by Rachel Lloyd
As an advocate and service provider, and as a survivor, I have many emotions about pimps, ranging from murderous thoughts to an understanding of the social conditions that can create this subculture. Yet the glorification of pimps and the minimization of their violent acts in American culture today make it difficult to have a nuanced and empathetic conversation about who pimps are, how they become pimps, and what we need to do to prevent this behavior. Any understanding we might have of the residual effects of slavery, the current effects of poverty, and the social messages that boys are receiving about what it means to be a man can’t come at the expense of the victims. Right now, the pendulum has swung so far in favor of pimps that it’s critical to bring it back to the reality of their crimes, the damage that they do, the callousness with which they treat girls’ and women’s lives. We don’t have to demonize them. Stopping the glorification would be enough for now.
Chapter 6
Johns
I will not cry, I will not think
I’ll do my dance, I’ll make them drink
When I make love, it won’t be me
And if they hurt me, I’ll just close my eyes
—“The Movie in My Mind,” Miss Saigon
WINTER 1994, GERMANY
It’s five on a Tuesday, and the club is dead before the trickle of the after-work crowd. I’m curled up in my corner at the far end of the bar, wearing slippers and a big woolly cardigan to guard against the overactive air conditioner. Today I’m halfway through Clockers, immersed in Richa rd Price’s richly drawn New York landscape, worried for Strike, wondering why Victor confessed, when my manager, Brigid, yells at me and interrupts my reverie. I’m always getting into trouble for reading so much at work. I’m allowed to read as long as there are no customers, but I’m often so caught up in whatever book I’m reading that there’ll be people sitting at the bar drinking before I even notice anyone’s there. I’ve always loved reading but now it’s become something else. A way to escape into another world for a while. The night before, I’d had a vivid dream about Strike; today, while I’m working, I’ll try to figure out what I think is going to happen next. Ina nods at me to go upstairs. She wants me to stand outside and try to attract some customers. I’m the only girl here for the day shift—two others called in sick and the rest won’t be in till the evening—so I have no one to sic Brigid on. I’d rather read but there’s no point in being here all day and all night if I’m not making any money.
Lately I’ve been pulling both shifts to meet JP’s growing demands. Business has been quiet lately, but he doesn’t believe me and always reminds me of nights when I’ve made triple the amount. Brigid and the club’s owners, Ivan and Ina, are all riding us hard, complaining about how we’re not making enough money, we’re not aggressive enough, we’re not getting enough VIPs. I’m tired of hearing the shit. I’m getting it from all sides, from everyone who’s making money off me. I’m one of the best earners in the club, due to my age and English-speaking skills and my position as a house dancer. But I’d be the first to admit that I’ve been off lately. I’m too tired, too fed up with the hitting and the drama at home. As someone who takes her clothes off onstage, I have no way to hide what’s happening. Ina told me recently when I came into work with bruises all over my body, again, that I needed to tell him to hit me only in the head from now on; otherwise I’ll be suspended. I wanted to punch her in her face, but I just sucked my teeth and ignored her. I tell him to stop hitting me because of the bruises; he manages to figure out the head-hitting part on his own. I’m miserable and worn out, too, with all the drinking and lack of sleep, sick of the men, wanting to be left alone, not touched. Brigid raps on the bar with her knuckles and gestures upstairs again. I switch my furry slippers for a pair of black stilettos and shrug off my comfy cardigan, my blankie, to show my black minidress underneath. I only ever wear black at work, only ever wear clothes that are not my regular clothes but are part of my “uniform.” It’s just another way of separating, another futile attempt to be able to switch on and off.
I give Brigid a look. I’ve already had a few drinks courtesy of a couple of lunch-hour customers but I need a bit more if I’m going to step into my role. She rolls her eyes but pours me a triple shot of Hennessy anyway. I down it and then drag myself upstairs out of the artificial light of the basement club, which makes it feel like it’s permanently midnight. It’s daylight outside, people are getting off work, and here I stand in the doorway beckoning men. It reminds me of a scripture in Proverbs I learned as a child that says something about the harlot luring men from the window. Even then it had bothered me. Why was it all the lady’s fault? Why didn’t the men just not pay any attention? The Hennessy is kicking in now so I’m less bothered about scriptural ruminations; besides, thinking about the Bible just makes me feel guilty anyway. I pose in the doorway, keeping my mind on my money. A middle-aged couple walks past and the woman gives me the type of look reserved for child molesters and people who kill small kittens. It stings for a minute, but I’m used to it and have built up my defenses. I look her dead in the face and laugh, “You want something?” She looks away quickly as if meeting my eyes might turn her, Medusa-like, into the awful person I clearly am. I laugh again. I’ve already seen the look her husband was giving me. I’ll lay money that he’ll be visiting the club in the next few days. The ones who act like they are so disgusted always do.
