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Nov. 29, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
54:05
533 Prostitution Part 1

Exploitation, or economics?

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Good morning, everybody. It's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. It's time for us to chat about prostitution.
I'm sorry to have to chat about this topic or to choose to chat about this topic, but it seems that something I took for granted is not something that is understood by other people to be taken for granted.
So that's no problem.
I certainly could be incorrect about this.
So let's do the useful stuff and to start with some facts.
Now you can debate and argue these facts and so on, which is fine, but the trends do seem to be rather universal.
So this is North American statistics.
But just before we start, I'm fully aware of the argument that says That sex is like nutrition.
You go and buy a meal. Why can't you go and buy sex?
I'm fully aware of the argument that says all of the problems that arise from prostitution arise from the fact that it's illegal, and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
So we'll get to those perhaps a little later.
Actually, not perhaps. We will get to those a little later, but let's start with some facts.
The average age of entry...
Oh, this is from prostitutionresearch.com.
The average age of entry into prostitution is 13 years old, or 14 years old.
This is sort of two. These are from the 80s.
I don't think it's changed that much.
Most of these 13 or 14-year-old girls were recruited or coerced into prostitution.
Others were, quote, traditional wives without job skills who escaped from or were abandoned by abusive husbands and went into prostitution to support themselves and their children.
Evidence of the prevalence of incest among prostitutes ranged from 65 to 90 percent.
Incest being they were raped as children by a blood-related family member, usually a father.
It could be an uncle, I guess.
Grandfather. The Council for Prostitution Alternatives in Oregon in 1991 stated that 85% of prostitutes and clients reported history of sexual abuse in children.
70% reported incest.
The higher percentages, 80-90% of reports of incest and childhood sexual assaults of prostitutes, came from anecdotal reports and from clinicians working with prostitutes.
80% of prostitution survivors at the Whisperer Oral History Project reported that their customers showed them pornography to illustrate the kinds of sexual activities in which they wanted to engage.
Pornography... Okay. 90% of prostituted women...
We've had pimps while in prostitution.
About 80% of women in prostitution have been the victim of a rape.
It's hard to talk about this because the experience of prostitution is just like rape.
Prostitutes are raped on average 8 to 10 times per year.
They are the most raped class of women in the history of our planet.
Other studies report 68 to 70% of women in prostitution are being raped.
And 78% of women who sought help from the Council for Prostitution Alternatives were reported being raped on average 16 times a year by pimps and were raped 33 times a year by johns.
In another study, 85% of prostitutes are raped by pimps.
In a study of 475 people in prostitution, including women, men, and transgendered, From five countries, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, USA and Zambia.
62% reported having been raped in prostitution.
73% reported having experienced physical assault in prostitution.
72% were currently or formerly homeless.
92% stated that they wanted to escape prostitution immediately.
A Canadian report on prostitution concluded that girls and women in prostitution...
Have a mortality rate 40 times higher than the national average.
In one study, 75% of women in escort prostitution had attempted suicide.
This is the higher classes, not sort of call girls on the street.
Prostituted women comprised 15% of all completed suicides reported by hospitals.
So those are some of the statistics.
And I'll just do a couple more, and then we will start our chat about the general theory.
Um... The age at which respondents...
This is from another study.
I'll post the reference on the board. This is in 2000.
They began interviewing prostitutes in the Chicago metropolitan area.
Age of entry. The age at which respondents first exchanged sex for money ranged from 4 to 50 years.
About one-third of the women entered prostitution before the age of 15, and 62% of the sample started in prostitution before their 18th birthday.
Early starters, those women who began between the ages of 12 and 15, were more disadvantaged in a number of ways.
72% of early starters ran away from home.
Early starters were more likely to have used drugs or alcohol growing up.
Only one-fourth of early starters had completed a high school education or GED. Early starters engaged in a greater number of different prostitution activities.
Over half of the early starters grew up in a household with prostitution.
87% of early starters had someone suggested they engage in prostitution while they were growing up, not recommended parenting metrics.
Early starters reported a greater number of health problems at the time of the interview.
Family of origin. One-fourth of respondents grew up without a mother in the household, and 59% without a father.
Close to one-fourth of the women had been separated from their primary caregiver for a year or more.
60% reported domestic violence in the household.
83% reported substance abuse by others in the household while growing up, with 86% themselves using drugs or alcohol.
Over half the women ran away from home at least once.
One-third of the respondents indicated that someone in the household other than themselves regularly exchanged sex or money while they were growing up.
71% knew someone in the neighborhood who regularly exchanged sex or money.
Over 70% reported that while growing up, someone suggests they engage in prostitution.
Regardless of the type of prostitution activity, high percentages of women had experienced violence while engaged in prostitution from customers, pimps, intimate partners, managers, police officers, and neighbors.
Women on the streets, in drug houses, and in hotels reported high rates of forced sex and physical violence, with almost one-fourth of women in drug houses being raped more than ten times.
