The Face of Oppression

We live in a culture that oppresses women. Many women have internalized that oppression. It is sold us every day on tv and in womens magazines, in social interractions, in common views and myths about gender differences and rape, in the mainstreaming of pornography. We are told how to look, how to dress, how to please our men. We have filled our breasts with silicone, turned our bodies orange, starved ourselves, learned what is expected of us in the bedroom (everything) and waxed our bikini lines to nothing to be what we’re told men want us to be. We now say we do it to make ourselves feel good. We are taught we’re not good enough as we are, we change ourselves and sexually objectify ourselves to be accepted and we say that say we choose it. It makes us feel good: we’ve done what we’re told that we ought to.

Does saying that we choose this make us powerful or powerless? Where do we get our norms and ideals? If the sex industry tells us that when a woman looks a certain way, acts a certain way - always sexually available - and ‘uses’ her sexuality by selling herself, that this is the height of women’s liberation and empowerment, does that make it true? Or have we been conned by a change of goalposts and a change of language?

In such an environment of oppression, is it fair to say, as do those who argue in favour of porn and prostitution, that individual women freely choose to engage in ‘sex work’? The word ‘choice’ implies an even playing field, a number of feasible options to be chosen from, freedom from financial, physical and mental constraints, the possibility to reverse a decision and quit at any time without repercussions. The statistics around porn and prostitution clearly indicate that this is not the case*. What the pro-sex industry lobby term ‘choice’ I call internalised oppression. That’s the very opposite.

       *  See:    www.object.org.uk

                      www.endviolenceagainstwomen.org.uk

                      www.demandchange.org.uk

                      www.catwinternational.org

                      www.avaproject.org.uk/our-resources/statistics/prostitution.aspx

Women In Debt: The Sex Industry Trap

According to the news the number of unemployed women is at its highest level for 25 years. The budget has hit women hard. At times like this, the misinformation women are being constantly sold about ‘sex work’ makes it seem like a tempting option, an easy way to quick money.

Women in Debt (www.womenindebt.co.uk) puts it like this:

‘How far would you go to avoid debt, or to pay off debts you’re struggling to cope with? Shockingly, the answer from some women is ‘all the way’. In summer last year, an American website hit the headlines for offering college students the opportunity to pay off their university debts by dating ‘sugar daddies’ – wealthy older men willing to pay large sums to ‘spend time’ with young ladies. And sadly, the practice now seems to have spread to the UK.

With rising living and rental costs and the introduction of university tuition fees, many female students have resorted to literally selling their bodies to solve their financial problems. From pole dancing and stripping in nightclubs to full-on prostitution, 10% of students now say they know someone who’s funding their time at university through the sex industry.’

Depressingly but rather predictably, the website then went on to say that ‘at least these women have a choice’. A choice? Is it a choice to be driven to sell your body by economic necessity? If there were other options available, would women really be ‘choosing’ this?

Ten years ago, 74% of women cited poverty as the primary motivator for entering prostitution (Melrose, 2002). And ten years ago, it was estimated that around 80,000 women were in prostitution in the UK (Kinnell 1999), both figures likely to have risen and to continue to rise given the economic climate. This should be of real concern, given the common ‘side effects’ of prostitution. 68% of women in prostitution meet the criteria for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in the same range as torture victims and combat veterans undergoing treatment (Ramsey et al 1993). More than half of UK women in prostitution have been raped and/or seriously sexually assaulted. At least three quarters have been physically assaulted (Home Office 2004b). The mortality rate for women in prostitution in London is 12 times the national average (Home Office 2004a).*

The answer is not to ‘make prostitution safer’ or ‘make it legal’ as some would mistakenly argue. There is nothing safe about prostitution, indoors or outdoors. Put it in a pretty room with a nice bedspread and you still have a woman being fucked by stranger after stranger. Making it legal serves only to protect pimps and re-label them as ‘businessmen’. The physical and psychological damage experienced by women in prostitution doesn’t just go away because it’s indoors, or socially acceptable, or deemed to be ‘just another job’. Re-labelling instead makes the harms done to women in prostitution invisible: it takes away the language of reality. We replace the language of economic desperation with the language of choice, replace degradation and abuse with 'work'.

There is no other 'job' like prostitution, and I include in that bracket stripping, lapdancing and pornography as well as escorting, massage parlours and street corners. I know of no other ‘job’ where you are bought (or sold) and treated as a human slave, to be called names and penetrated for the sexual gratification of man after man, told to look like you enjoy it and say it turns you on, having to dissociate from your body simply to get through.

