Being Pimped? Bloody Hell

Hell can become mundane. The daily battle for survival. Small victories taken here and there. Perspective becomes warped. The unacceptable is happening all the time - get over it. It'll be bad, but the question is, how bad? Fear is a constant. You know at any time you might die here, be killed here, but there's no escape. The mind adapts. The body adapts. Both work to distance you as far as possible. There's the booze too, and the drugs, when you can get them.

You're grateful when they don't hurt you too badly. Thank God! Pathetic gratitude for them not being more sadistic than they are. Goodness and kindness and compassion are so entirely lacking that being abused, but less severely, feels like a gift. You loathe yourself in your powerlessness.

Normality? Tuned to survival, you forget. You live like an animal, just to get by. Scavenging food. Crawling when you can't walk, on your knees when they make you. You're caught, caged, trapped. You stop speaking. Can't trust these people! Will his hand stroke you or hit you? Will his words soothe you or cut you? If he offers something nice, you're waiting for the catch. He'll take it back, laughing maybe, taunt you for showing your desperation, or maybe let you have it. And then get angry later. Or maybe not.

Nothing can be held onto as solid, nothing can be trusted except for the certainty that today you will be hurt. You are only alive because your body is useful to them. It has value, not because it's good or intrinsically of worth. It has value financially, and that value lies in its use as a fuck toy.

You are owned. This body's not yours anymore: you have no say over what happens. You want to detach yourself fully, you get to hate this body for what they do to it, covered in their fluids, their scents, weak and hurting, frozen and incapable, but you can't, because to let go wholly would be to die, and you don't want that either. Well, sometimes perhaps but you're scared because you know you're bad, they tell you you're bad, and you're scared of the devil.

Scared of everything: being alone with your head; being with people, because of what they do to you. Scared of dying here like this; scared of going on like this. Scared of the dark and what hides there, but scared of the light, of seeing what you've become.

Lonely lonely lonely. With no place to run.

Here in recovery, that past hell hasn't simply lifted. You can be out of the hell that was then but still in hell, mentally. The experience of being tortured, physically and mentally, isn't something you can shake off or snap out of. I was young when it started, so I don't have any other frame of reference. I struggle with PTSD, nightmares, dissociating, splitting... a mountain to climb. Slow, slow progress, integrating, processing, feeling, accepting, coming to terms with. So frustrating!

I learned to survive, but now I'm trying to learn to live. And that's a different thing entirely.

Pretty Woman?

I recently rediscovered this piece, written by me a while back. A reminder in gratitude for being out of the sex industry and in recovery for my addiction...

Fast forward a year and I’m out, up up and away from my partner. Well, away, anyhow – I can’t say I’ve come up. I’m actually still playing the game, albeit in a different setting surrounded by different characters in a different time. I’m no longer subject to his violence, to the punishments he meted out, I am no longer made to perform for his friends to pay for the drugs and drink he uses, but I’m still trapped. I got my leg caught in the trap and it’s not coming out. I still have a little habit of my own to support, drugs and alcohol, the drugs have a price and that price is me. I’m too fucked up with men, too fucked up with the drugs and booze and the constant replays of the past violence to do a normal job. I feel shitty and worthless and so I find myself turning to the only industry where that’s more or less a prerequisite for work. I’ve become a prostitute, a hooker, a sex worker – the names may vary but the work doesn’t. I tell myself I can close my mind off, this isn’t really happening to me, I have a work name, it’s just acting again, just another role, it won’t affect me, these fuckers won’t get to me. I keep telling myself that, if I tell it to myself enough perhaps it will become true.

I work in a massage parlour, seeing up to 8 men a day. Sometimes there’s just time to go down to the poky bathroom and mop up, add a bit of lippy, have a bit of vodka and then it’s back up to the next punter. It’s quite incredible to me that it’s come to this, that my life has come to this, me who had the world at her feet, who was top of her year, could be anyone, anything, go anywhere. How on earth did I end up here, selling my body at £45 a go, with men I wouldn’t normally give the time of day to cumming on my boobs or in my face (they claim a misaim)?

It shouldn’t surprise me, not after everything that happened with my partner, not with the addiction and the mental health shit I put up with, but it still does. I had a long way to fall. Oh how the mighty have fallen! It’s kind of ironic too that I should be selling myself like this at the time when I am actually losing my looks to the booze and the drugs. I’ve got that bloated, pale look with the red cheeks worn by all alcoholics of a certain fervour. I’m the biggest I’ve ever been and yet men pay me for sex. It makes me almost gleeful in a bitter and twisted way, my ex always told me no one’d fancy me if I let myself go, we don’t want you becoming any more of a fat cow than you already are do we? I’ve proved him wrong.

Maybe not. The guys who come here aren’t exactly Richard Gere. It’s not like they’d have the pick of the women. Most are old, most are fucking ugly bastards, most hate women for rejecting them and have scores to settle. These are the worst. They act like sadists, they hurt me on purpose, to get a rise. I don’t respond, I hurt but I don’t respond, and they hate that and they hurt me some more. I resolved after my ex never to show a man that he’s hurt me, him and his friends would do stuff to me to get me to cry. The shame I feel about crying in front of them, about giving them that pleasure (my tears made them laugh) stays with me. The shame and the scars have stayed with me.

