“[F]rom the perspective of a woman in prostitution or a woman who has been in prostitution—the distinctions other people make between whether the event took place in the Plaza Hotel or somewhere more inelegant are not the distinctions that matter. These are irreconcilable perceptions, with irreconcilable premises. Of course the circumstances must matter, you say. No, they do not, because we are talking about the use of the mouth, the vagina, and the rectum. The circumstances don’t mitigate or modify what prostitution is.” — Andrea Dworkin, “Life and Death” Because I’ve worked in every area of prostitution, I can say that no area has a monopoly on degradation and no area is free of it. The perception exists that street-walking prostitutes are unique among their kind in that they are the only women in the business who suffer daily degradation. They certainly suffer the consequences of being regarded as the lowest of the low, but it would be very wrong to assume that degradation is restricted to the red-light zones. There are no such restrictions in prostitution. Contrary to this misinformation, it is just as possible and just as customary to be humiliated in a five-star hotel. Some of the worst experiences I’ve had in prostitution took place in Ireland’s most exclusive hotels. Indeed, sometimes when you are dealing with a particular type of man, with a particular type of mindset, you are far worse off finding yourself with him in environs of opulence: some wealthy men (not all, thank God) communicate to you that you ought to feel yourself privileged to be there, regardless of how immaculately and expensively dressed and made-up you may be. The sense of the male being the dominant force in a money-for-sex exchange only ever comes close to fully disappearing in the case where a man expressly requests it in order to fulfill a desire to be dominated, and even in that case, as I’ve said, they still enjoy the control inherent to the status of the paying customer. Some men I’ve met in very expensive hotels or on callouts to extremely affluent houses were among the most difficult people a prostitute could meet. There was a sense of entitlement with those men that actually increased with every pound they paid you. The attitude was clear: ‘I have paid you two hundred pounds—therefore I will do whatever I feel like doing to you and you will keep your mouth shut about it’. Of course, in some men this attitude was simply a reflection of their general arrogance and inhumanity; in the majority of men who treated me this way though, it was clear that they got off in the sexual sense on humiliating me, on making me feel powerless, on giving me to feel and understand that I was there for one reason and one reason only—so that my body would be used as a receptacle for their sperm. After I began working indoors in 1993, I found that it was not safer as far as violence was concerned (though it was certainly safer in terms of avoiding arrest) but the degradation was just the same and often worse. I cannot think of anything less ‘high class’ than some of the experiences I had at the ‘upper end’ of the market. The truth is there is nothing classy about the exchange of money for sex and the environs where it takes place are powerless to influence that. I often met men who would have assumed that I was an escort, because they met me under those circumstances, and that I only ever worked in that sphere of the business; what they didn’t know was that I was often to be found on the streets or in massage parlours, and that they were paying me several times more than I’d been paid for the same service the day before. I met plenty of women who did this sort of ‘double-jobbing’, who worked different areas of the business at the same time. What I didn’t come across often were women like myself who worked all areas. Almost always, the women I met who worked in more than one area of prostitution worked either on the streets and in brothels, or in brothels and escort agencies. Working a crossover on the entire range of the scale, as I did, was unusual; so I believe that through simple diversity of experience I’ve got a fuller picture of prostitution than many of the women I’ve known. The women themselves bought into the supposed hierarchical structure of prostitution, with prostitutes in escort agencies looking down their noses at street-walking women and those in massage parlours comforting themselves with the fact that at least they weren’t out on the streets, at least they ‘hadn’t sunk that low’! I knew one woman, a lovely girl, who worked her own one-woman escort agency out of an apartment on an upmarket avenue in Ballsbridge. Her advertising costs were three-hundred- and-fifty pounds a fortnight. Her rent was a thousand pounds a month. Her mobile phone bills were higher than her advertising costs. This was in 1993. (Mobile phones were brand new technology in Ireland at the time and were the preserve of businessmen, drug dealers and prostitutes.) She spent a fortune on taxis and on clothes and shoes befitting her ‘escort’ stature. She broke even some months and when she did, she refused to work in any other area of the business to supplement her escorting income. ‘What are you doing on the streets?’ she used to ask me. ‘What are you doing in this fucking apartment?’ I’d ask her in return. It seemed so pointless to me—for some periods of time she was whoring herself just to maintain a situation in which to whore herself. The whole idea was supposed to be about making a half-decent living, I’d say to her, for God’s sake.