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Still, she managed to save ten thousand pounds in the time she rented that apartment, but
her money was earned in fits and spurts during peak-time periods and I could not
understand how she tolerated the dead-end intervals. The problem was that she was paying
the same overheads an apartment full of women would have split between them, but she
was compulsive about her independence and the privacy of her space. I was the only other
woman who ever worked in her apartment. I was the person she’d always call if a two-
woman job was required, and I sometimes did some of her clients in her apartment as well,
usually during periods so busy that two men would be booked for the same time.
We were close friends and I’d sometimes walk from the red-light district to her apartment at
the end of an evening’s work. She didn’t try to hide her distaste for my street-walking work
and I couldn’t have cared less. I knew that if she’d started out on the streets she’d have had
an appreciation of the differences between the different forms of work and the pros and
cons contained within each. As I’ve said, on the streets I was not at the mercy of someone
I’d had no chance to sum up before I entered into a contract with. In indoor work you don’t
know who or what you’re dealing with until the door has closed behind you, and by the time
the door has closed behind you, it’s too late. She was inexperienced in these different
dynamics.
Business was brisker on the streets. You often had the opportunity to make your money and
go. There was much less of the waiting around inherent to escort work, which I found
uniquely depressing. It gave you too much time to think.
I approached my work differently from my friend in other ways, too. I had a mobile but had it
blocked for outgoing calls. It was strictly used for clients to contact me. I bought that phone
when the laws changed in 1993 and street-walking prostitutes began being hounded nightly
by the police. I rented an apartment in Terenure for a short time and opened an escort
agency of my own. I was seventeen at the time and I’m quite sure I was the youngest
person advertising an escort agency in Ireland. It was a very simple thing to do and only
required an apartment, a mobile phone and an advertisement in the back of In Dublin
magazine, but when I had to deal with the reality of the ridiculous overheads, I soon got rid
of the apartment and advertised for call-outs only. I worked mainly in the brothels and escort
agencies of others from then on and did my own call-outs to homes and hotels. If I’d get a
request for a call-in on my agency line I’d use a bedroom in the brothel of one of the women
I was associating with at that time. I’d pay them a fee for the use of the room, which was
common practice. I’d made money myself that way when I had my own apartment.
The consequences of the new laws took a lot of getting used to. An understood street rule
had always been that the encounter was over when the client climaxed, but now we found
ourselves alone in rooms with men who were paying by the hour and wanted every minute
of their money’s worth. I found this new form of prostitution more dangerous and more
degrading, not less.
And so, because of all this, I developed a very à-la-carte approach to prostitution. I never
bought into the nonsense that some forms of it were somehow ‘better’ in a social or moral
sense than others. There was no true distinction that I could find there. Of course society
would clearly tell you which was the most and least acceptable of these, but I had not been
raised with an affinity to social structures or to compliance with social norms and I knew that
such notions were nonsense here anyway. I measured the different forms of prostitution
against each other in the only sane way I knew how, which was in terms of which was more
dangerous, stressful or profitable. I found through experience that in terms of danger, stress
and profit, each had their own pros and cons, but in terms of degradation, that was
universal. It was to be found in differing degrees only with different men, not with different
environments, and it was to be found everywhere.
One thing I never went in for in prostitution was calling myself an ‘escort’ or a ‘call girl.’ I find
these terms derisory and ridiculous, ‘call girl’ particularly so. What this term seeks to do is to
focus on the fact that a prostitute must call to your door and ignores entirely what goes on
when it shuts behind her. It does not even seek to fraudulently repackage the prostitution
experience, as the term ‘escort’ does, but rather discounts it entirely. These are lies, pure
and simple. I never tried to sugar-coat what I did, no matter where I was working or how
much I was getting paid for it. Similarly, while working as a stripper, I never referred to
myself as a ‘dancer’, exotic or otherwise. I heard these terms at the time, both in the media
and in the brothels, and when I heard them they always seemed to me to serve the same
purpose, which was to seek to paint a deceptive veneer of respectability over what we did.
For the women involved to use terms like ‘call girl’ appeared particularly stupid to me,
because to do that was to admit that you were not prepared to face yourself or others with
the truth of your daily experience, and if you were not prepared to do that, was that not an
admission in itself? Did it not say something, and say it very clearly? I felt that the women
who preferred to call themselves escorts and dancers were even less happy with their lot
than the women who’d tell you they were strippers and whores and hated the whole
business, because at least the women who weren’t afraid to call a spade a spade weren’t
indulging in self-denial. At least they were not afraid to look the truth of their experience in
the face. If you look at something and say you find it distasteful your sense of disgust is
probably less potent than that of the person who refuses to observe it at all.
WOMEN’S POWER: ITS PAST, ITS PRESENT, ITS FUTURE: FEMOCRACY
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