Surviving prostitution and addiction

How to Have Sex Like a Hooker (oops, I mean 'Pornstar')

2012-01-10T02:52:00.000-08:00

Just a few tips I learned along the way, my experience of being used in pornography when I was pimped, and from a little research into the experience of other survivors of porn and prostitution. Oh yeah, and P.S., pornography is prostitution, in spite of the arbitrary line society chooses to draw: someone, be that the woman, her pimp or her agent is paid in exchange for the use of her body. Thus buyers of porn are johns, albeit one step removed, though they wouldn't like to be called that. Strange really, such sensitivity to words given the words used about the women in the porn they buy.

Anyway.

So, you're curious about having sex (definitely not making love) like a 'pornstar' (hooker)? Some handy hints:

- Disregard your body and its pain. Remember: this is not about you, it is about the johns and what they want to see, the men fucking you and what they want to do, and the men behind the camera and how much money they want to make. Your body is merely the vehicle for the sexual kicks of others, no matter how painful or perverse. As 'Buttman' John Stagliano put it, 'pleasure and pain are the same thing, right?' (1) . I guess that's empathy out the window.

- Expect to be humiliated. Much of the pleasure the punters take is from seeing you degraded, whether that be a cum facial, what they say to you (slut! whore! cunt! Say you're a cunt), or when they slap you or spit on you or do delightful stuff to you like ATMs and worse. That stuff that pro-porn peeps sometimes say about respecting the women in it for their choice to do it? BS all. They don't respect you one bit and the guys working you over won't either.

- View yourself from an outsider's perspective - a pornographer's perspective, a john's perspective. That's why you're here. Their attention's focussed largely between your legs, hence the close-ups. Oh yeah, and boobs and mouth have their uses too. That's where your value lies: in your availability to be used. Think they're bothered about how it feels for you, if you're in pain? There's no place for consideration when the camera's rolling and the johns are waiting, cheering on acts of aggression as a 'get even' with the women they can't have in their lives.

- Penetration, penetration, penetration. That's where it's at. If it can be done, someone'll want to see it, no matter how extreme. Vaginal, anal, oral... Now anal's become mainstream, the push is on for the next innovation, and your body's about to be tested to its limits, not thrilling but risky and painful, life and death. As one porn director, Mitchell Spinelli put it, 'People want more. They want to know how many dicks you can shove up an ass... It's like Fear Factor meets Jackass. Make it more hard, make it more nasty, make it more relentless.' (2) Endurance is the number one qualification you'll need here: this is not about loving sex and being proud of your body like they tell you in the magazines. Think it'll be an exciting sexual experience? Think again. We're talking prolonged rough fucking, every way possible risking tearing, being bruised so badly that sitting down hurts, and shitting blood afterwards. And they'll use anything, not just their cocks - objects or fists, anything they can force inside you. You are a set of holes to them, money to them, the more extreme the act the more they'll make. Hard to see the human when you have dollar signs in front of your eyes.

- Be prepared to thank the men abusing you, to ask them to hurt you more, fuck you harder. The physical assault's not enough: they demand to know, for the benefit of the guy sitting at home jerking off, to get him off, that you're loving it. We're treating her nasty, and the little slut can't get enough! Or some audiences want to know you're in pain, so be ready to cry. You might not be able to help that, anyway, don't beat yourself up for that, you don't know what you'll be up against, that the strongest resolve is no defence. They have a way of breaking you, shaming you, hurting you 'til your eyes water. And don't forget to say thank you like a good girl when they're done, and present to the camera: they want to see that damage!

- Lay aside any notions of choice, empowerment or control. What they say goes, to avoid more off screen violence. Obedience is demanded: they have the power, your body is their playground, to do to as they wish. No matter how aggressively they treat you while the camera's on, be aware it can and does get a lot worse when it's turned off.

- And finally, take and use anything that you can get your hands on to numb you out, to lessen the pain, mental and physical. What's going to happen will happen with or without your consent, whether you struggle or don't, whether they have to beat you or threaten you first or not. Your body is here, and it's going to be sorely misused. The best you can do is get yourself as far away as possible, whatever that takes. Drink, drugs, dissociation. That's it kid, I'm afraid that's your only weapon: you're on your own out there.

Don't confuse the lies about women in pornography being empowered or respected, being 'stars', it being a thrilling glamorous job, or anything about enjoying sex, liberating sex, with the reality. Pornography is all about money and power. Women's bodies are the means to the end, which is someone who has power over her getting rich by selling her, images of her abuse, and someone getting off on it. Maybe if they knew a little more of the reality, people would be less keen to have 'sex like a pornstar', or to emulate the dynamic of abuser and abused that we call porn.

(1) Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, R Jensen, Southend Press, 2007, p117

(2) Ibid, p70

What Lies Beneath

2012-01-08T01:44:00.000-08:00

Someone wrote to me recently and what they said sparked me off thinking about appearances and reality. I have always possessed an uncanny knack for presenting well in even the most dire circumstances. In fact, in recovery I have found that my ability to seem confident, sorted and well have counted against me when I've reached out for help. People look at me and see nothing wrong - no help needed here! Move along! The reality, the damage, lies much deeper, can be hidden for the most part, though in extremis as of late my muteness and frozenness have been a little more difficult to stage manage. Dressed in long sleeves and gearing it up, meet the articulate, educated woman. Dressed in a vest top and playing it down, meet someone who's a little rough around the edges, a harder woman with tattoos and serious self harm scars. The language and the manner change to match.

Both are real, but which one is me?

Those are the public personas, and all the shades that lie between. I do believe to some extent that everybody adapts a little to suit their situation. The problem I have is one of degree. There are actually numerous personas my head flicks between, each one existing in its own right. I find it hard to remember quite how I am in one headspace if I'm in another. Cold, Detached, Savage, Angel, Emma, Destructive, Compassionate... The memory problem I find as I flick between personas adds to the fragmentation, the disconnection, my experience of life as a collection of snapshots, a series of events with little apparent connection, my difficulty with time. I find I lose track of days, that an hour can be a lifetime or else be gone in the blinking of an eye. Sometimes I look at the clock and an hour has passed, or more. I'm someplace else, gone, lost in a trance.

I have a love-hate relationship with my outward appearance of competence. There is power in wearing a mask. And I can be competent, so it's not a lie. Not always, anyway. Sometimes when I'm struggling, when the PTSD's bad I put on my outward appearance, Angel: hair done, makeup perfect, fresh clothes. Wearing it as a cloak, I interact with the world one step removed. I'm very well, thanks for asking, don't get too close there. But this mask, this cloak can also act as an iron maiden, closing me in, suffocating me - the metal digs into me and hurts me and it traps me there, alone.

I found this writing, something I wrote back in my drinking and using days, when I first felt myself splitting, found myself carved in two and me lost somewhere between, out in the ether. I fragmented further as things got worse, as I found myself beaten and sold. I became we, and we did what we had to do to get through. Sometimes all that can be done is to get through. Survival is everything, hour by hour, minute by minute, though one beating, then through another. Me but not me, there but someplace else, one but many, together yet apart.

.........................

I’d be sectioned if I told them what was really going on in my head, inside my mind. So instead I feign normality, humanity, I smile when someone cracks a joke, in fact I smile a lot, I’m known as the Smiley one, but it’s just pulling facial muscles, a dumb contortion of facial muscles that doesn’t mean anything, it’s just acting, it’s just pulling a face, just playing the part. I’m not smiling inside, and if they could see what was inside they wouldn’t be smiling much either.

Inside is darkness, brokenness and damage and a cloying, decaying sense of evil that feels somehow primeval and is shot through to my core. Don’t come near me or I’ll rub off my DAMAGE. I’m like putrefying meat, going bad from the inside out, this evil’s eating its way through me and the pretty smiling exterior just serves to make it all the more terrifying because if you met me just to chat with you might be mistaken in thinking there is Nothing Wrong and I’m a Lovely Girl. I see the devil sitting at the end of my bed. I want to inflict pain, pain like I’m feeling, I want to damage as I am damaged. I stop looking myself in the eye in the mirror.

I’m scared of myself and trust no one. I scorn the people around me. They see only what they want to see and that is not the real me. I am the consummate actress, the director, pulling the strings but they don’t see it. It is better, safer, to give nothing away, knowledge is power and I'm not about to hand that over to any fucker right now. It’s not that I lie, I just don’t tell the truth.

The divide between the Smiley me, the Normal me, that I present, and the Other me, my dark side, becomes cavernous. I feel caught between the two, detached and lost. I am living two lives, one visible and fake, one hidden but more real, those two aspects of myself meeting only because we share the same body. My body feels alien to me, separate from my mind and the darkness, just a canvas to etch with cuts, a vessel to indulge in the substances I choose, something I wear and flirt with and fuck with. My mind – that’s someplace else.

I am a voyeur in my own life.

I love and I hate the Smile, the Mask, it allows me to feel aloof and to pass unnoticed in a world in which I increasingly feel I don’t belong. I belong someplace else, someplace darker, and I find myself seeking out the dark and the dangerous. I flirt with it, it part scares me, part thrills me, it’s playing with fire and I know I’ll get burnt but I can’t leave it alone. I never can leave things alone: I’m an Addict, an Obsessive. The smaller part of me wishes people would notice, see my pain, see my turmoil, help me up and out of this Pit I’m in. But I’m way too far gone to be able to let people see the Real Me. My state is Unacceptable, and I know it.

............................

It's slow progress, piecing Angel back together. I'm not where I was when I was when I was drinking and using, no longer the subject of chemical hallucinations and the added complications: I know now that what I'm dealing with is me, not the side effect of self medication. But in many respects it would be less painful, easier, to remain fragmented. Reintegrating involves acknowledging and experiencing the extreme trauma I endured as a battered woman, as a woman who was sold. At bottom, I want to be able to engage in authentic relationship with others, to not be alone, and that requires that I start with myself. Until I am whole I will remain at a distance, and liable to cause confusion and damage, to others who care and to myself. Trust is a big thing, to process and begin to heal and piece these shards back together, I need help. It's a tricky one. But I am getting there, even if it feels like one step forward and three backwards some days. I want to be able to say - what you see is what you get. Take it or leave it, but that's me. That's Angel.

On Words In Favour of Prostitution and Other Madness

2012-01-04T11:31:00.000-08:00

I came across an argument put forward by a French MP in the debate there about whether to adopt a Swedish model for prostitution, targeting the johns rather than the prostitutes. He couldn't see the problem with prostitution. He said: prostitution is the oldest profession. If it weren't for the safe and legal outlet of prostitution, there would be more sexual assaults. Prostitution should be regulated, not made illegal.

Further examination shows this argument to be unsound in every respect. Take the 'oldest profession' comment for example. This implies that prostitution has some kind of soundness as a system simply by virtue of being historic. Some women have always been fucked for money so it's okay. Bear baiting and gladiator contests are also historic but I'm sure no one would want to argue that we legalise those on that ground. Modern thinking has generally recognised many practices of yore as barbaric and cruel, and rightly so. So we may dismiss that 'old = good' line of reasoning. I'm not sure that being verbally, physically and sexually abused can be classed as a profession, anyhow.

This 'oldest profession' line also has about it the ring of inevitability: prostitution was and is and always will be. This is simply not true. There is nothing inevitable about prostitution. The way our society operates, the 'norms' it accepts and perpetuates, are social construct all. The sex industry seeks to naturalise inequalities between the sexes to strengthen its grip, to say this is how men are - needing a constant sexual outlet- this is how women are - able to make money for providing this 'service'. Once we see something as natural or inevitable, we cease to question its being or morality - something the sex industry desires us to do. Even if one were to argue that prostitution is inevitable, does that remove from us the responsibility to try and change that, to try and stop that, once we recognise it is deeply damaging? One might argue that domestic violence will never be completely wiped out, but does that mean we should stop trying, close the refuges, de-criminalise it?

Then the argument about prostitution preventing sexual assaults, a kind of safety valve if you will for the man who is desperate. To say prostitution is okay on the grounds that it stops more serious abuse is to offer up a group of people - prostitutes in this case - and say, let them be the victims here, we'll offer their blood to the beast in order that the rest of us, the majority social group, may be saved. It is to create a sub-class and justify their abuse as a means of protecting those with entitlement. We'll deny them their safety, their human rights, to ensure ours. Better them than us!

This argument implies that rapists and sexual offenders are in some way not responsible for their actions. It is a given that they will hurt people, so it is better that they hurt that woman over there than this socially acceptable woman over here. Do we really want to say that people's actions are pre-destined, inevitable? Doesn't that sanction them? Whatever happened to free will? And personal responsibility? If I hit you, it is because I decided to. My arm doesn't have a life force of its own. Similarly if a person rapes someone, that is a decision too. At the end of the day, the man who rapes makes a decision. He is not at the mercy of his penis! The man who sexually assaults makes a decision. As does the man who batters. The whole penal system is grounded upon this understanding that the individual is responsible for his actions.

If a man sexually assaults someone, he must be punished. The law exists to protect us. We can't offer excuses on his behalf, say he couldn't help himself, and classify abuse as okay because of the exchange of money. Pornography adds to the naturalising of this kind of thinking: that 'boys will be boys' and are fundamentally different to women, needing many sexual partners, visual stimulation and a constantly available sexual outlet, whether that be using women in porn or women in person, be they prostitutes or partners.

This argument also implies that johns are rapists and sexual aggressors. If this is the case, if we acknowledge that the Pretty Woman portrayal of the average john was just a tad optimistic, why should we then expect the prostitute to deal with him, and then also say, her choice, her problem? This argument makes prostitutes a 'necessary evil' as an outlet for the frustrated sexual desire of violent perverts.

Then we have the idea of regulating prostitution. To say we should legalise prostitution and regulate it is to imply that there is such a thing as safety for a prostitute. It is to say, if we put you in a nice room with a lovely bed spread, it's okay for you to be fucked: nothing bad will happen to you. In reality, you can change the setting but you can't change the nature of the act. Prostitution is all about power: the john has all the power because he has the money and has physical strength on his side. The prostitute is the object of his fantasies, his fuck doll to be used and abused as he will. The very nature of the act is aggressive.

There is no such thing as safe prostitution, wherever it might take place. At the end of the day there will always be an inequality there, a naked vulnerable woman and a man (or maybe more than one depending), her very presence there being for the purposes of his sexual pleasure, whatever that takes. And safety implies boundaries, limitations, and back up. Where are the boundaries when a john fucks a prostitute? When he slips off the condom when he's behind her, even on a nice bedspread, where is her backup? Does having a pretty receptionist or someone on the door help her when she's alone with him and he does as he wishes? Or when he fucks her harder because it hurts her, thrusts deeper down her throat to see her gag? He can just as easily rape her, just as easily hurt her, in a nice room with a nice bed spread as on the street corner. It simply offers a veneer of respectability to the punter, and to the pimp. The prostitute is not any better off. The onus will still be on her to swallow down what he did to her, not to tell, her shame not his, her fault for being there. The words he whispers in her ear, telling her all the sick things he wants to do to her, will be no different in that context, and the feeling of her body being violated, being used, having him inside her, will be no different for the woman. She is there for his pleasure, his sexual gratification, whatever that means. End of story.

In the context of legalised prostitution, the pimp becomes a business man, the john a client. Everyone breathes easy, without moral compunction, because the harms have become invisible. The damage done the prostitute becomes invisible because the language with which to address it has vanished. We already have little enough real vocabulary used in debating prostitution. Discussion tends towards vacuousness, limited as it is to abstract concepts of liberation, empowerment and choice. Keep it real people!

Demands to legalise prostitution and regulate it are purely in the interest of the pimps and johns. 68% of women in prostitution suffer Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in the same range as torture victims and combat veterans (see www.object.org.uk). Regulating prostitution isn't the answer. Throwing up our hands and saying it's inevitable isn't the answer. Educating people about the realities of prostitution, dispensing with the sanitised, meaningless bleating about choice, liberation, empowerment for women and offering real choices to women who find themselves facing desperate times are what is needed. Until women know the realities of prostitution, they will continue to be vulnerable to being groomed for its use. Until women see other options in the face of mental health problems, poverty and addictions, they will continue to be vulnerable. And until women recognise the personal nature of prostitution in all its glory - cum and fear and aggression and pain and degradation, physical and mental scars, johns who in no way resemble Richard Gere - many will continue to fight for the right of women to continue to be abused and damaged in prostitution.

Don't fight for that in my name. Know the truth: you are fighting for the rights of the pimps and johns. That's real madness.

Pretty Woman?

2012-01-03T15:07:00.000-08:00

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.

On Choice: Invisible Cages and Language Traps

2012-01-01T06:22:00.000-08:00

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.

Shameless

2011-11-29T13:52:00.001-08:00

I've felt a real sense of shame of late. But then I think, whose shame?

And I think about...

The endless sexual objectification of women all around. No escape, no getting away from it, in cinema, films, television, 'lads' mags, womens mags, porn mags, adverts, music videos, internet pop ups, spam, porn dvds even radio and books. Everywhere the submission of women celebrated, inequality defined as natural and celebrated, her goal and his. She wants to be used abused and sexualised just as much as he wants to use abuse and sexualise her.

The dominance of a few voices. Jenna Jameson, a porn 'success' who made some money here, the exception not the rule, one of a tiny but powerful minority of sex industry puppets, women whose voices are used to defend its operation, wholesale. They use women like Jenna to tell us how good porn is for us, even the women it uses. Want to be Jenna Jameson? Gang raped and left for dead as a teenager, and she won't watch her stuff back. We needed therapy and instead we got fucked over literally again and again for the profit and pleasure of others. Now we have trouble talking in therapy.

It's a feedback loop: I feel dirty and shameful so I accept being treated as dirty and shameful which makes me feel dirty and shameful. Trapped to the gain of the pimps and johns, for the pleasure of the purchaser of the record of my abuse, an 'adult' dvd or pictures.