Women in escort services And exotic dancing were also subjected to high rates of sexual and physical violence, with 21.4% of women in escort services being raped more than 10 times.
It's not raped at all. It's raped more than 10 times.
Customers were most frequently identified as the perpetrators of violence across all venues, followed by intimate partners, pimps, police officers, and neighborhood residents.
Anyway, so pimping large numbers of women gave money to other people.
Homelessness, substantial percentages of women in street prostitution, drug houses, and survival sex were homeless while engaged in these activities.
Less than 5% of women in each prostitution activity said they never used alcohol or drugs.
Over 90% of women in both street and off-street activities increased their drug or alcohol use during prostitution.
Of the 39 different health problems listed, women reported experiencing a mean of 9.85 problems.
Over half of the respondents said they suffered from headaches or migraines.
About half of the women reported having sexually transmitted infections, and 22% of the respondents reported being HIV-positive.
60% of respondents stated they had tried drug treatment a mean of 7.64 times, detox outpatient programs and residential programs.
Three-quarters of the sample said they were arrested at least once.
Anyway, so you sort of get the picture.
And you can look up a variety of statistics.
And I sort of want to differentiate because I know that there's...
A sort of libertarian argument that says, if money exchanges hands, then there's nothing wrong with it, right?
I mean, if money changes hands, there's nothing wrong with it.
And the argument also, of course, exists to say that sex is a service, and somebody can cook your meal, then you can have sex with someone for money, and...
If you pay for a massage, that's somebody touching you in ways that you wouldn't allow just a mere stranger to touch you and so on.
And I also understand the arguments that say that these women...
I mean, no sane human being is for child prostitution, but these people are saying, well, you know, if she's an adult and that's what she chooses to do, who's going to interview with her choice?
And all that kind of stuff.
Like, I fully understand these arguments, and I'm, you know, I'm going to sort of have a swing at them.
For me, at least, I'm going to sort of put my cards on the table.
For me, the exchange of money...
For a particular transaction makes it, you know, the fact that it's not coercive is obviously one of the main criteria for determining sort of the difference between good and evil.
So I'm certainly not putting people in the category of it's evil to go to a prostitute.
It's certainly not my, because there is no direct violence involved in giving a woman money.
For sex. So, you know, please understand, when I was sort of talking about this self-esteem issue, I was not talking about anything immoral or criminal from a sort of good and evil standpoint, because, yeah, I fully understand there's no sex...
Sorry, there's no... There's no initiation of the use of force or fraud in going to see a prostitute.
But what I'd sort of like to...
Take a stab at, and I can't prove this, right?
And I've never been able to claim to prove it.
I believe it to be a fact.
I think that you can tell some...
I mean, this is sort of the basis of psychological diagnosing, right?
Which is that you can tell something about someone based on their behavior, right?
That it's not all just, you know, self-reporting, right?
So you can look at someone and say, well...
They are evidencing high or low self-esteem or greater or lesser integrity in their life based on their actions, right?
So if I say to you, person X was in good health...
And young and committed suicide.
Then you can legitimately, I think, say that this person was not happy, right?
I mean, it's this sort of basic that I'd sort of like to start with, right?
And of course, if you say, if your immediate response is to say, well, but there could be other reasons.
They could, you know, they're healthy.
And instead of saying, well, they're free, you know, whatever, right?
And they decide to kill themselves, we can sort of get some sense that they're not happy.
I think that would be a reasonable assumption.
Similarly, and this is sort of standard psychological stuff, right?
So if you want to argue, you can argue with every psychologist on the planet.
This is not just sort of me spouting off for once.
And if somebody self-mutilates, right?
Like if somebody cuts themselves on a regular basis, this is a symptom of pretty extreme pathology, right?
This is a crushingly low self-esteem usually associated with extreme physical or Emotional or sexual attacks or violence when they were children and usually very young children.
So there is, you know, just in the same way that a doctor is going to have to diagnose you based on, you know, you're going to report some symptoms.
You go to a doctor and you say, you know, I've got this pain in my, whatever, my kidney.
I've got this pain in my middle.
Middle does hurt.
Then the doctor is going to have to try to come to a conclusion based on, you know, fairly extensive knowledge and training.
And Christina was sort of asking me about a post that she put on the board last night talking about her experience in treating prostitutes and the Johns, both male and female on both sides.
And she said, well, how am I going to prove all of this?
And I said, well, you know, you have a master's degree in psychology, and so you studied it for six years, and then you took five years of supervised training, and you've got 14 years of experience, and you're running your own clinic.
There's no... I mean, you can't transfer that kind of knowledge to somebody else very easily, right?
I mean, actually, you can't, right?
You simply, you can't, unless they want to go and study psychology for years and so on.
You simply, and it's sort of like somebody going up to the surgeon and saying, let me take over for a while.
And it's like, well, I can't let you do that, or I can't transfer my knowledge to you.