I have scars all over my body, the backs of my legs, my thighs, my belly, my arse. He glassed me on several occasions, and beat me frequently and severely, sometimes with a belt. Everytime I take a shower, everytime I look at myself, there they are, it’s like I got away from him but he’s still there, he’s left his marks on me, the blood and cum may have washed off but the feeling of dirt remains, sometimes I feel like the scars are burning into me, a sign that his malevolent presence will never be gone from my life. The punters don’t care, their gaze is fixated: boobs and holes are all they give a fuck about.

I get flashbacks, I get nauseous and shaky when that happens, I feel like I’m right back there with my ex, my chest and throat go all tight and I feel like I can’t breathe, I’m being choked, being strangled, having the life drain away from me. Sometimes, I’d pass out when it was happening for real. I still get the feelings. I feel like I’m going mad. I sleep with the light on. The booze knocks me out, I’m on a litre and a half of vodka a day plus top ups, but I awaken in the night, bed clothes soaked with sweat, heart going nineteen to the dozen. I hear voices, my ex’s voice and the voices of the other men who used me, they are so real I can’t believe there’s no one there. I sit on the floor by the toilet, vomiting my guts up and shaking.

Sometimes I ask God to get me out of this mess, I plead with him, I get down on my hands and knees and say, hey God, if you’re really up there, please help me out of this shit. I make bargains and promises – help me to stop drinking, to get sorted out and I’ll do anything you want God, anything at all, just please help me. Met by a deafening silence, I figure God hates me, which makes sense: I feel like the anthichrist.

The Logic of Illogicality

We live in a system full of tensions and downright illogic. We live in a country in which rape is illegal but pornography showing increasingly aggressive and painful acts against women is becoming ever more mainstream, in which no means yes and even where a woman doesn't initially know she wants sex, she learns to like it and orgasm through it when she is fucked. We live in a society in which battery is illegal but where pornography depicting women being slapped, spit on, being forcibly held down to 'deep throat' male porn actors to the point of crying and retching, is commonplace.

So violence in porn is permissable, coercion in porn is permissable - remember it's only fantasy, except that this fantasy is meted out on the bodies of the women used in porn. Being penetrated and cum over isn't fantasy for these women - it's the reality. I know this - I've been there. This stuff is painfully real to me. When the john, the punter, has got his rocks off, turns the dvd off, closes the magazine, performs a mental channel change, can she do the same, can the woman in the pictures do the same? The camera stops rolling and she picks herself up, cleans herself up, the cum on her face and body, inside her, checks for tears to her anus, her vagina, her throat. She's at high risk now for STDs, Hep B, HIV. She limps to the shower, swollen and bruised, and then goes back to her homelife, such as it is, knowing that images of her being hurt, being fucked, being laughed at, are now going to help make the man who sold her a very wealthy man, that those images will be wanked over, laughed about, that she will continue to be consumed by man after man even when the initial assault is over. Drinking helps, drugs help: they make it all a little more distant, make the pain a little less real. They help in trying to pretend that what happens doesn't matter, that she doesn't matter, that nothing really matters just the next drink or drug.

She begins to feel like her body isn't hers. Unable to remove herself physically from the abuse, retreating into her body, into her head, is not enough. The men follow her inside. She splits off from it, watching it yet living it, there but not there. This body isn't mine. Don't show you're hurting don't show you're hurting (or they'll hurt you more - they get off on it) becomes a numb I don't feel it anyway, nothing touches me, nothing moves me. You can beat me and fuck me and laugh at me but I'm not here anymore, you're just touching a body, shouting at a body, laughing at a body. I feel no connection. It oscillates: fear and numbness, extreme pain and total detachment, in body out of body. The name they're aiming this abuse at used to feel like my name, used to be mine, to be me, but it's not now. It refers to the shell, to the body. They don't know I've gone. They can't hurt me, don't know my real name, my real being, my real essence.

Getting back into the body, my body, piecing back the broken fragments, is slow, so slow, and painful beyond measure. The illogicality of a society which approves porn as 'normal' but claims to have justice for rape victims, victims of domestic violence, acts seen mirrored all the time in porn which are treated as not simply permissible but harmless and even fun, makes the process almost impossible. How do I live in this society? How can I possibly belong there, be validated there, be affirmed and supported, listened to and respected, with my past, my present? The images of the abuse continue to be out there, to be wanked over and laughed about. And I am told by people with absolutely no first hand experience of what it means to be sold, to be raped on camera, sometimes by one man and sometimes by many, for entertainment, that maybe it wasn't so bad. Porn isn't so bad.

You misunderstood, Angel. Porn's harmless fun, women choose to empower themselves and celebrate their sexuality and bodies by being in it, they get paid and laid and everyone's a winner.

