Prostitution Research and Education by Author: Rachel MoranThe first time I was arrested because of prostitution, on Benburb Street in 1991, I had a conversation with the arresting officer that I have never forgotten. I’d heard one of the older women talk about how we prevented rape, and, sadly, I’d latched onto that as some kind of validation, some kind of evidence that it, and by extension, I, was useful and worthwhile. I didn’t even believe this, but I presented it to the arresting officer as some sort of evidence that I was not, in fact, vermin, but somebody who was doing society a favour in the form of a communal service. This was bullshit, as I sensed myself, and as he was quick to remind me.
I was in the Bridewell Police Station and it was somewhere in the autumn of 1991. I don’t remember his name, but he told me, that day, something I’ve never forgotten. He said, in that blunt way of the Irish: ‘Love, you don’t stop a man raping, or wanting to. You don’t stop rape or anything to do with that. A man who wants to rape will go out and rape, and there’s fuck-all you can do about it’. He might have added, though he didn’t ‘We deal with rape every day’.
I was in the Bridewell Police Station and it was somewhere in the autumn of 1991. I don’t remember his name, but he told me, that day, something I’ve never forgotten. He said, in that blunt way of the Irish: ‘Love, you don’t stop a man raping, or wanting to. You don’t stop rape or anything to do with that. A man who wants to rape will go out and rape, and there’s fuck-all you can do about it’. He might have added, though he didn’t ‘We deal with rape every day’.
And they do, the Guards, or the Police, as they’re known nearly everywhere else in the English speaking world. They deal with rape a lot. As a group, they’re probably second most familiar with it, behind the women in prostitution.
How can I tell you what rape means to me, as a formerly prostituted woman? I was lucky. I know that; both lucky and wily, lucky and crafty, but first and foremost, always lucky.
I was guileful, and I am remembering now so many times when I used my own senses for the nature of people’s intentions to get me out of trouble before it began. It was always a matter of warding off, stepping away from, or redirecting the course of events that were unfolding, and there was so much forward thinking involved in that; it was like a never-ending game of chess, and the ‘course of events’ was often set to end in sexual violence.
It is strange to me now to think that the ‘prostitution stops rape’ fallacy has ever had a chance to gain traction, when sexual violence is so much part of the prostitution life. Do people believe that women in prostitution will simply absorb all the sexual violence there is out there? And do they actually believe they deserve to? Are they so heartless as to imagine there ought to be a separate class of women who sustain the torment of sexual violence so that other ‘normal’ women need not experience it? And what does it say about the individuals who entertain this thought process? Such opinions cannot be held by anyone who does not first ignore and forgo the humanity of the women they would single out to be the recipients of sexual abuse.
Irish feminist Susan McKay, former Chief Executive of the National Women’s Council of Ireland, made similar points when she said:
“There is an argument that the existence of prostitutes acts as a safety valve for male sexual aggression, thus protecting other women. This disregards the rights of all women to live without sexual violence, but it is also untrue. Studies show that men who use prostitutes regularly are more likely to become violent to women with whom they are in a relationship. Men who use prostitutes are not men who respect women.”
This idea that there are some women for whom prostitution is good enough and right and befitting, and others for whom it is an unthinkable assignment, reminds me very much of the attitudes of those men I’ve already spoken about publicly who would abuse my teenaged self in their homes. They would do so with no apparent thought to the evidence of their family lives that presented all around us, including photos of their own teenaged daughters, often older than I was, that adorned the walls. I could feel the hypocrisy then, but I can better understand it now. I can understand, because I have been so often exposed to it, that there is a wilful ignorance at work here; and ignorance is necessary for those entrenched in self-deception when the bald facts paint an unpalatable picture. But this is wilful ignorance at the micro level. How do we best explain it when we are talking about whole societies looking the other way?