So when people say, well, why is this and why is this?
It can go on forever.
At some point, you're going to accept the authority of an expert, at least to the point where you'll be curious.
But if you stand up and just challenge that expert, then say, well, the expert isn't proving the case.
It's like, well, that's because it takes a lot of training and expertise to follow why all of this stuff occurs.
Human behavior is... Confusing, right?
So one gentleman asked, and you know, quite rightly so, how could it be that a desire to humiliate someone goes along with a desire to humiliate yourself?
And it's like, well, that's complex. And to answer that question would take quite a lot of study of early childhood development and the brain.
And it's, you know, it's a complicated, complicated field.
And, of course, it is not a hard science, right?
So people can always say, well, I know of an exception.
And that disproves the rule.
Well, of course, right? I mean, psychology is not physics, right?
One exception does not...
One observed exception does not disprove the rule.
And, of course, people can also, and I'm not accusing anyone of this in particular, but people can also mess up psychological explorations by simply lying, right, in a way that, you know, atoms and energy can't, right?
I mean, if you say, if your physics theory says the particle is going to be here and the particle is there, fantastic, but the particle's not going to lie and say that it's there.
But, you know, in that sort of house phenomenon on the TV show, right, that...
The people who have the greatest pathologies are the ones least likely to tell you the truth about their histories and their...
Actually, no, sorry, that's not accurate.
That's not true. It's just that there's...
I'm not going to sort of put that in, right?
Because, you know, the first thing that I jump to is if that's true, then all of the people who are reporting this sort of prostitution are saying, well, they're sort of lying about their histories.
But it is true, let's just say, that there is capacity to lie in self-reporting in psychological examinations, right?
So, you know, somebody...
If I say, well, self-mutilation is a sign of low or negative self-esteem...
Then someone would say, well, I self-mutilate and I'm very happy, right?
And of course, I have no way of verifying that.
No way of verifying that at all, right?
It's just that when you look at the long-term trajectory, and you can get this from looking at people's lives as a whole, when you count no man happy until he's died, when you look at the long-term trajectory of people's lives, Of people's lives, you get some sort of sense of what their stability and what their core values are and so on.
Anyone in the moment can come across great and look, you know, I'm happy.
I regularly cut myself when I'm feeling down, but it makes me feel better and I get a real thrill and I'm happy about it.
And so you have that problem as well, right?
So somebody puts forward a psychological theory and again, this doesn't prove or disprove anything I'm saying.
I'm just talking about the general risks of psychological theories that somebody could then say, well, I don't experience that at all, therefore your theory is false, right?
And of course, that's a risk you take, right?
So you have to look for statistical generalities and evidences and so on, right?
So, let's start talking about this issue in a bit more detail, because people are fairly flustered, let's say, that I have this theory, which of course, if you find it to be nonsense, you certainly don't have to listen to anything.
I feel a bit ferocious about this topic, because I'm all about the protection of children, and again, not child prostitutes, but I'll make this connection as I move forward, for better or for worse.
So, this is not going to be the most gentle of podcasts, but I hope that you'll excuse my passion.
I feel quite strongly about this.
So, on average, in balance, with the clear majority of prostitutes, if not...
I mean, certainly, Christina's not known of any exception, both in her practice and in other people's practice.
You look at these statistics, and all of them...
I'm going to talk about the stuff that occurs prior...
To somebody entering the prostitution field.
Because the standard libertarian argument that it's voluntary, that's fine.
Or that the only abuses occur because it's illegal, that's also fine.
So we're going to bypass all of that by talking about the histories of women and men who end up in prostitution.
now I'm just going to talk about the women but from what I've read and from what I've talked about with others who are in the sort of profession it's not specific to women but I'm just so I don't have to keep saying he and she all the time we'll go with the standard metric so the average woman and the vast majority of women who end up in prostitution have been seriously raped seriously and serially raped as children and
That's a fact that libertarian theory is not going to be able to bypass.
Now, psychological theories, and more than theories, this is pretty much a given in the industry, and in the discipline of psychology, is that early and repeated rape by primary caregiver, and the majority, clear majority, it's incest, and others, it's probably just others around the family, But of course, when you end up getting raped, even as a child by somebody outside your family, it's not because you've been taught good boundaries and been well treated and respected within your family.
So, when a child gets repeatedly raped by a primary caregiver, that child grows up without ego defenses, without a sense of self, with no capacity for self-protection.
And with no self-worth, right?
To rape a child, and again, I'm not saying anyone is arguing that this is a good thing.
I'm just sort of looking at the genesis or the etymology of a woman who ends up exchanging sex for money.
A woman who is repeatedly raped as a child, it is about the worst form of child abuse that there is.
I mean, I can't imagine the repeated rape of a child by a primary caregiver.
I can't imagine a worse form of child abuse.
Maybe outright murder, who knows, right?
But being raised by a sociopathic, evil murderess, Rhett Bassett, who rapes children, is very...
