This is a guest article by Kate of the Hangbitch blog.
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?
It’s not a question of feeling despondent about the work. It’s a question of feeling endlessly ambivalent about it – of being perpetually unable to tap into your own responses, but being doomed to keep trying. Some aged Benny Hill clone will be giggling like a twit, trying to smack the sides of his face with your tits, and you’ll be leaning back, watching him closely and trying to work out whether or not you mind. (The way men feel about it depends on the way they feel about women generally. Men who want to protect women want to protect prostitutes. Men who dislike women dislike prostitutes. I remember a group of privately-schooled male friends bragging to me once that they’d celebrated their inaugural visit to a Christchurch whorehouse by shitting on its floor).
The only time that you feel no uncertainty at all about becoming a prostitute is during the split second that you decided to become one. Your mind is very clear in that second. It is the second that you finally acknowledge the money that hookers earn. It was the second that I finally got sick of the hard bitches at Credit Union, the second that I could no longer live with the thought of the loan sharks I’d visited when I was a depressed drama queen in my early 20s and drinking two or three bottles of wine a day.
Anyway – it’s in this second that ambiguity takes its little flight.
Bugger it, you think. I am sick of this money shit.
Also, you believe that a spell as a prostitute will make you the neighbourhood champion of Truth or Dare. Seems a big prize at the time.
Joining up
The average middle-class, 20-something girl launches herself upon this career the same way she begins most enterprises: she tells herself fibs about it. For some time.
She looks through the newspaper for about a fortnight and slowly begins to understand that she will shortly find herself at a local massage parlour applying for a receptionist’s job. The idea she has at this stage is that the money as a brothel receptionist will be better than it is as a perpetually pissed, partially-employed journalist, and that working as a brothel receptionist will take her close to the fire without actually lobbing her in it.
“The receptionist’s position is gone,” the large, dark, hard-eyed, 40-ish, ever-smiling madam told me, “but there is work in the rooms.” She smiled with teeth and skill. She ran her gaze up and down my body. I knew then that I would do it. So did she, I think. It was fairly obvious that I had drinking and money problems, and that I had run out of bailout options. I began, of course, to dream. I suddenly saw my whore-self sitting in this very chair, in front of a queue of blokes fighting it out for first.
The parlour was warm and dark, flushed through in that heavy shade of breathy scarlet most of us find exciting. Outside, only feet from my seat, corporate Wellington was walking home. I could hear people’s conversations and shoes.
That clinched it. I have never been particularly rational about corporate New Zealand, or corporate anywhere. Corporate New Zealanders were the people I liked to think of as the real slaves of the time, the thousands of educated but unimaginative drudges who’d swapped their souls to follow the New Right all the way to the brink and then over it, and who were now irrevocably chained to Brierley’s or Telecom and the desperate office politicking and the endless fear of redundancy and all the other white-collar traps.
I loathed them. I was one of them in many ways, (I was writing part-time for the Herald at the time) but felt that I was uniquely unblinkered – creative where they were stagnant, and all that other crap. I’m not sure why I thought that. The truth was that I was isolated and estranged, a drinker down to her last few cents. On that day, though, I could hear those suits trudging past the brothel window, heading home having wrapped up another day of restructuring, or privatisation: eight or ten hours of office nothingness.
Erin was wise to all of this.
“I’ll get you to talk to Emma,” she said as she watched me. “Emma’s been working here for a while.”
—–
In came Emma. She looked straight at me and smiled so warmly that I was her friends in seconds. I so much liked the happy, smiling self that her friendliness brought out in me that I wanted to stay round her and use it.
Emma was in her late 20s, with a strong Kiwi accent. She was smiling, rosy and prettily round in that milk-fed, provincial New Zealand way, like Waverley, or The Chicks. She was a rube with an excellent grasp of sales dynamics. Smiles, cuddles, a touch of fanaticism – Christian camp leader meets Moonie recruiter.
She certainly sold the life well. “Like, if you suddenly feel you just can’t stand your smelly customer touching you any more,” she laughed, plonking herself into Erin’s chair, “make an excuse, pop into the toilet and count your cash.” She laughed, giggled, and leaned forward to pat my knee. “You’ll be just fine,” she said. She giggled until I started to. She held both my hands. I wanted to start right away.