Whose shame? The pimps' and the johns'. I used to think it was my shame. My shame? My arse. Literally.

Drowning Rabbit

2011-11-28T04:55:00.000-08:00

And I feel the words slipping away, find my body not responding, feel my mouth clamping shut. My lips feel as if they're stuck together, like I'm gagged and mute and bound. I'm utterly helpless, frozen like a rabbit caught in headlights. My thoughts race or else empty: I either over-inhabit my head or I'm gone, carried away in a wave of nothingness. The thoughts there are slow, detached: those of an observer, mildly interested. At the other extreme, I experience myself as utterly trapped, chained to this body and disabled by it: I command it to move and it doesn't, shout in my head for my lips to move but they don't. I feel like I'm drowning and I can't shout for help. I can blink, but that's where it ends.

The cause of this extreme shutdown response? Anything that triggers the worst of my past. My head and body reel with re-living the trauma, I'm overwhelmed by it, engulfed by it. I pray for the detach response: the other stuck-ness is too painful, too lonely, to be borne. Encountering it in therapy the other day I experienced myself trapped in my past, torturous technicolour images of the abuse burning through my mind and body, incapacitated and alone there.

I don't want to go back there on my own any more.

Everything is connected. One thought, one memory triggers another and another and it's off, an ever-widening circle of horror replaying for my eyes only, for my mind only. I want to scream 'help me, please help me, be with me here, help bring me out of here', but no words come. My lips remain welded together, impervious to my commands to open.

It shouldn't surprise me that at times I struggle to open my mouth, whether to eat or to speak. My mouth was sorely misused when I was sold: I retched and gagged on cock after cock thrust down my throat, lungs burning, eyes streaming. Feeling unsafe now, my mouth refuses to cooperate.

As for words, for speaking, for asking for help, that shouldn't surprise me either. When I opened my mouth I risked his fist, so I stopped talking. And words failed me anyway, were inadequate anyway, fell away anyway. How do you convey the terror that is gang rape? How to convey the debasement that you experience every day of being beaten, being sold. Narrative becomes disjointed, the result of blackouts. Feelings? God, you have no idea what you feel. Fear beyond description, pain beyond words, the numbness of going beyond that, beyond.

Everything falls away in the end. You detach and observe yourself beaten, yourself raped, yourself near death. You have no power over it, no escape. It's a little like observing the world from under water, at a distance: sounds seem far off, actions seem slowed down. A slow motion car crash without the emotion.

Then the sickening fall back into your body, back into the feelings, back into looking with your eyes, hearing with your ears, feeling what they do. Back into the fear and the racing thoughts, the shaking and the being. Reunited with your body, the pain rushes back in and stifles you. Your chest constricts, your throat closes up.

My current experience, then, of PTSD, is an exact re-living of how I experienced the trauma of being prostituted at the time. The fluctuation between detachment and over-embodiment remain, though the external circumstances of my life differ. I am no longer subject physically to the abuse I suffered. But the mental scars remain, and have a physical effect. They incapacitate me as they did then, but no longer serve a purpose. At the time, it was what my mind and body did to survive. Now, it serves to isolate me.

Trust doesn't come easily to me, for good reason. But now I need it more than ever. I need to be honest and ask for help. And I need a lot of help. I doubt this job'll be a quick fix. Until I'm able to open my mouth, I thank God for the ability to write. Without that release valve, I'd be as I was then - absolutely fucked.

Destruction Calling: Come on Down

2011-11-26T14:01:00.000-08:00

I get the strongest urge at times to utterly destroy myself, to hurt and hurt and hurt myself, to shred myself to bits. To punish myself. It's as if I've internalised what they said to me - you deserve it, you like it, you were meant for this - worthless! Bitch! Dirty girl! Slut! Whore... and on. There's a part of me that feels horribly dirty and damaged beyond repair, which makes any attempt at change seem utterly futile.

My therapist said to me, when you encounter evil of the type you have experienced, most people go with one of two options: destroy others, thus perpetuating the evil, or destroy themselves. I took the latter course. I believed the badness, the hatred and aggression, and the dirtiness, which belonged to the men who used me, to be mine. There were no boundaries: nothing was mine, nothing was sacred, there was nothing that couldn't be smashed and tainted. Their words circled in my head, their hands possessed my body, their body fluids in and on me, my pain their orgasm. They consumed me. Not surprising then that I was confused about what was their stuff and what was mine. Degradation after degradation, beating after beating, rape after rape. It was always my fault - my fault I got hit for not cooperating, for showing him up, for making him angry, my fault I got raped because I deserved it, liked it, was a slut anyway, had it coming to me.

They told me it was my fault, and I believed them. Their voices were louder, more persistent, more cruel, playing on my fears, on my insecurities than the small whisper in my head that said this isn't right, what they do and say isn't right. They told me I was dirty and it fit my experience: I felt dirty, a collection of holes to be fucked and cum on and in. They told me I was worthless: I felt worthless, disposable, when one man after another used me and then left me, a battered wreck, to clean myself up, to make myself decent for the next fucking. They told me I liked it, and I thought, no I don't, but I found myself saying I did, colluding, to try and stay safe, try and avoid any more violence.

I felt at times I simply can't take anymore - anymore shouting, anymore beatings, anymore punishments. Anything but that, I'll do anything. And I did. The shame stays with me, the self-blame stays with me.

To survive what was happening, I used to tell myself it doesn't really matter, I don't matter, this body isn't really me. Unable to remove myself from that situation, just to survive, I ended up internalising the attitude of my abusers, denying my own feelings and rights and humanity. Knowing I might die there, but powerless to change that, coming close, I detached from myself, and said to myself, so be it. So tired, so so tired of the fear and the pain and the daily horror of being sold.

It's a slow and painful process to say to myself that I do matter, that what was done to me does matter, and to really believe it. There remains a behaviour pattern in me that makes it much easier to say, particularly when I'm tired and struggling and hurting as I am right now, it doesn't matter: none of this matters and neither do I, and hurt myself again. To detach from this body, as I did then, to separate off, let the body take the punishment, and self harm. I get this overwhelming urge to purge myself of this evil, to be rid of it, to destroy every last bit of it, but this evil left its marks on me, on Angel, in the form of scars and body memories, association. To wipe out the past would be to wipe out the body, to wipe out me, to end myself.

I have come to understand, though it has taken time, and the urge to hurt myself, to punish myself remains strong, that this is misplaced emotion. I don't want to erase Angel, and I shan't. I just don't want to feel dirty anymore, feel shameful anymore, feel worthless anymore. I still feel powerless in the face of the sex industry. But I can see that this is not my shame to bear. I can see that the dirt and the guilt and the blame lie with the men who used and sold me. The feelings, though, oh the feelings! They take a little longer to catch up. As long as I keep doing the right actions - talking about this stuff, writing about this stuff - I don't have to act on it. I didn't get clean and sober to fuck myself up another way.

You know what needs destroying? The sex industry with all its lies and abuses. I fully intend to do everything in my power to aid that process.

Porn Again

2011-11-21T22:21:00.000-08:00

As I was driving the other day I caught a programme on the radio about HIV. It made me think about the practice of safe sex and pornography. Punters want to see skin to skin contact, unsheathed penises, and cum - plenty of it. 'Bare-backing' (sex sans johnnies, in whatever way) is the norm.

Unprotected sex is not without risk. But the sex acts in pornography all serve to increase that risk: anal sex, sex with multiple partners, rough sex (including rough oral sex), ass-to-mouth, anal-vaginal, bukkake (on the up)... Anything that may cause tearing increases the risk for HIV and hepatitis. Because of the aggressiveness of so much porn, and the prolonged penetration, including with objects or fists, the chances of tearing are much increased. Old injuries, from the last fucking, may re-open again as she is used again - oh so painful! (been there) and unsafe.

Supposed 'health checks' imposed in some quarters of the industry (largely to appease the public conscience) are beyond laughable. Women in porn are routinely prescribed painkillers to 'help' them work, and many more use drink and drugs to numb the pain. The result of this is that even when the woman is physically damaged in the making of porn, she is less likely to feel the full extent of it at the time and therefore less likely to stop and so prevent further damage. Which also assumes that she is in a position to stop what is happening to her - which is often not the case. Even when a woman isn't overtly pimped, there are many other means of trapping her into sexual acts she does not wish to engage in. Drink and drugs affect inhibitions and consciousness, leaving the woman more open than ever to abuse. She can be told that the contract she's signed requires her to do certain things, or be pressured by her agent to perform more extreme sex acts for the camera (it makes him more money). It's hard to imagine a woman in a gang bang scene, surrounded by men, and likely with a penis thrust down her throat, being in a position to say 'stop it, you're hurting me'. Indeed the fear and pain visible on the faces of porn 'actresses' in many dvds clearly attests that this is not the case. She may be desperate for money and so vulnerable to being pressed into doing more unpleasant stuff for more cash. Or she may be so mentally scarred she can see no other option for herself, no way out.

Porn uses the most vulnerable women and it heaps upon them damage after damage, mental and physical. Retching on cocks, covered in the cum of man after man inside and out, bruised, swollen and bleeding between her legs, throat raw, jaw aching, and feeling like her insides are going to fall out, the glamourous pornstar, the 'actress'. Her anus, her vagina, her mouth, her breasts and her body are offered up for the camera, to be used and abused without compunction. And we name this thing that is done to her for the gratification of men she has never met empowering, liberating, harmless fun! The statistics regarding drink, drugs, suicide and histories of abuse tell a somewhat different story - not that you'd know it: the industry, with the collusion of a society which does not wish to know, manages to keep those figures out of the debate. Instead we fall back to babbling without meaning about 'choice' and 'glamour'.

And so porn normalises the practice of unsafe sex, in every meaning of the word. The john can enjoy looking at the photo, watching the movie, a million miles removed from the smell of cum, of filth, without the pain and the fear and the danger. He laughs when she gets cum in her eyes - guess it won't be him queued up with an eye infection tomorrow. He gets a thrill watching ass-to-mouth: safely at the other end of the lens he doesn't have to worry about STDs; he imagines the humiliation, it turns him on, but he doesn't know what it really feels like.

While she limps home to scrub and scrub and scrub herself clean in the shower, to check if she's bleeding, to assess the damage, to get wasted and try to forget, he folds the magazine away, ejects the dvd and mentally flips channel, content in the knowledge that his behaviour is 'normal', that it's socially acceptable - no harm done.

There is nothing safe for the women in porn, or for those who are pushed by their partners to emulate the painful and unsafe practices porn promotes. Porn treats women as disposable -literally, it fucks them over, and then moves onto 'fresh pussy'. Porn is also everywhere - it is now mainstream. How can we be so blind as to miss the glaring contradiction between promoting safe sex practices and glorifying porn? The two are totally incompatible.

The words 'safe' and 'pornography' don't even belong in the same sentence. Porn damages - body, mind and spirit. Fact. I'm still working on unknotting the damage it's done me.

A Day in the Life

2011-11-14T05:46:00.000-08:00

Imagine...

Waking at 4am, shaking, sweating as the alcohol and drugs leave your system, and just not knowing what to pray for. You're terrified there on your own in the night ill and alone but when morning comes it'll be the same old merry-go-round, the same old stuff, being fucked by men and you don't want to be touched but you need the money for the drink and drugs cos you can't get off them, can't do it without them, they go hand in hand the addiction and the prostitution, the self abuse and the abuse. Your heart's racing out of sync, your liver's throbbing, stomach burning, sore between your legs from the men who fucked you today. You feel terribly terribly stuck and you hate yourself and you find yourself around people who hate you, play back that image to you.

You thought you were worthless, your ex told you you were worthless, and the johns treat you like you are, tell you that you are, that you like how they abuse you, they whisper sordid, sick fantasies into your ear before they act them out on you and they say 'and you'd like that, wouldn't you?' and you hear the sound of your own voice, though far off and disconnected like it's not really you saying, 'oh yeah, baby, that makes me cum'. You feel that knife twisting in your side, you're selling yourself out, any shred of self respect you might have had dies as those words exit your lips.

Your body's not your own, your words aren't your own, even your pain's not your own: sometimes they want to know you don't like it, what they do to you, they demand to see your tears, see your pain. You will the tears from your eyes but they won't come, they don't come, you're not connected, can't reach this body of yours. You know in a distant way that it will be safer for you to cry, to get it over with, so they'll finish, climaxing to your suffering, your humiliation, so they'll stop. No tears come. They keep doing what they're doing, or something more sadistic, til you either pass out or beg for mercy, their orgasm your final destruction. Or else you find the tears streaming down your cheeks, powerless to hold them back, feel the warm glow of shame and pain, and feel utterly betrayed by this body of yours, by yourself. You have nothing to hold onto, nothing is yours anymore: their hands touching you all over, inside and out, your mouth used for their pleasure, every bit of you used for their pleasure, their gratification, the open target of their body fluids, their sick and twisted fantasies, your pain their thrill. Consumed by them.

The drink helps, the drugs help, they numb you out, help take you away from what they do to you, from yourself, but also serve to keep you there, the need for funds keeps you there, locked in this cycle of abuse and self abuse, you know that you're killing yourself, know you may be killed, but how to get away from that? It seems impossible.

Imagine.

So crushed that to dare to even hope for something more, for anything more, seems frightening: you'll get hurt, it won't work out, best to endure, best to forget, best to keep your head down and survive. Normality is just a word to you, an unknown quantity, but surely something other, something better, than this.

Imagine.

Getting out, and you're one of the lucky ones, not everyone makes it, one of the lonely ones, the chasm between you and others around you, without your past, is unbridgeable. Every day you thank God for being clean and sober, every day you deal with the aftermath of what happened to you, what it is to be prostituted, to prostitute yourself. You lack the language, can't articulate, what happened, even to yourself, your past's a series of disjointed technicolour images, scents and sounds with blackouts inbetween, the result of the drink and the drugs and the head injuries, a jumbled non-narrative of horror, burned into your skull. When you sleep you get nightmares, when you wake they continue: panic attacks, re-living, triggered off by the everpresent background hum of the sex industry. Every film has sex in it, every ad has semi clad women in it, every newsagents has porn in it, women for sale everywhere, inequality sold as equality. You just can't get away.

Imagine.

You begin to piece together what happened, put words to what happened, inadequate as they are, words like 'pimp', 'rape', 'gang rape'. You start to realise that when even the most mild forms of abuse you suffered seem unspeakable, unacceptable, that your truth separates you, is too much for most people to hear. When being gang raped was just another day for you, just another day surviving, enduring as best you could, the only way you know how. Treated like an animal you became an animal to survive, and the shame burns you, the guilt burns you, the sickness of what was done to you, what you did to get by eats away at you. You live knowing that there are images of you out there, images of the abuse, men wanking over them, making money from them, your pain their thrill, their profit.

You realise you are one of too few who know that prostitution and porn and lapdancing are all the same, selling women is all the same, there are no boundaries, no distinctions. Your ex made you perform for them, made you dance for them, made you strip for them, made you entertain them whatever that required, and made money from your abuse. The johns photographed you, the dealer videoed you... No distinctions, no boundaries left to break though, every last piece of your humanity trampled down for power and for profit.

You live knowing first hand just what people are capable of, hearing people all around you defending porn, defending men like your abusers, calling people like Maxx Hardcore 'groundbreaking' and 'inspired', hearing ill informed arguments denouncing women like you who speak a truth no one wants to hear. You know that just because she's smiling doesn't mean she likes it, just because she's saying 'fuck me harder' doesn't mean she wants to be there, is free to choose to be there.

Choice?

Harmless fun?

Empowerment?

Sexual liberation?

Try

Choicelessness

Desperation

Despair

Hell

To be a prostituted woman is to be in hell. To be a woman who has exited prostitution is to live in that knowledge, knowing where you've been, living with trauma, and being dismissed as an abberation - or a fruitcake. The mental health problems you now suffer as a result of the abuse are used against you. Even those who believe you dismiss you as exceptionally unlucky - 'it's not like that for most women in porn'! And you're afraid to speak out anyhow, mistrustful anyhow, scared of being alone with your head but scared to let others in in case you're hurt again, fucked over again.

You feel overwhelmed, invalidated. You feel scared and alone, scarred and broken, and lost. Painfully lost.

Imagine that and you have some insight into what it is to be me, to be a prostituted woman, a survivor. Take that knowledge and take action, to help a little, change something a little, maybe not laugh along when someone jokes about porn, maybe not join in the consensus when people say about the sex industry 'well, lads will be lads'. Maybe stand alongside me, alongside us, make it a little less lonely.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.

The Joys of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

2011-11-12T14:53:00.000-08:00

I could sit here and write in a million different ways why prostitution and pornography are so deeply damaging, and as such are grave evils to be overcome. But in truth, right now, I am just too shattered to do anything requiring such mental effort and articulation.

I am beyond tired.

Shattered

Exhausted

Bone weary

The cause? My PTSD has gone into overdrive again. I'm simply overwhelmed by re-experiencing the trauma of the past. It's like I've been submerged in it and now there's no getting my head above the water.

So many images all chasing through my head! My body tenses and shakes, vomits and aches: headache, stomach ache, muscle ache, even old injuries ache. When I sleep, I have nightmares, and when I wake, I fight up from sleep into a panic attack. My heart beats faster, I find it hard to open my mouth to eat.

I've just begun to make inroads into talking through some of the worst of what happened to me in therapy, which I know to be necessary: this stuff eats away at me like a cancer and stands between me and a happy life at best. At worst, it risks me fucking myself up majorly over it: at times it's so unbearable to live with that it seems to me it might be better if I weren't here.