I mean, you can't get worse abuse and stay alive.
And if this occurs for you as a child, as a little girl, then you're not going to grow up with any sense of self.
You're going to grow up with an absolutely reinforced and traumatized and brutalized belief that you simply exist to service the needs of others.
That you simply exist to service the needs of others.
You're not going to grow up with any sense of self.
You're not going to grow up with any ego boundaries, with any sense of self or other, because, of course, the ego boundaries of your personality and your body, your tender little body, have been repeatedly violated.
You're not going to have any sense of privacy.
You're not going to have any sense that you exist independently of other people's needs.
And you're not going to have any sense of self-protection.
I mean, little girls do not want to get raped, and the only way that they get raped repeatedly is if the punishment for not submitting to the rape, and I would argue the punishment for not pretending that you enjoy the rape as a child, is far worse than the rape itself, right? So, basically, you have to threaten a child with extreme physical violence in order to get the child to submit to a rape.
So there is no capacity for self-protection, there's no capacity for negotiation, there's no capacity, I mean in a sort of fundamental emotional sense, there's no capacity for self-protection.
And there is a fundamental and deep-seated and highly rooted conviction that to attempt to deny the needs of others, particularly in a sexual sense, will result in death.
So, fundamentally, this is the worst form of post-traumatic stress disorder, the worst form of exploitation.
I mean, we all know that a woman who gets repeatedly raped as an adult is going to suffer some significant trauma.
I mean, enormous trauma, mind-blowing trauma.
A woman who gets raped once as an adult suffers mind-blowing trauma.
A child who gets raped repeatedly when she can't escape, can't run away, can't do this, can't do that, She is obviously not going to grow up with any sense of self-protection.
She is, particularly in the realm of relationships and particularly in the realm of sexual relationships, she remains a child.
Her development is stunted and thwarted completely and destroyed.
So that's sort of an important thing to understand, that prostitutes are the leftovers of pedophiles.
And I hate to put it that way, but I'm just working with the statistics and with reports from those in the field.
Prostitutes are the wreckage left behind by pedophiles, particularly pedophiles in the immediate blood family relationship.
If you look at just outside the realm of direct rape, if you look at, and the statistics are quite clear here as well, If you look at the disorderliness, the chaos of the families that prostitutes grow up in, you know, majority physical violence reported, majority people suggest that they go into prostitution.
They know people who are in prostitution.
These people are growing up in highly disordered neighborhoods, in very chaotic environments.
I don't ever remember as a child growing up and somebody saying, hey, Steph, You know, you should really go into prostitution, right, as a business.
I mean, I don't think anyone that I knew was offered that, boy or girl, right?
So this is a pretty seedy, decrepit, revolting layer of society that these poor little girls are growing up in.
And it's not their fault, right?
It's just why they happen to get born.
So... The way that most women get into prostitution, and of course there are strong indications that the majority of women get into prostitution between the ages of 13 and 14, the way that it occurs is the home life becomes so unbearable that the moment that they can legitimately get away,
and it's not an accident that's around puberty, which is associated with obviously the physical changes, but brain developments, greater size and strength, And the capacity to earn a living as a prostitute, right?
That's an option that's open to them.
And the home life becomes so absolutely unbearable due to an escalation of rape.
Or you start, as you get a little stronger, when you go through puberty, you start to fight back.
And then the threats of violence or murder escalate against the child.
And so the child runs away.
Half of the prostitutes have tried running away before.
And so you run away.
And then you sort of make, you know, we all know this grim tale, right?
This is not a mystery, right?
You go to the big city and a guy in a big fedora opens his door and says, let me get in.
And then he gets you addicted to drugs.
Or he simply, he continues the exploitation that has already occurred, right?
There's no woman in the world who wakes up one day and says, you know, I don't think I'm going to go to my job as an accountant.
I don't think I'm going to go to my job as a lawyer or a doctor or...
A clerk in a convenience store, I'm going to go and start selling my body for money.
There's an extraordinary amount of pathology that needs to be put in place for that to be an option, right?
Now, the question as to why, and I'm not going to be able to prove this, I think that we can sort of reasonably infer a general pattern from the statistics, but I'm certainly not going to be able to prove this, but the repetition compulsion that occurs to people who've experienced early abuse is significant.
And it's a way of normalizing their environment to escape the full horror of it.
Right? So the full horror of being repeatedly raped as a child is something that I can't even conceive of.
I mean, I just... I have a pretty good imagination.
I can't conceive what that does to a human soul.
How it turns it to ashes and self-loathing and emptiness and a murderousness in a kind of way.
But... The repeated raping, what it does to a human soul is so staggering that you end up with no sense of self-worth and all you're good for, the only reason for your existence is to...
And the best that you can do to escape being killed or badly mutilated or tortured is to submit to the rape of men.
In authority. That's the only life that has any resonance with you.
That's the only thing that makes sense to you in the world.
