More harm emotionally was done to me by rad fem activists than any pimp. – Jill Brenneman
This is a continuation of an interview which started Monday; if you have not read it please go back and read that part first, but be warned that the first two parts are the most graphic, disturbing narrative I have yet published or am likely to publish again, and I must caution sensitive readers to consider carefully before proceeding. Today’s installment begins after Jill escaped her pimp through serendipity and took the cheapest flight she could find, to Las Vegas.
Maggie: So, after finding yourself suddenly free, what next? Did you get a regular job, seek out help from a charity, or what?
Jill: When I got to Vegas, I found a fleabag hotel to stay in, and after faking a diploma through some creative cut and paste I got a job at Denny’s as a waitress. Eventually, I started cocktail waitressing at Rio and made much better money and was able to get a car and an apartment. Both jobs thought I was a really good employee; I did what I was told, worked really hard, never questioned anything. I tended to approach jobs as I had been taught by Bruce: Shut up, do what I was told, do it fast, without question etc. So ultimately what broke me is partially what saved me.
It took years to regain the fire in my personality, but eventually I got my GED and then a job as a flight attendant with Southwest, which worked really well to ease my paranoia because every day I was someplace different. As a flight attendant for the first couple of years you don’t ever really know where you will be going from day to day, so neither would anyone else. My efforts at dating were terrible; I couldn’t trust men or get by my fear of them, so I tended to make every guy I dated into a bad guy even if he wasn’t. In 1996 I entered a program called Council for Prostitution Alternatives in Portland and had a really awesome counselor and finally started talking about what had happened. Even though Council for Prostitution Alternatives ceased operations, I continued counseling steadily and am still doing it as there are still issues to work on, plus I need the meds for depression and PTSD.
Maggie: So between 1984 and 1996 you just tried to deal with your trauma alone?
Jill: Except for 3 counseling sessions after a 1994 suicide attempt, yes I tried to deal with it entirely alone. For years I was truly terrified of Bruce finding me, to the point that I had contingency plans for someone to take my dog if I disappeared for more than 2 days without notice. For a long time I really expected that his finding me was destiny and essentially thought of how I would surrender if he did. So much of me for so many years partially believed that I was wrong to have escaped and that I should have stayed, waited for him to come back or tried to bail him out. I know it sounds fucked up but I really struggled with whether I should have escaped and whether I brought bad karmic destiny on myself for doing it. I didn’t tell anybody any of this until 1996 when I opened up to a friend in Portland. Initially it had started as an interview as she was doing a website for a runaway teen shelter and had seen my posts on AOL challenging some asshole who said that all runaway teens were just spoiled brats that didn’t want to take direction and just wanted drugs. I unloaded on him on that message board. She read it, contacted me and asked if I would agree to an interview. I found that she and I were similar emotionally and then had an even bigger shock that we had some similar experiences although hers were as an adult and related to a former boyfriend. I finally made the breakthrough of realizing someone else had been broken as easily as I had, which ultimately was also really painful because it hurt me that someone as kind and empathetic and really cool had to suffer that. She was far more advanced on the internet that I was so she searched the country for prostitution based programs and contacted one in Washington, DC called HIPS, which ironically directed her back to Portland and the Council for Prostitution Alternatives as HIPS felt I was going to need extensive counseling and CPA was highly regarded for their counseling program.
Maggie: Your mixed feelings don’t sound fucked up to me; his conditioning of you was extremely thorough and effective and your mind adapted as it had to in order to stay intact. I’m astonished that you survived as long as you did without any outside help!
Jill: I survived as long as I did because it is hard to die. I developed a reputation for my fearlessness and bravado for many years, but it wasn’t fearlessness or bravado, it was a death wish.
Maggie: But eventually you were drawn into the prohibitionist movement; did you first get involved with them through the Council for Prostitution Alternatives?
Melissa Farley, who says women are too stupid to decide for ourselves what we’re allowed to do with our own bodies.
