Women are called womanly only when they regard themselves as existing solely for the use of men. – George Bernard Shaw
One major professional hazard for whores is the possibility of rape, and though it is much less likely for call girls than for streetwalkers it does still happen sometimes. In yesterday’s column I defined rape as I use the word and discussed the appalling ignorance which causes many people (including some women) to conclude that whores cannot be raped; I then described the first time I was raped on the job. In today’s column I will describe the second time and another incident in which I only barely avoided being raped; strangely enough it was the latter incident which was the most frightening of the three, for reasons which will soon be made clear. For those who missed yesterday’s column I will repeat this warning: Though I will do my best to describe these events as neutrally and without lurid detail as possible, it may still be a bit difficult for those of delicate disposition or women who have themselves been raped. If you belong to one of those two groups, you may wish to skip both this column and yesterday’s because I really have no desire to cause anyone distress. As I said yesterday I would rather not have to talk about it at all, but the only way to combat ignorance is with complete honesty, and that means discussing the ugly aspects of harlotry as honestly as the beautiful ones.
It was perhaps a year after the first incident that a regular customer of mine who was a wrestling promoter called me for one of his professional wrestlers, a champion from Honduras. The man spoke almost no English and I only half-forgotten high-school Castilian Spanish, so the details were arranged by my regular. The hotel wasn’t nearly as fancy as the Windsor Court but it was by no means cheap, and my regular was going to be in the next room, so even though I had a slight sense of foreboding I went ahead with the deal. As in the other call the first part went as usual, but soon after the client was inside me my true predicament became apparent.
The first sign of trouble was that he wouldn’t stop trying to kiss me. As I mentioned in my column of July 24th most whores never kiss our clients because of the desire to maintain emotional distance, and though I sometimes broke that rule if I felt some chemistry with a friendly, clean client, I certainly never did with men who seemed unable to kiss without being disgusting (which I will discuss in a future column). This guy I most definitely did NOT want to kiss; he had a huge, wet mouth and was a heavy smoker in addition to just generally being gross. But despite my protests and fighting he continued to kiss me roughly, biting my lip and sucking on it so hard it throbbed. When I finally succeeded in getting him to let go by biting him back, he started laughing like an idiot and sucking on my neck. Again I fought, pushing him off, and he moved to one of my tits, then the other, laughing and keeping me down in a wrestling hold so I could not escape.
Finally, I got my opportunity; he withdrew from me, reared up on his knees and announced, “No like condom!” and proceeded to pull it off. My legs slammed shut like a steel trap and I rolled off of the bed and dropped to the floor so quickly it almost made me dizzy. This seemed to take him off guard, so I quickly got up and started pointing at my watch, trying to make him understand that his time was up. It wasn’t, of course, but I managed to confuse him enough to cause him to hesitate while I started to get dressed. The next five minutes or so were like some grotesque comedy; he kept trying to hug and kiss me while I was trying to get dressed, then actually lifted me off of the floor several times and turned me around in his hands, talking to me in thickly-accented Spanish I couldn’t quite make out. If I hadn’t been so concerned for my safety it might’ve been funny. At last, though, I managed to get out the door, only to find my regular coming up the hall from the bar where he had been for the last twenty minutes, oblivious to my noisy struggles next door. It was the last time I ever saw him, needless to say!
I raced straight home and took a hot shower, then examined myself in the mirror; my lips were swollen and purple, and I had ugly bruises on my neck, chest and nipples. I was utterly furious and frightened at the same time, and I cried for some time before I could explain to Grace what had happened. I did not go out again that night, and the next day the bruises were even uglier so I had to take the night off; not even makeup would have covered them. By the second day following, however, I had figured out a makeup combination which would hide the marks until they got pale enough to ignore. I think the reason I was affected so much more strongly by this abortive rape than by the completed one was that, while the Frenchman had been very quick and nonchalant and even seemed to think he had done nothing wrong, the wrestler clearly recognized that he was hurting me and obviously took sadistic pleasure in it. In addition, the Frenchman did not remove his condom; I shudder to think what disease I might have contracted from the wrestler had he succeeded in penetrating me again after removing his.
