Farley, M. (2007) 'Renting an Organ for 10 Minutes:' What Tricks Tell Us About Prostitution, Pornography, and Trafficking. In D. Guinn and J. DeCaro (eds.) Pornography: Driving the Demand for International Sex Trafficking Pp 144-152. Los Angeles: Captive Daughters Media.
The perspective of a trick:
�I was like a kid in a candy store. I mean, it was nothing for me to knock off four broads in an afternoon. We�d go by the numbers. �Twenty-three A for Mr. Lewis, Please! No, Twenty-four A is the blonde; twenty three A is the brunette.� Jesus Christ�.It was just wonderful! The thing that was not wonderful about it was that there was no morality. I had no morality. I had no guilt. I thought: This is what men do.� [author�s italics]1
The perspective of a woman in prostitution:
�Every day I was witness to the worst of men. Their carelessness and grand entitlement. The way they can so profoundly disconnect from what it is they�re having sex with, the way they think they own the world, watch them purchase a female. I was witness to their deep delusions. Spoiled babies all of them, and so many of them called prostitutes. I thought, maybe all men called prostitutes. It was a terrible thought, but really, what did I care. There was a system in place that was older and stronger than I could begin to imagine. Who was I? I was just a girl. What was I going to do about it. If I had any power I would make it so that nobody was ever bought or sold or rented��2 Before I describe some preliminary results of research interviews with men who buy women for sex, I�d like to tell you what we found out about the effects of pornography on women in prostitution. When men use pornography, in that process they are trained as tricks. Pornography is men�s rehearsal for prostitution. Pornography is cultural propaganda which drives home the notion that women are prostitutes. One man who used pornography said �I am a firm believer that all women� are prostitutes at one time or another.�3
New research on the effect of pornography on women in prostitution
Interviews with 854 women in prostitution in 9 countries4 women and men in prostitution made it clear that pornography is integral to prostitution. In 9 countries, almost half (49 percent) told us that pornography was made of them while they were in prostitution. Forty-seven percent of our respondents were upset by tricks� attempts to make them do what the tricks had previously seen in pornography.5 These numbers are similar to those reported by the WHISPER Oral History Project in 1990.6 Fifty-three percent of the WHISPER interviewees reported that tricks made pornography of them. Fifty-two percent of the WHISPER women reported that pornography played a significant role in teaching them what was expected of them as prostitutes. Eighty percent said that tricks showed them pornography in order to illustrate the specific sex acts that wanted performed.
Andrea Dworkin wrote about prostitution in 1983:
Her mind is hurt by rape and other physical assault on her body, it fades and shrinks and seeks silence as refuge; it becomes the prison cell inside her�..Every invasion of the body is marked in the brain: contusions, abrasions, cuts, swellings, bleeding, mutilation, breaking, burning. Each capacity of the brain � memory, imagination, intellect, creation, consciousness itself � is distressed and deformed, distorted by the sexualized physical injuries that girls and women sustain.7
Psychologists are usually not that specific, and certainly not that eloquent, regarding the harms of prostitution and pornography. Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is a crude measure of the overall level of emotional harm against women in prostitution. The psychiatric diagnosis of PTSD describes mental and physical avoidance behaviors, psychological numbing, social distancing, flashbacks, and anxious physiologic hyper-arousal. Some of the PTSD suffered by women in prostitution results from the ways that men use pornography on them and against them.
Of 854 women, men and children in prostitution, across 9 countries, we found that 68 percent had PTSD.8 This is an extremely high prevalence of PTSD, and it tells us, like Andrea Dworkin did, that prostitution causes great psychological harm to those in it. As we analyzed our data, we investigated factors that might indicate what exactly it was about prostitution that was causing such high rates of PTSD. We wondered: did childhood sexual abuse, childhood physical abuse, or rape or other physical assault in prostitution cause particularly high levels of PTSD in the people we interviewed? We found that so many of our respondents had all of those types of violence in their lives that we couldn�t differentiate how much each type of violence contributed to their overall distress. This is called a statistical ceiling effect. Others have found ceiling effects for certain phenomena. For example, two studies failed to find race differences in PTSD symptoms among combat veterans.9 In these studies, combat, like prostitution, was the overwhelmingly traumatic event that mitigated differences in PTSD based on race. Their PTSD was already so high from the trauma of combat that the traumatic effects of racism could not be statistically demonstrated.
I mention these statistical effects because, frankly, we thought that prostituted women�s PTSD was so high that it could not go up any higher. We did not expect to show that the making of pornography or the coercion to imitate it had a statistically significant effect on the PTSD suffered by the women we interviewed in prostitution. But in fact our results showed that when women had pornography made of them, it hurt them even more. It is data that causes you to weep.
Women in prostitution whose tricks or pimps made pornography of them in prostitution had significantly more severe symptoms of PTSD than did women who did not have pornography was made of them.10
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