And it's almost inconceivable that you wouldn't do that in a way.
Or at least wouldn't have susceptibility to that.
Because, you know, one of the reasons that people end up normalizing their childhoods is to escape the pain of those childhoods, right?
So as long as you stay in this seedy, grim, disgusting, exploitive world, then your childhood makes a little bit more sense.
It's like, well, this is the world.
My childhood wasn't that unusual.
The moment you start moving in more decent circles, you start to really feel the absolute humiliation of your lifestyle.
And that's one of the reasons why these women say this.
It's to avoid those feelings of shame and humiliation and self-loathing, which will probably end up, and for, you know, 15% of the successful suicides that hospitals receive are prostitutes, right?
They've probably woken up and realized what their life is, right?
So they just can't take it anymore, and they don't see any other way out, right?
And there's lots of reasons why it's hard to get out of prostitution, which we don't sort of have to get into here.
I'm sure that you can mull back and think about, if you've been living, being regularly raped and beaten and so on, that you have no self-esteem.
You have no self-worth.
You can't negotiate.
You've got panic attacks.
You've got health problems.
You've got no resume. You've got no education.
You've got no references.
You've got no organized lifestyle, sort of getting up and brushing your teeth and so on.
It is just wretched.
So, when...
When a man goes to a prostitute, this is an important thing to understand.
I want you to picture this, and I hate to have to do this to you, and I'm sorry that this broadcast is so brutal.
I really am. But if there is no empathy for the continued exploitation, money or not, of these pedophilic leftovers, then if you expect me to have...
empathy for Iraqis and empathy for abused children and empathy for the children of Christians, you certainly are not going to expect me, I think, not to have empathy for the leftovers from pedophiles, from raping fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts and strangers and grandparents.
If you expect that I'm going to hold back from having empathy for these poor children, If you think I'm going to have empathy for children who are beaten but not children who are raped, then you kind of don't get what I'm doing here, which is fine.
I'm not saying you have to, but if you think that I'm going to let this one go, or not be perfectly frank about the etymology of prostitution, then you are mistaken about my level of compassion for the helpless in the world.
Now, if you go to a prostitute, I want you to sort of picture this.
So you give her $200 and you want sex.
And you basically say to her, you have a polite little chit-chat or whatever, right, to make it seem like it's not continued exploitation of women who have been raped as children.
And you say to her, okay, take your clothes off, turn around, stick your butt in the air.
You slap on your condom if you've got even two brain cells left.
And hope that you don't get genital warts or crabs or anything.
And you put your penis into her.
And I want you to picture this.
She is reading a book, right?
So she's in doggy style.
You're pounding away and she's reading a book or she's on the phone, right?
Because if it's just about sex in a hole, right?
If it's just about sex in a hole, wouldn't that be perfectly fine?
Wouldn't that be perfectly fine?
In fact, wouldn't it be better, because at least you know she's occupied and not bored.
So she's got a book, or she's listening to her iPod, or she's chatting on the phone while you're pounding away.
But I tell you, that's not how it works.
That's not how it works.
And that's why the gentleman on Sunday was not able to understand that the woman, or process, that the woman emphatically did not want to have sex with him.
Because the person who goes to the prostitute has a very strong need to believe that the prostitute is enjoying herself.
A good prostitute makes you feel like she sells it.
She makes you feel like she's having a great time.
And so you want to imagine or simulate some sort of relationship.
That's why people say, oh no, we chat beforehand and whatever.
And they sort of need to believe that the woman is enjoying it.
I mean, I remember a guy I knew many years ago who told me about going to a prostitute, and it was pretty grim.
He would go to a prostitute, take some money out from the ATM, and he's having sex with her, for want of a better phrase, and he reaches out to touch her boobs.
She slaps his hand away and says, no, that's extra.
And then he tries to chat with her afterwards, and she says, look, this is not what I'm for.
I mean, you're in the wrong place for chit-chat, right?
And so, I mean, again, this is not statistically relevant.
I'm just sort of pointing out that if you can imagine going to, if it's just about, you know, finding a hole, paying for a lubricated hole, getting your rocks off, then it shouldn't matter that the woman is reading a book or chatting on the phone or whatever, right, while she's doing it.
And that she doesn't want to talk.
But that's not what happens. What happens is that the men want to believe that the woman is enjoying herself.
And I absolutely guarantee you that she's not.
I absolutely guarantee you that she's not.
Or if she is, it's in a vague, horrible, and maybe even exciting and sort of dangerous kind of self-hatred in a masochistic kind of way.
That's the only enjoyment she's getting out of it.
Because since the vast majority of these women self-report that they have been raped as children, when you are putting your penis into them and sawing back and forth, who are you in their minds?
Like in their histories, who have you become?
This is the part that people really don't want to talk about.
And I understand it, because it's pretty grim to look in the mirror and say, I have the capacity for exploiting others.
And it is exploitation.
It doesn't matter that you give her money.