The champagne is cheap but effective, though it’s hard to stomach much of it without throwing up. Brigid knows my signal when I feel like I’ve had enough and will discreetly replace the champagne in my glass with seltzer and apple juice. Some customers are savvy about this trick and want to see you open the bottle of champagne in front of them. When that happens, there are other tricks: stuffing yourself with large amounts of dry bread before your shift begins in order to line your stomach and absorb as much alcohol as possible; forcing yourself to throw up halfway through the evening so that you can go the distance; and, riskiest of all, trying to pour as much of your drink into the plant pot in the VIP room while the customer is distracted. I never quite understand why some customers want to make sure you drink all of your alcohol and will get really angry if they think you’re trying to pull a fast one. Everyone involved knows that the payment for the champagne is really about owning a girl for twenty minutes or an hour, depending on the size of the champagne bottle purchased. I don’t get why the men are willing to cause me a lifetime of liver problems by forcing me to drink something that neither one of us wants and that is simply their indirect way of purchasing me.
The forced consumption of cheap alcohol is really about the customers wanting to feel as though they are on a date, not really buying sexual acts from teenagers or faded alcoholics in their forties. Some johns have no desire to fake it, but most want the “romance,” the flirtation, the process of seduction, despite the fact that we all know how it’s going to end. Hopefully, for me, it’ll end with the maximum amount of money for the minimum amount of contact, although that’s not always possible. Over the months, I’ve learned to gauge what they are looking for. Some want the passive listening type. As my German is still pretty shaky, this is my favorite since I can just sit and make encouraging noises throughout a story that I don’t understand at all. I learn to read faces and voices so that I don’t smile and say, “gut, gut” if he is telling me how awful his day was, or look sad and pained if he’s asking to go to the champagne room. Some want a story, so I create a few: “I’m half Filipina; I’m leaving for Vegas soon to compete in the Gold G-String Awards.” None of them wants to believe that I have a current boyfriend, or a pimp, so telling a story about an ex who broke my heart always works. One of my favorites is the story of the husband who passed away suddenly, leaving me destitute and penniless. I tell some of these stories just to amuse myself, given how boring most of the men are. I do my best to keep track of who I tell which story to, but most of them know I am lying anyway and just need a narrative upon which they can project their fan
tasies. There are the men who want me to be their therapist and who spend hours sharing their frustrations with work and relationships. Some even ask for advice. The wisdom of asking a seventeen-year-old alcoholic who works in a strip club for advice seems a little dubious to me, but I dispense it anyway, practicing my best pop psychology learned from a few self-help books and Oprah. Then there are the men who see themselves as rescuers, the “One” who will take me away from all of this and help me start again. Unfortunately their plans normally involve putting me up in an apartment where I would be at their sexual beck and call. Since most of what I know about the sex industry has come from Pretty Woman, I use Julia Roberts’s line, “That’s just geography,” and feel wise and experienced that I don’t fall for their offers of another life.
Other guys think of themselves as the “nice” ones. They are the ones who tell you that you don’t deserve this life, that you should go back to school; that you’re too smart, too pretty to be here. It sometimes seems as though they are seeing past the defenses, the alcohol-induced friendliness, the numbness, and are able to see Rachel, not “Carmen.” In the beginning, I believe them, feel hopeful again, find myself believing that yes, I can do something else. But I’ll learn quickly that in the end they’re all the same, and that despite all their dream-weaving, they’ll still want something from you. Strangely, it will bother me a little more with these guys. It’s perhaps harder to rationalize that you could want to buy me if you actually see me as a smart, worthwhile person than if you don’t see me as a person at all. Hard to accept that you would be able to see Rachel but then want to buy Carmen. After a while I’ll learn not to be hurt by any of it, to stay numb, stay drunk, stay high. Focus on my books, my crossword puzzles; smile and ignore them; pretend they don’t exist. I remind myself that there have been lots of times when I was touched but didn’t want to be. Now at least I’m getting paid for the indignity of it all.
As a highly accomplished teenage shoplifter for many years, going into stores after I had quit shoplifting was a challenge for a long time. I was less interested in checking out the merchandise than in evaluating the security measures to assess how easy they would be to exploit. I would size up the exit, check out the locations of cameras, whether clothes had electronic tags or not, and how closely the sales assistants were paying attention. It was automatic and unbidden; years of viewing stores a certain way had trained my brain to see everything through a lens that most people didn’t have.