Wrong wrong wrong. Everyone's a loser in porn. When I was sold, I lost everything: my body was used in ways that hurt me to the point of passing out and throwing up by the men around me, the images of that abuse continue to be used now by men who don't know me, although they think they do. Have you ever read the commentary in porno mags and on dvd labels? 'This little slut had it coming and couldn't wait to get all her hot holes filled'... 'This cunt took on more than she bargained for in her first gang bang, including taking her first DP and she loved it'... The experience was debasing, the images are debasing and the final insult is that it's described as being exactly what she wanted and deserved.

With how mainstreamed porn has become, and how increasingly aggressive, little wonder that public perception is often that rape victims are to blame. We are teaching the next generation that women want to be treated as sex objects, we demand it, that no doesn't really mean no and we had it coming to us. Follow that thought process through to its logical conclusion and it becomes clear that we are living in a rape culture. To deny that would be illogical.

A Hand to Help or to Hit?

Someone asked me the other day how to talk to an old friend of theirs who had been working as a prostitute. They had lost touch for a period but now, with contact re-established, she seems distant, unable to accept love and kindness. She seems to be in denial about what happened to her as a prostitute.

In some ways I am well placed to give an insight into this, yet in other ways I am quite lost. I identify with the woman in question, but I don't always know what I need, what would help me to move on. Sometimes it's hard to know when someone reaches out a hand if they're going to help you or hit you, particularly when past experience of reaching out for help has met with more of the latter.

I can still be very mistrustful of people, men in particular, who profess any affection for me, more so if it is romantically inclined. You get used to the johns giving you lines for their own ends. My first thought can still be, you ain't getting anything from me, fucker. Obviously, it's not an attitude that's conducive to great relationships, so it can be pretty lonely. Sometimes, when things are going well, I can make a conscious effort to avoid thinking like this. But inevitably if I'm tired, or scared, or hurting, its my default. The defences go up.

Being vulnerable with someone is an incredibly brave act, particularly if people have hurt you in the past and preyed on your weaknesses. Positively dangerous. Better, always better, to appear hard and uncaring and unmoved. Opening up, and being honest, requires safety, reassurance, and time. I saw my counsellor for 6 months before I began to open up to him. I had to be as sure as I could be that he wouldn't hurt me, of his integrity, his professionalism, his caring. I tested him for any hints of judgment or assumptions about me for a long long time, and even after all that time, and in that setting, I still doubted, and I still felt unsafe. The fact that his attitude towards me remained consistent both before I opened up and as I let small fragments out allowed me to continue. There's nothing more off putting than someone really pushing you to talk before you feel ready, nor than someone shutting you up or misunderstanding if you do talk. It's something of a tightrope walk.

I couldn't have rushed talking about my past, in part because getting my feelings back after trying to switch them off in prostitution and addiction has been a slow process. And then having the words and saying them out loud are 2 different things. I was afraid that by saying these things, it would somehow make them real. I would have to acknowledge that these painful and frightening things had really happened, and then deal with not only his reaction, but with mine too.

I wasn't sure I could handle it. Taking a proper, sober look at what had happened to me was a terrifying prospect. My mind and the drugs and alcohol had managed to numb me enough while it was happening to get through, just. I managed to distance myself from my body to the point that it didn't feel in any meaningful way to be me. Now looking back at my past, I could feel it. My body varied from numbness to shaking and aching with the flashbacks and memories. Muscles tensed and wobbled. At times I would physically vomit.

I felt that if I spoke, the feelings might overwhelm me and somehow I couldn't cope, wouldn't cope. I'd do something stupid and fuck my life up again. I felt I couldn't look another human being in the eye and say those truths, incredibly hard truths, aloud. I thought he'd hate me. I certainly hated myself. I thought he would judge me, and say that I'd liked it, like the abusers did. I think worst of all for me was the idea that in this man's head I was painting images of myself, horrific images in which I was naked and helpless and humiliated and being used as pure entertainment. I felt as if he could see it for real. Because I felt like I was really back there, it was hard to think he wasn't watching alongside the other men. I also worried at bottom that he wouldn't believe me. My ex constantly put that fear into my head, and it can still rattle around there if I'm not careful.

Denial's a tricky one. To survive as a prostitute, it is necessary to construct a network of lies, even to yourself. If you don't say it'll be different tomorrow, tell yourself that you don't care, that this doesn't matter, doesn't touch you, maybe even that you chose it, then how can you get up in the morning and face the johns all over again. To survive being sold and poked and prodded and fucked and told and made to do disgusting, demeaning things by punters, you have to change the experience, and if you can't change what's happening to you physically, you try to change your perception of it in your head, distance yourself, separate off. Your body's being fucked but you reach for the denial - I'm not really here, this isn't actually happening, they can do what they like to that body but it's not me. Trying to merge the fragmented parts of myself in recovery continues to be a slow and painful process, because it means accepting that the unacceptable happened to me, hurt me.

4 years on and I still at times find myself drained of all positivity and warmth, all connection. I feel separate from myself and from other people, cold, malicious and capable of complete self annihilation. There is a strong pull to self destruct and destroy everything that has meant anything to me along the way. It feels like someone has poured ice into my veins and unplugged my heart. I want to push people away, 'though I know when this passes I'll regret it.

