Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution by Rachel Moran Page A

institutionalisation sets in so quickly in prostitution. In this way, prostitution can be likened to the prison experience. A weight of sadness settles on me when I think of the way I reacted when my foster parents invited me to stay after those court-appointed few months. They invited me to live there, to make a home there. To go to the local school. To have a life. I just knew, somewhere inside myself, that I couldn't do it. The family had a hobby farm and I'd spent that summer collecting eggs from the henhouse and feeding milk at dawn to an orphaned black baby lamb. These things felt too pure for me, or rather, I felt too dirty for them. I felt that I couldn't stay, because I didn't belong there, and the thought of sitting alongside girls my own age in the local school made me imagine myself a drop ofoil in a bowl ofwater. I made arrangements in private to stay at the brothel in Leeson Street, which I knew ofbecause I'd done a few indoor jobs for the pimp who ran it just before I got arrested. I said I was going to stay with a friend of mine, which wasn't a million miles from the truth, because a friend from my hostel days was staying in the brothel also. When I arrived on Leeson Street I felt, along with other things, at least a sense of belonging. I was used to being out at three and four in the morning. I was used to nobody telling me what time to come in or how much alcohol or drugs to take or not take; I was used to being unrestrained in certain senses. That feeling ofunrestraint was the feeling of home to me, and it was the only home I knew. The brothel had steel steps leading down to the basement entrance and there was a sign on the wall depicting an old-fashioned tripod camera with a black cat, whose tail curled round one of the leg stands. I can't remember what colour the door was, but I remember the dull thud of my heart when I knocked on it. The pimp was far from the most odious person I ever met in prostit.ution, but it still would be difficult to speak of him in non-offensive terms. He was, in short, an arsehole. He was somebody who had stumbled upon prostitution and saw it as a way to make easy money. He was an upper-middle-class man in his late twenties, complete with Dublin-4 accent, who hadn't a shred of the harsh life experience common to the women and young girls he endeavoured to exploit. He was simply ill.prepared for the world he had immersed himself in and I resented him dreadfully. If I sound embittered, it's because I am. If there's one thing more degrading for a woman than selling her body to a man, it's selling her body to one man for the benefit of another. There were several different elements to his operation. One of the main ones was stripping. He organised strippers countrywide and in a very short time I was one of the most in-demand strippers on his books. Not because I was a good dancer (I wasn't) but because of my youth and physicality. Myself and others packed out hallways from Dublin to Tipperary for him on a weekly basis. Speaking of Tipperary, I remember one particular show a few of us did in Cashel: driving into that place was the mother of all shocks. The streets were absolutely plastered with huge posters advertising our arrival in neon green, pink and orange, so we knew we were in for a lively night. The pub was like a converted barn inside and that was very apt given that the men in it behaved like a herd of animals. To watch their carry-on you'd think they'd never seen a pair of breasts or a woman's arse in their lives. This was typical behaviour countrywide, by the way, and certainly not confined to the men ofCashel. I had similar feelings towards the stripping as I had towards the prostitution. It seemed like there was a trade-off in swapping one for the other for the night-it was a case of more eyes on you versus fewer hands. That's not to say that sometimes you wouldn't have to contend with both, because sometimes you would; some men took great pleasure in grabbing us and