Tell her to read this in full.
extract
For many anti-human trafficking and feminist activists, “sex work” is now the preferred term for how Myers-Powell survived from the age of 14 until just before her 40th birthday, when a particularly vicious assault forced a change. But it is not a term preferred by Myers-Powell. “I understand why people [use ‘sex worker’] and I appreciate it, but, you see, I lived it. No one ever used those soft words about me. My arrest record, before it was vacated, never said ‘sex worker’. It said ‘prostitute’. The men never called me a ‘sex worker’, they called me a ‘ho’.”
And there’s another reason this terminology doesn’t sit right with her: “It makes it seem as if it’s a part of normal society – but I don’t know any prostitute that ever got a 401k [pension plan] or a paid holiday, or benefits. Do you?”
Myers-Powell’s formidable power as an advocate comes from this directness. She has never found it uncomfortable to talk about her most painful experiences. “It’s always been part of my uniqueness,” she says brightly, then goes on to prove the claim by unstintingly describing her childhood. Her 16-year-old mother died when Myers-Powell was just six months old.
She was raised by her grandmother, “a beautiful woman, a great woman, a strong woman, but she had a drinking problem, and that made her be like two different people”. Myers-Powell has many happy memories of reading comics together and baking. “She could cook anything – even hard candy!” But then there was the drinking: “There was an opportunity for her drinking partners to take advantage of me, because her focus wasn’t on me … but theirs was. So I got molested a lot.” Myers-Powell’s earliest memories of rape go back to when she was four years old.
She was often alone at home in the evenings, because her grandmother’s job as a maid for wealthy families in the suburbs meant a long commute. Her favourite entertainment was to sit at the window and watch the red light district outside.
At that time, [the prostitutes’] dressed up really nice, like Diana Ross and the Supremes, with the sparkly dresses and the big hair, and they impressed me,” she says. One day, when she was about nine, she asked her grandmother what these glamorous women were doing. “She said: ‘They take their panties off and men give them money,’ and I said: ‘I’ll probably do that when I grow up,’ – because men had already been taking my panties off.”
Continues: www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jun/17/brenda-myers-powell-pimped-out-left-for-dead-survived