The one factor these two calls had in common was obviously the language barrier; I do not believe that the problem with these men was their ignorance of English, but rather my ignorance of their languages. Many people have a tendency to perceive people who don’t speak their language as stupid; think of the stereotypical “ugly American” shouting at non-English-speaking people as if increasing the volume will somehow help them to understand. Perhaps it is easier for some people to dehumanize those with whom they cannot communicate, to think of them as somehow lacking human feelings and rights. I believe that is what happened in both of these cases; because I could not speak the language of either man it was easy for him to dismiss me as stupid, even subhuman, like some kind of animated sex doll.
The third (and last) client who violated me to that degree didn’t have the excuse of a language barrier; he was just completely fucked up on some drug I could not identify. It was at a big Super Bowl party; a group of eight men had hired eight girls (four strippers and four escorts from two different agencies) for three hours, but the negotiated fee just covered our being there (dancing, socializing, and the like). As is usual in this sort of arrangement, the escorts were picking up “side bets” and entertaining them in the bedrooms off of the main room. These rooms weren’t locked or anything, so while I was engaged in one such deal there was actually another girl (whom I did not know) in the room changing clothes or something. The client was taking me from behind, then without warning it was like the Frenchman all over again; he bore down on me with his full weight and switched holes too quickly for me to stop him. I of course protested and tried to move away, but he was far too heavy for me to move and far too stoned to care about my protests (I’m not sure what he was on but it wasn’t pretty); I therefore went into my usual rape-defense mode, relaxing as best I could with this moron resting his full weight on my arched back. As with the Frenchman, I was perfectly calm and my thinking was absolutely crystal-clear; though I could easily have attracted attention by shouting, I realized that to do so would probably blow a multi-hour deal not just for myself, but also for seven other girls. So I kept quiet and resolved to endure it, but I think the other girl realized what was going on because she left the room immediately and apparently summoned one of my girls, a fiery redhead called Karla, who came into the room and asked if I was OK. Now, picture this bizarre situation; there was a big party going on in the next room, and here was this guy holding me down and raping me, completely oblivious to the fact that another girl was there talking to me. He was high, all right. “Yeah, I’m fine,” I gasped.
“Is he doing what I think he’s doing?” she asked, visibly bristling.
“Yeah, he is, but I’ll be all right,” I replied. She seemed to be getting angrier, so I added, “really.” And bless her heart, she stayed right there until he was done (which wasn’t much longer) and collapsed on the bed, at which point she took me into the bathroom and cleaned me up with a warm washcloth, cursing him all the while. I was really touched by her solicitude and told her so, explaining that I didn’t want to mess things up for everyone (including her, who was saving up to buy a car). She said she understood, but stared daggers at the stupid ape when he stumbled out of the bedroom an hour or so later. As with the Frenchman, things worked out for the best because I collected several more “side bets” and when the guys decided to keep four of the girls for another two hours, I was one of them; altogether I went home with over $3000 cash in my purse for five hours of work. As before, my “pushing past” the ordeal rather than dwelling on it got me through, though I still remember the episode with complete clarity down to the smallest detail.
These three incidents, the only ones of the kind I ever experienced while working, demonstrate the value of establishing oneself as a real person in the eyes of the customer. Whenever I had the opportunity to talk to the client, to let him see me as a normal woman like his sister or daughter or mother, I automatically invoked the protection of the social conditioning which encourages a man to treat a woman with respect and to refrain from harming her. But in these three cases I was prevented from doing so, twice by the language barrier and once by a drug-induced neurological haze, and so the old Madonna/whore duality came into play; unlike the vast majority of my customers these three men saw me only as a degraded and even subhuman creature out of the age-old propaganda of the false moralists, and therefore merely a thing to be used rather than a businesswoman who had come to perform a service for him. If I could believe that these men were just freaks, part of the small criminal element which has no compunction against harming others for their own gratification, it wouldn’t be so bad. But when I look at society as a whole and see cops violating our rights and persons, the media presenting us as pathetic addicts, legislators treating us as legal incompetents, neofeminists portraying us as damaged psychotics and judges ruling that we don’t even deserve protection from violent assault, I realize that the attitude which allowed those men to violate me is still that of the majority.
And because your business is illegal, the rapists know that they will likely get away with it. I mean what are going to do: call the cops?