These episodes occur when something triggers me and puts me back into my past. I think that underneath this savageness is a whole world of hurt and pain and more loss and sadness than I could have imagined possible before I experienced violence and prostitution.

I hope that there will always be people who will take the time and have the patience to get beyond the damage to the woman inside. I feel privileged that someone asked my advice. Sometimes it's hard to know what would help, or if you're in the position of trying to help someone who's exited prostitution, how to help them. I guess I'd just say that a little love and patience go a long way.

On Hangovers of the Emotional Type

My scars have come to my attention again, now I'm dating, seeing a new man. He notices and is curious. I'm not used to the questions. I had the same scars from my ex when I prostituted myself, but the johns couldn't have cared less. Fixated by boobs and holes, those staples of pornography, I doubt they even noticed.

Maybe not. They couldn't have missed the self imposed gashes on my arms, a desperate attempt on my part to survive, to live with the unlivable, to be me in my body, be me in the wreckage of my life. They wouldn't have wanted to know, anyhow. After all, isn't that the whole point of pornography, of prostitution, that it's the guilt free buying and using of a woman as a sex object? No place for hearing the woman's story, hearing her emotions, asking how it makes her feel and how she comes to be here - it would get in the way. The punters demand a guilt free, truth free experience, whether it be cumming in the face of the prostitute they bought or knocking one out over the shiny pages of a magazine, the woman's humanity another step removed, just to be folded up and put into a drawer.

The punter finishes and is free to continue with their everyday life. Not so the woman he uses! She lives this, she knows, has reaffirmed on a daily basis that her only value comes from being a receptacle for his spunk, a spectacle to be held open and abused and penetrated and sold. She doesn't matter: her pain, her feelings don't matter; what matters is him, the punter, his pleasure, his kicks. The only thing that matters about her is that she is available, that she is mute, that she displays nothing but pleasure and gratitude for whatever he chooses to do to her, however painful or sadistic. Rough anal sex? No problem - I love it. Double penetration? Feels so good! Ass to mouth? Fisting? Being pissed on? Can't get enough.

As if. Each time she is abused, she shrinks a little, becomes less. Every time he abuses her, he grows a little, becomes more. His power grows as hers diminishes. Boundaries no longer exist. Those sexual acts she didn't want, that hurt her and humiliate and debase her happen one by one. Her 'no' lacks power and the ability to remove herself from the situation to safety. You hear those words coming out of her mouth, asking for more, moaning with pleasure, saying she likes it, his words, but in her mouth. He is the puppet master. Take it from a woman who knows, the ultimate humiliation is being made to thank your abuser, to ask to be abused more. I cut, I drank and I drugged, I dissociated, I cried myself to sleep where there were nightmares waiting just to pick up where he left off.

With my ex, I knew what was expected. The violence, and the threat of it, was constant. I was told to smile for the photographs, to say that I liked it for the camera. Sometimes it was clear that I wasn't there by choice - there were welts and bruises, and violence on film (and that sells well in some quarters) but not always. It's easy to ignore what you don't want to see. For the user of pornography, he has behind him the weight of a society which condones and normailses his buying of women as laddishness. A society which, furthermore, says, don't worry about her, she loves it, is liberated by it, empowered by it, makes good money from it.

3 years out, and the bruises are gone. The wounds have healed into scars which will be with me for the rest of my life. But it's the mental scars that hurt me the most. My PTSD's been bad again of late, and it's not always easy to live with my past, the abuse. It continues to impact on my present, the emotional hangover of being sold which society continues to choose to ignore. It's a tricky trap to get free from. All I know is that as much as it hurts, trying to move forward is the only option. It's a beautiful thing to be with someone I care about. I'm going to use every means at my disposal to leave that shit behind so I can actually enjoy what I have.

Living with the Aftermath

I haven't written for a while... I've been struggling just to survive of late. The feelings and memories from my past have overwhelmed me and threatened to take me under.

I feel like I'm absolutely going through the wringer.

Fighting to get help, seeing the GP, ringing round to try and get a therapist, and battling, just battling so much with getting out of the house, with letting people in, letting people close enough to see me in my pain, as I am, shaking, crying, low.

It's hard to trust people when you've been so hurt by them, so letdown, in the past.

It's scary to let myself be loved, because it shows what happened to me so clearly as unacceptable. If I matter, if Angel matters, is worthy of love, then I can't try and keep the abuse at arms length anymore, can't tell myself any longer that it doesn't matter because I don't matter.

It means acknowledging and feeling just how hurt I was, am, by the beatings, by the violence, by the rapes and gang rapes, by being sold and photographed and filmed and used as entertainment, treated as less than human, for the pleasure of others.

It hurts.

So many images! So many flashbacks! Horrific, in graphic multicolour, in my head, in my sleeping and waking, my body aching and shaking and retching and reliving, as it tries to deal, tries to heal.

