Paid For - My Journey through Prostitution: Surviving a Life of Prostitution and Drug Addiction on Dublin's Streets

by Rachel Moran

Overview

When you are 15 years old and destitute, too unskilled to work and too young to claim unemployment benefit, your body is all you have left to sell.'THE BEST WORK BY ANYONE ON PROSTUTION EVER.' Catherine A. MacKinnonRachel Moran came from a troubled family background. Taken into state care at 14, she became homeless and got involved in prostitution aged 15, ending up isolated, drug-addicted, outside of society.Rachel's experience was one of violence, loneliness, and relentless exploitation and abuse. Her story reveals the emotional cost of selling your body night after night in order to survive – loss of innocence, loss of self-worth and loss of connection to mainstream society, which makes it all the more difficult to escape the world of prostitution.Paid For reveals the raw reality behind prevailing myths about sex work: that working indoors is safer; that some forms of sex work are 'classier' than others; that selling sex can be empowering; that a 'happy hooker' exists. The biggest lie of all, Rachel says, is that women can choose to be in prostitution.At the age of 22 she managed, with remarkable strength, to liberate herself from the cycle of drug abuse and prostitution. She went to university, gained a degree and forged a new life, but she always promised that one day she would complete this book. Paid For is her story, in her own words and in her own name.'Striking, saturated with sad and angry detail and raw, effective analogy.' The New York Times 'This is surely the best, most personal, profound, eye-opening book ever written about prostitution – irrefutable proof of why it should NEVER be legalized.' Jane Fonda'Rachel Moran's Paid For should be required reading in courses on human rights, in police training and law schools, and in sex education courses that separate welcome sex from body invasion.' Gloria Steinem

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780717156009
Publisher:	Gill Books
Publication date:	04/05/2013
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	310
File size:	539 KB

About the Author

Rachel Moran grew up in north Dublin city. From a troubled family background, she was 14 when she was taken into state care. She was prostituted for seven years in Dublin and other Irish cities, beginning when she was 15 years old. In 1998, at the age of 22, she managed to extricate herself from prostitution. At 24, she returned to education and completed a degree in journalism at Dublin City University, were she won the Hybrid Award for excellence in journalism.Rachel speaks internationally on prostitution and sex trafficking, including talks at the United Nations in New York and Boston’s Harvard University, and volunteers with young girls in residential care, teaching them about the harms and dangers of prostitution. Paid For, the story of her prostitution experience and a searing analysis of the prostitution industry, has been translated into Italian and German and has been praised worldwide for its bravery, honesty and insightfulness. Rachel lives in Dublin.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 6 The First Day

I first began working as a prostitute on a warm sunny afternoon in mid-August 1991. That afternoon changed unutterably every day of the subsequent seven years and, after that, will influence all the days, however few or many they may happen to be, so it’s hardly surprising that it is burned on my brain. My 21-year-old lover’s suggestion, which I had been mentally struggling with for hours, suddenly seemed viable, practicable, and even attractive in some of its components.

‘I could be that woman,’ I thought. ‘I could be strong enough to do that. It would put an end to this wandering, this never knowing where I am to sleep, whether it’ll be this sofa or that bench. It would put an end to the constant pining for some fucking food or a cigarette and to the shoplifting I’ve never been any good at. It could all be over if I am just strong enough to do this.’ In that way, I morphed it into a matter of courage, and I didn’t have a chance after that.

My boyfriend was as homeless as I was, and we were sleeping in the home of a friend of his, off the Infirmary Road, just minutes’ walk from Benburb Street, then a well-known spot for prostitutes to work. I’d been with him less than a week.

‘But I wouldn’t know where to go,’ I said.

‘I do,’ he replied. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’

I followed him. And so the ‘decision’ was made, and within an hour I was standing on Benburb Street, back after my first job, and now, officially, a whore.

The first job, of course, is one you’ll never forget. I don’t remember much about the second, and nothing of the third, but this is the loss of a new virginity of sorts, and, as they say, you never forget your first.

He was about mid-forties, probably a bit older, and he had a balding head and wore spectacles. He pulled in in a white car and my boyfriend told him through the open window on the driver’s side: ‘Take it easy, it’s her first time.’

I remember cringing at those words as the car pulled away; the hypocrisy of the pretence at caring, after where he had just taken me.

I consider myself very fortunate to have met that particular man as my first client, as he taught me a lesson I never forgot in all the years it remained relevant. The going rate, according to my lover’s enquiries from one of the other girls, was ten pounds for a hand-job, fifteen for a blow-job and twenty for full sex. That man paid me thirty pounds to pull his prick with one hand, while leathering the arse off him with a thin flexible branch he’d stripped from a nearby tree as we stood concealed in woodland at the edge of the Phoenix Park. And so, from the very first job, I deduced that the perverts were where the money was. I was right.

I decided after that first job that I couldn’t do full sex. I could still smell his prick on my hand and the experience itself had been as disgusting as to be scarcely bearable. Imagining those fuckers moving around inside me was just far too much; the thought of it made me feel physically ill. So I spent the first day doing hand-relief alone and ‘graduated’ to blowjobs within the next couple of days.

I don’t know what’s happening on the streets now, but in 1991, almost all the girls used condoms for fellatio. The reality was that selling oral sex was a disgusting practice, condoms or not, but I continued to provide both these services on a near-daily basis. That situation continued for two years: it was that long before I had sexual intercourse for money.

My memories of that first day are splintered and broken. I know I did about six or seven jobs. I remember at one point getting out of one car and into another before I had time to alert my boyfriend that I was back from the last job. This happened because a car stopped right beside me just as I’d gotten out of the last one and he was standing at the far end of the street. I decided that it’d be all right and went ahead and got in the car. When I got back, he was angry and panicked that something had happened to me. In my naïveté I interpreted this as caring, rather than the fear for his own skin he was more likely feeling.

That night, when I lay down beside him to go to sleep, tears came from some indefinable place inside me. I’d have had trouble even naming it, the thing that was hurting me. I felt as though I’d woken up as one person that morning and was going to sleep as another; and in many ways, that was exactly what had happened.

These words are coming much more slowly now. At this moment I am experiencing what must be the literary version of stuttering. I will write a line and stare at it for ten minutes. A decent-sized paragraph is an arduous feat. I am sure a psychiatrist, if I had one, would be interested to dissect the material that must be wrung out, but I don’t need a psychiatric dissection of the subject matter; I know why this is hard for me. Entering prostitution is to slip from one world to another and to remember the transition is to mourn again the loss of something pure, something good.