about your past is nearly the hardest part. Your throat constricts with fear. The words feel like tangible things; big lumps of words you must heave up to where your Adam's apple would be if you had one. And you have one today. You can feel it in your throat like a tightly compressed collection of rocks, digging into you until you've managed to choke it out, that collection of words, and then you do, and then comes the hardest part: the look in his eyes. Disillusionment. Simply that, and from that everything else grows. Disappointment, now, in his eyes. The love draining out of them. The hurt trickling in. The rapidly growing conviction that no, this is not the woman I thought she was, and in you there is just the building of panic and desperation and the awful urge to cry out: 'I'm still here, I'm still me, and I AM the woman you thought I was!' But you don't say that, because you know there's no point saying it, and you look at the floor because you can't stand to look in his eyes any more. This is the truth about sharing your past with the man who you want to share your future. Chapter 25 '""-'

IAFTERSHOCKS

The effects ofprostitution abuse have been found to resemble post-traumatic stress disorder. 'THE NEXT STEP INITIATIVE', RUHAMA RESEARCH REPORT ON BARRIERS AFFECTING WOMEN IN PROSTITUTION, IRELAND, 2005 D uring the writing of this book, while enquiring into ancestral names as possible pseudonyms for it, my aunt (who I was talking to) told me that she didn't want her mother's maiden name on this book, but that I could use her paternal grandmother's name. She didn't say this outright at first; I could see that she had a problem with my suggestion of using her mother's maiden name. I thought perhaps she didn't think the name suited as well as the other one we were discussing. This was either down to an uncharacteristic naivete or the effects of the two glasses of wine I'd just drank, either way, I hadn't seen it coming when I pressed her on it and she responded, softly but firmly: 'I don't want my mother's name on that book'. Immediately I understood. 'Oh; I said, 'that's OK. That's under. standable.' 'Is it?' she shot straight back. 'Yes; I said, 'it is'. And it was. Obviously she hadn't wanted to hurt me. I had to drag it out of her and I could see from her need for reassurance that she felt guilty about that reluctance on her part, but I understood it. I understood it better than she could have known and she had no reason to feel badly about that. A person will not comfortably watch any connection, however tenuous, be made between prostitution and a woman they love. She did not want her mother's memory tainted by an association between the name of her birth and the world of prostitution, and that reaction is so natural and so ordinary that in fact I don't know what I was thinking of when I made the suggestion. So yes, her position was understandable to me. It was as understandable as it gets. I also thought it was interesting to note the ease with which she gave her blessing to an association between prostitution and a name that came from her father's line. His memory, it seemed to me, was not corruptible by such an association. Being male, it seemed, protected him from such an outcome. It put him beyond that sort of reproach. This too is understandable given that the shame of prostitution is overwhelmingly and unquestioningly apportioned to females. It is understandable given that people make a very clear link between prostitution and the pollution of a woman's sexual self, however unaware they may be about the instinctual association they have made. I thought about all these things that night while talking to my aunt. And it has just hit me now that I have to worry that, though I have not used her name, my aunt may be upset that I have mentioned her mother here at all. I have only done so in order to make what I believe to be a very relevant point and all I can do now is hope that it doesn't anger or upset her. So here is yet another tremor-the anticipation of discord prostitution may yet cause in my life. These an~ your aftershocks, these realisations that come plop plop plopping into your mind and your life like pebbles into a pond. You know why they are there, but that does nothing to prevent the ripples forming on the surface of the water. Sometimes all you can do is observe them. The dictionary definition of the word 'aftershock' is: 'a smaller earthquake following the main shock of a large earthquake'. Therefore the term is not entirely appropriate here. Post-prostitution aftershocks are sometimes more consciously painful, sometimes more acute, and always more prolonged than the main event. There is a reason for this: we become so adept at camouflaging our reality from ourselves that it is sometimes only in the aftermath that a woman can fully engage with the proportion and the nature of the original trauma. For me, it has been in the retrospective processing of prostitution that I have been able to face the fullness of its numerous individual traumas and have come to a true and thorough consciousness of the depth and gravity of it as an expenence. Experiencing the aftershocks ofprostitution is to experience the act of dissociation in reverse. It is uniquely painful, mentally and emotionally. There is an element of the overwhelming contained in the experience. Recently I described this psychological assault to a friend, this sense of being overwhelmed. I said that I couldn't quite put it into words for her on the spot, without taking a long pause for thinking, but that I would try to illustrate it by way of an analogy. I told her that I imagine myself as a woman who is out hunting on the African plains. It is pitch dark, night, and all can be seen only in its outlines