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The squalid truth about call girl lit
by DANUTA KEAN - More by this author »
Last updated at 08:54am on 20th April 2007
Comments (8)
Why, in the name of decency, are 'respectable' publishers like Penguin rushing out memoirs portraying prostitution as a glamorous lifestyle choice?
When Aneta was offered a job across the border from her Czech village, she jumped at the chance. The pretty 17-year-old was to be a nanny for a rich family.
Petr, the handsome man who recruited her, promised she would travel with them to London, America even. "You'll get to practise your English," he joked.
The next day Aneta, along with ten other local girls, met Petr on the edge of their village, handed over their passports and climbed into a waiting people carrier. It was to be the longest journey of their lives.
Hours later when the van came to a juddering halt, instead of a family, a group of rough-looking men were waiting.
They had guns and dogs, which they used to bundle the girls, some as young as 14, out of the van and into a dank cellar where they ordered them to strip naked and stand in line.
The men moved along the line grabbing the women roughly, inspecting their teeth, their breasts and between their legs. The girls were crying.
"We were just horseflesh," Aneta recalls. Each was dragged from the room at gunpoint and gang raped. Within days they were smuggled across Europe to work in brothels.
Aneta ended up in a British brothel, from which she later escaped. "I got to practise my English all right," she says bitterly.
Aneta's story could be told by hundreds of other women who have been trafficked across Europe to be swallowed up by the British sex trade.
The head of the Metropolitan Police Clubs and Vice Unit estimates that at least 75 per cent of prostitutes working in London are foreign - and that as many as 14,000 women from across the world are working in the sex trade in Britain.
Now we switch to a smart drawing room where the latest bestseller is being discussed by keen readers in their trendy book club.
A stream of so-called Happy Hooker memoirs are spewing out of Grub Street and you won't find a trafficked woman in one of them.
What you will find are salacious confessionals by middle-class hooker hacks motivated as much by celebrity as acclaim among the literati.
We've had a clever girl slumming it with Belle de Jour, who led the way with her blog-turned-book The Intimate Adventures Of A London Call Girl, in which she chatted about her punters, lingerie and writing ambitions.
We've had desperate housewives, such as Dawn Annandale, who revealed in Call Me Elizabeth that she would rather sleep with men to pay the school fees than send her kids to the local comprehensive.
These have been joined by professional dominatrices whipping up interest in suburbia, and a procession of pseudo-memoirs by call girls plying their trade from London to New York.
Of course, Aneta's is not a story you will find in the raft of prostitutes' memoirs being pumped out by publishers hellbent on peddling the myth that the Oldest Profession is a path to glamour and eroticism for a certain type of woman.
As the bodies of the brutally murdered prostitutes were being found around Ipswich last December, nubile Brazilian Bruna Surfistinha published Scorpion's Sweet Venom: Diary of A Brazilian Call Girl in the UK.
At 17, Bruna is only two years younger than Tania Nicol, the Ipswich Strangler's youngest victim, but how different are their lives.
Poor little rich girl Bruna decided the best way to upset Mum and Dad wasn't to dye her hair green but go on the game, though she calculated: "If I am going to be a prostitute, I don't want to be a run-of-the-mill one." Bully for her: at least she had a choice.
As Aneta and the Ipswich Five demonstrate, what Surfistinha contemptuously regards as "run-of-the-mill prostitutes" are women who live horrible, degraded lives, and whose freedom of choice is stolen with their passports and the descent into addiction the first time they are given crack cocaine by their pimps.
Not that stark reality penetrates publishers' minds.
This summer another author, the seductively named Miss S, joins Bruna and Belle in bookshops with Kinky Confessions Of A Working Girl.
Her editor Katy Follain, of that august publishing house Penguin, proudly proclaims Miss S is "one of London's top five escorts".
How she knows this is a mystery. Is there a FTSE for hookers? The Floosie 100, perhaps?
In an astonishing letter to promote Kinky Confessions, Follain writes that the book is an 'intimate diary' of Miss S's first year in a brothel, aged 21.
She took the job after a vacancy opened in her local massage parlour. Miss S likes the work so much she now runs her own business - whether it employs trafficked women, Follain omits to mention.
She does reveal: "This is her chosen career - she does it because she loves it, and her attitude to sex is empowering, fun and refreshing."