“Believe me,” she said, nodding, “I’ve been doing this for years. It’s perfect. I work six months and then I can have six months off.” She made both lots of six months sound like first prize. At one point, she leaned back in her chair and parted her legs so widely that I could see the entire gusset of her white underwear. She made a Victory sign out of two fingers and then she pressed them hard against her vulva, to show me how to keep a condom in place. I heard a tiny sticky sound, like a kiss.
—-
The realities of the job itself are exactly like any other job – office politics, office Hitlers, competition, fears of redundancy – it’s all there.
“Hello,” I say – far too tremulously – every day to the fair-haired woman sitting behind the till in the dark, much-polished, central front office.
There is nothing warm or amusing about the start of my shifts. Every single day, I am about as far from being able to present the assured whore-self Emma helped me envisage as I could be.
Brothel work is not for the deluded. You’re surrounded by people who, understandably, see life as a grouping of cold, hard facts – women who’ve had to decide that they need money more than people. They act like it, too. Dreamers don’t do well here. It’s not a good place to be if you can’t shake the chill.
The fair-haired woman before me is extremely pretty with large brown eyes set in a clear, smooth, face around which her blonde hair waves. Her name is Janine. She is not, as you assume when you see her pretty face, a prostitute. She’s a receptionist. She has the job we all applied for before we landed the ultimate employment prize.
She’s also a complete bitch to new and newish girls, which is oddly upsetting when you’re a new or newish girl. I discover later that her behaviour is about testing girls, making sure that they’re up to this way of life. She wants to know if girls are of a type that is likely to make emotional demands on customers as they might a new boyfriend, instead of keeping those customers firmly in their place.
Which isn’t much comfort at the time. Janine is sadistic.
“Hello,” I say. Janine looks up at stares at me through the beautiful eyes.
“I thought that you were going to be here at one,” she says eventually.
“I’m sorry,” I say, immediately far too rattled to deliver a single part of the Emma-self I’d spent the morning practising. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
“There was a guy here at one. I had to send him away because you weren’t here,” she says. She stares at me. “I had to send him away,” she says. I apologise again. There is a $60 penalty for girls who lose customers this way, which doesn’t leave a lot of change out of $80. Janine turns back to her work.
I walk to the locker room to change, already snivelling a bit. I get changed and try to get it together. It’s the moment when a kind of desolation goes through me – ie, the start of a shift. I’ve felt the same in most jobs.
I go to sit with the other girls – Karen, Michelle, Selina, Cory and Rose – out the back for a smoke and a chat. Inevitably, I giggle too much and talk too loudly but we all do that: we all bring a slightly overbearing persona to work.
Most women here have been through a lot. They’re supporting kids alone and have a hardness of eye that does not encourage intimacy.
The variety of personalities is significant.
Michelle, for instance, is a very pretty, very young, smiling, confident blonde who has been supporting herself since she was about 14 and describes the work as “such easy money.” She has absolutely no problem with it.
“I was in Christchurch and I was down to my last $20. I just went into this parlour one night and I came out that night with about $600. It just totally set me up, just one night.” She genuinely can’t understand why all women don’t do it. “It’s such easy money,” she says.
Others have less confidence. Karen, 29, is pretty, short and very overweight. She talks nonstop about her weight and her partner’s dislike of her. He tells her she’s fat and useless. Occasionally, she says she’d like to run a cafe or a restaurant, but you know she won’t. She’s only ever worked as a prostitute.
She brings an enormous collection of clothes to work and changes her dress every time a client fails to choose her. If a girl in a red dress gets a client, Karen changes into a red dress. If a girl in a green dress gets a client, Karen changes into a green dress. If a girl in a pink dress gets a client, Karen changes into a pink dress. On and on it goes, every shift.
Rose is tall, dark, handsome and hairy in a clean, compelling, gender-neutral way. She has high, pale cheekbones, along which ringletted black sideburns curl. The beautiful pale skin on her arms shines pearl beneath the soft, coalblack hair. She is a mother and always wears red. She smirks a lot, knows a lot and has a good base of regulars. She’s been working for about five years.
So. We smoke and laugh hard, and then we smoke more and watch the smoke head towards the clean sheets that last night’s girls washed and left billowing on the line. We’re waiting for Janine to call us. We smoke more. I can hear homeward-bound Wellington buzzing off to the suburbs outside our walls.
—-
“Introduction!” Janine shouts down the hall whenever a man comes through the front door.