against the night sky. I am holding a hunting rifle and looking for my quarry; a medium-sized beast, shorter than me, but dangerous and strong, like a hyena or a wild boar. I feel a presence, turn, and look. Here is the beast at my shoulder. It is an elephant. This describes the time when the enormity of prostitution hits you, and you realise there is more lost to you than is possible to process at that point. Dissociation once concealed the fullness of prostitution's nature from you, because that was necessary, but it has !llso built a barrier between you and truth which must now be dismantled. The process is painful, but utterly necessary. Just like any other form of sex abuse, the true essence of the prostitution experience must be understood before it can be overcome. Prostitution is a particularly cruel form ofsexual abuse because, though sexual abuse that manifests in other forms (particularly incest) also hammers home the message, 'there is no sex abuse going on here', only in prostitution is this message still respected after the facts have been uncovered. The silencing voice of prostitution abuse speaks with great conviction, and much of the world believes it. � Ifthere is no abuse then surely there could be no -requisite for healing? There certainly is a requisite for healing here, but the prostituted must navigate through much more confusion and complication in the seeking of it. Society's misplaced certainties around the essence of prostitution seriously impede the former prostitute from moving on and moving beyond it. Cash is not only a legitimiser and a silencer; it is an obscurer, and a ruthlessly effective one. With her victimisation itself blurred and shrouded in obscurity, how much more difficult is it for a woman to arrive at healing, when her first hurdle is in reaching the understanding that she even deserves it? Conversely, I came to a fuller understanding of prostitution's role in my life by coming to an understanding of my role in prostitution. I-realised that I too had been culpable; I too had hurt people by my involvement in prostitution. It then came to me that because I was guilty of my particular role at any one time others were guilty of their momentary roles also. The lines between the innocent and the guilty can be indistinct and blurred, because society directs them to be, but also because they occasionally switch roles, the innocent and the culpable. I'll explain: any time I deliberately paid special attention, with conversation and an added edge of caring, to a young man who had troubles relating to women, I did so in order that he would continue to return to see me. I did this any time I came across a young man with this feature of character and I did so because they were always shy and non-intimidating and easy to manage; in other words, because they exhibited perfect qualities for a regular client. This was not done out of compassion; it was a falsified mockery of caring. I seldom thought long about what was best and healthy for him, although I instinctively knew what that was. I seldom (although I did occasionally) advise that he find himself a young woman and form a healthy relationship. I seldom pointed out that his fear of rejection was disproportionate to reality. I usually thought only of myself and of the fact that, if I had to see a number of men for money each week, my week would be somewhat less stressful if he featured in it. Was I not culpable, at least of not discouraging emotional frailty, for the sake of satisfying my own requirements? Of course I was, and not in those cases only; as I have already said, every time I engaged in prostitution with a committed man I colluded in hurting some woman somewhere who had done nothing to deserve it. For someone who is well aware that she was involved in a system in which she was victimised, to discover that at times the opposite has also been true comes as a shock. This was one of the aftershocks of prostitution as I experienced it. It was a valuable shock, in that it moved me closer to an understanding of the fullness of prostitution's negative nature. I see now that prostitution was an experience by which my own moral codes were being eroded and in seeing that, I now perceive the true depth of its corruptive and corrosive character. This is not to be mistaken as directing disproportionate blame towards the exploited. It is to be taken as it is meant-that I saw that if my experience were a prism, then negativity shone through every single facet of it. For me, this realisation has been a necessary part of moving on. Some women try to move on from prostitution by erasing its presence from the forefront of their minds, by batting away the memory of it every time it occurs to them. Separation and compartmentalisation are thoroughly necessary in prostitution, as is the suppression of memory; these are old and well-learned habits. It is understandable that women would carry them with them into their post-prostitution lives. After some time, however, these habits either will or will not begin to be discarded, depending on whether or not the formerly prostituted individual continues to use the defence strategy of dissociation in her own life. There was a deconstruction necessary for me here that would not have been possible had I continued to practise my old habit of dissociation, and deconstructing the experience was, for me, a necessary component of healing. I found really examining what had happened to me an essential factor in healing from it. I had to understand it, and to do so I had to fully remember. I had to open the door on a lot of things I really didn't want to. I believe that you can never facilitate the moving beyond any experience by the suppression of its memory, but many women try l j ~