The book, Follain gushes, "will undoubtedly appeal to both curious teenage girls as well as bored housewives".
Teenage girls? What on earth is she thinking?
"Kinky Confessions stands out from the other sex memoirs," she burbles, "because everything in it is absolutely authentic, and will have huge credibility."
Not with me. If you want authenticity, consider that, according to the police, women in brothels are forced to service between 20 and 30 clients a day.
This is the reality of the vice trade, not books like Handy Hints for Hookers, Callgirl: Confessions of an Ivy League Lady of Pleasure, Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl or Concertina: The Life and Loves of a Dominatrix. It is far from the image promoted by the publishers of those literary offerings.
While Belle, Bruna and Miss S emphasise their freedom of choice, most sex workers are no more than slaves and there is nothing glamorous about the world they inhabit.
By peddling the myth of the middle-class call girl, these books perpetuate the insidious idea that inside every young girl and suburban housewife is a woman who regards sex as a commodity to sell.
What these memoirs also fail to acknowledge is the uncomfortable relationship between prostitution and paedophilia.
Belle and Co may be legal, but according to the Home Office as many as 75 per cent of all prostitutes begin their involvement in the trade well before their 18th birthday.
Many start as young as 12 after falling in with bad crowds - the average age of girls being pimped by young hustlers is 14 to 17.
Of the 84 trafficked women rescued from brothels in Operation Pentameter last year, 12 were under 17, some only 14.
Child prostitution is getting worse. From Gatwick to Glasgow, charities report a sharp rise in child abductions from care homes. Once snatched, the children are either trafficked abroad or forced to work in brothels here.
Up to 5,000 children are working as sex slaves in the UK, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation claims. As well as child exploitation, a disproportionate number of sex workers suffered appalling violence and sexual abuse as children, which was a significant factor in leading them into the vice trade.
The Home Office reports as many as 85 per cent of prostitutes suffered physical abuse as children, while 45 per cent were victims of sex abuse.
One woman, Severine, who works as an erotic masseuse, contacted me when I was researching this subject to say: "I did have a childhood that most people would consider emotionally abusive. I don't know if that's why I became a sex worker or not. It was probably part of it."
Severine's acknowledgement is borne out by other prostitutes and ex-sex workers I have met. A few years ago, a room mate of mine was a bright, sassy girl, who admitted to me she'd been a prostitute. She had also suffered horrific abuse.
Aged seven, she was raped on her way home from school. When she was 13 she was gang raped. Her parents were going through a nasty divorce, so rather than turn to them for help, she ran away.
On the streets prostitution was not her 'choice', it was her means of survival and memories of what she went through at the hands of punters haunted her into adulthood.
As a volunteer on the streets, I helped out with a welfare charity and discovered my friend's story was all too familiar.
None of the prostitutes I met had enjoyed happy, secure childhoods free from fear or abuse.
For girls not forced to sell sex by traffickers, heroin has proved the slave driver, as the victims of the Ipswich Strangler exemplify. The Home Office reports that 87 per cent of women involved in street-based prostitution use the drug.
Not a picture you find in the pages of Miss S and her bookish sisters.
Nor is the violence meted out to prostitutes reflected in these vice memoirs - Dawn Annandale alludes to one nasty incident, but it is nothing compared to the beatings meted out by pimps and punters most street girls experience.
Instead of the grim reality, we are peddled the tales of Bruna, Belle, Miss S et al, ready to spill their socalled secrets in return for a fat advance from publishers too busy reading their blogs to bother finding out what really happens in the vice trade.
Publishers who sell this nonsense claim it 'empowers' us girls, showing women sex workers in control of their sexuality and enjoying the work. If it's such a good job, why don't these publishers recommend their daughters take it up?
And if it is such great work then why do brothels use trafficked women to fill vacancies?
Because vice is not nice, which is why women do not choose it as a career.
The image of prostitution these writers promote is utter rubbish, a lie propagated about a profession that relies on coercion, rape, violence and drug addiction to recruit its workers.
For the sake of Aneta, my friend and the victims of the Ipswich Strangler, as well as the 5,000 child sex slaves working in Britain, it is about time publishers dug a little deeper when dealing with the Oldest Profession and stopped trying to sell us this pernicious nonsense.