BODY SHELL GIRL: THE SEX INDUSTRY, MEN'S VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN, & “CHOICE”
This is an edited transcript of a speech Rose gave to CATWA’s Feminist Forum in Melbourne, Australia, on 20 May 2024. It includes excerpts from Rose’s book, Body Shell Girl, a memoir in verse that tells the story of the first two years of a decade she spent in the sex industry in Canada.
The speech was first published at Nordic Model Now on 22 July 2024.
Hello everyone. I’m so honoured to be here tonight to speak to you. Thank you to all the CATWA women. I and other survivors of the sex industry/prostitution are hugely grateful for the work you do.
Men’s violence against women has been a prominent topic in the mainstream news in Australia lately.[1] The negative effects of pornography are also being drawn into the mainstream conversation, which I think is enormous progress. However, the complete silence in the media regarding prostitution is astonishing. It is impossible to fight men’s violence against women in a meaningful way when this violence is allowed to continue as usual in other realms, like in a fully decriminalised sex industry, as is the case in Victoria, New South Wales and the Northern Territory. And my home state of Queensland has just fully decriminalised it as well.
I’m going to tell you a bit about my time in the sex industry and read some poems from my memoir, Body Shell Girl. This will include some of my personal background and what happened to me along the way. An important frame I want to put around the information I’m going to share here about my life is that I share it not just for the sake of telling my story, or so that you know some of the problems I’ve had; a sort of ‘poor me’ story. Instead, I tell my story because my story isn’t just about me. My story is in dialogue with the stories of so many other women who are exploited to lesser or greater degrees by this industry.
Every woman and girl who gets into this industry is an individual, yet research has shown that we have certain commonalities, and they aren’t fun ones. For example, a huge proportion of us were subjected to some kind of childhood abuse. So many of us come from physically violent childhoods and/or childhood sexual abuse. My own childhood abuse took a different form ‒ it was emotional and psychological abuse ‒ but abuse was nevertheless present. A large number of us already have some post-traumatic symptoms when we start in this industry, or go on to develop them as a result of what happens to us in this industry. And so many of us have difficulty getting out of the industry once we’re in it.
I got into the sex industry for the reason so many of us get into it: I needed money.
I was in different parts of the industry for ten years, and my experience was primarily in Canada, where I was living at the time. I spent the majority of my time in massage parlour and massage parlour-like work, with a shorter amount of time in brothel and escort.
I wasn’t coerced into it by a boyfriend or a traditional pimp; I wasn’t trafficked; I wasn’t underage, and I had a university degree when I started. Also unlike many other women in the industry, I came from a middle class family; however, it was not a happy one. My earliest memories are of me gorging on food in an attempt to escape my reality. This developed into a devastating eating disorder ‒ an addiction ‒ which defined my childhood and teen years. I came into young adulthood believing on a deep level that I was stupid and worthless.
Although I went to university and got through my arts degree, I was emotionally unstable and constantly falling apart. Unemployability followed my degree. I was lost and drifting, and I thought if I went to a different country maybe things would be different. Addicts in recovery call this ‘doing a geographical’. You go somewhere else, hoping to get away from yourself.
So I left Australia for Canada near the end of 1997, at the age of 25. I had a year’s working visa, and a determination never to return to Australia, because I clearly couldn’t get my life together here. I had already spent a chunk of time unemployed in Australia, but I thought well in Canada it will be different. How? I didn’t know. Again, some very suspect addict thinking.
I arrived in Canada without enough money to support myself, with the idea that ‘it will work out somehow’. Initially I did get a minimum wage job at a photo shop, but on impulse one day I walked off this job ‒ literally: I went to lunch and did not come back. I had no money in reserve, and rent was looming. Why I walked off this job was one of those mysteries ‒ as an addict I was well used to watching myself do things that made no sense to me.
In the meantime, I needed another job. My memoir opens:
Look, for months I ignored those ads
you know the ones, maybe:
Masseuses wanted!
$$$
cash paid DAILY
no experience necessary!!!
A bit later I make that call to a massage parlour:
I picked up the phone again
my breath like skipping stones
maybe I could get in trouble for even calling?
No experience necessary to be a masseuse?
Well, it didn’t say massage therapist.