If sex industry defenders, defenders of pornography and prostitution, could only see inside my head, and see the pain and damage it has caused me, and continues to cause me everyday, 3 years later...

I'm afraid to even watch the telly because chances are, there'll be some humourous or flippant reference to violence against women or objectification of women.

I'm so scared . Just doing the only thing I can do and hanging on in there right now.

Mind Body... and Me

More present than the present, more real than the real, I re-live what happened to me, as some of the blackouts, some of the blanks, fill themselves in... I find myself triggered and suddenly transported back to it all in all its technicolour detail. I'm waiting to be fetched downstairs to perform for them, to entertain them, and I'm shaking and rocking myself backwards and forwards, disconnected from my body yet strangely aware of its every sensation. It's like I'm in two places at once - in the sick fear I feel vibrating through every cell of my body, but also at a distance, observing, in a mind empty of anything but fear. The fear is all consuming.

My mind and my body stop working for me. I feel simultaneously numb and out of it but also more solid than usual. My body seems to have become a dead weight, not responding to my commands. It feels strangely heavy, while my mind feels floaty and light. My mind can't process, can't think straight.

It goes beyond tears, beyond movement. I sit and stare blindly: nothing else is possible. When he orders me downstairs, I can't move. Observing this scene in a detached way, I see that it's going to go more badly for me because this he will view as disobedience. Until my mind reattaches itself to my body in that jolting way that it does, I am a helpless observer. In that jolt, I suddenly find myself seeing through my eyes, hearing clearly, no longer a voyeur, back inside my body, a rush of physical sensations both disorientating and nauseating.

Sometimes the drink and drugs are responsible for this. But fear, at the pitch I experience it, has the same effect. I have some idea what's coming.

And now, years later, I find myself feeling some of the things, seeing some of the things, that my mind fought so hard to distance myself from at the time. Disconnected images, like projections on a big screen, appear before my eyes, obliterating my present reality. I am transported back, I find myself quite without warning there again. Staring at the inside of a toilet bowl and the nausea as I vomit before they use me. A man moving a blindfold towards me. A semi darkened room and bright lights and shadowy figures around the room. A particularly disturbing image he's showing me in a porno magazine to teach me how it's done. Staring uncomprehending at this reflection in the mirror, a woman I can't even recognise as me, bruised and bloody, as he holds me up by my hair and shouts and shakes me like a rag doll.

Painful then, painful now, me but not me, present but past. My mind and body battling between their partly chosen, partly unconscious, separation, and the knowledge that we are one, and need to integrate to heal. At war with myself, I struggle to eat, struggle to accept my body as it is, with its scars, its past, its associations. Common sense tells me to lay the blame, the anger, where it belongs - with the men who abused me. But sitting outside myself, as I so often find myself, dissociated, I struggle and hurt, feeling the dual betrayal of a mind and a body which couldn't rescue me, couldn't keep me safe, couldn't stop what happened.

Pain doesn't even begin to describe it.

Bread and the Games

The Romans had a saying: 'give them bread and the games'. What they meant by that was that as long as the people they ruled over were fed and entertained, all would be well. The status quo, Rome's survival as a ruling power, rested on this belief (amongst others).

I have been thinking recently about games, and circuses... an email discussion with an ex 'liberal feminist', now parted from that school of thought that porn and lapdancing and escorting are just a bit of fun, sparked off some reflection for me. There also seems to have been something of a run of articles in the national press of late at last talking seriously about the pornification of our society and what that really means for us and the next generation.

I got to thinking, animals in the UK and US are better protected by law than women. Think about it for a moment if you will... suppose a person were to videotape an animal, being held down and taunted and laughed at as somebody probes its anus and genitals, and inserts things, large objects in particular, and fucks it roughly and at length with them, and laughs more as they show close ups at the end, pissing on it as a final climax.

Such a person would, quite rightly, be locked up.

Here's another picture for you. A woman is videotaped having large objects inserted into her anus and her vagina. She is fucked roughly with them and the camera man and the man or men in the video laugh as they they do that, they hold her open for 'gaping' shots, they fuck her anally, orally, vaginally, and then as a final act they piss on or in her and cum in her face.

What becomes of the cameraman in this case? The person who videotapes this is not pursued by the law. No cops turn up on his doorstep! Instead, he markets it, adds it to a growing collection of similar videos of other nameless women, and he sells it. And he profits from it ad infinitum. Not only is he secure in knowing he will not be arrested for this, he rests safe in the knowledge that he is supported in his efforts by a huge clamour of voices calling for 'free speech' - whatever that might mean in this context - and in favour of pornography.

Okay, the word 'choice' here enters the debate. Perhaps this woman, these women, choose to put themselves here. Certainly, the element of coercion is less obtrusive in this case. In our example of the animal, we could see it being held down, or caged. I would argue, however, that some cages are not so visible, but for all that, they are just as real. If a woman appears in pornography, apparently freely (not tied up, chained up etc), and particularly if that woman smiles at some point, or says lines expressing that she likes what is happening to her, we say, see, fine, she chose it. She likes it! I can buy and watch this or look at this with a clear conscience.

