Behind the Lens: Living Porn

In porn and prostitution, women are fucked over and over again for the sexual gratification of others, as entertainment. Our bodies (and minds) are put through extreme stress and trauma, to turn other people on. Sex in pornography and prostitution is rarely gentle or thoughtful. Instead, it involves prolonged, brutal penetration by strangers. The woman's discomfort, should she show it, is a source of amusement rather than concern.

So what is it like to be penetrated all day long by stranger after stranger? What is it like to be at the other end of that camera? What does it actually feel like to be that woman who users of pornography laugh at, being penetrated with anything that can be forced inside her, by object after object and man after man, for the entertainment of men she's never even met? I write from my experience of being pimped, of that abuse being filmed and photographed to make money for my abusers.

I think that if they had to endure what goes on at the other end of the lens for themselves, people might think twice about fighting for their 'right' to access this material, and about funding a system that lines the pockets of pimps and pornographers whilst quietly destroying the women it uses.

Being groomed for more and more hardcore sex acts, your relationship with your body changes. Before all this, in another lifetime, you could talk without complication of ‘I’, ‘my body’, ‘me’. They were all one the same thing, and yeah, while you might’ve had a few body hangups (who doesn’t) you accepted that it was you. Then comes the violence, verbal, physical and sexual, thanks to your partner, later your pimp: the insidious slide into being controlled that is so subtly executed that you hardly even notice it. By the time you realize where you are you’re too far in, and even looking back it’s hard to pinpoint how things happened, when things changed.

As the abuse increases, the relationship with your body becomes something else. When he shouts at you, sometimes, when he hits you, sometimes, you feel like it's not really you - you're not really there. You feel yourself splitting. Things happen to the body but you’re detached. Unable to remove yourself physically from what’s happening, you remove yourself mentally as best you can. And given what’s happening to the body, what he does to the body, and later what the men who pay him do to the body, it’s not surprising you want to disconnect. The body ceases to feel like it is yours: there are no boundaries. The porn-fuelled imaginations of the men who use you decide what happens to it, not you.

You are irrelevant. Your humanity is disregarded. Your hopes and dreams, your feelings, your pain, are unimportant. The only thing that these men want is the body, the orifices in particular, your mouth forming what they deem to be the correct noises and responses on cue. You are a living, breathing vessel into which these men pour the sickness of their perverse, woman-hating fantasies.

Porn is the training ground for the men who use you, and they use it to train you. They see something, they want to re-enact it. And the woman in the original was smiling, she enjoyed it (though her face said otherwise) and so will you. The twisted logic of the johns. Educated by porn, they are obsessed with penetration – anything goes.

The level of aggression should be shocking but it becomes just a fact of life for you, an everyday occurrence. They push your head down on their cocks so that you gag and choke, they drag you by the hair, they make you crawl on all fours. There’s a monotony to the pain, a predictability as to the format. The details differ, the men differ, what they do differs, but largely in degree. It will be painful, but how painful? You will be fucked but by how many men? They will be aggressive, but how aggressive? Will they piss on you today, half strangle you today, or merely spit on you and call you names as they fuck you?

Group stuff is rough. Surrounded by men whose only intent is to use you 'til they orgasm and the viewer at home orgasms, the sounds, the colour, the scents are too much. You are in body and out of body, detached and present, numb and in pain: God, the pain. The drink helps. Time ceases to have meaning. Hands paw at you from all directions, touching you where you don’t want to be touched. They have you on your knees, one man then another then another pushing his cock (sans johnny) in your mouth. Your jaw aches, your throat’s raw, you can’t breathe, the stench of their body fluids in your nostrils, eyes streaming as they force your head down. You’re put onto all fours in the centre. At times you feel you might just pass out, sometimes you do from the pain, only to be brought back round to carry on. Man after man inside you, if they’re filming it usually more than one at a time: double penetration, airtighting, more extreme stuff. At times you observe in a detached manner: then the sickening fall back into the body, to feeling with every nerve and every fibre of your being what they do to you. You focus on different things – on breathing, on anything your mind can distract itself with to take you out of here. Just get through, get through, got to get through. You are passed about, posed in different ways, contorted for maximum pleasure and for the camera, just breathing is hard and you don’t take it for granted.