I’d heard about what they called ‘sex work’
in university, and how it was a job like any other
they said. Also a bit radical
and daring and even cool
at least in the groups I tried to fit in with
although none of us actually did it
My university degree had been in English, specifically Cultural Studies, which I’d say was one of the best places you could go to get indoctrinated into ‘sex work’ ideology. This was in the early 1990s, but I see the same thing continuing today. Various lecturers espoused the idea that so-called ‘sex work’ could be empowering and subversive. At the time I lacked confidence in my own abilities and opinions, and I just wanted to fit in. So I adopted this opinion that was seen as ‘correct’ by academics and my peer group. None of us had any direct experience of the industry that I know of.
I have no doubt this background contributed to my daring to pick up the phone that day and then going for an interview at the massage parlour, which turned into my first shift.
At that time in Toronto massage parlours weren’t the same as brothels; they weren’t, to use the industry term, ‘full service’ places. They were massages with so-called ‘happy endings’, and you got paid extra by the buyer if you did the massage nude and let him touch you as well.
A shy and quiet person then as I am today ‒ as well as awkward and comically inexperienced ‒ I doubted I could go through with these ‘massages’. But I also knew I was going to do anything I could to avoid the other available options: going back to Australia, or asking a person who was emotionally abusive to me for money, or being homeless in Canada.
I got $140 for that first part-shift and I thought all my life problems had been solved.
It didn’t matter what happened in the room, I thought. I could forget about it and take the money. In my memoir I call the massage parlours in Toronto at the time ‘hand job factories’. Another person in the memoir calls them ‘grope-a-thons’, which they were as well.
Back then in the parlours you earned $10 for doing a half-hour massage. Where you earned your money was in so-called ‘extras’ or ‘tips’ that you negotiated with the buyer: basically nude massages and nude massages with touching. This touching was supposed to have certain limits. But in practice men continually ignored these limits. For example, a lot of them would try to put their fingers up your crotch or ass. I recognised very early on that being forcibly touched in places I hadn’t agreed to and didn’t want to be touched, was simply part of this strange job/‘job’. What I didn’t recognise was that when you keep saying ‘no no no’, as I depict in my memoir, and he does it anyway, this is actually assault. In fact, it was Susan [Hawthorne] and Renate [Klein] at Spinifex Press who pointed this out to me. This was early in 2022 when we were editing my book manuscript, and they made this comment in the tracked changes. I remember staring at their comment and thinking wow, they’re a bit precious! Getting touched in ways and places you hadn’t agreed to and when you keep saying ‘no no no’ was just part of the job! Then the penny dropped. Oh. The job is paid assault. Oh... It was like that. As I said, that was in 2022. I’d been out of the industry fourteen years, and I’d written a full manuscript about my experiences, and I still hadn’t fully seen this yet.
I recount that anecdote to illustrate how difficult it can be for survivors of abuse to recognise the full extent of the abuse. And how can we recognise it, when it’s shoved down our throats that the sex industry is “a job like any other”?
Some lines from my memoir:
So one time this guy, haggling over prices
and pestering about that full service
‘We don’t do that here,’ I told him
but copying how I’d heard the other girls say it
soothing-chirpy plus second person plural
not a personal rejection
just something we don’t do here
for anyone, so sorry.
“Yes you do,” he said, and yanked on my boobs
like trying to rip them off a clothesline; where
did they get this stuff from? Porn?
Did they do this to their wives and girlfriends?
So many of them mentioned them
or had wedding rings
if they did this to their wives and girlfriends
what did these women say about it?
Did anyone want this type of mauling?
I didn’t know (any of it)
‘No no no,’
I kept moving away
he kept moving toward
and sitting up when I tried to massage his feet
and for sure this guy had more than two hands
fully fending off a swarm
but like the girls said:
‘Get him off and get him out’,
and since I’d given him a discount
I thought an early finish would be OK; OK
no. Gawwwwwdddd. Right before closing
four a.m. and feet aching
floating with exhaustion and body groped-out
I just wanted to get out of there
I just wanted those swarm hands off me
I just wanted to stop saying, ‘No no no’,
and seeing how it had no effect
but surely it was almost over
And the poem goes on. It was not almost over. And this part of the poem represents a not unusual half hour at a massage parlour in my experience.