Jill: I was peripherally involved in the anti prostitution movement from 1997 to 1998 largely via posts on listservs, including the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW). I wasn’t really doing much activism, more trying to create a voice for women who had actually been in prostitution within a framework that was largely made up of activists who hadn’t and who didn’t particularly want the opinions of those who had. I had already run into steep conflicts with Nikki Craft and Melissa Farley; both felt I was an infiltrator from the “pro prostitution” movement or the CIA. On CATW I and others wrote about our experiences in prostitution, and we tended to argue with Donna Hughes and the other academic members of CATW about their inaccurate and demeaning perceptions of prostitutes. So CATW made a decision that those of us who had been in prostitution would be removed from the listserv and put on one specifically for us; their feeling was that an international listserv on trafficking wasn’t the place for survivors to discuss our experiences. I balked very strongly at this; I felt CATW and specifically Donna Hughes were a farce not interested in trafficking or prostitution but only in advancing their careers, and I went public with it.
In late 1998, I accepted a position on the advisory board of the Women’s Recovery Center for Prostitution Resources in St. Paul, which was an exit program for those who wanted to leave the sex industry. Then in 2001 I was invited to join Escape: The Prostitution Prevention Project, which was based in the Twin Cities. In April 2001, I did my first speaking presentation, and this led to many other speaking events as Escape had become well known. My role was largely to speak about my past; my colleague Christine Stark (who founded the organization) did the feminist/political side of the presentation. Christine was very staunchly anti-prostitution using a very Andrea Dworkin-based approach. In 2002, Christine and a collective of feminist activists in San Francisco created a protest called “International Day of No Prostitution”. When Chris initially explained the concept to me I understood it to be a symbolic day to create awareness of violence in prostitution and a call to prostitution clients to end violence against prostitutes. I had no further input into the event and it became an outlandish protest that went worldwide. I felt it was academic and out of touch, and went to extremes like calling for the rescue of animals from “systems of prostitution”.
Escape got a lot of criticism from sex workers about the event, and I was chosen to respond to them but I heard what they were saying and it made sense to me. Rather than challenge their views as I was expected to do, I heard their point and made no response. At the height of the protest against International Day of No Prostitution, Christine Stark abruptly resigned as Executive Director of Escape, which left me in charge. At the same time, the Sexual Violence Center in Minneapolis was seeking to expand its harm reduction-based services to offer them to prostitutes in need, so we agreed on a trade. Escape had no office, just a phone and a fax; Sexual Violence Center would give Escape office space at their facility, access to a 24 hour crisis line run by Sexual Violence Center, legal advocacy for sex workers and a no-cost harm reduction-based counseling program for sex workers. In return I gave my knowledge because no one on their staff had direct involvement in prostitution and they felt they weren’t qualified and thus reached out to me to fill that role. As part of that process I went through their crisis counselor certification class (which was 40 hours of training) and became a certified crisis counselor in Minnesota.
To be concluded tomorrow.
So Jill was speaking out against prostitution, was for enforcing anti laws, and they still thought she was some evil infiltrator? (The CIA?)
And, she was the only prostitute or former prostitute they had. Which should tell you how much they care about the women they claim to want to rescue.
As sad and infuriating as parts of Jill’s story are, there’s a real sense of triumph there as well.
She wasn’t the only one, as she mentions above; however, you’ll see tomorrow that the “antis” have a tendency to drive ex-whores away by their patronizing attitude and exploitative treatment. Also, she never really spoke out against prostitution as an institution but rather the treatment of women in in (there’s a subtle but important difference): “I wasn’t really doing much activism, more trying to create a voice for women who had actually been in prostitution…” She saw the wisdom of the “harm reduction” model almost from the beginning.
A subtle difference, yes, and an important one definitely. I look forward to pt. 4 tomorrow.
Jill, enjoy Chile!
They still believed I was CIA or “a pro prostitution” mole. I wasn’t ever a good fit. I wasn’t dogmatic enough, didn’t know who the famous people in feminism were and didn’t care.