It goes on. They cum in your mouth when they’re done, in your face, in your body and on it. The foul body fluids of man after man make you retch but you have to swallow, like a good slut. They display you for the camera – the audience at home want to see your body swollen and distended, covered in cum.

Left alone to clean yourself up, you move slowly and painfully, still not quite attached to the body, not quite in control of it. Disorientated and confused. How many men today? How long have I been here? It’s just another day being sold, the days blur and run together. You don’t remember all of it, don’t want to remember. You can’t acknowledge the reality of where you are, what’s just happened to you and what will happen to you again tomorrow or the next day,couldn’t survive it. So instead you split. You slowly, gently clean the body, because it hurts - it’s bruised and bleeding and you sort it out. And you think to yourself, I’m not really here, this doesn’t really matter, they can do what they want to this body but the joke’s on them because it doesn’t touch me at all. I am untouchable, and this is just a body. It's not me.

You have to dismiss the fact that when you touch the body where it got hurt, you feel it. You tell yourself that you don’t and chastise yourself for your weakness. To admit your powerlessness is to open the door to terror and ultimately insanity and suicide. Instead you take blame – they tell you get what you deserve anyway - and if people do stuff to you because of how you are, at least you feel you have some measure of control in things.

Looking back, now, in recovery, the truth hits and it hits hard. I was pimped, I was raped on a daily basis and gang raped frequently. This abuse was filmed and photographed and is still out there, making him rich, getting people off. I was absolutely powerless and could have died at any time. That body was me, what they did they did to me, though I still struggle to accept that. My body has been in the wars. My body and I were once one, and to heal and become whole we must cease to be strangers to one another. The me that endured all that I have endured deserves acceptance and love. Instead, in recovery I have continued to battle with my body, inflicting self harm wounds to ease the mental pain, neglecting to feed it and treat it with even basic compassion. I still often call it ‘the body’, speaking of it as if it were separate and other -lesser - still drawing a clear dividing line between my mental and my physical self, still sacrificing my body to protect my mind. We have become almost enemies, co-existing uneasily for the most part in a state of mutual mistrust. The body does its own thing: vomiting and shaking, tensing and aching; my mind is powerless to control it. Communication remains fragmented at best.

To reintegrate body and mind means feeling and acknowledging pain beyond words. My mind itself is fragmented, a result of the trauma: healing is a long and complex process. It means owning fear, powerlessness, horror, revulsion, confusion and a whole ocean of sadness. It’s a painful journey, but one I’m making now, in baby steps, because I want to be whole. I lock down, I go mute, I get nightmares - if I sleep, which I struggle to do. This stuff’s working it’s way out of me! I’m talking about my past and it’s scary and it’s huge and it’s necessary. My body and my mind have been through enough shit. I figure they deserve a shot at something more, something better. That I deserve something better. A bit of gentleness is the way forward, even though that makes me want to cry. I had things back to front: I didn’t deserve what happened to me, but gentleness? I deserve a whole heap of that.

That's what it's like at the other end of the camera, living porn. Predicted recovery time: considerably longer than reaching for the tissues, closing the magazine or ejecting the dvd.

Emotionally Challenged?

I find I have become an expert at hiding emotion. It’s the only thing I can hold onto, that I don’t give them the satisfaction of laughing at my tears, or cumming to them. Blank is good. Neutral is good. He finds fault and when any expression can lead to a beating, it’s better to have none. Although sometimes he’ll beat me for that anyway. What’s the fuck’s wrong with you you stupid fucking bitch? Not got anything to say for yourself?

I have nothing to say for myself. My lips remain sealed, there are no words - if there were to be any they would be the wrong ones and lead to more trouble. Talk is, largely, futile. There are words in my head, sometimes, but I stop saying them and sometimes they don’t connect with what’s happening anyway.