We girls file into to the guest lounge to meet him. He’ll shakes hands with us all and choose whichever one of us he likes. It can be highly competitive stuff. You don’t get paid if you don’t get chosen, which is difficult when you start out and you’re shy.
Erin says that the truly motivated whore charges into the guest lounge, grabs the customer’s hand and says “choose me, sweetheart. I’m the best fuck in the house,” but I have yet to visualise myself delivering this line. I sometimes wonder whether anyone other than Erin has tried it (as it happens, I did as my confidence improved).
The bloke in the guest lounge is short, overweight, sweaty-skinned and in his mid-50s, with small, brown, clever little eyes. He wears a suit – he probably worked late and came straight from the office. There isn’t a rush to grab his hand. He’s a regular whom nobody likes, because of the mean glint in his tiny eyes.
Everyone is also aware that the older ones who come in after a long day are sweaty, foul-smelling and sticky. Later at night, they’re often very drunk as well, but I don’t mind that so much. I like the smell of alcohol. It overpowers a lot of other smells and reminds me of my dad.
I give him the eye anyway. The revolting ones generally like an overture – they want to play the flirting game. I tend to like them better than the smart-assed, good-looking, med-student types who stand with their arms crossed and want to see you crawl around, or shit.
We leave the room. Erin joins us after a few minutes. “Becky,” she says, pointing at me. I stand quickly and walk to the small office. Janine silently hands me a couple of towels.
The little fat man waits for me at the bottom of the stairs. His bald head gleams with the day’s grease. He’s grinning at me with his little piggy eyes.
“Now, how about I follow you, Becky?” he says in the jokey voice he always uses. I already want to hit him. Behind his back, I roll my eyes.
He knows what to do. He heads straight upstairs to the guest bathroom, and strips off and goes to stand in the shower. All clients must shower first. It’s supposed to be about helping them relax, but it’s for us. It’s about getting rid of the smell.
When he’s washed, I lean forward to wrap a towel around him. He takes this opportunity to put his arm around my waist. We walk, like a couple, to our room. Then he sits on the bed and watches me winch my tight dress over my head. Someone is playing Bic Runga outside.
“Ah,” he says, as I am revealed. “A suspender girl.” I nod at him and bend down to unfasten the snaps. “No, leave them on,” he says. This means I have to get my knickers off while leaving the belt on, which is quite a trial. As time goes on, and I get more experienced, I dispense with the knickers from the start.
Now he’s lying in front of me, resting his head on his round, rather hairless arms. I sit on his back, as he asks. I stroke his neck, up and down, with the balls of my thumbs.
And so it is that I begin again to try to decide whether or not I care about this work. I look at my hands on his sticky skin and try to gauge my reaction to the stickiness. I look at him. He’s terribly short. His hairless little feet come nowhere near the end of the bed.
His suit pants, when he had them on, looked as though they’d been cut off at the knees.
But it is a lovely suit – beautifully sleek and expensive-looking, much in the Winston Peters style. It is only a pity that this attention to appearance doesn’t extend to the far reaches of his physical person. He stinks. In the shower, he ran the soap down his barrel chest once. He stood under the water for a bit and then he got out.
I notice that between his buttock runs a deep, yellow-brown line which seems to be set under his skin. He has the same odd colouring between his toes and in the corners of his mouth. It’s odd – it’s set under his skin, like a tattoo. It’s mould, shit, or hereditary – I can’t work it out.
“Touch my bum,” he says suddenly. The pillow muffles his voice, so he speaks again. “Please touch it.” I watch my hands as they move towards his backside. I touch him. Straightaway, he moans and starts jerking his backside around. He strikes me as rather theatrical. I try to remain seated on his legs. He’ll roll over onto his back soon.
Then suddenly, he asks me a ridiculous question – ridiculous because it’s utterly unnatural, theatrical. He’s been rehearsing it. He’s lifted it from some movie or other that he’s seen about relationships, or women, or whores.
“How does it feel having all the power?” he asks.
“Sorry?” I say. I’m surprised and disgusted. I hate the ones who think they’re in a movie. I’m almost in a trance, watching my hands on his behind.
“How does it feel having all the power?”
“Say again?” I say.
He lifts his head from the pillow. “How does it feel having the power?” he yells. He stops writhing, rolls over and stares at me. I am at the height of my indifference. He watches me but eventually rolls over and buries his face in his pillow again. I’m glad he does that. I know now that he’s impotent.
“Forget it,” he says. “Who cares?”
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