Problem is, for women who have watched ‘Diary of A Call Girl’ and read endless women’s magazines where ‘sex work’ is painted as being not just easy money but empowering and a bit of a thrill, there is a lack of information on which to base a well-informed decision (even supposing a woman is free to choose). As a society, we are grooming girls and women for 'sex work'. The media portrayal of ‘sex work’ has nothing to do with its realities. Every chat show graced by a smiling ‘porn star’, every magazine article or book promoting sex work as liberating and fun (often using the voices of women in sex work) is an advert, a money maker – we are being sold the idea of being sold! Why? Because the porn profiteers, the sex industry profiteers, the guys at the top (not the women used in it) want us to keep on buying it, to keep lining their pockets. The fact that they use the voices of women trapped in it is nothing more than a PR stunt. Since when were you free to bad mouth your employer, particularly when that employer has untold power at his disposal, and you were financially (if not physically or psychologically) dependent? Their voices, yes, but speaking the words given them, not their own, mouthpieces giving credence to an industry which will use them in every possible way - and then throw them away in favour of ‘fresh pussy’.

I have been exited for 5 years and I still struggle everyday with PTSD, with trust, with sleeping and eating and living a normal life. And I am not an aberration as the statistics show. Other exited women I have met tell the same story – the details vary but the ‘side effects’ don’t. Women get in the prostitution trap and accrue damage which serves to keep them there. Poverty is compounded by substance abuse and up to 95% of women in prostitution are problematic drug users, including around 78% heroin users and rising numbers of crack cocaine addicts (Home Office 2004a).* Not something you hear talked about a lot in all the pro-sex industry hot air being constantly churned out, but a reality. Prostitution hurts and drink and drugs help make it bearable, help numb you out, but keep you trapped there, strapped for cash.

No one is as much the object of myth, of fear of ridicule and of hatred as the prostitute. People talk about the ‘oldest profession’ (as if that excused woman hating!), ‘choice’, ‘liberation of sexuality’ but it’s just so much talk. Ask a woman in the industry if she enjoys it and she’ll tell you she does, because she has to. It is unsafe for her to do otherwise, the people who surround her (but out of sight) – her ‘manager’, her ‘madam’, her ‘pimp’ – will not let her say different. And to survive what happens to you, you live in denial anyway. You can’t acknowledge the damage, can’t acknowledge the danger until you’re out and safe, and even then it’s hard to face something so incredibly painful.

If you’re lucky enough to exit prostitution, and not become another statistic, someone else who died there, you have to face an unpalatable truth:

I was bought

Men, ugly men, fat men, smelly men, sadistic men, old men, young men, angry men, sleazy men touched me, whispered sick little fantasies in my ear and leered at me and fucked me and stared at me, had one over me

And it hurt

And I had to smile and say I loved it and please do all those sordid things you just said because, ah, baby, you make me cum

And that body was me

And that body is me

And that voice was mine but the words weren’t, they were lines given me, that I had to say in an attempt to stay safe, another dignity taken from me

And it doesn’t matter if I was using a working name because he was looking at me when he said it and touching me when he said it

And when he went away and laughed about it with his friends and looked at the pictures on his mobile it was me

Not too easy to come to terms with. You’re in for a lot of self-hatred and body issues and PTSD if not addiction problems. Being prostituted changes everything: the effects are long term and some irreversible. You can never look at the world quite the same way, look at people quite the same way because you know what they’re capable of. You know what men are capable of and you know there’s a whole army of people out there willing to defend to the hilt the ‘right’ of women to be treated just as you were because they do not understand, or will not understand, what it means for a woman to be bought and sold, an object to be wanked over and then walked away from.

The statistics remain for the most part hidden, the realities for the most part hidden, drowned out by the omnipresent background hum of the sex-industry. But I've found my voice. I had to say I liked it then but now I’m free to tell the truth. I am one of a growing number of voices of women who have been used and discarded by the sex industry who are joining forces and putting the truth out there because it’s vital that women know the realities of prostitution. And given the economic climate and its effect on women, it’s a matter of urgency. The doorway to quick and easy cash? More like the doorway to hell.

* for statistics see www.object.org.uk/the-prostitution-facts

On Choice: Invisible Cages and Language Traps

It seems so simple when they say it, so reasonable when they say it. If he hits her, she should leave him, and if she doesn't, that's her choice and her problem. If she didn't like what they did to her in pornography, she wouldn't be smiling and saying fuck me harder, and she wouldn't choose to be in it. If she didn't make good money in prostitution (include escorting and lapdancing - the same thing) she wouldn't choose to do it.

Choice.

There it is, that little word, so small and seemingly innocuous. A word bandied about freely and unthinkingly with regards to the abuse of women. Such a killer to the spirit of women trapped in violence, in being sold! That little word 'choice' holds the key to society washing its hands of responsibility, of empathy, of any attempt to care or understand women living a half life.

We love the word choice here in the West. How tightly we grasp onto our choices and our freedoms, our rights. We forget that with rights come responsibility. Freedom is a beautiful thing, and choice. But we forget that some choices are less free than others, that some choices made freely then limit us and our future choices, trap us and end up destroying our freedom.