I wish there was some way to get lawmakers (and the general public) to realize the simple fact that you’re never going to *get rid of* prostitution. The only two choices are: make prostitution *less* dangerous for whores and customers, or make prostitution *more* dangerous for whores and customers. Currently we are doing the latter.
Again, I’m sorry you had to go through that.
I join with Sailor Barsoom in expressing sympathy. Unfortunately he’s right. The moral police in our society think they should have the right to dictate what people do with their bodies. The net effect of such myopic policies is to put women in danger. Unfortunately with the control-freak nature of many of our politicians and the sanctimonious (often hypocritical) moral outrage expressed by Bible thumpers and their sheep, the policies that put women unnecessarily in harm’s way are unlikely ever to change.
Thank you both, guys. There have periodically been periods in history when governments tried to abolish prostitution, but it never lasted more than a few years at a time until the late 19th century. We are currently in the longest sustained abolition campaign in recorded history, and though it hasn’t curbed the trade one iota it has made it more dangerous for us. But it isn’t the Bible thumpers who are our biggest ideological enemies right now but rather the neofeminists, and that’s truly sad because the early modern feminists of he ’60s and ’70s were very pro-whore; it wasn’t until the anti-sex neofeminists hijacked the movement during the moralistic ’80s that it changed. I’ll have to do a column on that sometime soon.
But again, thank you both for the sympathy. As I said in the first paragraph, I think the only way to combat ignorance is with complete honesty, and that includes talking about some things I would have preferred not to talk about.
This post and the one before it were not cheerful or funny, and they sure as hell weren’t sexy. But they were necessary. If we are to have any understanding of this business and of the people involved, we have to know the bad with the good. The freedom and the money and the sense of adventure, but also the danger and the lack of options due to illegality.
Thank you for helping us see this.
You’re welcome. And thank you for reading with an open mind.
I am truly, truly sorry that you had to go through these experiences (and also the first, life-threatening one). ‘Only’ three rapes in over a decade of prostitution may indeed be statistically little, but the one thing I agree with radfems on is that as far as rape is concerned any number above zero is way too many.
I find your conclusion — that it was a barrier preventing human contact (the language barrier in the first cases, the drug haze in the final one) that made the rapes possible; if there had been human contact, social conditioning would kick in and make it hard or even impossible for these men to want to rape you. I agree that this is an important factor, but I think that there is more; and this because of a rape experience I’ve also had.
I don’t like to call it ‘rape’ because it wasn’t really violent, and the only bruises were to my self-esteem. But by the definition you gave in the previous column, it does classify as rape.
What happened was that, when I was 15, I ran away from home (a very complicated situation there) and, looking for a place to hide (I couldn’t go to any of my friends or else my parents would find me), I went to the house of a teacher I knew from the school where I learned English. He was in his late 50’s; he was also (of all clichés) an Irish Catholic priest, a very cultivated person — he led a Shakespeare reading group in which I also participated for several months — and he looked like a trustworthy person.
On my second day there, I slowly woke up from a strange dream to find him with his hands inside my underwear, touching my penis. As I slowly woke up he retreated, left the room and said nothing. The next day, I couldn’t sleep but lay in bed; he came in, I pretended to sleep, he pulled my underwear down and started again playing with me. The third day I kept my eyes open, I said “no” to him, but he still paid no attention and went on doing what he wanted. This time he even inserted one of his fingers into my anus. (He touched his own penis a few times, but he never tried to penetrate me with it; I assume he finished himself off in his own room afterwards.) This went on for a couple more days, till I couldn’t take it any longer and left, without telling him where I’d go.
All the time, after those incidents, he still looked affable and normal; as if nothing had happened. At first I couldn’t talk to him, but he would pretend he didn’t notice my silence and go on talking, and after an hour or so he’d manage to get me interested in what he was saying, and before I knew it I was also acting as if nothing had happened, and we’d talk about English literature or about Irish (he taught me a few rudiments of Irish). Then at night he’d come again, I’d say “no” again, and he’d take me again.