It doesn't matter that you give her money.
And the reason that it doesn't matter why you give her money...
Is that if she had not been previously raped and abused in horrifying ways, she wouldn't even be at the table.
The differentiator is not the money.
The differentiator is the woman's history of savage abuse as a child.
Right? You can't have a deal if no one's sitting down at the table, no matter how much money you have.
You can't go to a woman of high self-esteem and offer her any amount of money for her to have sex with you because she'll just say no.
The only reason that the prostitute is available is because of her history of sexual abuse.
And that is what makes prostitution possible.
Not the money. Not the money.
Not the money.
The money is a symptom.
It is not a cause. And it is not an excuse.
How is it... That a woman ends up with the capacity to have sex with 5 or 7 or 10 or 12 or 15 men a day.
Well, the reason that she's able to have sex with that many men is because she's fundamentally dissociated from the sexual act.
She is not there.
What's happened is her connection with sexuality, with her vagina, with her body, with intimacy, has been so severed, crushed, and broken through early sexual abuse that she is able to disconnect and dissociate herself from sexual The act of having a stranger put his penis into her and all of the vulnerability that is associated with that act.
Men probably have a little bit of a tougher time, right?
But imagine if I put out an ad for a job which said, you, as a man, I'm looking for a guy who'll do this, who five, seven, or ten times a day or more is going to let other men tie him down and insert a broomstick in his butt and work it back and forth for ten minutes.
And you're like, well, gosh, that's pretty vulnerable, right?
I'm tied down. What if I get a sadist?
What if some guy just goes nuts?
What if I move wrong?
They've got the capacity to really injure me, right?
Because there's an internality to the female sexual organs.
There's a vulnerability. The woman has her legs spread, the guy's pounded away inside her, and she's pressed under his usually double size.
If something goes wrong, she's really helpless, right?
This is why the rape element has occurred.
She is helpless. Now, people of high self-esteem don't put themselves in those kinds of physically dangerous situations.
How much would I have to pay you to get you to enter a profession which you were very unlikely to escape, wherein you were tied down 8, 10, 12 times a day, and a big man put a broomstick up your butt?
What would you have to look in the mirror and see in order for you to say, that's a good option, that's what I want?
Well, clearly it would not be a healthy choice, right?
And so, if you were able to do that, obviously you'd have no self-esteem, right?
Because even if you just look at it at the pure physical risk level, right?
It's the physical risk level that's missing.
I mean, and it's not the only component.
It's another symptom, but it's important.
It's important. There is a difference between ordering a meal and ordering a whore.
There is a difference. And that's why.
You can go to your mom tomorrow night and go to family dinners or go to church and say, I had a great meal at this restaurant.
but you can't hand out a card which says this hooker will blow you like there's no tomorrow.
You don't ask the chef to pretend to enjoy cooking for you.
And eating a meal is not a physically vulnerable situation.
I mean, of course, for the man, there's a physical vulnerability in a blowjob as well, but his size difference and so on is still so large.
And the solitary nature of it is so considerable that there is this physical risk at all times.
If you're pounding away on the woman and you hit her cervix or you injure her or you're leaning too hard on her or you suddenly get seized by a fit of rage and start really banging at her and bruising her, what's she going to do?
Well, officer, this man assaulted me when I was, you know, and if it was legal, there would still be the risk.
Even if you charged every guy who ever hurt you as a prostitute and you had that availability or that access through the court system in a DRO society, you would still be facing that physical risk.
And there's lots of other psychological aspects.
I don't even know if we're going to get to the John side of things.
I just sort of want you to understand that a prostitute is not enjoying it, and it's only possible for her to be a prostitute because she completely dissociates during the sexual act.
And this doesn't mean that she never gets any physical pleasure from sex, but certainly in the knowledge that I've gleaned through various sources, a prostitute may have bisexual relationships.
She may have relationships outside of prostitution where there's some enjoyment of sexuality, although sexuality is almost invariably rather non-mainstream, let's say.
But there's no pleasure in the act of prostitution itself.
It's a cash transaction.
And we know that if you are tortured repeatedly, if you're in some prisoner of war camp and you're tortured repeatedly, the body's fundamental defense is dissociation.
When pain becomes overwhelming, the mind snaps off.
And you sort of go to your happy place and you can't feel anymore.
That's the short circuit.
It's like when a body experiences severe trauma and great pain, fainting or unconsciousness is the body's defense for dealing with overwhelming pain.
The same thing occurs in the mind.
It's dissociation. You no longer can feel what is happening to you.
And for a woman, for a prostitute, if she did not have the capacity...
To dissociate from the sexual act, to zone out and no longer feel during the sexual act, during the act of penetration.
If she did not have that capacity, then she could not be a prostitute.
If she felt shame, degradation, and humiliation, if she had gone through treatment for her sexual abuse and recognized how horrifying that experience was for her, Rather than have a repetition compulsion and the no self-esteem which says, you know, if all you can offer is a whole, right?
