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Prostitution harms body, mind, spirit

I have been writing and lecturing about prostitution as a system of violence against women and girls for over ten years -- about the same amount of time that I was used in prostitution. When I was asked to write this article telling teens "everything they should know about prostitution" in 1,200 words or less, I thought I faced an impossible task.

Should I write about the violence? The drugs? The health risks? Or do teens need to know about the social consequences of prostitution? The missed educational opportunities, isolation from friends and family, getting arrested, court appearances and jail? Maybe I should write about how real life is so different from the movies. How there aren't any "Pretty Woman" stories out there. How women carry broken dreams of "glamorous careers" in their hearts as they stand on Lake Street flagging down cars.

After a while however, I realized that everything, the most important thing, the only thing young women and girls need to know about prostitution can be summed up in two words: It hurts.

The first harm of prostitution is "agreeing" to do it. Upon entering prostitution a woman or girl typically gets a new name, changes her appearance, and creates a fictitious past. She does this not so much to protect herself from the police (although a string of aliases help) but to rearrange herself to meet the market demand and in an attempt to save something of herself for herself.

Prostitutes are caricatures of women fashioned from a collage of pornographic films and magazines that feature prostituted women acting like prostitutes. Johns (customers) and pimps use pornography to teach prostitutes how to act. The process of "becoming" a prostitute entails the systematic destruction of an individual woman's ideas, beliefs, feelings, and desires. These are replaced with a collection of values borrowed from various pornographic paperbacks.

A "good" prostitute is devoid of a unique and personal identity. She is that empty space surrounded by flesh into which johns deposit evidence of their masculinity. She does not exist so that he can. Prostitution done "correctly" begins with the theft and ends with the subsequent abandonment of self. What remains is essential to the "job:" the mouth, the genitals, anus, breasts…and the label.

The second harm of prostitution is the prostitution itself. To be a prostitute is to be unconditionally sexually available to any male who buys the right to use your body in whatever way he chooses. Prostitutes are visited upon by about five men per day, close to two thousand men per year. Since the average age of entry into prostitution is fourteen, a girl who is recruited into prostitution at that age will have submitted to the sexual demands of four thousand men before she is old enough to drive a car, eight thousand men before she is old enough to vote, and twelve thousand men before she can legally buy a single beer in most states.

In addition to the daily mind-numbing indignity of engaging in "non-violent," unwanted sex, prostituted women are subjected to a wide range of sexual abuse as part of the job. Women are tied-up, gagged, whipped and paddled, engaged in acts involving urination and defecation, are penetrated by objects and animals, gang raped, and forced to participate in humiliating, circus-like sex shows for the voyeuristic pleasure of men. There is no other "job" which requires a person to endure these indignities and abuses as a condition of employment.

The third harm of prostitution is a woman's accommodation to it. The repeated act of submitting to the sexual demands of strangers with whom she wouldn't otherwise engage in even the most superficial of social interactions necessitates that a woman separate her mind from her body. To be a prostitute is to be an object in the marketplace: a three-dimensional blank screen upon which men project and act out their sexual fantasies. To be a prostitute is to experience exploitation and abuse, and to say, "I want it." It is to withstand the sweating masses of uncaring strangers furiously pounding against your body, and to say, "I want it." It is to feel the piercing thrusts of violent desire bruising the back of your throat, and to choke out, "I want it." To be a prostitute is to never forget: to see every man in every john and every john in every man everywhere and always. To be a prostitute is to never be believed -- unless you say, "I want it." At its very worst, prostitution is literal sexual slavery. At the very least, prostitution is an accommodation and an adaptation to one of the most brutal forms of sexual exploitation in our society.

The final harm of prostitution is women's inability to escape it, even when it stops, if it stops, which on some level it doesn't. Women have literally described prostitution as rape that is bought and paid for. If a single rape creates trauma, then the first thousand cause a kind of madness, the second thousand soul-numbing resignation, and all that follow resurrect the spirit into bitter acceptance. If a single rape can be conceptualized as a deep cut into the spirit that will eventually scab, heal, and scar, then prostitution can be understood to cause a festering wound which so threatens the torso that the limb must be severed to save the body. Escaping prostitution is less like recovering from an injury and more like living with an amputation that haunts the spirit with inexplicable phantom pain. And it is this pain -- this grieving for all that is lost and can never be regained -- that is the fundamental harm of prostitution.

Put quite plainly, prostitution hurts -- a lot -- and that's really everything you need to know about it.

by Evelina Giobbe, director of WHISPER