Let's take another look. Is coercion, is lack of choice, is lack of freedom, really so clear to spot? Does a smile or a lack of obvious physical constraint in pornography or prostitution really give us grounds to say, everything's fine here, let's move along?

Such an approach would be over simplistic. It ignores the bigger picture.

So what is the bigger picture? The reality is, here in 2010, women are still not financially equal to men. The sex industry constantly wants new women, new 'meat', because your average 'user' wants to see 'fresh faces' ( or 'fresh pussy'). Women who work in the sex industry often seem weary beyond their years and that's not what 'users' want, the industry chews women up and spits them out, damaged both physically and emotionally. There is a high turnover as women are used and discarded. So in reality it is extremely easy to gain employment in the sex industry. Age, weight and looks, academic ability, accent... none of these matter, if you're willing to get naked, there will be a market for it, and someone who'll sell you. If women need money to live, and other jobs are not as easily accessible and available to us as sex 'work', to what extent do we have choice?

The sex industry also carefully manages its public image... women's magazines speak of 'high class' escorts who get taken for dinner etc... the seediness, the reality is edited out or made fantastic (literally: fantasised). Highly paid porn stars say how much fun it is being paid for something so 'fun' - to say anything otherwise could cost them a job. As for 'glamour modelling' - even the language sanitises it and makes it sound respectable, glamourous. As I've argued in greater detail in previous blogs, the whole porn industry thrives on the lie of being harmless enough, just some fun. No mention of the deep mental and physical damage women in the industry commonly endure (see Object website, www.object.org). If women are groomed to think that sex 'work' is just harmless fun, the reality hidden until they are living it, to what extent do we have choice?

Many women in the sex industry have mental health problems. Sometimes these problems include substance addictions. Addiction has 3 major effects that serve to make women highly vulnerable to sex 'work':
1. Active addiction needs a constant supply of money, and desperation for a fix may lead you to do anything, even things that you hate and which hurt you: addiction is all consuming.
2. Addiction changes perception and level of consciousness, disinhibiting, numbing, and lowering awareness. This makes it almost impossible to maintain mainstream employment, so you need money but can't get regular work. It also leaves you open to being exploited sexually (blackouts) and means that you are not aware always at the time of how much you have been hurt. Women trapped by addiction may be in pornography or sell their bodies as prostitutes initially to get money, but end up needing to use higher and higher levels to block out the physical pain of prolonged rough sex, and the humiliation. This in turn requires more money and so the cycle continues. At the same time, ability to take care of basic safety eg use of condms becomes compromised, and violence and exploitation increase.
3. Addiction and self loathing / low self esteem go hand in hand. The shame of addiction, with all its social unacceptability, may lead a woman to feel she deserves to be treated as an object, used, abused and sold.

If women are trapped in active addiction, and stigmatised for it and given no help to get out, to what extent do we have choice?

The shame of addiction and the secrecy surrounding it (or attempts at it!) are preparation for the secrecy and feelings of shame which arise in 'working' in the sex industry. Bizarrely, as a society, our thinking is not at all coherent around the women who are used in pornography and 'work' as prostitutes. Despite talk of empowerment and free speech and liberation and choice, the reality is that supporters and users of porn / prostitutes ultimately do view and use the women simply as sex objects - bought to be wanked over or on for a quick release. So though these people publicly and very vocally laud pornography and its supposed 'liberalism', their use and purchase of women as objects still invokes negative feelings for the women involved.

For myself, I felt humiliated, exposed, degraded, objectified, used (first by the pornographer, then again by the consumers), discarded, and very, very hurt. The hurt was physical and emotional at the time, and in time when the physical pain stopped, the emotional pain grew. I do still get body pains, part of the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder I (and many sex industry survivors) suffer with. I get flashbacks, I struggle with food, and body image, I don't like to be touched, sometimes I wish I was invisible. I get nightmares that it's still happening. Of being humiliated and scared and hurt, and in the dreams I run but I can't get away. Just like the reality. I hear people who argue for pornography in a seemingly erudite, liberal fashion laughing and joking about the bodies of women like me, speaking with one language but acting with another.

I still think somedays, when a guy looks at me, has he seen pictures of me or videos of me? Sitting opposite my psychotherapist, I think it again. Or that man? Or that? Porn has a long shelf life, and once it's out there, once it's in the hands of the pornographer, there's no taking it back! Something I and every woman who has ever been photographed or filmed has to live with every day. The power inequality is obvious, because he can see me, and I can't see him. He can buy me and look at me intimately, and I wouldn't recognise him.

In the pictures they took of me, the videos, the violence, the lack of choice, wasn't always obvious. Sure, sometimes it was. But other times, the threat of violence ever present, and his warnings ringing in my ears, I put the mask on and was in his words a 'good girl'. No beating tonight if you take it like you should! Smile, cover up the pain, when they're fucking you in the arse, or double penetrating you, just breathe and get through it conscious, don't look like it hurts. Sometimes I guess I must have looked fairly out of it, with the drink and the drugs. Other times, though, you might not have known. I never injected so there were no track marks. And he gave me elbow length fingerless gloves to wear when the self harm (cutting) on my arms was bad. Sometimes he had me cover up the bruises from the beatings, and he'd help, dabbing makeup on, there were plenty of them and often out of my reach. Other times, though, they'd leave the bruises, because in a particular market, that sells.