I get that old urge to self harm. When I'm detached, sometimes I feel as though I've got stuck outside of my body and I can't get back inside, which scares me. Everything seems unreal, starting with me. At those times, the thought of self harming suggests itself as a means to get back inside myself: I am real, I can feel pain, I bleed. At other times when the mental pain reaches such a pitch that I feel I just can't take it anymore, not another second, self harming suggests itself to me as a means to detach: feel the tension drain away with the blood in the sink, feel the calmness, the distance, flood in.

I'm either too detached or too in-body. I get scared of myself, of being alone with my head, and scared of other people because I don't want to be hurt anymore. I trust no one.

I need to talk to people, to tell them what's going on in my head, specifically. I'm a great one for generalising: 'I don't feel great', 'bit of a headfuck', 'past stuff'... All words meaning something and nothing. I guess I'm back at that jumping off place once again of daring to say what exactly I'm remembering and reliving. That feels like a lot of power to give to someone, even someone I trust. In the past my very survival has depended upon pleasing other people, not rocking the boat, keeping stumm about the abuse. Talking about what's in my head isn't going to be easy listening, and any negative reaction, or potential negative reaction, perceived or real, by the person I talk to triggers off massive fear, which I feel mentally and physically. I don't like the idea of sketching out the images in my head that fill me with shame and make me feel sick about myself into someone else's head in all their glorious technicolour.

So I am exhausted. I'm reliving some of the most horrific times of my life. My therapist said, you've been tortured. Have been, but I feel like I'm still being tortured and I guess realistically that's not going to pass quickly. We're only just beginning to tentatively look at this stuff. I guess I need to keep on keeping on. The tiredness and the sadness are part and parcel of moving on. But the pain? How those things make me feel? It defies description.

The Logic of Illogicality

2011-11-11T01:24:00.000-08:00

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.

Freak Show

2011-10-29T14:39:00.000-07:00

Pretty woman starred Richard Gere. Sadly, dear Richard is not representative of the men who buy women, either looks-wise or behaviour-wise.

There's a reason that the men who buy women have to buy women.

Let me paint you a more accurate, if less pretty, picture. The johns are there for a reason, and if you think that reason has anything to do with loving women or entering into a simple financial contract, you'd be wrong. Let's have a closer look at the johns.

The woman hater. This man has a personal history which has led him to hate women. It may go something like this: his mother abused him as a kid. Or he feels a girlfriend / female work colleague humiliated him. Or he has a female boss which he can't bear. Or he can't get women like he deserves. The history may differ but the result is the same: he wants to teach women a lesson. He wants to make women, that woman, any woman, this woman he pays for, feel pain as he believes the women in his life have made him feel pain. No matter that this is a different woman. The point is, the prostitute is available to him as a means of expressing his hatred and aggression in a way that the woman or women he wants to even a score with are not. He can't get a relationship with a woman because of how he treats them. The thing is, and he knows this only too well, with a prostitute, there are no consequences. If he beats her, if he rapes her, half strangles her, threatens to kill her, nothing will happen to him. No blue siren will arrive to take him away. That's what she's there for isn't it? An outlet for the rage. He gives her money, or maybe he withholds payment and just uses her and leaves her bleeding on the street as a final snub to her (she should be grateful to be alive. Bitch).

Then there's the conventionally unattractive man. He can't get a relationship with a woman because of his looks or his personal hygiene. For him, the prostitute is the woman who can't say no. An attractive prospect? Maybe not. Was it good for me? NO! But I'll fake it because I have to.

Next up is the porn addict. He might or might not be in a relationship with a woman. He may even be married. Point is, he wants to try out some of the more extreme sex acts he's witnessed in porn, which his partner won't do or he's afraid to ask to try maybe because somewhere deep down he knows it's not something women who can choose will choose. This might be anal sex, taking pornographic photos on his 'phone, two girl shows, DPs, fisting, watersports... you get the point. Driven by his porn fascination, he divides women into two groups: madonnas and whores. He dates madonnas, but he sees it as his right to explore other sex acts brought to his attention by porn and he knows that for the more unpleasant stuff, prostitutes are the only option.

Finally there is the john who just can. He likes to pay for women to have sex just because he can - it's a power trip to him. He can get women for himself, he might not be physically unattractive, but he also gets off on knowing that if he offers cash to a prostitute, she can't say no. He can do whatever he likes with the prostitute and then pick up his current girlfriend and whisk her off to an expensive dinner, smiling even as he does about where he's just been. To him it's a thrill, a buzz.

In short, the johns are a group of men who are accountable to no one. They demand to use and abuse in whatever way they wish to get their orgasm, with not a humane thought towards the woman they have used. The prostitute is at the bottom of the heap, the subject of hatred and fear, the stuff of fable and folklore. She is fucked, discarded and laughed at. The john holds all the power and he knows it. That she is desperate for his cash is self-evident: it is her reason for being there. If he rapes her and beats her and leaves her half dead, the law won't come for him because as a prostitute, she has no recourse to the law. He is safe in the knowledge that even should she try to speak out, her voice will be dismissed as unbelievable, hysterical, extreme. In fact, the worse he hurts her, the less chance she has of being believed. It can't have been that bad.

I write this from my experience of johns during my time as an escort and in the brothel. The men varied but their reasons didn't, their behaviour didn't. Being pimped was even worse.

Richard Gere? Not a hope in hell.

On Morons and Oxymorons

2011-10-18T15:08:00.000-07:00

A quick thought on another article I found this month on the Guardian online. This particular article referred to Anna Arrowsmith as a 'feminist' pornographer. I'm sorry, but there is no such thing as a feminist pornographer. Let's rephrase it: a feminist woman-abuser. See what I mean? It doesn't work. It's like saying an atheistic believer, or a round square.

It's an oxymoron.

Pornography naturalises the subjugation of women - it treats them as less than human, and as demanding to be treated as such. The men are aggressors - they take, fuck, dominate and cum on or in as a statement of possession, as a cat would piss to mark its territory. Feminism's efforts to advance sexual equality, with both men and women treated humanely as human beings, sets it at odds with such abuses.

Feminist pornographer? We're in the domain of the moronic there.

Anna Arrowsmith: So Open Minded My Brain Just Fell Out

2011-10-14T10:28:00.000-07:00

My attention was drawn to an article in the Guardian online stating that porn is good for society. In it, the (female) writer argues that there is no evidence that porn causes any damage. I've just left my two pen'orth in the comments section for what it's worth, a little apprehensively (defenders of porn may claim to be in favour of free speech but in my experience they're never backward in coming forward to tell anyone who disagrees with their perspective to shut the fuck up - prude! conservative! do-gooder! frigid cow... you get my point) . I'm prepared for a backlash.

That the author, Anna Arrowsmith - a porn director - is likely to be a tad biased in favour of porn is hard to dispute. That she makes sweeping statements, as if of fact, as to the harmlessness of porn, is a little harder to swallow. And as a survivor of prostitution and pornography, I've had to swallow a good deal!

Of course, reading through the comments, her view is a popular one. Men and women who get off on using porn, without too much thought as to any consequences beyond their own orgasm are unlikely to thank anyone who draws attention to the damages caused by porn. Hell, it might take the edge off things or even make them feel a bit bad, and porn's all about feeling good after all, isn't it? Having a laugh, getting your rocks off, not too serious, no harm done.

As if.

Porn damages. Fact. In it, women are sex objects, a set of orifices to be bought, wanked over and discarded. Men who object to this view are seen as unmanly, women who object as prudish or jealous. Or anti sex. God, that makes me laugh, yeah, of course, I object to women being sold and abused to make vast sums of money for an industry that then discards them with their mental health problems and physical damage, so I must be an enemy of sexual empowerment and sex.

!!!

The arguments put forward by the sex industry are thin and reedy, when they are seen for what they are. Once we discard the fear of being called names for not supporting an industry that destroys women, we can begin to speak. But more than that, we can point out a few facts that unlike Anna Arrowsmith's wishful thinking are harder to dispute. The argument put forward by the industry is little more than hot air, a huge spin machine there to protect maximum profits for the business men behind it. The sex industry doesn't care about promoting a healthy varied view of sex, it cares about money! It is profit driven. The pimps don't care about the women's bodies, they care about new, ever more extreme niche markets. Double penetration? Double anal? Fisting? They all hurt. But they make money, push the boundaries, have an edge. Porn isn't free speech: since when did a vagina or anus have a voice? It's the very opposite, a muting of the voices of the women it uses and hurts. They can't say: this hurts! They have to say: I love it, I choose to be here, it feels so good, fuck me harder, or else not be paid or be hurt by the unseen pimps and coercers hidden in pornography at the other end of the lens.

I know: I've been there. The words I said weren't my words, they were the words of my ex, of the man who beat me and raped me and sold me for other men to photograph and film and beat and rape. Being forced to say I enjoyed being abused, wanted more of it, nearly killed me, and I'm not speaking figuratively. I've wanted to die even since I exited.

Women don't get into the sex industry because they're happy and sorted and well adjusted. We end up there through mental health issues, substance abuse issues, violence, past abuse... desperation. And once you get in there, it's all down hill from there on in. The trauma of being sold, of being used as pure entertainment, of being abused, being laughed at and hurt and fucked and told you deserve it, stays with you. If you're lucky enough to get out alive, and not everyone does, you are left so damaged, so scarred, that you feel you no longer fit in, no longer belong. You feel you belong back there, although you hate it, are terrified of it. It's the only place they'll welcome a fuck up like you. Everywhere you go for help they tell you that prostitution's just a job, that porn's harmless, they invalidate you, they judge you (you've got bad mental health now after all, you're easily dismissed, and a 'history' of substance abuse issues, of self harm) and they send you away. Even the so-called mental health professionals don't want to hear your story.

Mute then, and mute now. Disposable then, disposable now.

Because, as Anna Arrowsmith's article, and the majority of comments beneath it show, most people don't want to listen, don't want to hear the unpalatable truth. Society demands that the individual be able to use a woman, buy a woman, wank over a woman and then fold her back into the bedside drawer, with a box of tissues and a spotless conscience. This state of affairs will continue for as long as there is fear in speaking out. No one likes being called names. As for me, though, when I hear defenders of porn saying that people who are anti porn are closed minded, I say: it's ok to say that somethings are damaging. Porn damages. We have to draw a line somewhere. Otherwise we will continue to live in the situation in which we are so open minded, our brains have fallen out.

Waving Not Drowning

2011-10-11T23:53:00.000-07:00

Where the anger ends there is a whole ocean of sadness. In truth, I have put a good deal of effort into avoiding this sadness: I don't watch sad films or read sad books, if I sense an ending I'll flip the channel, I don't listen to classical music. I don't even like last seasons of programmes: it'll be over soon! The rawness of the sadness, my sadness, the depth and the width is immense.

I'm scared I'll drown out there.

It feels uncontainable, unmanageable, and that terrifies me. Much better, much safer, to be angry instead. Of course the problem is that in order to stay clean and sober, and to try to move on, this sadness is going to need to be looked at, experienced and talked and cried out. How to release it slowly, rather than sinking in a deluge, is a tricky one.

Everything interlinks. One thing triggers another: the death of my parents; the horror of addiction and active alcoholism; the insidious slide into domestic violence; being pimped; the violence of being pimped; the trauma and escape and fall into prostituting myself and the violence I met there.

In order to survive, just to get through, I told myself I don't matter, what's happening here doesn't matter, nothing touches me, these people and this situation doesn't matter and neither do I. Now here in recovery I have to resist that thinking. In truth, when I got sober, it was because there was a part of me, a tiny fire which was strong enough to say at my lowest point - enough! I am worth saving. I have to stop or die here, alone and terrified, just another addict prostitute gone, just another statistic.

But following this magical new outlook on me through to its logical conclusion continues to be painful. If I matter, then what was done to me matters, I can no longer snarl and say these fuckers can't get to me, they'll never hurt me. The fact of the matter is they did get to me. And they have hurt me, immeasurably. I survived through stuff as best I could by denying my feelings but those feelings are lining up to be heard, to be felt and acknowledged and accepted.

I guess that when you've pushed so much under the rug that it's become a mountain with a rug perched on top it's time to lift it up and clear some stuff out!

Scary but necessary. Anger, channelled positively, is a great driver in my life, and I'm not about to ditch that. But I'm at that jumping off point with the sadness, with being honest enough I guess to admit that I hurt, and to let some of it out. To be vulnerable. No human being can walk through all that shit and be unscathed. I'm just human. It fucking hurts. But I don't want to drink or use again, and I want to find some peace. Whatever it takes, I'm moving forward because going backwards just isn't an option.

Unwatchable? Or Voyeurism Run Amok?

2011-10-07T12:25:00.000-07:00

I heard about the storm the film 'Unwatchable' has caused when my therapist mentioned it to me. Suffice it to say I have no wish to watch the re-enactment of a woman being gang raped and hideous violence meted out to her family to put across a point about abuses which occur through the mobile 'phones industry in the Congo.

This is in no way because I think this stuff shouldn't be given publicity, and be denounced and taken action against. I believe passionately that wherever there is violence and injustice that the truth must be told and brought to people's attention, no matter how unpalatable. Here in the West we too often sit all too comfortably on our complacent arses and think that as long as life is good for me, then I'm not too bothered about anyone else. We live in a 'me' culture. Even when things that bring us pleasure cause other people pain (pornography being the main example I have drawn upon here in my blogs) we prefer a good old ostrich approach. We need to be made uncomfortable! Only if I am uncomfortable will I move from my armchair and take action.

But to draw attention to rape and torture doesn't necessitate a re-enactment. It just seems to me to be part of the same old same old pattern: people get desensitised to pain and violence, so rather than finding more creative means of expressing the destructivity of rape and violence we simply show it in ever more graphic ways. And so the shock factor barrier gets pushed further and further and the images on our screens become more and more sordid.

The truth is that rape is sordid. It is damaging, it is scarring, it is the fundamental loss of something irretrievable: yourself. As a survivor of rape, and of gang rape, I felt lost even to myself, disconnected, other than my body, betrayed by it. Unable to stop what was happening to it, I removed myself mentally, I split off. My body remained but I didn't: I was there but not there, present but not present. The rapes and the violence remain a part of me, even now: they were my reality, that was my life as a pimped woman, addicted to drink and drugs. And there's no moving on fast from that. Everybody likes a happy ending, boy how we love them! She got away from him, got clean and sober and now lives a happy life. The end! We can move onto something else conscience clear.

Not likely. Not in my experience, anyway. Healing from trauma takes time and help, and healing from severe trauma takes a lot of time and help.

What has been produced is a quick, sensationalist video of graphic sexual violence (likely to trigger survivors of rape), another piece in the ever growing pile of more sexually graphic material that's already coming out of our ears. This has triggered off a flash shock-horror-this-is-what-gang-rape-looks-like kind of response which seems likely to fizzle out soon (we'll see if the hype it's created moves beyond talking about the actual video into actual longterm action and pressure groups). Isn't that the pattern with shocking images? Shocked, then less shocked, then just forgotten as something more shocking comes along. I've watched a video and been outraged and talked about it, maybe even signed a petition so now I can wash my hands and forget... Wouldn't it have been more effective perhaps to draw attention to the psychological damage of rape? Wouldn't a broader conversation rather than a visual shock tactic have had more of a lasting impact, getting people thinking, triggering whole areas of helpful frank discussion and action rather than a routine response?

Why are we still obsessed with watching a woman being raped rather than talking to a rape victim and hearing her voice? Why is the emphasis still on a naked helpless woman's body rather than the whole woman?

Wouldn't it be a refreshing change for us not to be the voyeur?

In a society saturated with hardcore pornography in which women are routinely subject to violence, where lapdancing clubs where women are objectified and bought every day are thought of as harmless fun, where stripping and pornography are seen as empowering for women, in truth nothing is unwatchable. A more helpful and unusual approach given our society's obsession with objectifying women's bodies would have been to actually hear the woman's voice, not linger on her with the camera, frozen in time, as she is raped. If people are uneasy about this film (and they should be: I'm arguing here that there was a better way of raising awareness of this issue, not that this issue shouldn't be raised), maybe we need to ask them not so much why they are distressed by the realities of what's happening in the Congo as why they aren't distressed by the realities of what's happening here and now in our own country.

1 on 4 women will experience domestic violence.

Every week, 2 women in the UK are killed by their partner or former partner.

The incidence of rape still makes it a threat for every woman.

The conviction rate for rape remains at 13%.

Polls continue to show that most people, male and female, believe that the rape victim has some degree of responsibility for being raped.

Our culture is a rape culture, that is, one in which women remain unequal, where pornographic material of an ever more hardcore nature is becoming more and more mainstream, and where this is deemed as a good thing, not at odds with promoting sexual equality. The makers of 'unwatchable' aren't the only ones who realise that more shocking tactics than ever are required to pull in an audience. Pornographers are entering more and more extreme territory to pull in johns to buy it. We are desensitised. The price pornographers are willing to pay is the damage done to a woman's body as she undergoes more and more brutal acts for the punter's kicks. Strikes me, if the people who made the video were really bothered about women, they shouldn't be taking a leaf from the pornographer's books and focussing on more extreme graphically depicted sexual violence. Being a voyeur is not enough. Instead, it would be more helpful if people stood alongside survivors of rape and heard our voices.

I can't speak for every rape victim, but for me? I'm tired of people standing by watching, be it shocked or unshocked, as women are raped and beaten. We need access to help, and beyond that, we need a voice, we need understanding, we need to live in a society where we are not blamed for being raped because of what we wore / said / how we acted, where people stop simply seeing us frozen in time as the woman being raped and see the whole us: our history, how we came to be here, our hopes and dreams. In short, we need change, which can only mean one thing. Action!

Is it Him or Is it Me?

2011-09-25T15:28:00.000-07:00

I've been around a lot of anger of late. A lot. It's a tricky one. A very large part of me holds myself responsible when people treat me badly. I know somewhere, on some logical level, that that's not true, that when people act badly or abusively towards me, that's their stuff, their responsibility. But I don't feel it. I know it but I don't feel it.

