Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution
Rachel Moran
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0393351971
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
An astonishingly brave memoir of prostitution and its lingering influence on a woman’s psyche and life.
“The best work by anyone on prostitution ever, Rachel Moran’s Paid For fuses the memoirist’s lived poignancy with the philosopher’s conceptual sophistication. The result is riveting, compelling, incontestable. Impossible to put down. This book provides all anyone needs to know about the reality of prostitution in moving, insightful prose that engages and disposes of every argument ever raised in its favor.” ―Catharine A. MacKinnon, law professor, University of Michigan and Harvard University
Born into a troubled family, Rachel Moran left home at the age of fourteen. Being homeless, she was driven into prostitution to survive. With intelligence and empathy, she describes the exploitation she and others endured on the streets and in the brothels. Moran also speaks to the psychological damage inherent to prostitution and the inevitable estrangement from one’s body. At twenty-two, Moran escaped the sex trade. She has since become a writer and an abolitionist activist.
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otherwise, and just like fire, you could blow it away and it would live elsewhere, as long as it had somewhere else to go and something else to feed upon. I could see what aggravated her, she made that very clear, and I deduced that the best way to play the game was not only to behave so as to deflect negative attention from myself, but also to actively direct her aggression onto the other children so as to make doubly sure that I would remain unscathed. I deflected attention from flaws she
overnight in the waiting room. I told her she was mad but she was determined to go through with it so I told her I’d make sure she was okay. She took an entire box of Feminax (female pain-relief medication) that she’d stolen from a chemist. There was a moment of hilarity in it, morbid and all as the situation was, because she’d taken the overdose on the south side of the quays and she wanted to be taken to the Mater hospital on the north side, so to avoid being taken to St James’s hospital, I had
apparently; and there is no acknowledgement of the true essence of sexual liberation, which does not in any sense accord with having your sexual behaviours dictated to you. Many women who acquiesce to their bodies being used thus do so under the weight of insecurity issues so oppressing they cause them to crumble in the face of accusations such as ‘frigid’, ‘closed-minded’, ‘unadventurous’ and, God forbid, ‘prudish’—labels which they process as too unthinkable to bear. This is psychosexual
expression of her sickness would have been the evening, a day or two after our father’s suicide, when she sent me and my older brother to our father’s bed-sit to collect whatever was useful of his belongings. We were thirteen and fourteen at the time. It was in Rathmines, on the south side of the city. The main street was dominated by the neon lights of the Swan shopping centre. I had never seen them before that, and every time I’ve seen them since they’ve brought me back to the darkness of that
and whether it communicates a view of females we’d want to see promoted to our sons. We need to look at the proven consequences of the legalisation of prostitution and ask ourselves, in short, are we happy with the sort of world it creates? And is it one we want to live in? Whenever the criminalisation of male demand is raised we are told by pro-prostitution campaigners that society ought to consult with prostituted women before it introduces any such legislation. There is a problem with that.