The other mental health issues women in porn and prostitution so often suffer with are also hidden. Many women in the sex industry were sexually abused as children. Many have low self esteem, and are in abusive relationships as adults. Many or most have borderline personality disorder. If women have mental health issues, and inadequate mental health services to access, and there's stigma involved in accessing them, to what extent do we have choice?

And so we come back to our starting point, that animals are better legally protected than women. That will continue to be the case until we get rid of the stigma around mental health issues, addiction, and violence against women. It will be the case so long as women who enter the sex industry, and those who support it and buy into it, believe the lies spun them by the moneymakers, that it is fun, just another job, an easy way to make money. And it will be the case until we are prepared to admit that gender inequalities still continue to exist, albeit hidden away by the clever use of language by the sex industry, who speak so glibly of choice. Until we acknowledge the lack of choice which forces so many women into the sex industry, until we stop dismissing the voices of women who have survived and who are speaking out their truth, that this industry damages women and treats them as less than animals, future generations of women will continue to find themselves trapped there. We will, quite literally, have sold them out.

Just a Job?

It's just a job
like any other
they said

And - boom!
that lie
chopped her down
dead

They laughed
as they hurt her
they came as she
bled

They wouldn't listen
when she said
No! please stop.
I'm scared.

Instead
They told her
she liked it
they fucked
with her head

They told her
that's where she
belonged -
on a bed

Her bruises
stayed hidden
Her dignity
shred

They caught her
and made her pay
worse
when she fled

She lived terror
and pain
a life spent
in dread
She died lonely
addicted
That's where
'just a job' led.

Abso-fuckin-lutely Unbelievable

I was just driving in my car, listening to radio 4, when they started a debate about to what extent is a woman to blame if she has been raped.

!!!!

It really upset me and I had to drive straight home to ground myself. The whole point about rape is that it is against the woman's wishes. Whether she's had one drink no drink or twenty drinks, it's still the same. If a woman says no, she means it, full stop.

How pathetic! How hurtful to every woman who has ever been raped, ever been sexually assaulted, to remove the blame from the man who penetrated her, touched her, and lay it straight on the woman he has hurt! I'm still crying, still shaking, from hearing this. It makes me want to vomit - my whole body responds.

And the worst thing is that a survey shows most women think the woman has some responsibility.

What message are we giving to the next generation of young men if we say, well, she was dressed a certain way, she smiled at him a certain way or she drank a certain number of drinks so it was ok for him to rape her? What are we doing to ourselves? When women condemn women for being raped, where has the rape victim to go?

And where is the perpetrator in all of this? Strangely absent. The man who did this to her. She has been hurt once by the rape, and now this. It's all her fault. Her 'no' didn't mean anything to him, and it doesn't mean anything now.

It doesn't matter if he was drinking - he is still responsible. If he had bludgeoned someone to death after a few drinks and claimed drunkenness, would we say, ah, there there, let's just forget it, he couldn't help it? And disregard the victim, and maybe blame them for being around a man who was clearly drunk and out of control?

Being raped is a sort of death. It's a loss. Of confidence in yourself, in men, in being protected by the law. A loss of dignity and respect. And the physical pain too. Life is never the same after rape. Your body never feels quite so much yours.

It makes me sad, too, when I think about what it really means we believe about men and about women as a society if we place the blame for rape on the woman. Implicit in that statement is the idea that men are somehow less than: they are animal, ruled by their sexual urges, powerless in the face of their desire, not capable of responsibility. And that women do this to themselves, hurt themselves, and are responsible ultimately not just for themselves but for men's treatment of them too.

I do not believe that. I believe that both men and women are responsible for their actions, and the effect they have on others, and that to deny that is to deny their humanity.

But now, sitting at home alone I wish I'd heard one voice on the radio that had spoken up for me, the woman who was raped.

How does this happen?

Should I have seen this coming, got out before it got so bad? He hits me and he tells me it's my fault. I shouldn't provoke him. He rapes me and it's my fault. I dress like a slut. The doctor who stitches the gash where he glassed me looks at me with disgust as he says, 'you're going back to him?'. My fault again. People, neighbours, colleagues look away when I have black eyes, have bruises. I see looks exchanged, hear the whispers. How can she? No kindness, just judgment. And help? Only on their terms, if that.

And I think looking back, now I'm out: how does this happen? How can it be that here in the 21st century, in a time when we speak of equality, of choices, of opportunities, that a woman who is hurt by a man can be hurt again, shamed again, dismissed again by everyone around her, by the people who could help? If we are to apportion blame, how on earth did it get twisted to be her fault?

