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

mauling us and humiliating us publicly to , the maximum possible extent. I knew one girl who had a man's fingers shoved inside her vagina in the middle of a show. She ran from the floor screaming and in tears. Needless to say, the man who was supposedly paid to protect us was nowhere to be seen when these sort of things happened. A lot of people, including women, view stripping as some sort of harmless fun. Itisn't. Itisn't harmless or fun when your heart is thumping out ofyour chest in the middle of a crowd offifty or sixty drunken men, all roaring vulgarities and obscenities, and you're there, slowly peeling off the only layers that exist between you and them-your clothes. It is thoroughly psychically invasive. When I think back to the evening I arrived on Leeson Street, in the autumn of 1992, my mind keeps pulling me back to that first moment I looked at the picture of the cat winding its tail round the leg of the tripod, because it sent a ripple of negative energy through me that I didn't understand. The image, I later came to find, signified the nature of what went on there. It was a pornographic studio. I can't remember how many men photographed me there, and I actually don't want to know. The set-up was that a man would arrive with his own camera and a blank roll of film. He'd pay a set amount, . I think it was ninety pounds, and when he was done photographing whichever girl he'd selected, he'd do whatever else he wanted to her, for an additional fee. He'd then give the roll of film to the pimp, who had it processed, God knows where. Someone was in on the operation obviously, because this was in the days before digital cameras. The photographs had to be processed somewhere, and most of the girls in them were under-age. I remember one man in particular because he didn't seem interested in taking explicit photographs; this was unusual. He told me to pose any way I wanted and never instructed that I take my clothes off. I remember sitting balanced in the window ledge, with my head resting against the wall and my chin tilted up and closing my eyes as though I was deep in thought, and suddenly I was deep in thought, and I was imagining that I was a model; that it had all worked out in the modelling agency and I was just doing a day's work. The click ofhis camera brought me back. He told me that it would be a very beautiful photograph. I felt injured; violated in a new way. He had caught something ofthe real me on his roll offilm. That was a new sort of lesson in never letting your guard down. Some women have no problem with pornography. Well, I do. I know from having been photographed in sexually explicit poses that there is a lotmore going on behind those glossy graphic images than most people take the time to consider. It is a demeaning exploitative business that is hugely damaging to women, both within and without the industry. In the on-going effort to sanitise pornography we are told that it is 'sexually empowering' and a form of'sexual self-determination'. For me, this was no truer of being photographed, naked and posing than it was true of being fucked, naked and posing. I worked alongside a half-a.dozen girls at that time, all in their mid-to late-teens. Some I'd known from the hostels and others I'd been introduced to by girls I'd known from the hostels. What we did in that freezing-cold seedy basement was the same thing we did out on the streets; we took the only thing worth taking out of our circumstances, the opportunity to put roofs over our heads and food in our mouths. This was the only 'empowerment' evident in our lives. One seventeen-year-old girl I worked with (a survivor of child sexual abuse) had left her flat, newly pregnant, because her landlord kept trying to have sex with her. She reasoned that if she was going to be sexually harassed by older men, she may as well get paid for it. It was a reasoning many of us arrived at. The consistent reality of being exploited by men in more socially powerful