What’s inside and what’s outside cease to match up.

I can do blank and I can do detached. But sometimes it’s more than that, sometimes I manage neither but something wildly inappropriate, bearing no relation to what’s happening or how I’m feeling, will out. It’s like all of the expressions of emotion have jumbled into one big mess, firing off at random. So sometimes in the direst circumstances, about to be beaten and raped I’ll laugh, a kind of whatcha gonna do? Which infuriates him or makes him tell me I’m mental. I talk to myself aloud sometimes, apparently, I’m not aware of it until I’m told to shut the fuck up, poems and odd words, comfort words. Rare indeed are the times I’ll cry. I throw up a lot, pass out a lot, play distraction games: reciting mantras, spelling out every third letter of each word, or every word coming at me or spoken over me, thinking in colours or numbers or rhyme.

I’ll smile at times, because I’m told to for the camera or to please the punters, the threat of violence always in the air. It’s a killer, smiling for your abusers, it’s been so long since I’ve really smiled and the pain is at times so great that I don’t know if I’m smiling or grimacing. Showing your teeth, something apes do when they’re scared. Sounds about right, although I kind of get beyond scared – out the other side, a light headed dizzying detachment. You can’t survive if you acknowledge the true danger – can’t live knowing you could die at any time.

I wear a mask at any rate beyond the pulling of the facial muscles – my makeup, heavy makeup for the most part. It’s covering dark circles beneath my eyes and bruises, making the mouth they’ll be fucking more prominent, easy to find, eyelashes thickened and lengthened. Got to please the punters! They don’t want to see past damage or dirt, just the damage and dirt they’ve caused, a part of their conquest, though they’ll ignore bruising between the legs as long as it’s squeaky clean. Of course, often your pain is their pleasure – when they don’t want you to smile but want you to cry. Wiping up the tears and the cum those times they get what they want, having done what it took, feeling the sickness of selling yourself out.

I am in body, out of body, detached, terrified, numb, in pain, sick, drunk, drugged, concussed, injured, sleep deprived, starving… it’s no surprise I guess in retrospect that the emotions should get out of kilter and, further, the facial expressions should become detached from the emotions. This isn’t a tv drama or a film, where the female lead weeps unsnotty silent tears and utters powerful and articulate monologues to a sympathetic audience at the appropriate moment, unveiling herself. This is daily, monotonous torture pure and simple and the consequent breaking down of patterns of emotions. Splitting, PTSD, get in the way of straightforward cause and effect feelings and expressions of emotions. Something triggers the head and it’ll be freeze, laugh cry or vomit as head and body re-live, irrespective of what’s actually happening in realtime. Confusing and nonsensical to an outside perspective.

It is true to say I am hard. Sometimes. But I am also soft, vulnerable. Most people have emotions but emotions have me: different head, different emotion. I am not Angel sad, Angel angry, I am Sad, I am Angry, the main continuity as Angel being that these heads inhabit the same body. To some people, I seem hard and cold, able to speak seemingly without emotion about horror and loss. In fact the very opposite is true: I split, I hardened, I detached, laughed hysterically and inappropriately because I am human, because I am vulnerable. Surviving in traumatic conditions, body and mind do what they have to do to get through, to protect themselves. My unusual reactions are not proof that I am heartless or cold. They are proof that I am human and have remained human. I built a shell around myself, the hard protecting the soft. Remaining vulnerable and open and dying, or closing off and surviving. I made my choice. Tell me you’d have done it differently.

On PTSD, Survival and the Inadequacy of Language

I get bursts of creative energy. Sometimes, with a clear head, I can write for hours. At other times, the language fades. Words become insignificant, meaningless in the face of so much pain. Any energy I have is directed to surviving, just getting through, a day at a time, an hour at a time, a minute at a time. The pain is so raw, the re-living of the abuse through PTSD so real, so vivid, that I feel as if I'm losing my grasp on sanity.

