Category Archives: Women

My average life as an average whore

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A few people have asked for links to the article I published in the late 1990s about my time as a prostitute.

I don’t think the magazine (Auckland’s Metro) has an archive online, so have reproduced the article below.

A couple of thoughts first:

I thought the article might be useful, because it isn’t particularly dramatic. It’s prostitution from the perspective of someone who wasn’t forced into the work. I wasn’t trafficked, or there to finance a drug habit (although I was a very heavy drinker, which meant I was depressed and unwilling to focus on other earning options for any length of time). I was there for the money.

In much of the modern socialist narrative, all prostitutes are pressed into trade – by traffickers, by drug and alcohol addiction and/or by personal experiences of sexual abuse. In this narrative, all johns are brutes and all brothelkeepers are bloodsuckers.

There are many truths in this narrative, but it is my feeling that the negativity of it skews the point. It is unfair to sex workers as a result. Prostitution in itself is not synonymous with debasement. Stories of trafficked, bullied and beaten women are stories of abuse, not of prostitution per se.

Away from the abuse – and prostitution does exist away from abuse – prostitution is retail. Describing it a trade would probably be overplaying the romance – you need looks and/or a gift for indifference, rather than genuine skill – but it is certainly enterprise.

More than that – it’s enterprise in which many women have an unusual – for us – advantage. It’s lucrative. It’s one of the few occupations where women can expect a good fiscal return. That doesn’t go for everyone in the field, but it certainly goes for some. Men shell out for sex. When I was working, girls got about NZ$80 to $100 an hour (the spending equivalent today of about £100), with more for extras if you were in those markets. Five or six clients a shift earned you a consultant’s wage.

Prostitution buys you time. Even now that I’m past it, I sometimes think about making a glorious return to the field – when money is tight, and/or I get sick of having to sacrifice large chunks of the day to the day job. In the end, if you’re not among the abused, prostitution is no more or less dispiriting than the middle-tier jobs and lives we’re supposed to aspire to.

As I say, I drank very heavily in those days.

—

1998

The one question you ask yourself when you’re working as a hooker is ‘Do I care that I am doing this? Do I care?’

You never settle on an answer, but your mind seems to want to. You’re standing in a warm, dark (curtains drawn), fusty little room, listening to people outside trotting home from work, and listening to the dolt you’re with whispering that he wants you sitting on the bed with your legs parted so that he can see, and your mind is trying to pinpoint your response.  Do I care? Continue reading →

Women – hear me roar

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Right.

Liberal Conspiracy – a site I generally love with a passion – has managed to find yet another educated, well-off woman to write a ‘women are victims and sad fannies’ piece.

I can’t tell you how furious this stupendously male vision of the female state makes me. (I’ve got a couple of articles to finish in the next day or two, and after that, I’m going to write on this in more detail). I leave you with this for now:

The young woman in the piece tells us that she’s had the good fortune of an excellent education, health, and choice and opportunity (which, in my opinion, should pretty much be where the article ends):

“I am twenty-one years old. Female. British. Middle class, and agnostic. I attended a good university, and came out with an arts degree. If I want to make money, I can, and if I don’t, I can borrow it without impediment. I don’t feel the need to compulsively buy things. I’m healthy, and I don’t hate myself.

No one will stop me if I want to leave my country, stay in my country, sleep in until midday, go out and not come home, get a boyfriend, get a girlfriend, study, drop out, claim benefits, get married, or do none of the above.

Am I the freest woman in the world?”

The answer to that question is ‘Yes – on the strength of your description of yourself, you are among the freest women in the world, by about the length of the Gobi,’ but that doesn’t stop our heroine embracing the liberal left’s cherished notion that educated women who choose how to live their lives and control their fertility, etc, are forever doomed, by virtue of their genitalia, to a life sucking on the hind tit (a tit, by-the-by, that will always be half empty):

“Except that I’m not. I can’t walk home at night alone without looking over my shoulder. I will never fight on the front line for my country. I will statistically earn less than my male peers for doing the same job, and if I stop to have children my career will almost inevitably suffer.

I am bound by social conventions, those barriers we place in our own minds, received from others. I wouldn’t dream of never shaving (and neither would most British men and women). I was desperate to pluck my eyebrows and wear a bra by the age of 12. If I don’t exercise, I feel guilty.

Every accomplishment is a second-long thrill, followed by the question: ‘what now?’ If I went into politics, I would have to spend my life lying and smiling and caressing egos before I got anywhere near to power.”

The writer makes an attempt to weave religion into the piece – I think she’s trying to argue that liberation from God ought to liberate women from social constraint – which indeed it does, but of course – no female writer today is allowed to think or imply that this liberation is genuine. All statements women make about liberation must, by today’s misogynist definitions, acknowledge that for women, there is always a catch – that even if we have degrees, good jobs, and control over our fertility, we are still small, scared, and on the receiving end.

I put this comment the article. I was pissed off at the time, but hell – why not? A girl is surely allowed to tell blogworld where it’s gone wrong:

“Is there actually an active campaign here now to find as many women as possible who will paint themselves as victims in 600 words? Am I the only women of the liberal left’s acquaintance who feels this obsession with publishing this type of whinge is sexist in the extreme? Why not just replace half the site with a nice pic of a Stepford wife?

This article is fucking offensive and I’m keen to know why its type is continually solicited, by both the blogworld and the mainstream media. Anorexics, bulimics, depressives, girls who are too scared to walk down the street – talk about falling over yourselves to reinforce male stereotypes of women as sad, weak little creatures. I’m a woman and a feminist and I’m sick to the teeth of this whining, middle class shit. Stop talking about your minor worries for Christ’s sake. Your personal experiences are neither representative, nor important. Neither are mine. Nobody cares. Start writing about people other than yourselves and get a sense of perspective. Use your advantages to help people who haven’t been as lucky as you. Women are smart, strong and capable. Stop insisting that we’re all just creeping around quietly, waiting for a good raping.

Jesus Christ, but this fucks me off.

And while we’re at it – if we’re all so concerned about women as equals, and we’re all such great feminists and so in tune with the female mind, why are there two pictures of gorgeous young birds in their underpants on the homepage?

As I say, I’ll come back to this soon. I want to expand further on stories of feminist success, and clearly need to write something that is substantiated, and speaks a little more of maturity. I hope the liberal left will join me.