The studied, determined ignorance of the individual with an agenda can in fact be compared with that of the society that doesn’t want to know, because it, too, has an agenda. The punter’s agenda is active. It says ‘don’t show me that, because I might have to stop what I’m doing’. Society’s agenda is passive. It says ‘don’t show me that, because I might have to do something’.
It does not stop with the head-in-the-sand mentality. Those who do not want to acknowledge the truth about prostitution ensure they introduce the circumvention of reality into every conversation they have about it. Active, energetic contradictions abound. There are statistics fabricated and legitimate figures obscured. There are repudiations and abjurations and disavowals of the facts. There are disclaimers and rejections and denunciations and denials. There are refusals and disallowances and negations of truth. There are determined and deliberate lies. There is the outright abandonment of reason and every other damn type of wriggling away from reality that the sorrier side of humanity can come up with.
In the midst of all this, every generation churns out a class of women who are expected to be the recipients of the remunerated sexual violence we are told is necessary to protect the general female population, and yet the existence of prostitution as paid sexual violence is something liberal feminism strives desperately to deny. So which is it? Are a class of paid women necessary to absorb this sexual aggression or does paid sexual aggression not exist at all?
Let us imagine the setting for a form of abuse that is primarily physical rather than sexual; a battlefield, for example. We are all acquainted with the concept of ‘human shields’, and rightly abhor the cowardice and inhumanity that singles out individuals to bear the brunt of the violence so that others will escape it. Why, then, are one class of women generally accepted to be deserving of their position as the human shields of sexual violence? Because they are from lower socio-economic groups? Because they are from impoverished nations and communities? Because their homelands have been war-torn or environmentally damaged? Because they’ve been sexually abused since childhood and grew up thinking that’s all they’re good for? Because they are generally undereducated? Because they are disproportionately women of colour? – And if you refuse to look at these things, if you refuse to look at the demographics that make up the prostituted population, I have this to ask: What is it about these demographics that make you so uncomfortable you refuse to acknowledge them? And if you refuse to acknowledge them while claiming to be a feminist, I just have this to ask: Are you for fucking real?
The facts are the women who’ve been previously disenfranchised for numerous reasons beyond their control overwhelmingly make up the prostituted population, and these are the women much of society is content to see used as the human shields for sexual violence.
The obvious question is why? Why are so many people at ease with knowing armies of disempowered women occupy the front lines and are thought to act as a buffer between ‘normal’ women and sexual violence? And why do those who are content with this horrific reality include women who, laughably, term themselves feminists?
The female proponents of prostitution consistently tie their arguments in knots; it is a messy business trying to find legitimate reasons for the existence of prostitution while pretending it was never any harm in the first place. It gets messier still when trying to maintain an air of civility while contending that women like us are necessary to protect women like them. If they believe we were capable of protecting their bodies with ours they’re bigger fools than I thought they were, and that is saying something.
Probably the saddest point in our job as the human shields of sexual violence was that it was considered good enough for us in the first place. Probably the most pointless was that we hadn’t a hope of being able to carrying it out. Our shielding position was a make-believe one. It always was. The truth is that prostituted women are in the front lines of the battle of rape and sexual assault against women, but the mistake society makes is in assuming that by absorbing it, we could curtail it. We could not. Prostitution does nothing to satisfy the problem of male sexual aggression. It does the opposite. It says to those men who are sexually aggressive, ‘here are women upon whom you can vent your urges’, and by doing so, it says, ‘you are entitled to find women upon whom to vent them’. Is anybody really so ignorant as to the nature of sexual violence that they think it can be validated and confined at the same time?
Far from preventing sexual assault, prostitution sets up the conditions for rape; and where we set up the conditions for rape, it will happen. The utterly unequal sexual power relations of prostitution are the perfect breeding ground for rape and sexual assault. Prostitution is the rape fantasist’s playground, the one place in society where he can indulge what he considers his kinky little thrill without fear of legal reprisal. If anybody is so foolish as to think this environment curtails rape rather than encourages it, then they not only misunderstand prostitution, but the nature of sexual violation itself.
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