For the first few years after I left the life, I experienced the same type of reaction toward the men I would encounter in my everyday life. Instinctively I would view the vast majority of men through the lens of my experiences with johns: You’re the type of john who shows pictures of his wife. You’re the john who wants to be hurt. You’re a cheap john. Or, simply, You are definitely a john within the first few minutes, often seconds, of meeting or seeing a man. A midsize town in Germany wasn’t the most diverse of places, so for me, most guys who were white, older, and wore suits were the most likely suspects as they had been my clientele.
I didn’t know realize how angry I was at these men until I came to New York and began working for the Little Sister Project. I was sent alone into all the downtown strip clubs and peep shows to give out flyers to women and girls. The flyers were ostensibly rallying against the new Giuliani policies on club locations, e.g., not near a school, but were mainly to get our contact information into the hands of women and girls who otherwise would not hear about our services. I was leered at and harassed within a few minutes of being inside these clubs and got propositioned at every one. I got riled up, forgetting that from the point of view of these customers, I was a young woman in a strip club, so of course I had to be working there. And that meant I could be talked to or treated any way they saw fit. I had forgotten how it felt to be robbed of personal space, to not have the right to speak up, to be seen solely as an object for purchasing, so at first I was silent and looked away. Three or four club stops later, a man’s offhand comment to me sent me into a rage. I cursed him out, shaking and nearly crying. Why couldn’t they see what they were doing? Why didn’t they care? Why didn’t someone stop them?
As much as I needed to process my experiences, it was hard to talk about them to people who’d never been in the life. I tried talking to a few friends but it was clear they didn’t understand. In talking to a boyfriend about it, the conversation quickly turned awkward and I realized that no one, particularly not someone I was dating, wanted to hear me vent about all the men who’d purchased me. Only one man had made a profit off of me, but there were numerous men who’d bought me, and I felt my anger rise and rise. It began to occur to me that the exploitation of girls could not happen without these men.
John is in some way a fitting moniker for men who buy sex. Like John Doe and Dear John, the name is used as the generic catchall for the anonymous everyman who makes up the millions of men in America who buy sex from children. Those of us who have been exploited by the sex industry know that johns represent every walk of life, every age, every ethnicity, every socioeconomic class. Judges, mailmen, truck drivers, firemen, janitors, artists, clergy, cops, drug dealers, teachers. Handsome and rich, poor and unattractive, married, single, and widowed. Fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, uncles, neighbors.
Yet calling men who buy sex from children johns minimizes the harm they do. At the very least, they are statutory rapists and child abusers. That said, the reality is that most men who buy sex from trafficked and exploited girls aren’t really pedophiles, as backward as that may sound. Most of these men aren’t specifically attracted to children, and viewing men who purchase children and youth for sex as pedophiles leads to a sense that it is isolated behavior among men who are “sick” and “perverted.” It allows us to overlook the fact that most of the men doing the buying are what we would consider “normal.” Many of these men wouldn’t dream of sexually abusing the girl next door but when it comes to a “prostitute,” even a “teen prostitute,” they figure it doesn’t really matter. She’s already out there. She kinda wants it anyway. She is working her way through college (even if she does appear to be in junior high). She needs to feed her kids. I’m actually helping her. There are a million rationalizations that men employ to deny the exploitation that they’re a part of.
The buying of sex is so normalized that while we may frown upon those who get caught, there is an underlying belief that men have needs, and that sometimes those needs may be legitimately, if not legally, fulfilled by purchasing someone. While not all johns are looking to purchase a minor, there is a demonstrated link between the availability of the adult sex industry and the commercial sexual exploitation of children. A University of Pennsylvania study stated that “without equivocation . . . the presence of preexisting adult prostitution markets contributes measurably to the creation of secondary sexual markets in which children are sexually exploited.” While many men would argue that they want someone who is of age, ultimately they want someone who looks clean and fresh, more likely to at least look disease-free. That desire generally translates into buying young girls. In research done by the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation (CAASE), of 113 men who purchased sex, 76 percent of interviewees stated that the age of the woman was an important factor and 80 percent stated that they felt most men preferred young “prostitutes.”
In a culture that continuously objectifies girls and women and that sexualizes and commodifies youth, it is little wonder that men prefer younger and younger girls when buying sex. When the Olsen twins came of age, there was a countdown clock on the Internet salaciously marking the minutes until they were “legal.” Britney Spears’s first video at seventeen, “Hit Me Baby One More Time,” was memorable mostly for her schoolgirl outfit and her overtly sexual appearance. The cover of FHM magazine a few months later featured Britney clad in what appeared to be a slip, on a bed, looking incredibly young and childlike. The headline read, “My . . . hasn’t she grown!”