Problem is, what's going on now gets confused by all the past shit it triggers off for me. My PTSD's in overdrive at the moment. Having been with someone who used to beat the shit out of me, and sold me to other men, and encountering more violence as I did when I prostituted myself, I find that anger - shouting, stony silences, aggressive body language, even sarcasm - all trigger that stuff off. I rapidly detach, or get faint and sick. It becomes unclear to me whether the raised voice I'm hearing belongs to the person in front of me, my ex or myself (yeah, I found in the end that his voice became my voice. Bastard.)

I went to IDAS (Independent Domestic Abuse Services) for a while since getting sober, and they really drummed it into me that no matter what, you can't make someone hit you. They are in control of their own fist. I know from my own experience of when I get really angry that I could be violent if I wanted: I just choose not to be. I passionately argue against those who tell victims of domestic violence, of rape, it was their fault. When I think about anyone else on the receiving end of such violence, I can see that idea for what it is: BS.

Yet when it comes to me, I'm uncertain. I guess it goes to show how much I internalised what my abusers told me: that I deserved it, I made it happen, that I should count myself lucky they were so generous towards me (some generosity, huh). Yet in with all the self loathing and the self destruction and the self harming, it stuck. It stuck in my head that I am the problem. I am a big fat fucking problem. I attract trouble, I cause trouble, I make bad decisions, boy do I make some bad fucking decisions. I give out the wrong signals and I make people hit me. I do it to myself.

The judgment I encountered from professionals in the course of the violence has stuck too. My fault! I should just leave him. I don't count anyway, I'm just a drunk. After another talk with the policewoman, I remember saying do you really think I want to go and stand in court and be ripped to shreds by his counsel because with my substance abuse issues, my mental health history and with the way our system deals with victims of rape and domestic violence, I don't stand a hope in hell out there. Even if he went down, at what cost? My shame and my weakness hung out for everyone to see and judge. They would've destroyed me.

And I remember the policewoman saying, what if he does it to someone else? And thinking there's no point even trying to respond to that crap. If he does it to someone else, that'll be his fault, not mine. I'm not some kind of co-abuser, jointly responsible for him somehow. Fuck, I can't stop what he does to me let alone try and step in to save someone else.

I thought then, as I think now, what a broken system. And what a damaging misperception. Yet here I am, four and a half years sober, and trying to work on self care, on not hating myself, trying to put my shattered person back together, and I find a voice in my head telling me that if this person here and now in 2011 abuses me, its my fault! A large part of me still despises myself, still blames myself. Slow progress. My different fragments, the fallout from splitting, detaching through trauma, tell me different things. The voice that happens to be there, the person I happen to be when the triggers occur, dictate my response. My fault - not my fault. He's the dick - I'm the dick. His stuff - my stuff. I deserve to be loved - I deserve to be hurt.

I'm not sleeping which never helps. I feel trapped in the past. And confused, so confused with the jumble of thoughts, with the fragments. Still, I remain clean and sober, so I guess that's progress. The mind / body shit's taking a little longer to shift.

To Trust or Not to Trust

2011-09-10T03:00:00.000-07:00

I'm really struggling with trust at the moment. It's the kind of thing you don't notice in your everyday interactions with others until it's gone and you find the whole business of communicating with others, interacting with others, a maze and a nightmare. In recovery, through a huge conscious effort on my part, my ability to trust has grown a little. By the time I got into recovery, my trust was shot to shit. I didn't trust anyone, male or female. I felt sold out, betrayed, not simply by the men who abused me but by the whole system, the way our whole society's geared up to turn a blind eye to such abuse and classify it as fun. I felt angry at the middle class worldview in which I was brought up, which left me so totally unprepared for what happened to me that I didn't even have the vocabulary for it. Pimping. That was a word I came to only after 2 years of getting clean and sober. My ex pimped me. At the time, with the fear and through the haze of substances and head injuries I couldn't have said what was going on. In fact, I largely lost my ability to talk at all. Rape. That's another one. I think like many people I grew up believing that rape was something that only a stranger commits. The idea that a partner might rape me, and frequently, and a circle of others some of whom grew familiar to me was so far removed from my understanding that I couldn't understand it. It's a word I still can't say out loud. I could maybe now just about manage 'made me have sex'.

The professionals I encountered in the midst of this enforced this confusion, and multiplied my sense of shame. On the rare visits I made to hospital with injuries, it was made clear to me that this was my fault. I was treated with disbelief and palpable hostility - 'she's going back to him'. People spoke over me as if I was not there, and didn't even try to understand. He was in my house, and my money was tied up in my house, and I was scared and lost and struggling with an addiction beyond my control. I didn't understand why this was happening, I didn't know what to do. Brought up to trust in the medical profession, I didn't know where to turn.

When I got sober, I realised that to stay sober I was going to have to do things a bit different. I heard other people sharing about their feelings, and with the help of a few good people around me I began to make sense of what I was feeling. In early recovery, I just felt - bleugh - that was about as articulate as I could manage. Years of burying emotions, splitting off from myself, numbing myself out and detaching made it hard for me to handle any feelings at all. They threatened to overwhelm me. Identifying and labelling emotions - anger, fear, sadness - took time.

But there remained, even as I began to be more open and honest about how I was feeling, large swathes of my life about which I simply could not talk. The violence, the pimping, the filming of that abuse, stayed for me unspeakable. That was one of the reasons behind me starting this blog back in 2009: as I began to put a narrative to what had happened, as more stuff came back to me, I realised that this stuff had to go somewhere, or else I would go mad. Unable to say it aloud, and mistrustful of others on matters of this weight to me, I chose to write and just put it out there. I had a voice but without a face, I could be honest without dealing with another persons reaction to me, to this.

I have at times managed to speak a little about this stuff. I saw a therapist for a year and began to try to talk about some of it. It was incredibly raw, incredibly painful. There were long silences and I worried that I might pass out or throw up. And about his reaction. Because it was in my first year of recovery, I was still struggling for the vocab. Trying to open up a little to other people has been much less successful. I've found that even with decent people, people I count as friends, their worldview simply has no space for what I've experienced. In a society saturated by porn, which makes light of violence against women, and when a woman is raped or beaten tends to say 'well, she did go back to him / give the wrong signals / lead him on / have a drink / wind him up' it's hard to know where to go when you're struggling with the after effects of being abused. Women are in my experience often just as judgmental, and just as likely to take the side of the abuser.

This year, I've lost my last parent. That has made a big difference to my ability to trust. I've really gone backwards. Because we're not great at death in this country, I've had some negative reactions to my loss, a couple of friends have avoided me (their stuff, I know, but painful nonetheless), a few people have made comments along the lines of 'well you've just got to get on with life' (I know that! What do you think I'm fucking doing?) which translates as 'please don't talk about this' and it has reignited my total mistrust. I trust no one. My closest ally at the moment is my pet dog.

Which leaves me in a pickle because obviously this isn't going to work, I have to trust people to stay sober, but it's really hard. I am scared and lonely and so lost right now, I don't even trust myself to choose the right people to talk to. I've just begun therapy again, which is positive, and I'm having to fight against all my defensive instincts to actually let him help me. I want to be close to people, I want to love and be loved, but I'm not sure I know how to do that anymore, which makes me so sad I might cry if I only let myself. I guess I'll have to 'act as if' and just try being honest against all my instincts. In truth, I've managed on my own for too long in the past, battling on, and I'm tired, and I don't think I can do it any more.

I'm at a jumping off point. I just hope I land on terra firma, not in the shit.

The Fantasy of Fantasy

2011-08-28T03:03:00.002-07:00

I find it truly bizarre when the women who are used in pornography are called 'actresses'. It strikes me as something of a misnomer. While it is true that they are often given lines to repeat to camera ('fuck me harder', 'it feels so good' being staples), and are told to smile as if they were enjoying it, there the acting ends. What is done is really done to the woman. It's not like any other show where you tune in and watch as actresses and actors pretend to be hurt. Take Casualty for example, or Midsomer Murders. It is stating the obvious to say that when the written role involves violence against the character or harm done to them, whether it be a car accident in Casualty or a murder victim in Midsomer Murders, this violence or harm is not actually done, is not actually perpetrated against the actor or actress. When, however, in pornography you see a woman being fucked, she might be speaking lines but the experience is real, it is something that is happening to her, that is done to her. It is real. The penetration, the 'money' shots, the aggresiveness, are her experience. The obviously painful tricks and the less obviously, they happen, they hurt her. No fake blood or fake bruises here, no painstakingly crafted fake body parts to take the impact of the actions. Whatever is done is done to her, done to her to make him money, done for your consumption, for your pleasure. Her expression of pain is for real.

The money she receives, what if any she gets of it after her pimp or 'agent' has his cut, simply expresses the fact that women have to be paid to take this crap. Or the men who control us have to be paid for our use. We don't do it cos we love it, as the pimps and pornographers would have you believe, we do it because we need the money, be it for drugs or food, and we see no choices, or because they want the money, our pimps want the money and there'll be Trouble if we dissent. The women used in porn don't generally come from the happiest backgrounds. We're damaged, and in porn we get more damaged.

The risks and the harms done are grave. Unprotected sex with numerous parties having unprotected sex with numerous other parties is hazardous, with or without screening. HIV and Hepatitis B are a couple of a whole host of other blood and fluid borne diseases. Prolonged rough sex, be it vaginal or anal, or the insertion of objects can lead to internal damage and bleeding, to urine infections, prolapses, fissures and other long term problems. Many of the more 'hardcore' acts are undisguised expressions of aggression.

Put yourself in her shoes for moment if you will. She is hurt, she is humiliated, by one man or several, while somebody films this happening. While she is physically in pain, she is called names like whore, cunt, slut, bitch, and told that she likes it. She is told to say she likes it -'fuck me harder' 'fuck my arse'. She is made to say she enjoys being abused. They laugh at her, about the damage done to her body - 'she just might be wearing diapers soon!". Imagine being her, opened up for the camera, nowhere to hide, for the pleasure of a bunch of men she never even met, who pay the men who do this to her to do it, who will also sit and laugh at the damage and sit and orgasm to her pain.

Not good for the old headspace, is it? Or for the body. The physical experience of pain of being used in pornography is matched only by the mental pain. The rates for PTSD, drug and alcohol abuse and suicide in prostitution and porn speaks for itself. Trust issues, body issues, dissociation, self harm, substance abuse issues... and on, the glamour of 'acting' in porn goes on, it doesn't just end with a quick scrub off in the shower. The nightmares begin, the triggers begin.

Powerless to remove yourself from that situation, you do the only thing you can do to cope, just to survive, to get through. When the pain is unbearable, the fear is unbearable, the degradation is unbearable, you split off. Your body feels like it's no longer your own, you're not even safe in that, and their words are in your head, they're in your head. No place is safe and so you go to no place, a kind of disconnected numbness that pulls you through at times. When I can't get there by willing it, I cut or I drink or I use. I try to forget, try to maintain some shred of this self, such as it was, against all the odds.

In recovery, I often find myself disconnected, sometimes pleasantly so but mostly it scares me, I feel stuck outside my body and there's no getting back. Every movement this body makes feels like an immense effort, a conscious pulling of strings. I feel fake because I don't know who I am, who Angel is, which of the shards and the fragments and the competing but opposing voices are me. The despair or the hope, the optimist and the pessimist, the hard and the soft, the cold and the warm. What you get when you encounter me depends largely on whichever part of me is dominant at that time. Trying to integrate myself is slow progress and right now I feel as if I've gone backwards. Trust them - don't trust them! Be honest - show nothing! I matter - I don't matter! I live in a warzone and it's exhausting and scary. I don't know who I am, and that makes me sad and lost.

My experience of being used in pornography has been one of extreme and enduring trauma.

Now I'm no mental health professional, but I'll wager that the actress who was in a car crash in Casualty went home with a paycheck, nothing more. The 'extras' a porn 'actress' leaves with - physical and mental trauma - mark her as separate. Porn is not fantasy, it is not acting - it happens to and hurts real women. Instead we should see it for what it is - lies and abuse. The women in porn are the rubbish dump for our perverse imaginations, used and discarded for our pleasure, at the bottom of the pile in a series of unequal power relations.

Actresses? My arse.

Comedy Club Central

2011-05-27T10:06:00.000-07:00

I was reading an interview with Larry Flynt the other day (The Independent: Fri 27th May 2011). The guy who claims he lost his virginity aged 9 fucking a chicken (leaving it bleeding and squawking - he killed it after). He seems to have spent the rest of his life taking much the same attitude to women through his magazine, Hustler. This is the magazine that depicted a woman being gang raped on a pool table, showed rats coming out of women's vaginas, showed a woman being forcibly shaved, raped and then killed in a concentration camp. To name but a few. Criticised for inciting the gang rape of a woman on a pool table in New Bedford, Hustler brought out postcards showing another woman being gang raped on a pool table with the tidings: 'Greetings from New Bedford, Gang Rape Capital of America'. The rape victim's reaction is unrecorded, but it made Flynt laugh and seemed to satisfy his 'readers'.

This guy got filthy rich by publishing hatred against women's bodies and encouraging people to have a laugh and a wank over it.

How did such pictures come to be legally defensible as 'free speech'? Since when has a tortured vagina been able to speak? How could rape and torture, the complete absence of freewill and choice, come to be celebrated as a freedom, fought for as a freedom? Why would people rally to the call of such a man and come to his aid?

What ever happened to the rights of women not to be violated, not to be shamed and humiliated and tortured and used for the entertainment of others?

Do we really want to encourage people to laugh at this stuff, get turned on by this stuff? Would you feel the same, could you feel the same if your daughter, your sister was used in one of these photoshoots? Still think he's a hero, a warrior for free speech, not just some overweight white guy getting rich and getting his rocks off by degrading women, selling women? What about Chester the Molester, the cartoons he published about a paedophile's exploits until the guy who drew them for him got busted for paedophilia?

Is anyone still laughing out there?

Porn isn't in some bubble. What is acceptable there, the attitudes towards women promoted there, are going to have an impact on how the people who 'use' (wank over) it regard women in real life. And yet as a society we wilfully choose to turn our backs on this unpalatable truth and lumber on, any passing doubts quickly overridden by a fast orgasm and a mental channel change.

Maybe it's time to join up the dots.

Memory, but Not of the Moonlit Variety

2011-03-30T04:28:00.000-07:00

So the problem I find myself coming up against time and time again is this: how to live with these horrific images and memories which are burned into my brain? I'm clean and sober, this week it is four years.

The images remain.

If I'd hoped that getting clean and sober and working a programme would somehow magically erase that shit I'd be sorely disappointed. Sobriety enabled me to remove myself from that situation, and every day sober adds a little distance timewise from that place. But the phase I'm finding tricky is the next phase: the cleanup operation. An oiled seabird rescued from drowning won't survive if it's simply pulled from the sea and dumped on the beach, covered in toxins, its warmth draining away through soiled feathers. Similarly, simply being out of prostitution, even out and clean and sober, isn't enough for me to survive in any meaningful way unless I can get the toxic crap left behind by years of abuse and being sold out of my system. I've spent the last 4 years trying to work out just how to do that because until I can change this, it's always there, smothering me, threatening to engulf me at times when it's particularly raw.

This is my Achilles' heel.

Just to clarify: sobriety gives me a hell of a lot. Every day I'm grateful to be in recovery, out of physical danger, not revisiting groundhog day with the terror and the shame and the degradation of being an addict in prostitution. One of the many things sobriety does do is give me a chance to try and work this thing out somehow.

The thought of speaking this stuff aloud, naming things, putting words to the images and sharing them with another human being scares me. But the thought of not doing, and continuing with this stuff rattling around me head, affecting everything, is more scary still.

I have come, as they say, to a jumping off place.

It's incredibly difficult to tease out the truth of what's really going on in your life at the present moment when the past intervenes and tangles everything into one big thorny knot. Every interaction, every response, is informed by my past.

I guess I'm struggling to feel connected to 'normal' life, although I go through the motions. I feel anything but. Nothing devastates trust or intimacy, nothing separates one quite so much as the experience of extreme pornography - being made to watch it and perform in it - and violence. When people have trampled all your boundaries, it's hard not to create boundaries everywhere afterwards physical and emotional to stay safe. They're not hurting me again! They can't get in, can't get close. But neither can you get out. You get trapped. You feel a sense of loss and loneliness, knowing what you know. The pictures in your head remind you you where you've been, what people are capable of, where these things lead, these things you see people laughing and joking about, defending everywhere as harmless. Because they can't, won't acknowledge the damage - the damage done by pornography, the damage done by prostitution - they won't acknowledge you. Your experience makes you invisible.

They've changed the language, see? if something's harmless, and it's a woman's right to be able to do it, then it stands to reason there can be no casualties of it. You're a victim of the language game and of a system which denies women their human dignity by silencing the victims of the system, the exploited, and framing in their mouths the justifications of the pimps and pornographers - she likes it, she chose it, she is responsible for it. End of, no exceptions. Women who will say things that support the sex industry are allowed to remain, courted by the mainstream, paid to tell their 'saucy' stories in women's magazines and in chatshows.

Women who tell a different story are outcasts. Not only have you been abused but you're told that you weren't, that what happened is ok, merely adult entertainment. I have to tell you, being used and abused as entertainment is inhumane.

People who say 'just get over it' are uttering a curse. I want to scream 'how, exactly?' at them but I don't because often these people just mean shut the fuck up up get on with your life which I do: I am clean and I am sober and I get on with my life. The fact that I am suicidal because of this stuff and struggle with PTSD on a daily basis is a matter of supreme indifference to them as long as everything looks good from the outside.

I refuse to shut the fuck up though.