I was never meant to be an anti. I wasn’t a good fit even despite my history. Had I run into the sex worker rights movement first I would have started there anyway. The fit was much better, plus I’ve been free in the movement to be true to myself.
The one sure way to tell that somebody is not from the CIA: if paranoid folks keep insisting that you are from the CIA, you are not from the CIA.
@Sailor, I wish I was a CIA mole infiltrating radical feminism. It would be a safe gig with good pay and really good insurance.
Probably the safest CIA mole job you could get.
But wouldn’t that be handles by the FBI?
Melissa Farley:
A person who deserves a special place in purgatory for helping to eliminate Craigslist Erotic Service ads. Something I’ll never forgive her for. The Craigslist ads were very crucial in getting street-based sex workers to be able to become indoor workers, and increasing the safety of all sex workers.
But I’ll tell you the real reason Craigslist ads were attacked by the antis: because they placed sexual service and those that provided it as being equal to other economic services, and part of the same economic community. Obviously if you can pay for sex at the same site you can pay for babysitting or snow removal, then it’s harder for the antis to portray sex workers as deviant from the economic norm.
But, I don’t want to give Farley too much credit. Her and the other antis efforts weren’t worth the energy expended on them if it weren’t for all the attorneys general up for reelection and found Craigslist to be the perfect boogeyman. They presented a real threat for Craigslist, and the real reason Craigslist gave in. But it was Farley and the antis who gave the attorneys general the idea of attacking Craigslist.
That’s how it happens in nature sometimes; parasites attack an animal until it’s too weak to fight, then eventually the lurking hyenas and jackals get brave enough to close in and bring it down.
I admit to being relieved to being past the worst part. Some of that was hard to read emotionally speaking, and I’m not a very emotional guy but I’ve had enough encounters with human suffering.
This is the piece where I’m actually interested in, from an educational standpoint. I have really had no contact with Neofeminists in my life. Outside of my time at college I really haven’t encountered any women of any real sort of radical bent. I mostly have dealt with Army women who, in my experience, have no problem expressing their sexuality. I really feel like I have learned a lot in the past few weeks of reading this blog. Especially that these women and religious puritans have so much in common, never would have guessed that. Although much of this is very depressing, I certainly feel like it is making a difference and has tons of potential.
There’s one pretty intense passage in tomorrow’s concluding installment, but IMHO less so than parts one and two.
You may count yourself very fortunate.
I’m really glad to hear that, Americanus; that’s what I’m really trying to do, get the information out there in as palatable a form as possible.
Oh, definitely; a priest writing in the early ’90s pointed out that it’s most useful to think of fundamentalism as a religion in itself, because though its supposed principles vary its practices are exactly the same no matter what the flavor.
That was pretty much my experience with actual women in America, too. Even those who called themselves feminists didn’t seem at all to be radical — the latter I’ve mostly (with only a couple of real-life exceptions) met online.
That was one of the first things that caught my attention in the whole feminist debate around sex and sex-related issues. A lot of it seemed to come from a vision of the world and the genders that looked, well, “patriarchal”: woman the poor innocent lamb, man the bad hunting wolf. I think there is some work to be done on the “patriarchal” (or gender-stereotypical, traditional) roots of many so-called radical feminist beliefs.
I just want to put out there that maybe Jill’s pimp is better defined as a torturer. Most of his abuses were for sadistic reasons and she said inflicting pain was the motivation for his behavior more than getting money. Along with the misplaced condemnation of prostitution, our society seems to forgive torture. What do you think?
Bruce was definitely no garden-variety pimp, and as she stated the customers weren’t typical prostitutes’ clients either; I suspect he advertised her in an underground newspaper or the like.
Now that the part dealing with Bruce’s role in Ms Brenneman’s life is over, I feel like asking her: Ms Brenneman, did you ever find out what Bruce’s ultimate fate was? Did you ever feel like finding out, or has it become immaterial to you? (With experiences such as yours, one would imagine that sooner or later a desire for revenge, or at least justice, would appear. Was this your case? Did you have to deal with that?)