I feel as if I'm falling off the edge.

I lock down. I'm absolutely alone here, returned to my past, a ghost in my present. Different feelings, different phases: terror; muteness; the futility of actions or words; and when all the energy's gone, a hard cold empty feeling of detachment that nothing really matters including me, that they can't really touch me. They can do what they want to this body, they may laugh and taunt and threaten, call names and shout and shake and beat and fuck the body, but I've gone. I'm floating on a sea of nothingness.

Some things my mind blanked out, though in recovery, and over time, some of these blanks have filled in. I couldn't always detach myself, and even when I did, I can still have memories, just one step removed. It's like watching myself on video, I am a voyeur in my own life. The images remain, technicolour, replaying when I sleep or sometimes anyway. Something triggers me and I'm gone, magically transported back there, no tardis required.

I sleep with the light on, and barely even then. Scared of dreaming, but scared of my thoughts lying awake hour after hour. The night looms, interminable, the fragile grip on sanity of the day stretched to a mere thread, at breaking point. The body, that is to say my body - the splitting I did to survive what they did to me continues - doesn't help. Muscles tense and tire, old injuries ache, and now the exhaustion from night after night of broken sleep has taken it to the point of fainting, of collapse. Both body and mind work against me, telling me I am in danger now, making me re-experience what happened then now.

Words like 'horrific' or 'nightmarish' seem inadequate. Vocabulary offers only some approximation for what I am experiencing. Without the drink and drugs I see and feel things more clearly than I did when they were happening. Beginning to talk about the pimping, the constant violence and abuse is terrifying, even if I know it's the right thing to do, which I do. Hearing my voice saying this stuff aloud, naming stuff, and hearing it spoken back, someone else's reaction, is painful beyond measure.

Am I glad not to be on my own with all of this? Hell, yes! It's taken more than four and a half years in recovery to find the right person to talk to, someone I can trust. Knowing it's the right thing does help - to a degree. Alone with the knowledge of my past, with the PTSD and constant replays, coping alone has been an incarceration of the worst kind. Isolated with the wreckage of my past, the scars, the humiliations, the beatings, the rapes have eaten away at me like a cancer. I have always known that this was something I needed to sit down and talk about face to face with someone just to have some shot at survival, should that chance ever arise. The writing helps too. I am freer in my writing than in my speaking with this stuff, though I knew it could never be instead of talking with someone.

Now I am beginning to talk and it's scary and confusing. So many emotions! So many voices tangling in my head, messages tangling in my head. Say it, don't say it, I'll kill you if you ever tell anyone, no one'll believe you, they'll hate you, they'll think you're disgusting, they'll judge me, they'll think I deserved it, you did deserve it and they'll know it, what if they say the wrong thing and belittle it, you could get crushed, trust no one they'll always let you down in the end, this stuff'll kill you if you don't talk... on and on. The thoughts are endless. They circle and confuse, round and round they chase in this tired head, while this tired body hurts and aches, vomits and shakes.

It's hard to get much clarity of thought when both body and mind are trapped in a nightmare. But I have one major thing going for me, for which I thank God. I am a Survivor. I know what I need to do to stay clean and sober, to survive, and I am bloody minded about my recovery. Nothing and nobody will de-rail me from that. So I may get abusive comments on my blog; I may live in a society saturated with porn and churning out pro-sex industry shit 24/7; I may be struggling to sleep and function right now. But I shall continue to survive and to do what is right for me even when that is difficult and I feel lost and like I'm going backwards. I shall continue to challenge the sex industry's lies in whatever small way I can by giving voice to the reality of being prostituted, being sold. I have faith in myself although at times I doubt even that. Because what you gonna do? Give up, shut up and fuck yourself up as the men who abused me would wish? I don't think so. I'm beginning to build a life and find a voice because they may have taken everything they could from me but they couldn't take that. I'm still here, battered and fragmented and exhausted, but still here.