For me, the images remain, the memories remain, reappearing in dreams, and when triggered in everyday life, often with little warning. Healing requires gentleness and the possibility that when you or I speak our story, it may be believed. Currently our society simply doesn't offer that to the survivor of the sex industry.

A Hand to Help or to Hit?

2011-03-05T05:59:00.000-08:00

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.

Despicable Me

2011-03-01T07:41:00.000-08:00

I was listening to the radio the other day and there was a piece about soldier who shot two of his comrades as a result of his post traumatic stress disorder after they'd been drinking. They were talking about how PTSD can make the sufferer re-experience past traumas. Their messing about had apparently triggered off for him the experience of being under attack in a warzone. So he killed them.

I have been diagnosed with PTSD some years back as a result of the abuse I suffered as a prostitute and battered woman. I remember my therapist saying to me that soldiers often suffer with it, and that people who experience severe trauma may develop it. Symptoms include flashbacks, nightmares, and triggers.

I have all of these.

But what the expert on the radio said which really caught my attention was that soldiers who've been in conflict find it hard to adjust to civilian life afterwards, left with all those horrific images of the atrocities they've witnessed emblazoned on their minds. And so they may wish to return to active duty and a combat setting, because there they will be around other men who are experiencing what they are experiencing and who understand.

And there in that one sentence which I caught by chance on the radio I found an answer to 4 years of guilt and shame and confusion. Since exiting prostitution I have at times felt a pull back towards it, in particular when people have refused to help me, or have told me that I chose it ergo I must have enjoyed it. There's nothing worse than having someone explain to you that you're wrong about how you feel, about how things were, that you somehow misunderstood. I could never understand why I would feel pulled back towards something which I found so horrific, and had come to the conclusion that it must be my self destructive urge, which is strong at times.

But what was said about the soldiers made perfect sense to me. Since exiting prostitution, I have found my experiences invalidated at every level, dismissed or denied. I still find, 4 years on, that almost without exception (and there have been very few exceptions, even amongst so called mental health professionals), I have not found anyone who understood what it is to prostitute oneself. Most don't even try.

So the only place I have ever felt truly understood was amongst other prostitutes.

There is not other situation which parallels prostitution, none that attract so little understanding, so much judgment and hatred and scorn. If you're beaten as a prostitute, you deserve it. And if you're raped... can you even rape a prostitute? Surely that just means not paying, and she obviously likes sex well enough or she wouldn't choose to be there. I've been told I chose all this. Well, Angel, what did you get out of that? Take responsibility for what happened to you! I don't fear taking responsibility for past wrongs but I draw the line at being told I wanted this stuff. Nobody chooses rape.

The prostitute stands condemned, both by those who despise her for what she does and by those who argue so generously (on her behalf - they wouldn't dream of doing it themselves) for her right to be an abused woman, to be a prostitute.

It's a desperate place to find yourself.

There was no suggestion by the expert or indeed anyone on Radio 4 that a soldier might try to get back to active service because he enjoyed witnessing the atrocities that had triggered his PTSD and so disconnected him from the general civilian population. Where is this compassion and understanding for the prostituted woman? Why does she among all people get blamed again for being hurt, and told once again that she chooses this because she likes it? There is a complete lack of understanding of choicelessness, addiction, hopelessness, and the trauma that results from being fucked and used and abused and treated as less than human. As a prostitute I was a human fuck doll, the only difference being that I was expected to enthuse over the abuse and take pleasure in it. A blow up doll would've been treated more gently.

It's not so surprising there's a pull to go back, looked at like that. A woman who has been prostituted is a woman who does not belong. Damaged as she is by the experience, she is, simply Unacceptable, a truth too dangerous to handle. If women used in the sex industry don't actually like it, it casts a harsh shadow of doubt across every person's 'right' to wank over women in lapdancing clubs, magazines, videos and on tv, and society isn't prepared for that to happen. So we are used and then discarded, an inconvenience, the human waste generated by a system of perpetual inequalities and abuses.

Being human garbage? Now that's rubbish.

On Total BS

2011-02-28T06:37:00.000-08:00

The total BS that goes on in everyday life as part of our culture in Britain is really getting to me. I was thinking this morning as I got dressed (a great thinking window for me) just how much is stacked against me. Not just me, but every woman who lives in our culture faces a choice: buy into the game of pornification, of female 'laddishness', be a part of it (thinking: 'alright, I see the game here, I'll play the men at it, I'll dress as they want, behave as they want, and get what I want ie to be wanted and desired by them. Then I'll be powerful'). As if to be a female fuck doll was somehow empowering. How do I know? I used to think this! Or think, I want something a bit different. Being treated as a sex object isn't empowering, being able to attract hundreds of men who want to fuck you isn't actually a measure of power. I want to play on my terms. I want to be attractive and have fun, but not attractive by conventional measures. I want to feel at ease with my body, rather than beat myself up for not being stick thin with fake breasts, as out norms demand. I want to treat men as my equal, rather than playing games with them in which I despise and scorn them and they degrade and scorn me. I want something more than skin deep, and more intimate than fucking.

Opting for the latter choice, as I do these days having witnessed the destructive damage caused by a sex industry pushed game playing based on lies and misinformation, I feel very very outnumbered. The other view is everywhere! Women are chosen as actresses on mainstream shows because of what they look like. They pose in scantily clad 'lad's mags', looking exactly the same as every other woman there - no room for mold breaking or individuality here! - and speak of feeling liberated. Sitting in our living rooms, we feel the opposite. Almost every film has female nudity in it, not parallelled by the males, and we've lowered the ratings. Almost every garage, every newspaper shop has shelves of 'lads mags' (so called 'softcore' porn, as if porn could be 'soft' or harmless) , every music video features gyrating semi nude women, pornography is now sold in Anne Summers which purports to be female friendly...
I could go on ad infinitum. There's no escaping it, as a woman, you have to fight to be seen in any other way than as entertainment. And as a man you have to fight against the all too common view that if you treat women as equals, as human beings not sex objects, you are somehow not 'a man'.

Let's cut the BS, take a risk and speak out and say that treating each other as the enemy, to be manipulated, conquered and discarded is neither healthy nor somehow inevitable. Men and women we can stand together and refuse to have our sexuality dictated to us by an industry that couldn't care less about sexual liberation or the people it uses, but is purely and simply a vast money making enterprise, the most profitable industry in existence.

Get active. Fight the bullshit.

The Art of Grieving... Learning to Be

2011-02-14T08:49:00.000-08:00

I've just lost my remaining parent, a difficult time. Though to the untrained eye I appear to be functioning pretty much as usual, I don't feel right. It's hard to say how I feel. So easy to say 'all over the place' but that doesn't really mean much. I feel, by turn, disconnected, lonely, angry, fearful. Ah, the fear! Always my default setting. I feel like my confidence, my security, has drained away through the sole of my shoes and I am scared, so scared, of life. The fear as ever shows itself through anger, an unreasonable temper and a clingness which throws those nearest and dearest to me into the middle of a tug of war: don't leave me - fuck off! Aware, as I am, of my moods, I feel I should isolate myself, crawl under a stone, and leave the others be. Of course I don't do this, because my addiction, my alcoholism, craves that.

I know what to do to stay clean and sober but beyond that, I feel lost. I don't know how to be. How should one be in grief? I know there are no 'shoulds' but I wish someone had told that to my casual acquaintances. They act nervous and embarrassed around the subject of the death, quite without need: my temper only manifests amongst intimates.

My body vibrates and then exhausts with feelings unrecognised, thoughts unheard. I feel a vast movement of things of which I feel I am at best partially aware. Old hurts return, the prostitution, the violence, the abuse. I'm on the defensive again. Past, present and the future run into one another. I take it one day at a time, but which day is it? My sleep and dreams are over-full - too much to process! The night holds no peace.

Still, I have much to be grateful for. I don't drink and use, I don't have to prostitute myself anymore, and I am not beaten and raped and in fear of my life as I was. Looked at like that, anything else is a bonus.

My Head Hurts My Body Hurts I Hurt

2010-11-18T05:37:00.000-08:00

I'm going through a rough patch at the moment. My head's full of past hurts, vivid images all tumbling one after another, a quick progression, intermixing, going round and round. Tauntings and beatings and humiliations and being laughed at and pain and shame and degradation and being used.

My head hurts and my body hurts in turn and together, one then the other, feeling and re-feeling the stuff going through my head. Muscles twang with tension and then ache with release. I'm living in a warzone.

Exhausted.

I can feel my trust going, feel my words going, feel my strength going. I feel incapable, defeated.

Everything's slipping away.

Everywhere I look, images of women as sex objects, voices justifying it, normalising it, singing praise of it.

Hurting me.

I've been here before, been through this before, I guess I'll get through it though the feelings tell me otherwise, the voices from the past tell me otherwise. They want me to give in. They nag at me, needle me, undermine me: what's the point? Did you think you'd ever make a difference you stupid fucking bitch? Stupid fucking bitch! Now shut the fuck up.

I will NOT be defeated. The truth simply can't be silenced. I just wish it wasn't so damn painful at times.

On Invisible Harms

2010-10-25T08:02:00.000-07:00

I just had an article published by the European Women's Lobby. They sent me, along with a couple of copies of the magazine, a dvd called 'Not For Sale' , which they produced jointly with the Coalition Against Trafficking Women. They also sent me 'The Links Between Prostitution and Sex Trafficking: A Briefing Handbook', full of facts about prostitution and pornography. It makes for pretty grim reading.

What really interests me is this question: where are these facts and statistics when prostitution and pornography are debated in everyday life?

This information is not hidden away: it is not stored in some secret cache in a darkened room. Yet it is completely absent from most discussions. Why is that? If one were to debate the pros and cons of genetic engineering, one would never attempt to do so without recourse to information, to facts and figures. If one were to debate anything of import, from capital punishment to the welfare state, in any meaningful way, one would expect to use data and evidence.

The sex industry has made a good job of ensuring these facts are kept out of debates about prostitution and pornography by instead using a language which is extremely attractive to the modern western mind. Choice, liberalism, empowerment - who doesn't support those? I have argued elsewhere that this language has no place in the context of the sex industry. Their arguments are largely attractively packaged hot air.

The point that the dvd I watched made, and which I believe to be one hundred percent true is this: that when we adopt this language, in particular where a state legalises prostitution, it serves to make the harm done to the women involved invisible.

Legalising prostitution makes the harm done to the women it uses invisible.

There are fewer exiting services in countries where it prostitution is legal. Why? because where it is legalised, it becomes viewed as just another job, and why would you need help to exit a normal job? Just think about it. Where prostitution is legal, the pimp becomes a businessman, an entrepreneur, whose interests are protected by law. The language of abuse vanishes. The women who are prostituted become 'sex workers', the johns become 'clients'. A veneer of respectability is given to a system that is no respecter of human rights. An atmosphere where daily acts of violence and degradation are perpetrated on women becomes legitimate because it takes place in a 'safe' setting. What is safe about being penetrated, hurt, being used? Is it okay because it takes place in rooms with nice bedspreads (for the benefit of the johns of course) and indoors? If I am raped in a legalised brothel not on a street corner, how does that make it better?

Violence is inherent in the action of every john. They demand the right to take their pleasure in the manner they feel fit, and because they pay for it, it is deemed acceptable. Why is it more okay to rape a prostitute, to abuse a prostitute, than any other woman? Does an exchange of money, much or all of which the woman will have to pay to the house or to her pimp, make the unacceptable acceptable?

Legalising prostitution is not about improving the safety of the prostitute: there is no safety as a prostitute. Being an 'escort' may sound more salubrious, but the act is the same, the risks are the same. What legalising prostitution is all about is the safety and wellbeing of the johns, of the pimps. It gives them an air of legitimacy, enables them to hold their heads up high and chat about their 'business' in public (a very abstract, sanitised version of it, anyway). Legalising prostitution effectively removes any possibility of the prostituted woman asking for help, speaking about her abuse, which is hard enough as it is.

Legalising prostitution would be the equivalent hearking back to the times before marital rape was recognised: change the language and you silence the problem. How do you speak out without language?

I have struggled to access help, to be heard, since I have exited. I have experienced mental health practitioners (so-called) who fail to see anything wrong with prostitution. I have been told that I was wrong to have a problem with it, to be upset by porn (even as someone who was used in porn and was made to 'learn' how to be from porn) - told to get over it and that I chose it.

WTF?

You don't choose to be treated that way. You're fucked up and you end up in it. That's what happened to me and I saw the same story time and time over with the women I met. They had been abused. They were caught in addiction. They had no money. They had no self esteem. They had no options.

You get to the point where you are so shattered by it, so exhausted by it, that the things that you're told - by the johns, by your partner who beats you, by the whole clamour of a society that has bought into the lies of the industry, that you cease to care what happens to you. They told you you like it, you chose it. You get confused. Maybe you did. Who cares. So tired. Just survive. Just survive.

I am lucky to have got out - just. I nearly didn't make it. I know a lot of women who weren't so lucky. We need to fight to keep the harms done them visible.

Appalled but Unmoved

2010-10-20T03:26:00.001-07:00

I saw the other day that a 16 year old boy had been convicted for raping an 8 year old girl. People are appalled - and it is appalling and wrong. But it is perhaps not surprising. This is what happens when we live in a pornified culture. When we live in a culture that sells women, that degrades women, that makes a good deal of profit from depicting women as sex objects, constantly available, simply waiting for your cock (or any other passing object) to be inserted into their vaginas and rectums, we should not be surprised when our upcoming generations believe women wish to be treated this way. 'Underage' children* will access porn and will be affected by what they see. I remember seeing a friend's brother's porn collection when I was primary school age. Those images, and what they meant for me, stayed with me. When I told the men who used and sold me that it hurt, they told me it didn't, that I'd like it - just like the women in the films they watched said.

I don't believe they liked it either, judging from the expressions of pain on their faces.

Defenders of porn say it's harmless fantasy. But it's not fantasy for the women who are used in it ('actress' and 'model' seems too sweet a label for the truth: fuck doll). Or for the women whose partners watch it and want them to emulate what they see, totally ignorant of intimacy and equality. Or for our children who learn about sexuality and relationship dynamics between the sexes this way. Porn is not about equal partnerships of needs and wants. It is about assertion of power and ownership, lies and misinformation.

Most hetero porn doesn't depict safe sex - in any sense. Rarely do the men use condoms, and women are shown being penetrated both orally, vaginally and anally (higher risk of infection) by multiple men. Or the same man fucks multiple women, one after another, sans johnny. 'Bare back' as the industry likes to call it. How often does porn show lube being applied? Or any sort of nod toward the welfare of the woman. She is there simply to turn the man on: the man shown fucking her; the one wielding the camera; the one making money selling her and the man on his settee wanking over it at home. Her wellbeing, physical or emotional, just doesn't feature.

So with both boys and girls often learning about sex via porn, we have a problem. Women feel that their needs and wants are invalid - there is no place for them. Women in porn have no needs or wants other than to be touched any way, fucked any way, fulfilling the man's requirements and demands. Girls growing up feel a weight of expectation. Boys feel that 'being manly' involves treating women as sex objects, being dominant, and fucking women with neither intimacy nor respect. It's hard to learn intimacy and respect in a culture of aggressive porn, especially when it's so mainstreamed. Fisting, gang bangs and DPs don't really go hand in hand with respect. And the presence of a camera and an audience don't exactly shout intimacy.

Human worth is out of the picture.

We should stop acting surprised when men or our younger generation of boys treat women like sex objects in the real world and take some responsibility for once. After all, if we condone women being treated like that in magazines and dvds, and defend it, cash in on it and laugh about it ('boys will be boys!'), why wouldn't that change how men treat women in everyday life and how women think about themselves? We need some consistent thinking, some ownership of our part in this and some definitive action to stop the sexual objectification of women becoming further normalised. Until we are prepared to act, to do things differently, we remain appalled. But unmoved.

* I find it bizarre that when a woman turns 18 her status somehow magically changes so that her exploitation in pornography becomes legal... Does reaching a certain number agewise suddenly make a human being less worthy of protection and dignity? Likewise with the age of accessing pornography - at 18 does it suddenly become okay to join in the buying of and abuse of women in porn? I am not arguing here that minors should not be protected but rather questioning why the concern for human welfare vanishes when a minor becomes an adult in the eyes of the law.

On Being Human

2010-09-29T09:26:00.000-07:00

I've just been looking through some anti porn websites... A new one launched recently, The Anti Porn Men's Project. Finally! A space for men who have the vision to see that porn doesn't just damage women, but it devalues men, too. It is unhealthy to define masculinity in terms of treating women like sex objects.

It's good to know there are other voices, albeit still a minority, campaigning against the mainstreaming of what are unacceptable and inhumane practices. Our society has taken something innately damaging and normalised it to the point where most people just accept it - with a shrug if not open arms. Pornography is not inevitable, somehow a necessary evil! When we treat it as such instead of taking a stand against it, we do ourselves and future generations a disservice. What does it mean if most teenagers' ideas of sex and intimate relationships are formed through the lens of pornography?

The bottom line is that we are dealing with something that dehumanises, that diminishes, which makes women throw away commodities - when she's been thoroughly used and abused and is too damaged to 'perform' anymore, she is cast aside, another nameless woman put in front of the camera. Pornography robs people of their humanity. In pornography, women are shown being dominated, humiliated, penetrated and double penetrated and triple penetrated - hurt - and as liking this. Women are shown as constantly gagging for sex.

Respect and dignity have no place in this picture.

The pornographer wants the viewer to get a buzz from this. Even the men in porn sometimes act surprised that the woman wants such extreme treatment (usually large insertions in her vagina or rectum). No wonder when women are raped so many people say she asked for it! Women in pornography are rarely depicted as saying no to anything. And when the viewer might be in danger of thinking something being done to the woman looks painful, she is often given a line saying it's fun, that she likes it.

