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Prostitution: Being Raped for a Living

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Chris Hedges
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"You have to dissociate," Moran said. "You have to split yourself off from the reality of what's currently happening. If you are having your body used by -- ... it was up to 10 men a day when I was on the streets -- you've got to be able to shut off from that. You just couldn't keep on doing it unless you could ... pretend that it's not happening. That's what I always did. I just shut it out."

There, however, is an important distinction between prostitution and war. In prostitution your body is physically violated by men who revolt and disgust you. These men, as they penetrate your body, frequently insult and beat you. And this makes the traumas of prostitution, like rape, horrifyingly unique.

"It is difficult to describe how hollow a woman feels after she has been used sexually by ten different men," Moran wrote. "Of course, the experience rarely stopped at the agreed-upon hand relief or oral sex. Even when a man has accepted that he will not be putting his penis in you, he often has no compunction about shoving his fingers or other objects in you and mauling you and biting you and trying to shove his tongue down your throat and everywhere else. I know by the rabid, doglike behavior of one particular client that he'd have liked nothing better than if he'd bit and sucked my nipples till they gushed blood."

In the interview Moran said that there are men "who actively get off on hurting you and watching you being hurt" -- about 30 percent of her clients. "Then you have your men who are aware, of course, that what's going on is not right, not humane. They choose willfully to ignore that. And you have your other men who just don't seem to have that in their minds at all. They don't seem to understand that what's happening is not something that should be going on. But even [so], ... those same men know they wouldn't want to walk into a brothel and find their sister sitting on the bed. So I do believe that there's a good deal of denial going on there."

"Prostitution is violence in and of itself," she said. ... "[T]o put your hands on another person when you know they don't want your hands there and to put your penis into the orifices of somebody's body when you know that they don't want your penis inside them or near them, that is pathological behavior. And money doesn't erase that. Money does not have some kind of magical quality that can take away the essence of a person's behavior or an exchange between two people."

Moran rejects the concept of "sex work" -- which, she says, has as its primary qualifications "the ability to resist your urge to vomit, to cry, and to pretend that your current reality wasn't happening."

She points to Germany and Australia, where prostitution is legal, to illustrate that legalization only fuels the trafficking of poor women (in those two countries most of the prostituted women are from Asia or Eastern Europe) and the industrialization of prostitution. And legalizing prostitution does not offer women more protection.

"In Germany you have an estimate -- and I believe it's a very conservative estimate -- of 450,000 women and girls prostituting," she said. "Forty-four of them have stepped forward to sign as registered. So here we have a situation where the whole world believes that prostitution ought to be regulated, legislated, and all of this, but the reality of what's happening in Germany is only a pitiful handful of women were prepared to register and get the benefits that go along with that, the social security and health benefits. The bald reality is we don't want to be labeled prostitutes. Women don't want that 'prostitute' stamp, as I call it, on us forever. And the illegal trade absolutely booms anywhere where you legalize, because what happens immediately is that demand massively increases. We've seen it in New Zealand [and] ... Australia."

She calls for prostitution to be outlawed, with the johns, pimps, brothel owners and illicit massage parlor operators prosecuted, publicly shamed and jailed. She believes the women who are being prostituted should be exempt from criminal charges and offered a variety of state-run programs to enable them to survive outside of prostitution.

"What I want to see is women in prostitution, and indeed men, boys, everybody, be offered alternatives, real, viable alternatives," she said. "And I'm talking about help with housing, with child care, with education, training, with counseling, with addiction [therapy], all of the things that women need help with in order to get them out of that situation. I'm not advocating for let's just criminalize the pimps and the johns and [abandon] the women."

In war, where there is a cavernous space between the all-powerful and the utterly powerless, the prostitution and rape of girls, women and boys is an epidemic. Armed combatants, who surrender their individuality and usually their capacity for moral choice, become part of a herd of killers. Sex in the culture of war is reduced to its basest animalistic function. It is referred to in marching cadences and ribald small talk in the same way people speak about defecation. Pornography in wartime is ubiquitous. In war, as in prostitution, empathy, compassion and love are ruthlessly banished.

War is an assault on all systems -- social, political, economic, cultural, familial, religious and environmental -- that sustain and nurture life. Human beings in wartime become objects to destroy or to be used for gratification, or both. The hypermasculine barbarity of war, which dehumanizes the other, is mirrored in the hypermasculine barbarity of prostitution.

America's glorification of male violence and cultural acceptance of sexual gratification at the expense of another, along with the lust to dominate, humiliate and destroy those who are different from us, have made us callous and cruel. It has rendered us incapable of compassion. It has created a soulless society where the exploitation of the weak and the vulnerable, along with the persecution of the "stranger," defines our national character.

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Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

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