These things are rarely so simple as they sound. To suppose that they are and that we understand women in complex situations, usually without taking the time to know them, to ask them, to understand them, is to do them a huge disservice. It is to cast judgment, to hint at stupidity, to lay blame and assign fault to women who are trapped in the system, legs caught in the trap.

If we say that a woman who stays in a violent relationship should just leave, we imply that she can, that she has freedom to make that choice as an equal choice out of various choices. It is to ignore or wilfully dismiss the other factors at work here: financial insecurities, the problem of where she is to go, whether she has anyone offering her emotional and practical support, her mental health... Women experiencing trauma, as a battered woman or a woman in prostitution or pornography, will be traumatised. This is perhaps obvious, but largely unacknowledged. It is rarely something one hears taken account of in conversations around the abuse of women. Should we castigate the traumatised for not thinking more clearly?

When you've had your self esteem chipped away at day by day by what your partner says to you, by what he does to you, you feel like you can't cope anymore, can't make it on your own. He treats you like shit and tells you you are shit and deserve it, and you find the voices of total strangers in chorus with him, saying you must like it or you wouldn't go back. Or else disbelieving you - he's such a nice man! From the outside anyway. As you go in on yourself, a result of the humiliation and the pain, you retreat from people, as you recede he expands. Outsiders see what they want and judge you - you're not as sociable now, now you know what people can do to you, what people think of you. Your lack of trust, a direct result of the abuse, now works against you, discredits you further. You become invisible.

Encountering abuse, maybe you drank more or used substances to take away the pain, anything to help. A choice? Maybe to start with, but then you couldn't stop. Up to 95% of women in prostitution are problematic drug users (see www.object.org.uk for statistics). The two things go together, the self abuse and the abuse, and the need for funds traps you there. 74% of women cite poverty as the primary motivator for entering prostitution. Women experiencing domestic abuse may find themselves trapped by finances and homeless if they leave.

I've heard it said that there is help out there, so if women don't access that help, that is their choice. A beaten down woman, who is just surviving, just concentrating on getting through, isn't always in the best headspace to evaluate options, to see choices, or strong enough to act. Living in constant fear is utterly debilitating. Studies show that the most dangerous time for a woman who is experiencing domestic abuse is when she decides to leave. Battered women are not stupid - we learn quickly, we dissociate and numb out, we live in denial at times, just to survive. It's hard to reach out for help when you've been slapped down, when you've trusted the wrong people in the past, when you risk more violence, are scared he'll kill you, maybe he's told you he will or you know what he's like. I tried to leave once before I got lucky and got away to safety and the lesson he taught me after that, when he found out, stayed with me. I couldn't walk for days.

Choices choices choices eh.

As long as the discussion around prostitution and pornography is couched in the language of fun, empowerment and liberation, as long as the voices of women who have been used and abused by the industry continue to be muted and invalidated, the language of choice is meaningless. We live in a culture that grooms women, where school girls dream of being glamour models, where the reality of the sex industry is papered over with a veneer of respectability, porn stars on chat shows, pro-sex industry stories in women's magazines and the expectation of easy money and harmless fun - just a job like any other.

I don't know of any other job outside prostitution and pornography where a body and mind is so abused, where complete strangers fuck you in every hole and in every way possible, where 68% of women experience Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in the same range as torture victims and combat veterans undergoing treatment, where violence is the routine, where you are verbally, physically and sexually abused for the sexual kicks of others. I had men spit in my mouth, call me a bitch, a slut, a whore, tell me it was all I was good for, that they'd like to kill me when they were done raping me, I was told to perform for the camera or else, I was given tablets to 'help me' relax. I could go on for pages. The abuse was endless.

We need to keep the language around violence towards women real. Change the language and you silence the debate. In the face of mental health issues, poverty, violence, misinformation and addiction, the language of choice is meaningless. We need to make the realities visible. With porn and prostitution we need to tell the truth and not sanitise it: it's about money and power, inequalities and the infliction of pain, aggression and cum, women's bodies being sold and abused. It's about what happens to the women after, should they be lucky enough to escape it - nightmares, panic attacks, re-living, trust issues, dissociation, addictions, serious physical and mental scars that will take years to heal, and will never be forgotten.

The next time we hear someone blithely casting judgments about women, and condemning them for their choices, we need to shift the language. It's uncomfortable - and it needs to be. As long as we continue to simplistically apply the word 'choice' about the women in prostitution and pornography, we wash our hands from all responsibility. It means I can justify my use of porn, enjoy laughing about it and have a wank to it, guilt free. The sex industry is as powerful as it is, as omnipresent as it is, as mainstream as it is through our collusion, our denial. We need to break through that denial and the first way to make a chink in the armour is to stop clinging to the simplistic defence of the abuse of women as choice.