From the women used directly in pornography to the men and women who live in a society which accepts the selling of women for sex, everyone's a loser, if not financially then certainly humanly speaking. Money triumphs over humanity. And do we really want to be lining the pockets of pimps and pornographers?

Fucking Intimacy

2010-09-07T15:15:00.000-07:00

I found in my former life that there was fucking, and then there was intimacy. Ne'er did the two meet! The concept of loving sex, in a partnership of equals, was completely alien to me. In the context of violence, choice is meaningless. I did what I had to do to stay safe, sometimes instigating sex even when I didn't want to in an attempt to avoid a beating. Or else I did what I was made to do, whether by physical constraint or threat of violence. I had no control over my body, what happened to it, who had access to it, who used and abused it. Treated like an animal, I became one - living on instinct, without dignity or respect. Rape and dignity, violence and dignity, pornography and dignity are not compatible.

Unable to remove myself physically from what was happening to me, I removed myself mentally: I numbed out. Even now, my memories remain scattered, a series of snapshots preserved in all their glorious technicolour, with huge gaping voids of time inbetween, lost. The things I do remember I'd perhaps rather not, but then the gaps disturb me too.

I can still struggle to link sex with intimacy. I can still feel very detached when I am touched, or very vulnerable. My default position is still one of wariness: of being hurt, of being used, of being humiliated again. I still cry occasionally in an intimate context. Awkward though that may be, I guess it's a good thing. Tears bring healing, and it's progress that I allow myself to feel, even if I sometimes wish I felt differently! Allowing myself to feel, to be fully present, in a sexual context is still something I'm learning. I've had to unlearn a lot of things about people and how to relate to them. Not all men are like the men I met in my previous life.

I believe that trust is earned. I don't give it away lightly. I do get scared about getting hurt again. A lot. But ultimately I know that I can't survive on my own, trusting no one. That way lies loneliness and addiction! It's not something I take for granted and it comes and goes at times, but it's just good to be alive and have a chance to do things differently, to be in my own skin, to state my own needs, or if I'm not sure what my needs are, simply to know that it's ok that I have them.

Know what I'm saying?

On Dreams and the Dreamer

2010-09-01T04:10:00.000-07:00

I awaken, a tangle of confused thoughts and memories, of limbs and bedclothes. I feel the sweat trickling down my back, down my face. Soaking. The dream I was having is one of several, one of a rotation, a familiar set. These dreams...

They are a pushing out by my subconscious, a spewing out of matter pushed down and buried for my survival. When I dream like this it is a replaying, a reliving, of my past. It haunts me. The images may change but the scenario does not: I look down on a body, a body that belongs to me and does not belong to me, look down as my ex and the other men abuse it.

This body!

It may run but it can't outrun them, may resist but it doesn't stand a chance. Hopeless helplessness. My body. Me. I am the spectator, the voyeur, I am the fear and the shame, the pain and the terror. I am my feelings, in my body but too much, or else I am on disconnect, a floating mind, connected by the slightest thread.

I am and I am not.

Sensations so real in these dreams. Too real. Being touched and I don't want to be. Wanting to scream but nothing comes out. Trying to see but the darkness of a blindfold. Senses out of kilter, scent and taste and touch alive and overpowering.

My mind is letting in stuff, slowly, yes, but some of the blackouts, the gaps in memory, are being filled in. In all honesty, sometimes I'd rather not remember.

An image.
A sensation.
A snapshot.

Curiously, gloriously, split from my body, there but not there.

The pain and the darkness is a part of me, I choose not to live in it these days in recovery but I cannot stop it slowly leaking out of me, working its way out, the Unacceptable forging its way out. No amount of denial, no amount of distraction, will stop this. Unwanted? Yes. So painful my whole body aches with it. But necessary, absolutely. My body and mind healing themselves on a deeper level than I can understand. Being heard brings healing, being accepted brings healing, and I need to hear and accept myself.

Oh, and PS....

2010-08-28T14:54:00.000-07:00

Just a footnote to my last blog... the gentleman I was speaking with who was voicing the opinion that a lapdancing club was 'just a bit of fun' used as his main justification that 'he's a guy'. Ok, so he is a guy - but so what? That doesn't mean he needs to act like a jerk. In fact, I find it kind of sexist to imply that he is a guy ergo he must view women as sex objects. This ignorance and appalling lack of coherent thought behind damaging and sexist practices never ceases to astonish me. For myself, I like to believe that a man is not ruled by his penis and does actually have the same ability for self control that a woman has. I believe they call it equality.

The Defence of the Johns

2010-08-28T14:01:00.000-07:00

His is the voice of every single man who ever hit me; every man who ever touched me when I didn't want to be touched; every man who ever bought me. 'Lads will be lads... it's just a lapdancing club'. I can read the subtext, no problem. What's wrong with you? What a prude! It's just a bit of harmless fun.

Harmless fucking fun.

I don't think so. It is the buying of women, the sale of an inequality, the legitimisation of abuse. All justified in the name of a 'good time', all squared off by the exchange of money (though most of that won't go to the women being looked at, being touched).

Yet I'm the one who's being charged with being extreme, unreasonable for daring to object, suggest there might be another way of looking at this. !!!!. Fearful of being termed prudes for not joining the cacophany of voices in support of the selling of women, too many women choose to be liberal about the oppression of their sisters. I have felt that pressure myself! Young and naive, I joined in the laughter of my companions at pornography, at some of its more extreme images (fancy putting that in her pussy and arse! You'd think it'd hurt but she loves it, she's smiling!) - until I found myself at the wrong end of the camera, being hurt, being used, being sold, torn apart - smile please! - and realised what this stuff means for me.

If she can be treated that way, as a collection of holes, as a piece of meat to satisfy men, so can I, so can every woman. It would be foolish indeed to think that people who regard lapdancing and pornography as the norm don't carry that mindset with them in their everyday dealings with women. To regularly look at material, or go to places, be that a lapdancing club or a brothel, where women are treated as less than, changes you.

Away from the pimping, the beatings, away from being a prostituted woman, I still rub up against people who think that way all the time. For me, it touches on old nerves, reflecting as it does that throw away attitude of the johns. It takes me back. I cry, I shake, sometimes I vomit.

Perhaps if these people could see the aftermath, see the reality of what they do to the women they use, they might grow a conscience. Maybe, maybe not. I don't feel too trusting of that right now. Sometimes people don't want to see the truth. It gets in the way of the fun, of the orgasm. I guess all we can do is keep putting the truth out there. We got rid of bear baiting, didn't we? Perhaps someday women's rights might catch up.

On Hangovers of the Emotional Type

2010-07-02T03:54:00.000-07:00

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.

Feminist or BS Artiste?

2010-06-16T06:40:00.000-07:00

I recently spoke at a conference alongside several other speakers about my experience of domestic violence, pornography and prostitution. As ever, I was extremely anxious, but these days I try not to let my fear stop me doing things. Progress not perfection! One of the other speakers is a former lap dancer, Lucy, whom I met when I spoke at the Foyles event earlier this year. It was so good to sit alongside other women who are just committed to putting the truth out there about the sex industry and what it really means for men and women.

One of the key points to come out of the discussion is a point which I feel very strongly about, which is how the sex industry has hijacked the language of feminism to justify its oppressive practices (see Language Games amongst other posts on this topic). Although I have written a good deal about the use of language in the legitimisation of sex industry abuses in society, I hadn't really thought too much about supposed 'feminists' who defend the industry. So to rectify...

In brief, to me the idea that someone who supports the buying and selling of women could pupport to be a feminist is beyond irony: it is nonsensical. It's like someone who called themselves a human rights activist supporting the practice of slavery, not allowing slaves to speak freely of their experience of that situation, but aggressively speaking as though on their behalf in a language of rights to support their abuse, and insisting they be re-named an equal. After all, the language of buying and selling human beings is just so distasteful and unpalatable, doncha think? Almost makes it sound, well, bad.

If someone is being treated as less than human, no amount of wordgames can make it right. It makes a mockery of language to use it in this way. Pornography and prostitution is about the consumption of an inequality. Just because it has been re-labelled by the sex industry and some so-called 'feminists' as being empowering for the women it uses does not change its true nature. The sex industry sells women and destroys the lives of those it uses. End of.

I have to agree with the suggestion of another woman who I spoke alongside at London that perhaps women who wish to call themselves feminists but are pro pornography should instead call themselves sex abuse positive campaigners. After all, what are they fighting for if not to defend the sexual abuse of other women? Let's call a spade a spade and apply a little common sense here rather than buying into the BS.

On Equality

2010-05-26T02:36:00.000-07:00

I was talking with a friend the other day about man hating, and it made me think... I am not a man hater. I did go through a phase of hating men, when I was 'working' as a prostitute, and looking back, it's easy to see why. My ex partner abused me, the men he introduced me to abused me and the johns paid to abuse me. It was far safer for me to say, men are shits, they hurt you, and to disconnect. I think it made it less personal, less hurtful to me as a human being, to say all men are like this.

Now, though, in recovery, and over time, I have come to believe something different. As the anger fades, and I can see things a little clearer, see the hurt a little clearer, I can see my old view for what it was: a defence mechanism which was helpful in a situation of extreme trauma. I have sought therapy in recovery (I spent 12 months seeing a male therapist, which helped me immensely with my difficulties trusting men), and met and became friends with some good men along the way. I have come to see the truth that just as there are good women and bad women, so there are good men and bad men. I just happened to have spent more time with the latter!

The porn industry perpetuates a lie, it sells us a lie that men and women are fundamentally completely different. Women are there to be used, to be fucked and photographed and filmed as sexual animals, who want that, who love that, and who get off on that (look at that smile!). Men, on the other hand, are there to dominate, to penetrate, to violate, with impunity. All this under the guise of 'free speech', of 'harmless fun', of 'boys just being boys'. It is excused, no, more than that, it is expected that men behave a certain way, treat women a certain way, in order to be men. The subtext is clear: if you do not buy into using pornography, into treating women as sexual objects, to be seen as a collection of body parts and 'holes' that exist for your pleasure, you are less than. Similarly, a woman who questions whether an industry that sells women's bodies, that makes vast sums of money not for the women it uses but for the men who sell them, is 'empowering and liberating' for women, are labelled as prudes.

The sex industry has achieved something quite remarkable: it has hijacked the language of feminism and choice to defend its destructive and oppressive practices. And society has bought into this. I don't believe it's easy for anyone, man or woman, to stand against what has become seen as 'normal' and mainstream. Society has naturalised something which is completely unnatural, which oppresses both men and women. There's nothing new about the oppression of women, but the way that the sex industry seeks to undermine its opponents by posing as some sort of protector of free speech, justice and liberty has added a clever twist and made it more difficult for people to speak out against it.

The lies that we are told and sold by the sex industry are damaging to both men and women. But we do not have to buy into those lies. I believe that men and women are equal, and that a healthy relationship between men and women needs to be founded on respect for their common dignity and humanity. We all bleed if we're cut. We all hurt if we're beaten. To tell men that they are 'less manly' for not treating women as sex objects is to do them a disservice. To tell women that they are 'prudes' for wishing to be treated as ore than sex objects is to do them a disservice.

It is not surprising that such a hugely profitable industry should defend itself at all costs against attack. What is perhaps more surprising is the way our society has bought into this so easily. In my experience, a good deal of the inaction around the inequalities the sex industry fuels is based purely on ignorance. People who lack personal experience of the sex industry look at the arguments as they are laid out (by the sex industry), and are drawn in by what superficially appears to be the side of 'choice' and 'empowerment' for women, ie the sex industry's argument. As a survivor of pornography, of prostitution and domestic violence, there is nothing more painful to me then to watch other women fight to defend the 'rights' of other women to be treated as I was. The arguments defenders of the sex industry use are abstract, impersonal, at a safe distance, and sanitised beyond meaning. I defy anyone, male or female, who saw what I saw, who experienced what I experienced - being raped, being beaten, being threatened, being sold - to continue to defend the practices of the industry. The use of women by the sex industry is nothing if not personal! Being naked and penetrated and wanked over and used again and again is as personal as it gets.

So though I remain cautious in my interactions with men (as I do with women: trust takes time to rebuild after being so thoroughly shattered), I do not buy into the lie of the sex industry that men are at the mercy of their hormones, controlled by their penises. I think men deserve to be given more credit than that. Men and women who oppose what the sex industry is doing to our society, and how it treats the people it uses, need to join forces and fight together. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for the good person to sit and do nothing. It's time we spoke out, side by side, male and female.

Drowning with Rage and Boiling with Sorrow

2010-05-19T03:42:00.000-07:00

I seem to be feeling pretty angry recently. For me, anger and sadness go hand in hand, and sometimes what manifests itself as extreme rage turns out to be hurt or loss. I think it goes back to the places I found myself in life. Often, it was unsafe to cry, or to express any emotion. Angered by any hint of upset on my part, my ex would tell me to 'shut the fuck up or I'll give you something to cry about'. Or then sometimes he'd demand that I cry - he'd get off on it. Either way, it all became entangled in the games of power and control I found myself in, and I guess it's not surprising that it takes some moving on from.

Patience isn't my strong point and so much of the time I find myself berating myself for not being 'sorted', for still struggling with my past. My logical voice tells me I should give myself a break, show myself a little compassion, that I've been through enough and don't need to add to the pain, to the shame. But still, it's a work in progress. I find it so bloody hard to be good to myself! So much easier, always, to do the old thing, self destruct. Cut myself. Binge and purge. Starve myself. Take risks... In recovery, I'm really working hard to change old patterns, and its' exhausting. Accepting my body as me and mine means accepting that what happened happened to me, not to something 'other' or apart. It means acknowledging that everytime my body was beaten and sold, I was beaten and sold. That's a hard pill to swallow.

If it sounds blatantly obvious that me and my body are one and the same, it's worth saying that it's not obvious to me. Years of splitting, of dissociating, consciously or otherwise, of acting as the observer, an outsider, watching this body, these thoughts, detached and separate, leave me fragmented. Watching him shout at me, I'd find myself strangely calm, almost mesmerised. I can see his lips moving, but I can't really hear him, see words forming, but they don't mean anything. In my mind, I dissect each word and spell out each letter with precision. There's spittle forming on his lip. I see that this man will hit this woman, but it doesn't really matter, because that's not really me. I observe at a distance.

I'm told (and I've read - I do a lot of reading on this stuff now, to better understand myself, to recover) that such splitting is a product of extreme trauma - a defence mechanism. Unable to remove myself from the abuse physically, I sought to distance myself mentally, doing the only thing I could. The mind's a remarkable tool. Buddhists often speak of simply observing thoughts and feelings coming and going, they speak of impermanence and non-attachment, and that makes a good deal of sense to me.

But here, 3 years clean and sober, I'm in that tricky process of putting those pieces together again, of turning that brokenness into something whole. It's slow progress and painful. I've sought therapy, and I work the programme on a daily basis. I'm doing a lot of work around blame and shame at the moment, so it's not surprising my emotions are all over. When you've been told by the men that abuse you that you deserve what's happening to you, worse, that you make them do that to you, and you're isolated and afraid and full of fear and self loathing for the drink and the drugs, you believe it. And I'm finding that even though rationally I can see that what happened wasn't my fault, that the blame and the shame belong to the perpetrators, my emotions are taking a while to catch up. If this was anyone else, I would have no problem with that. But, it's that old story, while I can be compassionate and objective with others, I find it extremely painful and difficult to apply that same care and thinking to myself.

I'm so angry! At my ex for the extreme physical, verbal and sexual abuse he put me through. At the men who used me, who forced me, who knew that I didn't want to have sex, who slapped me about and laughed at me and fucked me anyway. At the men who made money, who took pictures and filmed what was done. At my ex for beating me and making me perform for these men like an animal, just to get a fix. At the doctors and nurses in A&E for judging me and treating me like shit on those occasions I was able to seek medical help. And I'm angry at myself for still feeling responsible for things that were way out of my control.

I'm angry at myself for being angry at myself (which makes absolutely zero sense, I know).

But underneath the anger, and I've seen a few glimpses this past couple of weeks, is just a deep, deep sadness for what happened to me, at what happens to women in this country every day. I've been told I was lucky to survive it, and I was. I believed absolutely he would kill me if he so wished - he'd told me as much. When you live through that, you lose so many things, and I feel like I'm grieving for some of that stuff now. You lose faith in people, in their humanity. But most of all, you lose yourself. When you're constantly having to mold yourself in a desperate attempt to avoid a beating, you don't know who you are anymore. When you act like an animal in order to survive, you hate yourself. When your body's not your own and men touch you and fuck you and hurt you and use you and you are powerless to stop them, you lose your dignity. Everything is taken from you: you don't belong to yourself.

My body, my mind, did what they could to protect me at the time. But here and now, what once protected me can isolate and damage me. I guess I need to be a little more gentle with myself. After all, there are no quick fixes in recovery. I am doing what I can, and getting help. When I'm measuring my progress by that of other people, I need to remember that given what went on, I'm doing ok. I am ok. I didn't used to believe that, but you know, most days, I do now. Angry or sad, tired or down, I am ok.

The Public Face of Angel

2010-05-14T02:35:00.000-07:00

Just to say...

I shall be speaking at this year's annual Compass conference. This will be only the second time I've spoken in public about my experiences, and I've had butterflies ever since I agreed to speak there! I tend to get a lot of conflicting emotions whenever I speak out about this stuff, be it through my blog, through testimonies online or in public, face to face. I believe 100% it's so important that the message gets out there about what the sex industry really means for women, behind its feminist language. But I also find it incredibly painful to look at my past, and sometimes I have to back off for a while and take care of myself.

However, I'm putting in place some good safety measures for myself (being around friends afterwards, etc) and am speaking alongside a couple of women there who I'm lucky to be able to count as friends. I really have met the most amazing, strong and warm hearted people as I have got active in speaking out about prostitution and domestic violence. So I'm excited to be seeing them again, and also to have been given another opportunity to try to get the truth out there. Here's hoping some people turn up!