Battered women, prostituted women, are not stupid. We are hurt, yes, but not stupid. To get through, to survive day by day, hour by hour, in such a sub-life we observe and we learn - fast. Reaching out for help is dangerous. So when we dare, screwing every ounce of courage in our hands only to be slapped down and judged, we learn our lesson. You are not acceptable. Words become futile so we stop talking. People ignore us so we become invisible. We have been hurt by the people we hoped would help.

He is acceptable. He has no bruises, does not bleed, bears no mark of the shame of that life. While we pay twice over, once in the pain and the degradation of the beating, of the rape, of the insults, and then again as society demands, he does not pay a thing. In fact, he earns. Money from selling our bodies, money from the pictures and the tapes. He is rewarded by a society blind to the reality, which turns its back on the human cost, on women, a society which defends pornography as free speech and prostitution as a woman's choice. He is free to go where he will and mix as an equal.

How does this happen?

The reality behind the fantasy

I find it utterly bizarre when people speak about pornography as 'harmless fantasy'. Porno isn't cartoons or drawings (in the main) - it's photographs and videos of real women, who have hopes and dreams and feel pain and humiliation like any other human being. Where's the fantasy for them?

I am one of those women. Okay, so I'm one of the lucky ones - I got out in more or less one piece. But my experiences of being used as pornography, as entertainment, have left deep scars. The thing is, with modern technology as it is, when a photo is taken, or a video made, there is no end to it. The humiliation and abuse of the woman, of me, can be endlessly replicated, endlessly sold, endlessly 'used' (I love the way society changes language round this stuff to sanitise it... read instead 'wanked over'). These images can survive long after our bodies and minds have been broken by being dehumanised and degraded.

In the context of violence, I had no choice and no voice. If I refused, or struggled or was 'awkward', I was beaten. I lost touch with reality. They treated me like an animal, and I became one to survive. Sometimes I'd initiate sex to avoid violence, and that hurt me, it filled me with feelings of shame, that I'd colluded with them. Often, I'd go along with things, awful, painful, sordid things, to avoid something worse. When you have to beg to use the toilet, to get some water, to get some booze, because you've been locked in your bedroom, you lose any last shred of self respect. Dignity went out the window long ago. Cut off from other people, you lose touch with reality, with right and wrong. And when the hand that hits you is also the hand that picks you up, and feeds you, you get confused. You don't know what to think anymore.

Nothing can prepare you for this. No words describe it. It is being utterly lost, and the only thing you can tell yourself is 'it's not really real, this can't really be happening to me' and detach as best you can from your body, try to zone out. Everything becomes disjointed, fragmented. When you can't remember what happened to you (blackout) and can't see a future for yourself, life becomes a series of snapshots, of jumbled thoughts and feelings and images and scents. Getting out becomes even more of an impossibility.

I still dissociate a lot - a strange feeling, like being a voyeur in my own life. In the past, I fragmented myself in a desperate attempt at self preservation. The drugs and alcohol were a part of that. I didn't know how to deal with what was happening to me, or how to process it. Now, I still can find myself numbing out and detaching when emotions run too high. But a slow and painful part of getting sober for me is an attempt to integrate these different parts of myself, the different personas. They even have names. An attempt to accept what an isolated, terrified, woman, had to do to survive. The feelings I've had as these memories have returned, and as I've tried to face them, are raw. Painful beyond words.

The thing I find hardest is the way that society normalises so many of the practices that have hurt me. It is an accepted 'right' that people be able to use pornography. Where are the rights of the women used to make that 'harmless fantasy'? The camera doesn't always show the coercion, the fear, the threat of violence, the addiction... all of these are hidden away to allow light entertainment. And where are the rights of the women who are made to act out these 'fantasies' by their partner, who are told that 'she's smiling so she likes it, and so must you' (or else be called a prude, a 'frigid cow' or less of a woman. Who wants to know the reality?

Harmless Fun

When you laugh
at a porno movie
or sneer over a woman
in a porno magazine
You laugh and sneer at me,
at my pain
at my exposure and nakedness
at my humiliation.

You laugh and sneer without knowing
who I am
where I come from
how I ended up here.

Maybe I'm smiling.
You don't see that I have to
don't see the man holding the camera
ordering me to do all sorts
or else
and I know what that means.

You weren't there to see me vomit before it started:
the camera wasn't rolling then
a toxic mixture of fear
degradation
and alcohol
tumbling from my mouth
and they had other uses for my mouth later.

You don't feel the sickening pain
of soft membranes
forced open
and fucked
and fucked
and fucked
by one man then another
and object after object
my tearing, my bruising
all hidden from your eyes.

You didn't sit with me when it was finished
and see me cry
and cry
endless waves of despairing
that it had come to this
that I had come to this
the self loathing
the drugs and alcohol that trapped me there
and Him.

You weren't beside me when he beat me
and battered me
and made me
and then picked me up and stroked my hair
and told me sorry
maybe things could be different
if only I would change.

A smile can hide a thousand secrets.
Money can buy a thousand lies.

When you buy her
you buy me
and you pay him.
Knowing what you're paying into -
now maybe that's not so funny