The point: I don’t think there was any barrier making it impossible for him to connect to me as an individual. Also, as a 15-year-old, I certainly looked to him like a child (especially since I’m a little below average in height and size; your typical skinny bespectacled nerdy intellectual kid if you will), so the instinct / social habit to protect children should also have worked. It’s not that something kept him from noticing I was a human; when we talked about literature he certainly did that.
It’s that somehow he had the power to turn off this ‘identifying mechanism’, this ‘human connection mechanism’, apparently at will. Despite being sober (he never drank alcohol), despite connecting to me as a person in other contexts, when he entered the little room in his house where I was sleeping he somehow managed to turn this off and proceed as if I were someone else, something else, some element in a fantasy of his.
Asehpe, I’m sorry to hear that happened to you; since he didn’t penetrate you with his penis I wouldn’t call it rape either, but it’s certainly sexual assault and certainly wrong. It’s amazing how often such assaults (particularly of this type) happen at night while most people are asleep; perhaps it’s akin to the desire people have to turn off the lights during sex, as though the shame (and in the case of assault or rape, the wrongness) can be covered by the dark, as if they believe God is asleep as well and will not see. 🙁
I’m sorry this happened to you, Asehpe. It may not qualify as rape technically, but it isn’t good. I don’t know what lets some people “switch off” like that, but it unfortunately isn’t all that uncommon.
Thanks! Sailor, I sometimes think what allows people to ‘switch off’ is their own frustration at things they would like to do but haven’t been able to, for various motives (Catholic priests are forced to celibacy, etc.). Not saying that some people aren’t assholes; but I don’t think that priest reallly was one, I think he was a really very frustrated man.
Maggie, I also don’t think it was rape, but mostly because there was no real violence, i.e. no bruises or wounds; calling it rape would feel to me like belittling real victims in real rape cases (like what happened to you, especially the first, pre-professional incident). Does ‘rape’ for you imply penile penetration? For most feminists, it seems any time something sexual happens despite someone saying ‘no’ there is rape.
But anyway, let me say again that what happened to you was much worse, and that I really lament that these things happen. I only told this story because I have often wondered about the motivations of rapists. I think we have to understand them better in order to fight rape more efficiently. Just telling men that ‘rape isn’t cool’ strikes me as insufficient.
Yes, to me (and I think to most people) rape has to be penetration; indeed, most laws in most countries define it that way. If there is not penetration it’s sexual assault, but not rape. This is not to imply a hierarchy; as I said in the column the most disturbing of the incidents was the one with the wrestler, which was sexual assault but not rape. And who can deny that a child might be much more disturbed by being groped than an adult woman would actually being penetrated by a lover she didn’t want at that moment? The latter is technically rape, but it isn’t nearly as bad as the sexual assault (without penetration) of a child. 🙁
Certainly in the UK and probably elsewhere, the fact that the finger was inserted, non-consensually, into the anus, makes it rape. ‘Penile rape’ is not the only ‘true rape’ – toys, fingers, organic produce all classify. If you don’t want it in, it’s rape. How is this not clear to any of you?
It’s pretty clear to me, and I suspect it’s pretty clear to most people. Even if something doesn’t meet a legal definition of rape, it is still wrong to do something sexual to somebody that that person doesn’t want done.
Unfortunately, “getting it” isn’t enough, for some people, for them to not do it. I rather suspect that many rapists know full well that what they are doing isn’t nice, isn’t sweet, and isn’t legal. But they do it anyway.
So, this isn’t exactly “the view from the other side”, and I’m not even sure if it will shed all that much light on this, but I hope it will be worth considering.
I like to think that I’m the sort of customer you would have preferred (as if most men don’t think that way). I’ve been polite, well-groomed, and respectful to the women who have worked for me.
So I got together with this Asian lady for the first and only time. Her English seemed adequate if not unusually fluent, and I had no more apprehension that I usually do for a first encounter. We assumed the missonary position and got started. I slipped my arms behind her knees, folding her almost in two. She didn’t seem to mind that.
After a bit, she started hammering my shoulder repeatedly with her fist. She was slight, and in that position she didn’t have much room for a wind-up, so I barely noticed the first couple of blows. She hadn’t said a word, and otherwise wasn’t giving off anything I could interpret as a “no” signal. She was grimacing, but that’s not all that unusual during sex. I found her behavior a little puzzling, but didn’t mind. The thought crossed my mind that maybe this was something she just liked doing when things got intense. I certainly wasn’t in any pain or discomfort from it, so I kept going.