This year’s Compass conference is confirmed to take place on Saturday 12 June 2010 at the Institute of Education, London, with this particular seminar being held at 11am. Details are to be found at www.compassonline.org.uk There are lots of interesting sounding seminars, so we've got serious competition!

If you or anyone you know may be interested in attending, do it! It would be great to meet some like minded people, and the feedback I've had on this blog has been much appreciated - it would be good to meet some of you.

Apologies to those of you who are not based round London - I get frustrated myself sometimes as a Northerner that I can't get more involved. UK Feminista is one of the organisations I'm part of which is aiming to do something about that, so perhaps soon we'll have something similar further up country.

Desensitised and Anaesthetised

2010-05-05T14:03:00.000-07:00

A group of us were round at a friend's house the other day, chilling out together, and we began to watch a film which someone had heard was good... 10 minutes later we were stopping it again, overwhelmed by the violence. Don't get me wrong, my friends and I aren't fragile or exceptionally sensitive. But when a man was depicted being graphically tortured, we were in agreement: it wasn't 'entertainment', it was sick.

I got to thinking afterwards how desensitised our culture has become. That this sells as entertainment is a little disturbing. But how much more disturbing that pornography is so widely accepted as 'harmless' and 'fun' and 'entertainment'! The blood in this film, the violence in this film, the cuts and bruises in this film were special effects: they weren't real. The actor would most likely object were it otherwise!

Yet in pornography, real women are penetrated and used and fucked and cum on or in, for real. No faking: the vaginas and anuses and mouths in the close ups are all part of the 'models', the women being sold. When that woman looks like she's in pain, that's because it hurts, it hurts her, for real, no acting required. That she is given lines sometimes in films to repeat, that it feels good, doesn't diminish that fact, though it increases her pain.

When I was raped and being hurt and it was being filmed or photographed for the entertainment of others, to make money for others, it was the final insult, to be made to 'smile' or say I enjoyed it. I didn't want to say those things, didn't want to be there, didn't want to smile, or at least, try to smile, not knowing whether I was or if I was grimacing. I remember thinking, I can't remember how to smile.

Sitting here at my computer, knowing that those images are still out there, I see that the best I can hope for is for that pain, that real pain and suffering, to be acknowledged. But I also sit here in the knowledge that pornography is becoming ever more accepted, ever more available, and ever more extreme, because as people become accustomed to it, it no longer seems shocking, and something new, something more 'hardcore', more 'shocking' is needed to gain the same 'effect'. All this combined with the fact that pornography is bizarrely seen as fantasy, inspite of the fact that the women it uses are real, and shrouded in a language of 'rights' and feminist terms, is deeply disturbing.

It hurts.

The women directly involved are damaged. But women who are not so involved are damaged by it too. What we view has a direct effect on how we act in our lives. So if in pornographic magazines and films women are treated as sex objects, and treated violently, and shown to enjoy it, and pornography is now viewed widely as acceptable, something men need to be men, something harmless, we are normalising treatment of women that should not be normalised. We are making the unacceptable acceptable. If we allow some women to be treated as fuck dolls, nothing more than a bunch of orifices to be used and abused for men's pleasure, we allow every woman to be treated as such.

Women need to know this. Women need to see that while they may not be in those pictures or those films, this touches their lives too. No one is immune. The prevalence of violence against women makes that clear. If I allow other women to be sold as sex objects, penetrated, wanked over and cast aside, that leads me to 2 possible conclusions, logically. Either I say that there is a sub-class of women who are in some way different than me, and therefore it's ok for them to be treated that way, but not ok for me to be. In this way I can remove myself from the picture, and say: not my problem. Or I have to say that the woman in the pictures is just like me, and that if it's ok that that can be done to her, it's ok for it to be done to me. I stand alongside of her and say: no, I wouldn't want this for myself, so it shouldn't be happening to her.

I am one of those women in those pictures, one of those women in those films. I am no different than you, reader. I laugh and cry, have hopes and dreams, have family and friends. I'm a middle class young woman who found that domestic violence, that addiction, that rapes and pimping can happen to anyone. That being used in pornography can happen to anyone. I'm not special or different, or unusual in any way other than to have come through it, to have survived it, and to be in recovery and finding a voice to speak about that now. I'm speaking for all those women who aren't able to, for all those women without a voice, for those women who won't make it out.

We don't have to let future generations of women suffer this way.

Living with the Aftermath

2010-04-18T07:20:00.000-07:00

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.

Warzone

2010-04-04T11:26:00.000-07:00

And I find myself in that place again. At war with myself, at war with my body, body and mind at their most conflicted. Even my mind's in conflict, a series of bickering, fragmented voices all vying for attention, clamouring to be listened to, acted on. Logic versus feelings, addict versus values, inner critic versus my more forgiving, compassionate side.

It's hard to see anything beyond me, beyond this, images and scenarios replaying before my eyes, difficult to hear the voices of friends when the voices battling in my head drown them out. The world clatters on around me but I am lost and disoriented, inhabiting the past, and terrified of the future.

The only constant is fear.

I shake and my heart races and my thoughts race, chasing themselves round in circles, round and round, picking up momentum, getting more confused. The words start to run together, I'm losing my words, and I feel like I did then, and it's terrifying and it's everything and it's nothing and it's dark and it's tangled and twisted.

A knot in my stomach.

A tightness in my throat.

A choking breathlessness.

Can't think. Can't speak. Can't move.

Terrifying. Despair, blackness, hopelessness, pain, lostness, powerlessness.

I can't connect. Lonely on my own, lonelier in company.

Even when it stills, when it calms, it's ever present, lurking in the background, an ominous presence, threatening to blot out a fragile grip on reality.

Then, existing through the pain, through the violence, caught in the cycle, I named this place The Pit. I used to think, once you're in there, ain't no getting out, baby, not ever.

I had revised my opinion.

But now... I reconnect like I was never away.

Angel, Emma and I: Finding a Voice

2010-03-26T03:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I shared my story with an audience in London. I've never spoken about my experience in front of a group like that before, and I was terrified, although I'm told it didn't show. I forget sometimes that how I feel, and how I think I look, and how I actually look to other people are often quite different things! I used a pseudonym, Emma, but still, being face to face with an audience, speaking about what I used to term the unspeakable, was daunting. When I was first asked if I would consider speaking there, I said no: the fear got in the way. But after thinking it over, I realised what a great chance this was to be heard, to do something, however small, to have a voice. So I agreed.

I'm so glad I did!

When I was in the middle of it all, caught up in the violence, the addiction, the drinking, the prostitution, I was mute. Quite simply, I just didn't have the vocabulary to form a narrative of any sort. Words ceased to do justice to the pain, the shame, the confusion and the terror I felt. Trusting no one, I became a ball of feelings, a mass of tangled emotion, of jumbled thoughts, of fragmented snapshots. When you are isolated save for the men who use and abuse you, but tell you you like it, deserve it, belong here, you lose touch with reality. Doubting yourself, loathing yourself for your inadequacy (ashamed of your addiction, and he reminds you every day that you make him do this to you, that you couldn't manage without him, that you're lucky someone loves you inspite of all your failings) you lack perspective. What they tell you about your reality and your experience of that reality are 2 different things. You get confused. You lack validation.

Even when you get out, if you get out, you continue to be invalidated. You turn on the tv and are told sex 'work' is fun, easy money, just a job. Magazines tell you the same, even the women's magazines. When everywhere you turn you are told that selling your body is fun, empowering, liberating, harmless, feminist even, you quickly learn that you and your story are not acceptable. Before you even open your mouth, you're put on the backfoot. You risk the label 'prude', 'conservative', 'moralist', 'judgmental' by just daring to say, hang on a minute, that's not how it was for me.

You learn early on that the people who hurt you, who make money from you, are a just part of a wider picture, a clever story which the sex industry has told us, has sold us, in which they are the good guys, championing women's rights, and their critics the bad guys. In disbelief you listen as they hijack the language of feminism, a cause which supposedly protects and promotes practices to help tackle inequalities, to end abuses, to further women's rights, for their own ends. And in doing so they have amassed the uncritical support of the mainstream. You see people, other women, otherwise moderate women, defending the very people who hurt you, fighting for women to have the 'right' to experience what you experienced! Or at least, what they believe you experienced, which is something altogether different. You feel alone.

You are struck by the absence of personal words in the debate around surely that most personal of experiences, being used in prostitution and pornography. You find that these defenders of 'free speech','liberalism' and 'rights' don't seem able to listen when you speak of your experience, of pain, of lack of choice, of body fluids and fear and degradation and exploitation. The sanitised language the industry adopts around its practices - 'girls, clients, escorts, business, workers, models, actresses' puts a comfortable distance between the majority of women, who have no direct experience to go on, and the reality. People who defend images of women, open legged, penetrated, as 'rights' (on behalf of us women! Thanks for that...), react with anger or embarrassment when you tell the truth: 'I was raped' or 'I hated it'.

You see you face an uphill battle just to be heard, to be acknowledged. Used, judged, and finally dismissed ('she has mental health problems you know'), left to shut up and put up with the mental scars that threaten to overwhelm you, you question, at times, if you can take this anymore.

In it, you find yourself colluding with the lie, telling the johns as they hurt you, as they touch you, as they fuck you, that it feels good, that you like it. It's not enough that they abuse you, they demand to hear that you want it. Smile, baby! And trapped as you are, desperate as you are, needing the money as you do, you say it. He gives you money, and you ease his conscience, massage his ego. The ultimate betrayal, you feel you've sold yourself out, body and mind.

So to have the chance now to get the truth across, to give that a voice, is awesome. It's not a given. It makes me feel ... lucky. Unbelievably lucky. There have been so many occasions I have thought I wouldn't make it, that I wasn't going to get out alive, with the violence and the addiction...

Just to be alive after prostitution, after the violence, is amazing. Not all women make it out. But to have the words now, clumsy as they may be at times, and inadequate as they sometimes feel to convey that pain, is a miracle. It's 3 years on and it's taken me that time to begin to articulate that chapter of my life. When I first got sober, I couldn't even put a word to how I was feeling, I had got so used to hiding how I felt. My emotions were just a huge tangle, and incredibly, janglingly raw. That takes some unpicking! And then putting together some sort of a narrative of what happened to me, with all the blackouts and gaps... It's been a slow and painful process, and one that continues as more memories resurface and repressed feelings emerge and demand attention.

Being given the chance to speak out, and not just told to shut the fuck up, feels... truly liberating. For all its talk of free speech, the sex industry puts a mute on the women it uses, it sells her body and then puts its words in her mouth to justify it.

The only way this situation will change, and I believe it can change, is if people are prepared to stand up, to take a risk, to speak out, to join forces. We need to shift the grounds of the debate from the abstract to the real, where it belongs. It's by showing the sex industry for what it is, by speaking the concrete language of our common humanity, talking about the physical and emotional suffering it creates, that we will change things.

It was a real gift to be asked to speak yesterday. Meeting again with women from Object and UK Feminista who are taking action, fighting for change, I was given fresh hope. It doesn't have to be like this.

Mind Body... and Me

2010-03-21T05:02:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-06T11:59:00.000-08:00

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?

2010-03-05T04:27:00.000-08:00

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.

Paint Me a Picture

2010-02-26T14:05:00.001-08:00

When you look at me, what do you see?
The pornographer paints you a picture:
My breasts, bare for your delight
My legs, spread wide to show I'm willing
My vagina, held open for your pleasure
My anus, lubed and ready
My mouth, painted red, lips parted slightly,
Teasing
Just waiting, all waiting,
To be fulfilled, to serve you,
To serve your cock.

Do you think you see the whole me?
(And I don't mean in the close ups)
Or do you just see the 'holes' in me?
He shows you my insides - the physical
But he doesn't want you to see my real insides:
That's hidden
Painted out.

Let me paint you another picture.

I am a human being
Who had hopes and dreams
With family, a history,
Who feels and thinks and eats and sleeps
and shits
Like any other.

Maybe you don't know me
But you can't afford to stay detached.
If I were your sister
or your mother
Would you treat me the same?
Could you treat me the same?
How would you feel knowing
other men made money from me
Made judgments on me
Put a price on me?
That other men buy my body
and wank over me
Perhaps that man in the street
Or that one?

I live with that every day.

Let me paint you a picture
A snapshot of my world
A day in my life
Unedited

Beneath the heavy makeup
Are dark circles around my eyes.
I don't sleep well at night
Knowing what lies ahead -
Another day undressing
and posing and pouting
and acting like I like this
want this
am this
On my hands and knees
Exposed
Degraded
As these men instruct me
Direct me
Push me
To ever more explicit, painful things.

Dignity
Humanity
Self respect
Long gone

The drink and drugs
The desperate need for cash
For a fix
Which traps me there
My self loathing
and the man who fuels it
Who beat me
and raped me
and sold me
and sold that picture of myself
to me:
A nothing
A set of holes
A stupid bitch
Who belongs here
and deserves nothing more
than your laughter
your contempt
your body fluids

Unpalatable truths
have no place in the picture
you choose to see.

They are my picture
My reason for being here
Always present
But concealed from you so easily
With your complicity
Beneath the makeup
Beneath the smile.

I see you, laughing at me
or commenting on my body
and wanking over me
There trapped in my two dimensional existence
You with your talk of rights and choices!
But do you see me?
Will you see me?
I will you to see me
The whole picture
And buy into his picture
The pornographer's picture
no more.

Abso-fuckin-lutely Unbelievable

2010-02-20T06:38:00.000-08:00

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.

Lonely in Company

2010-02-10T11:16:00.000-08:00

I find myself silent, often, in therapy. It's as if I'm still gagged. Silent then, and silent now. Show no emotion. Some behaviours are hard to break. Watching the therapist, who I like, who I trust, in as far as I trust anyone, I feel like screaming. Such torment and frustration! He's only a few feet away but it might as well be a million miles.

How to reach out across that distance, to bridge it, with words, to paint a picture of pain and suffering, to say the unsayable, here in this bland middle class setting with its table and box of tissues for clients to dab their eyes with, with this kindly middle class man. I feel like I'm pure darkness, pure evil, a toxic entity polluting this place, this man's mind. If some of the images, the memories, of what was done to me torment me and make me feel repulsed by myself, what will he think, this man with his textbooks and his stable life and stable job and clean and tidy appearance.

His kindness touches me, his presence soothes me, knowing that he won't hit me or touch me or shout at me. I know it's just his job, all part of the deal, for him, I'm just another client. But it means so much more to me than that. A man who doesn't want anything from me, is there to listen, encourages me to talk, speaks softly to me. I don't want to lose that feeling of companionship, can't bear to think that he might see my damage and my darkness and leave me.
I've been alone for so long I don't want to lose this. And so I sit silent and will him to see into my mind, to understand, to see my pain and fear, to know and understand and accept me as I am, because I can't say this stuff.

Loneliness in company. Together but apart.

Living in Limbo

2010-02-10T03:13:00.000-08:00

There comes a point when the feelings are so intense, the pain so raw, that words cease to do them justice. You grope about for the vocabulary but there is none. Nothing you say could approximate to how you feel, to what they do to you. People fail you, and language fails you too.

And who's listening anyway? Who's gonna help? You feel invisible. When you go to A&E (and you should go more, but he won't let you - scared they'll find out) and they talk over you, as you lie in the bed - 'drunk enough to knock out a horse', 'clearly alcoholic', 'look at the state they get themselves into', and disregard you and your pain, you lose your humanity. You become 'she', 'her', 'just another drunk', unworthy even of a name. You're already hurting, but still they hurt you, hurt on hurt. You can't take much more of this.

This woman in the bed has feelings you know.

You know you're on your own. And you blame yourself already, hate yourself already, for the drink and the drugs. You're trying to survive, just trying to survive, and you know these things are problems in themselves, you're not stupid, though they treat you like you are, but you're scared and lost and lonely there are no choices. The people who are meant to help you, the 'professionals', judge you and look at you like you're a piece of shit, which is what he told you anyway. When opening your mouth risks disbelief, or his fist, you stop talking. You hurt enough: you don't need anymore.

Feelings, events, people, all jumble in your head, a wordless, hopeless, non-narrative you'd rather not remember. You feel you are losing touch with reality. The blackouts come thick and fast, a product of the drink and drugs and head injuries he gives you. You're scared you're going mad. You can't bring yourself to think about your future. What have you to hope for, to aim for, to pray for, when you're so utterly broken, so completely fragmented. Even your body's not your own. It feels numb to everything but pain. You try to detach, to get away from the physical trauma, but there's no safety or peace even in your head. You feel consumed by him, by them. Their hands possess your body, and their words possess your mind.

They tell you you belong here. You begin to believe it. When the people who might help you, who you were taught to trust before you found yourself here, when you belonged, were accepted, fitted in, in society, look through you, you have no place left to go. Escape feels impossible. Where do you go? Who can you trust? Where now do you belong?

Since I've got out, I find myself still lost, still scared, still hurting. There is no place I can call home. I don't feel I fit with most regular people, with their regular lives, their regular families, their regular behaviours. With their uncritical, unquestioning acceptance of how I as a woman have been treated by society, am treated by society. It's like they see me but they don't see me, they see what they want and throw the rest away. With their comfortable assertion that prostitution should be legalised, that it is empowering for women to 'choose' sex work, that gender inequality is a thing of the past, that there's plenty of help out there for battered women, if they would only choose to take it. They speak confidently of addiction, of alcoholism, as a lifestyle choice, nothing more, a poor one at that, a sign of weak character and selfishness and poor morals. I feel suffocated, dismissed by them and their beliefs. It's like they're talking a different language than me. They are.