@Asehpe, Bruce’s current status is immaterial to me. Other than I hope he hasn’t harmed anyone else. There were at least two victims of him. A girl named Liz and I. I hope we were the only two.
I don’t want revenge. It wouldn’t give me anything. I’m afraid of him anyway. There is no physical punishment I could or would want to give to him that would equal what he did to me. The point is moot. The only hope is that his death would make the world a safer place. He is a large man. There is nothing that could be done to him to equal what he did to me as a teenage girl. They simply aren’t parallel. My only wish is that he not be able to harm anyone else.
I didn’t deal with it for 10 years and took another 10 to learn to deal with it to use it as a lesson in which I could use it to try to prevent others from suffering as I had. The best revenge would be to prevent the suffering of others. I’d rather have that happen than any harm I could do to him.
The only thing I would like would be answers from him. Certainly after the escape attempt I had learned the entire scope of his power. I don’t know why he had to continue to the very last day to be as violent and degrading as he was to me. With the exception of the escape attempt, I did everything he told me to do that was humanly possible. His rule was that I never speak first, never question anything. I never broke that rule. Many times he wanted displays of my willingness to die on command. I gave him those over and over whenever he wanted proof that I understood it was his right to demand that for his varying reasons. It is complicated, there were many reasons given. I was broken within hours of being in his cellar. He had absolute control. I would like to ask him why he still hurt me so much. Which, for the record, I’m not trying to present this as a sub thing. It wasn’t inherently that. It was simply that he had that much control because I was not able to do what I wanted to do and resist him until he did kill me. The process of being killed was too long and painful. I never made it through that process. I wasn’t afraid of dying, I was afraid of living.
There area lot of things in sex which are a good fantasy but a terrible reality, and sexual slavery is one. Though Bruce wanted others to think you were a willing submissive who could stop things if you wanted, that clearly was NOT the case and that makes the two things as different as charity and theft. 🙁
@Maggie, you brought up a point that I have never even thought of. You’re right. I had never considered the idea that Bruce sold the events that happened as something I could stop if I wanted. I knew he presented them as something I was willing to do, but it never occurred to me he would have also made it appear that I could have stopped it.
People openly commented about my bravery in how far I would go or let them go and about what a great “catch” I was and how truly wonderful it was that he had convinced me to “drop college” for him and that. But I always thought they knew I had no voice in stopping it. But you must be right. It makes far more sense that my thought process.
Yeah, I willing to bet most of them (though probably not Chuck and Brian) thought you were just a severely masochistic sub, and that there was a safe word you just never used. 🙁
@Sailor,
The anti movement never trusted me. At best I gained some respect for my public speaking abilities. I’m not dogmatic, I wasn’t then and am not now. They had plenty of other former prostitutes who were more than willing to be both anti prostitution and dogmatic. I wasn’t ever right for that movement. I would have ended up with the sex worker rights movement from the outset had I run into them first. It’s a much better fit
Glad you’ve found a place where you fit. It’s good if you and the movement can be good for each other, instead of just one way.
@Maggie,
It’s hard for me to even conceptualize that anyone would have thought I had a safe word. I’m not arguing your point, just trying to process something I had never truly considered in it’s enormity. I have always thought of it in the sense that even those who believed the girlfriend story knew I couldn’t do anything to stop it. Even though I can consciously think this through, processing it to feeling is a different story. I can’t imagine in the same situation that anyone would have gone through all of that with an option to stop it.
@Sailor, it’s a good fit between the movement and I. The sex worker rights movement is tolerant of diversity and has a group of activists that have a far better understanding of respect and humanity than the anti movement had. I’ve always been allowed by the SWR movement to be me. They welcomed me when I left the anti’s, trusted me when they no reason to and allow me the freedom to express myself and my views on social change how they feel right me.
[…] working as a professional submissive. In the early aughts, Jill made an amazing conversion from membership in the prohibitionist movement to sex workers’ rights activism. She set up SWOP-EAST from the remains of an anti sex work […]