Maybe 10-15 seconds later (and remember, she’s pounding my shoulder the whole time in rhythym with what we were doing), I somehow sensed that something was “wrong”. I’m not sure what it was, maybe she managed to emit a grunt or two that struck me as a sign of distress rather than (even feigned) pleasure. I stopped and she started struggling. I let her up immediately and became concerned for her health. It didn’t seem like she was having a heart attack or a seizure or something, but I knew something was wrong.
She started gasping for breath, but recovered quickly while I held her. I asked if she was OK, and now found that her facility with English didn’t measure up to my first impression. She did communicate that she’d gotten a bad cramp in her (leg? hip?) and had some trouble breathing, and (I presume) panicked. I apologized profusely, and asked several times if there was anything I could do for her while she recovered.
Now, I hadn’t been putting my weight on her (I generally don’t do that with an average partner, and she seemed delicate to me). I’ll admit that the position has the potential to be uncomfortable, but I’ve never had that problem with any other partner, and she didn’t seem to have any problem with it while we were getting into it. And to be clear, her legs weren’t quite over my shoulders, although we weren’t far from that.
So I just talked to her and let her recover, and after about 5 minutes or so, she indicated that she was ready to give it another shot. I don’t recall which position we used, but it certainly wasn’t the first one!
Things went much better the second time around. We made what small talk we could afterward (language being a problem). I’m not sure how many times I apologized, but it was more than a couple. I gave her a nice tip (if for nothing else, being such a trooper and a good sport about it), and she made the usual pitch for more business. I had no complaints about her, but for numerous reasons, never got together with her again.
Now, I never had any intentions of taking advantage of her, of using her, or taking anything that wasn’t mine. But the fact remains, she tried to get my attention by what in hindsight was about the most violent means at her disposal, and failed to do so for longer than I feel comfortable with. But looking back at it, I’m not sure how I could have gotten the message any quicker. “Please stop-NOW!” would have definitely did the trick, but I’m not sure she was capable of that, either physically or from limited language facility.
So Maggie, like I mentioned at the beginning, I’m not sure if there’s anything to take away from all this, but I did see little bits and pieces of your narrative in mine. And let me add the obligatory “I’m sorry all that happened to you” and “Of course you didn’t deserve any of that.” (And I do mean that sincerely, I don’t mean to come off as trite.) I’m not sure where massive cluelessness ends and true culpability begins, but I note that we don’t give drunk drivers a break just because they don’t realize that they’re drunk. All I know is that I gave one poor woman a lot more distress than I intended to one night, and save for limiting my partners to those who are quite fluent in my language, I’m not sure how I would prevent a repeat.
I’ve definitely been in situations where clients inadvertently hurt me, but I didn’t get angry at them because I knew it wasn’t on purpose; I’m sure every working girl has had similar experiences. And I’m equally sure your little lady understood, language barrier or no, that you did not mean to hurt or ignore her. 🙂
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How do I as a male find the balance between being an alpha male who is going to dominate my female sex partner and being aware that she doesn’t absolutely want to do it? Would the answer be – “the safe word”?
“Perhaps it is easier for some people to dehumanize those with whom they cannot communicate, to think of them as somehow lacking human feelings and rights.”
This is absolutely true, and has been written about extensively with regard to the black slave trade in early America. Not to defend slavery or anything (I think it’s a reprehensible practice that inevitably corrupts and leads to massive abuse), but American slavery was radically different from slavery as it had usually been practiced in history. For example, the Romans made slaves of many of their neighbors, these people were the same race, spoke the same language, and practiced more-or-less the same religion, and under the Roman system slave status was not inheritable; children of slaves were born free. Athenian slaves in particular were valued as tutors for their children, as Romans saw them as being better educated and more cultured than them. Slavery was for a set term of years, and after it ended it was not uncommon for former slaves to stay in contact socially with their former owners. There are letters back and forth between them that survive today. Many former Roman slaves even went on to build enough weath to buy their own slaves, a few were even known to go into business with their old owners.
