I wrote this on a FWR thread a few weeks ago - it was moved to 30 days only and got zapped. Half planned to clean it up and move it to Medium or something... the bold bit is the post I was replying to.
There are many strong SWs who make their own rules and do it very well, run it as a business. Also many who genuinely like the people they meet and choose who to spend their time with, build up a regular clientele
I am not referring to those that are forced into it, that is a totally different situation. Or, those that have no premises to work from and in order to pay the bills will work the streets
There is another category though, probably the biggest one, in my anecdotal experience - the women and girls who are groomed into it, by partners, by poverty, or those who are reacting to childhood sexual abuse (hyper sexualisation, lack of sex worth etc: pdfs.semanticscholar.org/869b/1f3ce1825613b22052240eabb92a3862ee14.pdf)
Others are groomed into by the ‘industry’ itself.
You start out as a hostess, or a lap dancer, or, in my case, as a sex chat line operator (this was 20 years ago, these days I imagine premium snapchat accounts and ‘camming’ are the equivalent entry points).
Once you are in that world, it starts to seems normal. You move from phone sex lines to a fancy table dancing bar in Mayfair. No one tells you that you have to go with the men the other dancers refer to as ‘cases’ (a weird, coy euphemism for punter, left over from decades before, the days that prostitutes carried empty suitcases into hotels, to give an air of respectability) but you’ve got money troubles, and one ‘case’ will pay for that new washing machine you so desperately need, and one more might get you a tumble dryer, because hand washing all those babygros and hanging them up in your little flat like poop-stained bunting is damp and depressing.
So you think, ‘fuck it’ because the baby sitter needs paying anyway, and the other girls all do it, and they are your mates, and your mates are normal, right? Coping, right?
And this case is one of the better ones, youngish, a minor celebrity. Spends money like it’s going out of style.
A couple of years ago, you might even have gone home with him for free, if you were drunk enough, lonely enough, if your self esteem was low enough.
You don’t do that nowadays though, you’ve got commitments. A baby.
But you don’t quite have the bottle to go through with it, so one of the other girls helps you out with a line of coke in the ladies, and it’s that and the overpriced champagne the club made your ‘case’ buy before you could leave the premises that powers you through.
And it’s horrible, worse than you imagined, so you dissociate and get away as quickly as possible but you can’t bear to think about it so you have another line of coke out of the wrap in the bottom of last night’s handbag, even though it’s 10am, but your toddler won’t let you sleep in the daytime anyway and you’ve been up all night.
And maybe getting you hair done or buying a new dress will make you feel better and take away the yicky feeling, and having that much cash in your flat makes you feel unsafe anyway, so you may as well spend some, right?
And before you know it, your shift is starting again, so you take a taxi into town, even though you know it means you still can’t quite afford that washing machine yet but you are tired and the shame of last night keeps creeping through, so you end up buying more coke off of one of the bouncers and every time you go to the loo you share it with your friend, because it’ll be her turn to buy tomorrow night and it really does help you both talk to the customers and stops you getting quite so sloshed on all that Dom Perignon and Cristal that the club makes them buy so they can sit down with you.
And in the loos, bit by bit, you get to know the other girls, they show you photos of their kids and together you set your goals for the shift. You all need the money for something, sometimes it’s for
something positive, like university fees, but it’s more likely to be for something negative, a boyfriend’s gambling debts, perhaps, or council tax arrears, or the 26% interest on the telly you got from that weekly payment store. The one your ex put his foot through when he finally left for good.
You and your girls look out for each other, watch each other’s backs. Sometimes, you can convince your cases to make it a threesome, you get less money that way, no matter how well-off they are, they won’t pay full price for both of you, but there is safety in numbers, and somehow, walking out at daybreak, birds tweeting, arm in arm in with another woman, makes the yick more bearable.
The girl you get on with best, the one you sit with in the late night cafe on the quiet nights when the only money to be made goes directly to the club tells you a secret. She isn’t really Greek, but Bosnian. Her Greek passport is fake, or maybe stolen, provided by people traffickers who drove her across Europe, hours and hours laying under a blanket, teaching herself to breathe without moving her ribs.
Her dad had used all his savings to get her out of their village, her brother had died in the conflict, and she was all he had left.
Her dad’s life savings had tuned out to be little more than a deposit, she had to pay the rest in cash instalments, every Friday.
One Thursday night you find her crying, she’s had a quiet week, she’s got her period, she’s bloated, spotty and bleeding, her usual phone call to her dad didn’t connect, she doesn’t know if he’s alive or dead.
She doesn’t have this week’s cash yet, so she needs to earn the rest tonight but it’s a quiet night and you know she doesn’t have her head in the game. You give her the couple of hundred she needs from your diamanté purse, spend what’s left on coke from the doorman, two coffees in the late night cafe, two night busses home.
You still don’t have quite enough for that washing machine you need, but it’s ok, because there is always next week.
20 years later all you have left of your friend is a Polaroid picture with a biro’d name. Signed with a kiss.
You can’t look her up on Facebook, because the name isn’t really hers, it’s just the fake name from the fake Greek passport. You hope she’s ok, wherever, whoever, she is. You hope she got out. Like you did.