I mean, if you're in this sort of tied down with a broomstick up your butt scenario, if that's your contribution economically to be tied down, like, that's not a great deal of contribution, right?
So if all you have to offer is a whole, right, not a person, right?
Now, saying, if you go to a prostitute and naturally the demand, the requirement is that she pretend to enjoy it.
So she pretend to enjoy it.
So somebody I was chatting with yesterday was saying, oh, I went to a prostitute and she was going to school and she had a boyfriend and she said it was just, you know, it was an interesting way to earn money and so on and so on and so on.
So he needs to believe that.
But statistically it's just not true.
She may be going to school. Some prostitutes are very well educated.
But they all have the same history of extraordinary abuse.
And stunted development.
And they are child women when it comes to their sexuality in particular and negotiation and life and wise decisions and so on, right?
Because the reason that I put...
I'm sorry. And so I asked him, I said, well, would you be happy if your girlfriend up and started having sex with strangers for money?
And he's like, yeah, I have no problem with that.
And I understand that.
He needs to believe that.
He needs to believe that.
And maybe he wouldn't have any problem with it consciously, right?
But that simply indicates a kind of dissociation on his part.
And again, you can get all mad and tell me why and say this is all completely wrong and we can drop that.
If that's an issue of contention, I'm not wed to that, right?
We're not going to talk about the Johns at the moment.
I'm just trying to get you to understand that going and having sex with women who have been raped as children and insisting that they enjoy it or that they pretend to enjoy it is, for the women, a recreation of childhood rape.
It is a recreation of childhood rape.
And it only occurs, the only reason that the woman is having sex with you is not because of the money.
Right? Because you can go and offer 200 bucks to just about any woman to have sex with you, but the only ones who will say yes are those who were raped as children.
And it's not that every woman who was raped as a child becomes a prostitute and this and that.
That's not what I'm saying. But I guarantee you that if a woman says yes to 200 bucks of paid sex when she doesn't know you from Adam or from John, And so the reason that I wanted to talk about that is because when you're the guy saying,
I'm going to, you know, basically we're going to recreate your childhood rape, right?
That's what is occurring with prostitution because we know that only women who've been raped as children, you know, statistically almost all of them end up as prostitutes.
Now, I know there's going to be people out there who then want to say, well, I know of one Irma LaDuce exception, right?
I know of one exception and that's, you know, therefore it's not a perfect theory.
It's like, well, sure, absolutely.
You know, you will claim to know, you may claim to believe, and so on, right?
But, you know, and if you've gone through a couple of years of therapy, and if you've got no history, and you still, you know, you're a prostitute and so on, fascinating.
Love to hear more about it. That doesn't change the general trend, right?
That doesn't change the general trend.
And the fact that people look for exceptions to this rule means that they're having grave difficulty Finding empathy for these raped children.
And you kind of need to, not for me, forget about me, I'm not important.
You need to look in the mirror and say to yourself, I can't find empathy for raped children.
That's a very important thing to know about yourself.
We've talked about the dark side before.
This is a pretty black side of human nature.
Because if you're going to a woman who was raped as a child, who is functionally still a child when it comes to her development, and you are paying her, and then you are basically putting your penis in her, and you're telling her that she must fake enjoyment of this rape recreation, that's kind of exploitive, right?
That's not something that is kind of sadistic.
And I'm hedging a little here.
here.
I could go a lot further, but I just, I want to sort of do this as gently as possible.
But that is really what's occurring because that is the one common denominator is abuse, specifically sexual abuse for the prostitute as a child, which has totally stunted her development and lends her to be a unprotected which has totally stunted her development and lends her to be When it comes to sexual matters and matters of choice, particularly life choices, particularly in the realm of her body.
She has had no experience saying no.
In fact, the only experience she's had saying no to anyone is, if you don't submit to the childhood rape, then you'll be tortured or killed.
That's the only experience she's had of saying no.
So she's never developed any sense of ego boundaries or self-protection.
And she's fundamentally dissociating.
So you're going in, recreating a childhood rape and then demanding that she pretend to like it.
That's not healthy.
That's not what a happy, healthy and confident person does.
A happy, healthy and confident person Does not go around paying women who've been sexually abused to put his penis into her, recreating the rape within their own unconscious, and then tell them that they have to like it, and they better like it, and that the whole transaction is based on them pretending to like it.
That's not healthy.
That is a fairly revolting form of exploitation.
And if you think that these women are not severely damaged goods and broken goods and the functional equivalents of retarded children when it comes to their own sexuality, well, you know that.
I mean, you know that.
I mean, the reason people are fighting so hard about this on the boards and in my email, the reason that people are fighting so hard about this is everybody knows.
Everybody knows, everybody knows that you don't end up being a prostitute because you just think it's a cool career choice.
Everybody knows the history of these people.