Compared to the American history of slavery, it’s almost unrecognisable, and that’s all down to a simple reason: they couldn’t mistake them for people. They were owned people, sure, but always people – it’s virtually impossible to communicate face-to-face with another human being and come away thinking they’re not a person. You can hate them, sure, but you can’t convince yourself they’re not quite real. I think most rapists (and child abusers, for that matter) need to sell that not-personhood idea to themselves in order to face what it is they really want.
I too have some hesitation about the degree to which rape is more or less morally heinous depending on how “easy” it is for a particular person to see you as “subhuman”, especially based in a lack of common language. On the one hand, it isn’t okay to hurt animals, either, and refraining from hurt of another conscious being doesn’t depend on whether the other being recognizes you as a human being like himself. Your body language was sufficient to indicate to the other party that you did not accept their demand– indeed, in one case, he seemed to be the special kind of bad client who only wants to do *whatever* you don’t want to do, because they want the sense of violating your boundaries, not whatever service you are willing to perform. Such men are rare, but they do exist, although I utterly reject the stereotype which identifies clients of sex workers in particular as sadists– indeed, the majority of those I know of personally violated girlfriends, wives, and dates, not necessarily professionals.
The history of human civilization gives abundant evidence that people in complex social organizations have not tended to categorize other beings simply as either human beings or not, a binary opposition, but rather in terms of people conceptualized by what “kind” of person they are. Men, women, free, slave, missionary, native, adult, child, whore, wife, ruler, subject, many many different ways of splitting up the human beings into various tribes and sub-groups within tribes with different roles and responsibilities and requirements and privileges vis-a-vis specific other kinds. Catharine MacKinnon, for all her horribly wrong conclusions and prescriptions, was sometimes sharp with a phrase: gender, along with a number of other ascribed memberships in status groups, is all about who gets to do what to whom. I would say that clients (as well as husbands and boyfriends!) who go on and have sex with the body of a female who is indicating “No, not there” are not simply blind to that signal, they ignore it because they don’t think it matters, they know they can get away with going ahead and doing what they want, and they have not sufficiently internalized the morality of not hurting other beings for it to matter TO THEM even if they are not going to be held accountable by any other agency than conscience. The deliberate sadists are few, the ones who genuinely miss the signals (being distracted?) maybe somewhat less rare; but the majority of the civilized actually wish to purchase consent, which is why they seek out whores and negotiate agreements rather than go to singles bars and try to decoy drunk girls into their cars.
But alas, I actually started this comment to try to respond to the earlier gentleman’s question about balancing respect for consent (which is how I interpret his ‘absolutely doesn’t want to do it’) versus sufficiently active persuasion and dominance. What degree of submission is okay and how much is too much? If that’s genuinely an issue, then the safe word is a good idea and doing a good bit of research into BDSM culture would be the best possible idea for this gentleman to figure out how to pay attention, how to ask whether it’s really okay right now, realizing that it can change at any moment, respecting the other party’s absolute right to continue consent or not for any reason OR no reason you can understand or she can explain. Since consent BY ITS NATURE is something inside the mind of another person, you can ONLY try to read signals, and the best you can possibly do is try your very best to pick up the signals and understand them, starting perhaps with an explicit agreement on some signal that will definitely mean stop. People cannot read each other’s minds and should not be expected to do so. Some women are reluctant to BE explicit about their signals or talk these things over in advance– if they expect you just to be able to tell, somehow, by magic, exactly what they want or need or mean, and get mad at you if you can’t, even when you do your best, then they are asking way too much of you and setting themselves up for trauma. People don’t always know what they want, but it is reasonable for any adult human being to take responsibility for simple “permission/not” signals and respect the intentions and efforts of anyone who does his best to respect their consent.
You know I read this column because I have really been wanting to point a finger on what makes people unreasonable..you know I have been wanting to say, “it is such and such’s fault for someone’s pain.” You have shown me that in truth, bad things happen because of false-preconditioned ideas, such as, “I can get away with it,” or “I am stronger, smarter and my ‘victim,’ is too stupid.” Dehumanization of a situation is what breeds violence. At least that is what I have surmised from your ideas. I still want a name for it..if you were to place Dehumanization into a group, “what would you call it?”