Exiting and somehow surviving prostitution can lead to a depth of grief which is almost impossible to express.
It is to know that you wake into huge sadness, yet no tears come.
It is to have huge slabs of gravestones continuing to remind where you came from.
All I can do in this post, is to reach and grab this past in expressionist prose – I cannot say the depths and width of that sorrow.
I can never measure the aching grief of the prostituted class – all I can do is examine my past as a tiny example of that living pain.
I use me coz I was never unique – I use me coz somehow I able to be forensic with my own history, whilst I cannot handle the pain and grief of how other somehow survived prostitution.
I could start with the sorrow of being an exited woman – the sorrow of hearing constant lies and myths said about what it is to be prostituted.
To hear that it can be made safe if all prostitutes are indoors.
Hearing this, and the daggers of knowing a past of being indoors.
A past where safety was a joke. Where bouncers or security was only there to stop the prostitute from leaving or to tell punters their time is up.
A past where no prostitute can escape a violent punter, a past where the real profit is made by letting punter be as sadist as he wants.
A past where prostitutes just disappears, where prostitutes are murdered and no-one speaks of their existence.
To hear it is just sex.
To know it is rape – unless money is consent.
To know each punter who buys a prostitute will know he can torture, can rape and can batter – and it will a non-crime.
To know that when a prostitute is murdered, it is decided no human is involved.
To hear that prostitution prevents real rapes.
To know that this means you are now and have always been sub-human.
To know that this means all the prostituted have no access to human pain, human emotions, and therefore can not be harmed.
To know we never had any rights to the language of no, to know our voices were smashed down every time we wanted more than being sex goods.
But the real gravestones that leave me and so many exited women in a stunned silence – is the gravestones where it is written “no-one will care”.
It inside these slabs we see and know that whatever sadism that went through our bodies and minds – it is always seen of little importance when real violence is happening to the innocent women and girls.
For to be prostituted, is to never be allowed to be innocent enough to be raped, innocent enough to know what it is to be battered, innocent enough to be a child, innocent enough to be a murder victim worth remembering.
That is the gaping wound that all exited women carry – most are silenced about, most do express what it is to be always on the outside.
We stay silent so others do not defend themselves, we stay silent and pretend it just a continuum of male violence, as we are always forgotten and abandoned.
Our silence is not agreement, it is just exhaustion that we are keep sub-human, it is frustration that our pains and confusion is so easily dismissed.
Our silence hides the screaming of how we never abused as individuals – we were raped, tortured and murdered as throwaway goods.
Each prostitute knows there is nothing personal when punter or profiteers destroy their humanity – we know in the world of the sex trade, nothing is being done to nothing.
To be a prostitute is not be an individual, not have access to humanity, to have no authentic voice.
We were stripped of the right to know we were being raped or tortured – as we were brainwashed it just our work, that we had strong sexual desire, that we did know pain like real women and girls.
There is nothing personal in prostitution – it is just an institution that rapes women and girls into nothingness, it is just an institution that constantly new ways to torture the prostituted class, it is just an institution that will murder the prostituted for it just disposing its goods.
To be prostituted is to not exist.
No wonder we all have gravestones deep inside of us.
Rebecca Mott 