Their words are painful to me, ill informed, detached from reality, cloaked in a language strangely out of context given the nature of the sex industry. Meaningless, but widely accepted. Sanitised to the point of abstraction. Edited to the point of vacuousness. Such language suggests it would be prudish to see the women bought and sold in pornography and prostitution as anything more than an expression of free speech and liberalism. And see, she's smiling, so she must like it! And men will be men...

Looking at a naked woman in pornography, with objects in her vagina and rectum, defenders of the sex industry speak not of women at all, but instead they speak the language of rights and free speech and choices. So much cleaner, so much less distressing. So much more socially acceptable. After all, who wouldn't be in favour of rights, free speech and choices? Taken out of context, these words are accepted to have positive connotations. Our society promotes them. The question we need to be asking is, do these words belong in the context of the sex industry and its practices?

The sex industry and our mainstream culture which accepts it looks straight through the women it uses. They looked right through me, look right through me. Looking at a real life woman before them, naked, with genitals exposed, proponents of porn are oddly blind. They see only what they want. Her body's value to them relies on their ability to project their desires and beliefs onto her, and so use her without blame or responsibility. She remains an object of fantasy to them because they do not see, will not see, the reality. Safely at the pornographer's end of the camera, 'users' of pornography remain at a sanitised distance from body fluids, bruises, feelings, reality. They fail to connect with the woman at the other end of the camera, holding herself open, posing, inserting dildos or other objects for the gratification of men she does not know, to make money for someone else. With their language of 'free speech' and 'empowerment' and 'choice', these so called 'liberals' are in fact anything but. Free speech is not so free when it seeks to silence the debate, to mute the voices of the women who have lived out the reality of the consumer's fantasy.

Her humanity, her feelings, get in the way. The pornographer doesn't want you to worry about her - that's why she's been told to smile. Not as easy to get off to if you saw what it cost her, is it?

Perhaps if 'users' of pornography had to face the human cost, if those women were not mute, they would have to take responsibility, to get active. They might have to dare to speak out and risk the wrath of an industry with billions of dollars behind it, and top lawyers behind it, a whole circus of people who have so much to lose if it became unacceptable to trade in real live women. Not that the sex industry would or could ever quite phrase it like that. The sex industry aims to mute language which draws attention to what it actually does - uses women's bodies, with particular focus on the genitals and their penetration - to make vast sums of money, not for the benefit of the women, but for those higher up the chain. This lie retains its power by avoiding such vocabulary at all costs.

The sex industry seeks to control not just the voices of the women in it, but the very language of the discussion, and the vast majority of the media. Strangely, these people object to words which conjure up with any sort of accuracy the reality for the women involved. The reality's a little less palatable. It's not as easy to speak blithely of free speech and empowerment if you could hear the voice of the woman who just had unprotected sex with 8 different men describe the pain from the prolonged sex, how she snorted coke at every break to try to numb out, how difficult it was for her to try and smile for the camera and moan for the camera like she liked it, to say to them 'fuck me harder' when all she wanted was for it to be over cos the pain was unbearable and she thought she might vomit and she just wanted to grab the money and go shower and get drunk to forget.

The sex industry paints a picture of itself as a benevolent figure in a fight against women being chained to marriage and monogamy and subject to sexual control. They present themselves as the good guys, the modernists, the open minded ones. Against all the evidence, they want to be seen as women's liberators, not their exploiters. Society buys into that lie in as much as it accepts that language. The industry's use of language spins a lie which draws on fear: people's fear to seem prudish; people's fear to seem old fashioned; people's fear that they might be seen as backward, anti-women's rights, controlling or frigid. It's rarely said that you can object to women being hurt in pornography and prostitution, to being objectified and sold, but not be a traditionalist, a conservative. It is not in the sex industry's interest to allow that there might be a middle ground. Or that real empowerment of women might be found in something other than their getting naked to get men off.

They play a clever game, and they wage war on those who speak out. They seek to put their money making off limits, to make questioning the effects of the sex industry forbidden. How ironic that an industry that destroys women's lives should adopt a language of women's rights, of feminism and empowerment! How all pervasive has this lie become that a woman like me who has experienced the hell of prostitution, of being used in pornography, first hand is scared to speak out, is told to deny her truth, has found normally kind, non-judgmental people unable to hear her story? Faced with the appalling reality of what it means for women to be sold and destroyed one picture at a time, one punter at a time, people fall back into babbling about choice and freedom. How can it be that the woman becomes unacceptable, her story unacceptable, while the industry is untouchable?

The sex industry's choice and careful control of language is what keeps us where we are. It avoids explicit language to engage with wider society in its battle to remain where it has managed to place itself: in the mainstream. Many people who advocate the 'right' of adults to 'use' pornography, or argue in favour of the legalisation of prostitution, are embarrassed by the use of sexually explicit words to describe the sexually explicit films and magazines they defend. Such language is frowned upon as seedy and unsuitable, unnecessary.

But why is it ok to wank over a picture of a naked woman being penetrated but not ok to speak of her vagina, her anus, to speak of her reality, to say it as it is? To ask why she might be there, how she feels about it, what it means to her. If she has other options. How have we let an industry which deals in selling living, breathing, feeling, warm blooded human bodies as objects, to be used for our gratification, and then discarded in favour of the next body, control us so thoroughly, brainwash us so completely that we may only speak in abstract terms of fantasy, free speech, choices, and never the humanity of the women who we are staring in the face? How is it that the statistics showing that an overwhelming percentage of women used in pornography and prostitution were sexually abused as children or adults or have mental health problems and want out of it desperately have been so hushed up? (See Object: Demand Change website for recent statistics). In this language of rights, where are the rights of the women being used? What happened to the responsibilities that go hand in hand with rights? And in a context of abuse, of addiction, of poverty, of violence, of mental health difficulties, how meaningful is it to speak of choices?

Getting the women who are caught up in all this, trapped, to speak out in defence of their degradation, of their being dehumanised and objectified and sold, is the cleverest and dirtiest trick the industry has come up with. Nothing can release society of it's responsibility to action, to change, like the voice of a woman who knows. A woman who speaks out in support of the sex industry's lie is paid handsomely, by a society that is grateful it need not look at itself or question its practices, and by the industry itself. The industry pays these women to denounce other women, women who dare to say I didn't like it, I didn't want it, being treated as an object hurt me, I don't think it promotes a healthy image of women, as extremists and prudes. A woman who speaks against that lie pays over and over again, firstly through the pain of being sold, then again by having her pain and her story dismissed. Dismiss the woman who speaks the truth, and you need never face that truth or own your part in it. The status quo is at risk, needs to be protected. The truth can't get in the way of that! It is a status quo which suits many, which makes money, in which women can be bought, wanked over, then put away neatly in a drawer til next time, or left in the brothel til next time, no thought for their humanity, their dignity, their feelings and emotions, what they go home to at night. Hearing the vastly publicised voices of a few women telling the sex industry's lie, society again rests easy, blameless.

When I fell back into prostitution after I crawled away from my ex to support my drug addiction, in despair because in my condition I couldn't get any other work, when I'd begged my GP for help to quit the substances and she'd refused, I found myself telling johns if they asked me that I chose it, that I liked it. It was what kept them coming back, and I needed them to come back because I needed the money. No choices. No free speech. They'd whisper revolting words into my ear, and then say 'and you'd like that, wouldn't you?' and I'd have to say yes. It felt like I had given away my last shred of self respect. I cried myself to sleep at night, I couldn't look myself in the eye in the mirror anymore. Being fingered and fucked and stared at and cum over and photographed and videoed and treated like an object for the entertainment of others was oddly unempowering.

The chasm between the 'acceptable', society and its sanitised, abstract views of women and sex 'work', between that world and my world, that reality and mine, seems vast, unbridgable, even now I am out, even now I am sober. They with their jobs and their houses, their strip clubs after work, just a bit of fun, a porno movie or mag just for a 'laugh', no big deal, going home to a warm house, a safe bed, sleeping sound, comfortably distanced. And me, simply surviving here, struggling to live with the feelings and memories, the scars, the nightmares, grateful that I haven't drunk or used just for today, that I haven't been beaten or sold today.

I'm no longer in that hell of prostitution. But I find myself in limbo, still fighting to survive, still at odds with omnipresent voice of the sex industry, still at odds with society, the survivor and bearer of a truth too uncomfortable for most to hear. It's time we call these language games for what they are and get honest with ourselves.

Progress not Perfection

2010-02-01T02:10:00.000-08:00

In recovery circles, they have a saying: the good thing about recovery is that you get your feelings back and the bad thing about recovery is that you get your feelings back. These last few weeks I have to say I've found having my feelings to be tough. Someone I love very much is seriously ill, with a possibility of not coming through it. It's at times like this that I have to remind myself I am powerless over people, places and things.

When I was drinking and using I used to work really hard at fixing people. I wanted to be everything to the people in my life, I think because I wanted to be loved and needed, and making myself indispensible to people seemed a way to make people like me. I had no self esteem, and so I searched for approval in the eyes of others. If someone liked me, good (although even then I'd think, if they really knew me they'd think different). If not, all hell let loose: a confirmation it seemed to me that my worst fear was true, that people could see through me and know I'm a bad person. I clung to people for dear life.

Looking back at how lonely I was, and how desperate for love I was, I feel compassion for myself. And I feel sad. Now, in recovery, I can see myself more clearly. I see the patterns in my life, the character defects I have which have led me to fall into unhelpful behaviours and destructive relationships. Relationship is at the heart of the problem: I tend to have incredibly skewed relationships with everything in my life, from people to money to everyday objects which I can imbue with certain powers beyond the real. So I can start to think certain clothes lucky or unlucky, demand that any man in my life be a white knight and save me, get superstitious about rituals. Ritual was another big thing for me in my using. And the white knight thing...

I still am prone to these ways of thinking. I am an addict, and they are my default position. But I do these days think myself more worthwhile, and not set up others as gods in my life to be raged at and thrown away when they inevitably fail to save me from myself. Only I can save myself, with the help of others. And people won't help if I don't let them in, and tell them I'm hurting and scared. I find it so hard to admit that! But I am trying, nevertheless. At this time of upset and worry, I have mustered up the courage and honesty to reach out to my friends for support. And the grace to know that I can't save him, that I'm not God, that I can only do what I can and look after myself and hand the rest over. It's difficult, and I'm scared and I'm hurting, and I still often feel lonely, but it's progress.

How does this happen?

2010-01-31T02:33:00.000-08:00

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?

Language Games

2010-01-26T03:48:00.000-08:00

When it comes to prostitution, we wrap it up pretty. We use language to distance ourselves from the reality of the situation. The language of the sex industry, of those in favour of legalising prostitution, minimises the pain of being a prostitute, of selling your body. It facilitates. With the language of 'work', 'jobs', 'clients', we can look straight through the pain and suffering of the women and teenagers who are caught there.

A friend of mine had to debate whether prostitution should be legalised as part of her college course. She was the only one who argued against it. The rest of the group spoke of safety and choice and a woman's right to 'work'. They didn't look at it as a personal issue. Yet what is prostitution if not personal? As a prostitute, I tried to distance myself from what was happening to my body - I used a different name, and tried to numb out with alcohol and drugs and a conscious effort. It never works.

The truth is, in prostitution, men gave me money to use my body. They told me sometimes repulsive, sometimes frightening, things that they wanted to do to me. And that I'd like it. I was told he wanted to fuck my arse until it bled and then stick it up my cunt. That he wanted to tie me up all helpless and watch other men rape me and abuse me til he came.

The fact that he used my 'working' name didn't matter. He was looking at me when he said it, touching me when he said it, hurting me when he said it. My body, my vagina, my rectum, are not distant, abstract concepts. They are real, they are a part of me, a living breathing, feeling woman. When they tear, it hurts me. When they bruise, it hurts me. When I was fucked again and again, hard, to fulfil the fantasy of the punters, it was reality for me.

The language of the sex industry, so widely accepted and used in debates across the country by people who have never experienced prostitution, and are comfortable in knowing they likely never will, is a whitewash. No other 'job' leaves women traumatised, with PTSD, a suicide rate far above the average. (see Demand Change website for Home Office statistics). Using that language kills the debate and silences the reality of women's suffering.

Freedom of speech talk from the so-called liberals is BS. I've never 'worked' with a woman who was free to tell the truth. To live as a prostitute, to survive, you have to construct a careful network of lies, even to yourself. It's known as denial. How else can you pick yourself up in the morning still sore from the day before (joke: 'still walking like John Wayne') and get back out there?

It is the antithesis of glamour. The reality is bodily fluids and smells and KY jelly and femfresh wipes and sponges in your vagina to be able to 'work' during your period. And pain from lots of sex and sore nipples cos they're pretty rough with you, men trying to pull a fast one and stick it up your arse if you're not looking and take their condoms off. Offering more if you let them in sans condom.

It hurts me when people who know nothing of the reality of prostitution throw their support behind the sex industry driven call to legalise it. I wouldn't legalise prostitution for the same reason I wouldn't legalise heroin: it destroys a human being, physically, mentally and spiritually.

The reality behind the fantasy

2010-01-22T09:24:00.000-08:00

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?

Moving on? On honesty and truth.

2010-01-21T11:45:00.000-08:00

I was reading through the journal I kept when I was in rehab last night, and I couldn't help but smile. Every fellow 'inmate' I met I viewed with a suspicion and hostility surely Stalin would be proud of. My comments on my fellows were less than complimentary... and on reflection, entirely projection. By the time I came to leave I had nothing but love and respect for these people. We had laughed together and cried together and been vulnerable with one another, and when the words ran out we had offered all that we had to one another - hugs, ciggies, just our company.

The people I went through rehab with knew more about me, knew more about my life, than anyone had ever known before. In my using, everything had been hidden, I had been lost in a sea of secrecy and lies. I lied to cover up shame, I lied to avoid a truth I couldn't face, I lied with the justification of protecting others, I lied to support another lie... and sometimes I just lied. On my knees with addiction, there in rehab I finally got honest, and hurt, shame, and fear came tumbling out.

And now, 2 and a half yrs later, outside in the real world?

I still struggle with the concept of honesty, of being open and honest with people. I still tend to think: why would I let anybody really know me, let anyone really near me? I still tell little bits to different people - safer, surely, than putting all my eggs in one basket. They say knowledge is power and I'm not about to hand anyone power over me, thank you very much. My default position will always be one of profound mistrust of others, which somedays I make a conscious and monumental effort to overcome. That's working my programme, baby! Somedays, though, when I'm hurting and scared, I don't manage that so well. I can find myself isolating, find my words falling away. But I guess I need to learn not to be too hard on myself for that. When I look at my past I understand how I learned to mistrust, and how it kept me safe.

When I was beaten and raped, sold and tortured and treated like an animal, I lost my ability to talk. It was like becoming mute: speaking made no difference so I didn't speak anymore. When I went out with black eyes and people looked right through me, I felt invisible. When they scolded me at hospital for 'going back to him' when I was terrified and asked for help, I stopped asking. And now I'm clean and sober and still these words are hard, so hard, for me to say:

Please can you help me.
I'm scared.
I'm lonely.
I was raped.
I was sold.
I was abused.

I know I have to talk about this stuff, to reach out and trust someone and open up about it, and if I don't, I'm not going to make it. Sometimes I feel I'll never be over it, never be ok around men, never leave the nightmares and the flashbacks and the replays. It's f****** tough. My ability to gloss over stuff, to appear very together and sorted and confident and articulate, works against me here. I'm none of those things when it comes to this stuff. And as more memories come back to me as I stay sober, I can feel the pressure building inside. It's hard to leave the past in the past when it confronts you at every opportunity. It is with me every day. Constantly reliving experiences of prostitution and abuse would test the strongest person and I defy any of the glib therapists I have thus far encountered and not opened up to to do better.

I'm just trying to make my way through.

Harmless Fun

2010-01-20T03:56:00.000-08:00

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

On Passivity

2010-01-20T03:43:00.000-08:00

When you hit her, you hurt me,
because I feel her pain;
her suffering diminishes me.

When you buy her and use her,
you buy and use me;
because in lessening her value
you lessen my value too.

When you make her disposable,
you make me disposable;
dehumanising her
dehumanises me.

STOP

Look around.

We are all connected.
We are all human.
Whatever is allowed to be done to one
is permitted to be done to another.
Inactivity is collusion,
and political in itself.

Speaking as a Woman

2010-01-20T03:34:00.000-08:00

Speaking as a woman
who drank and drugged
on happiness
on fear
to numb out every feeling
and emotion

Speaking as a woman
who became fragmented
so broken
and lost
she couldn't even answer
to her own name

Speaking as a woman
who sold herself
was sold
body and soul
to feed a hatred and addiction
beyond her control

Speaking as a woman
I say - enough.
No more.
I am a woman
and worthy of better things.

This Addict's Journey

2010-01-20T03:00:00.000-08:00

I am 30 years old, an addict and an alcoholic, in recovery. My story differs little in many respects from those of countless others I have heard in the rooms of the 12 Step Programme I work. I count myself lucky to be here, and in a fit state to write. Recovery has in many ways changed my life beyond recognition.

However, the one thing I still struggle with is my experience of prostitution: of being a battered partner, a fuck doll, treated as less than human. I suffer with PTSD and get triggered, flashbacks and frequent intrusive thoughts.

It makes me sick when the media and sex industry talk about choices and freedom: these words have no place in my experience or the experiences of the other women I came across when I was 'working' and since, in recovery. The language of choice is meaningless in a context of violence, addiction, and mental health problems.

I am writing this blog to give some voice to the reality of prostitution. When I was in the middle of it, I had to say that I liked it, that it was fun, because that's what the johns want to hear. Or say nothing, to avoid a beating. The real me was effectively mute. I write for that part of me who cried herself to sleep every night that I had come to this, for the me that vomited before and sometimes after, full of fear and shame. And I write for the women still out there, who may never get the chance to be heard.