And people don't want to take sides because, of course, the sexual abuse of children is still one of the dark corners of, well, it's more than a corner, sadly, is a pretty black area of human relations, right?
But this is why I say, and Christina says, right?
I mean, this is somebody who's spent a long time working with these people.
This is why Christina says that it's an act of humiliation of the other, of a rage against the other, and humiliation of the self.
You know, recreating a childhood abuse and demanding that the person claims that they enjoy it is around the continued destruction of the soul of the other human being.
It's not like ordering a meal.
it's not like getting a massage.
Sexuality is about intimacy.
And, of course, for a woman, the psychology of sexuality for women was evolved prior to the pill, naturally.
A woman, to open her legs, invites the creation of a family, right?
As we all know, right? So for a woman to say, yes, I will have intercourse with you or I will have sex with you is a pretty significant act because it's around the creation of children, right?
I mean, that's sort of how women's psychology has developed with regards to sexuality.
And so, of course, a woman with any kind of self-esteem is going to want a man around to raise her children.
He's going to want a man who's decent, who's going to be around, who's going to provide, who's going to take his responsibilities seriously, who's going to be honorable, who's going to go and get her some mastodon meat while she's pregnant, and who's going to whatever, right?
A decent, kind, and generous guy who's going to be around to raise her children, right?
Because that's what she wants.
She wants the best for her children, and she wants to be treated well.
She believes she's deserving of being treated well.
She won't accept being treated badly.
That's sort of self-esteem, right? I'm going to be treated well.
I'm going to treat other people well.
I'm not going to accept being treated badly.
And that's sort of the basis around the sort of question of self-esteem.
And so a woman opening her legs and letting a man put his penis inside her, I mean, the psychology of sort of basic biological and psychological nature of women has not changed in the last 30 years or 40 years since the invention of the pill.
And so that is to invite to the creation of a family, right?
To get the family going is a woman deciding to have sex with someone, right?
And so, yeah, it's a bit more significant for a woman than it is for a man, just sort of in her soul.
And so, for a woman to just open her legs up and...
Have sex with a guy because for 200 bucks, clearly that's not a very rational decision in the sort of history of a woman's psychology wherein that would invite the creation of a family, right?
I mean, this endless sort of getting pregnant and so on that occurred for women, and of course prostitution is an age-old and the oldest profession.
But there is a blind spot, you know, and I'm a little bit surprised to see it, right?
But there is a real blind spot when it comes to empathy for the victims of child rape and the after effects of it, which is the continued rape and violence and utterly disordered, disorganized, chaotic lives where the mortality rate is 40 times higher.
Forty times higher than the average population.
And of course, prostitutes, you know, a lot of them don't live to be a very old age.
And what happens when they do, right?
What happens in the long run to a prostitute when she gets too old?
Well, you know, it's pretty grim.
It's pretty grim, what happens to prostitutes when they get older.
No savings, no...
They've got no old age pensions they've got, right?
I mean, this is a... Pretty grim.
They've got no way of escaping this life, right?
I mean, there is a point of no return, right?
Now, of course, the question is, well, what happens to these prostitutes if they end up, like, if I don't support them, they're, you know, it's going to be even worse for them.
Or it's like, well, you know, but if you've got 200 bucks and you want to really help a prostitute, then, you know, donate to a charity that helps get these women out of prostitution, right?
Helps get them some help, right?
Don't Don't exploit them.
Don't continue the sexual exploitation that began in their families.
I mean, at least don't support this.
I mean, do things to help children, for sure.
I mean, yeah, if you care, absolutely.
But I don't think that it's fair to say that the way that I help those who have been raped as children is to pay them to have sex with them as an adult.
I don't think that really follows logically.
It's a pretty horrendous thing to do, fundamentally.
When I said that a man who visits a prostitute does not indicate high self-esteem, it indicates low self-esteem, this is sort of the stuff that I'm working with.
You can certainly put up alternate theories, and I'm certainly happy to hear them, but we sort of do have to work with the basic facts, which is that almost all the women, and I only say almost because there's no way of proving the final conclusion, but certainly from a wide variety of studies, a wide variety of sources, almost all the women who end up in prostitution do so as a result or have a direct history of extreme sexual and physical abuse as children.
Right, so imagining that some 13, 14 or 15 year old, right, which is the average age of entering the profession in many areas, is competent to make decisions.
And of course, when she enters the profession, it's not like she learns a whole lot more about self-protection and how decent people interact with each other, right?
So it's not like by the time she's 20, she can then make better decisions, right?
Because she's just further traumatized herself and has been traumatized with repeated rapes and violence and And so on, right?
And all of this stuff is independent of the legality of it, right?
Because when you're looking at a causality that occurs prior to somebody entering the profession, making it legal, which I support, right?
I think prostitution should be legal.
But changing the laws is not going to change how it sort of initially comes about.
So, I hope that this has been helpful, at least sort of put out my sort of theories about it, and we'll see what happens, and we'll talk about this later.
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