And yet, like most types of abuse, there were also some incentives in the mix. Of course the money. But there was also the attention I got from the men, many of whom gave me extravagant compliments. Since I lacked self-esteem and had additionally spent my late teens and early twenties overweight (which had made me feel unattractive) ‒ I was vulnerable to this. And of course I’d been raised in our culture that teaches girls and young women how all-important it is to be sexy for men, and no matter how uncomfortable or time-consuming or painful it is. So the compliments these men gave me were that hit of dopamine. Maybe it blunted some of the pain and humiliation of the groping too.
Some lines from the poem ‘Rick’:
How he put one thumb on top of the other
then switched it with the other (and again)
thumb patting and mumbling into his blushing neck
as he called me ‘beautiful’; a ‘knockout’?
Had to stop myself from scratching my head
or glancing behind me, huh? Or, some days
maybe it was true? Peeking in the mirror
and sucking in my stomach
or maybe I had always been too hard on my looks
or was it just at this angle or in this light
my ego ricocheted around like a pool hall break
Another ‘positive’ thing about this job for me was that my chronic emotional instability was not a problem here. If I walked off a shift in the parlour, I could always get another shift or go to another parlour. Really I needed treatment for that chronic instability, but I was not capable of seeing that. I didn’t know I had mental health problems ‒ I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Except that I was a bad and dysfunctional person who couldn’t seem to keep a normal job.
But I thought if I could just get into a better life situation maybe this instability would disappear. So I decided I would use this work to pay for a film production course I assumed would give me a career in a field I loved. The sex industry was supposed to be a temporary means to an end. Many of us have similar thoughts.
In the second half of 1998 I moved from Toronto to Vancouver to take that course. I thought I’d support myself by working in massage parlours there, the same as I had in Toronto. I got a shock when I found out massage parlours didn’t exist in Vancouver in the same way. Instead the in-house sex industry in Vancouver was dominated by highly visible brothels. Here you couldn’t earn money doing these ‘massages’ like you could in Toronto. You had to do the whole thing.
As with the parlours, I doubted I could do it, but I went ahead with it anyway, because I wasn’t going to throw away my film school dream. I remember that first time only in a foggy sense. My body was there, but, as in the parlours, my thoughts floated away, somewhere else. A sentence I often heard in childhood drifted into my mind: ‘What you feel doesn’t matter.’
I thought I could detach from the whole experience and remain unaffected by it. This seems incredible to me now, but it’s what I thought then. I believe the industry relies on women and girls who have learned to devalue themselves in similar ways ‒ who are used to being abused in some form, and so they see some sort of abuse as ‘normal’. Something we can brush off and ignore ‒ like we have our whole lives.
Here are some lines from my memoir where I describe the experience of my first john in the brothel:
Leaning back, back
into a place where I didn’t have a body
(therefore nothing was happening to it)
I was just a mind
of pop songs or reciting things
the hook endlessly, playing
covering the puncture wounds in the silence deep as fangs
Singing pop songs in my head or repeating phrases in my mind was one thing I’d do to keep my mind occupied while I waited for whatever was happening to my body to be over.
Many of us do something similar. This isn’t a consensual experience as most of us would understand that term.
It was like I split apart from my body and no longer cared what happened to it. I now recognise that as a symptom of PTSD.
I didn’t graduate from film school, which was devastating to me.
I went back to Toronto and after a short stint in escort I went back to massage parlours and massage-parlour style work, which is where I ended up spending the majority of my time in the industry. It was better for me because it wasn’t full service.
You can imagine the toll full service work takes on your body. It will be self-evident to any woman here, so I won’t go into it now. Getting touched in ways and places you don’t want to be touched for hours total on a standard massage parlour shift also takes a bodily toll.
But I think what doesn’t get mentioned as much is the psychological toll this ‘job’ takes. For example, the majority of sex buyers in my experience wanted you to pretend you’re enjoying it. If you’re working in a brothel or parlour where the bosses/pimps are around, buyers will complain if you don’t. You might get docked pay or shifts if you get complaints. Additionally, anything that gets the buyer done and out quicker is what you’ll do. Usually pretending you enjoy it has that effect, even if he knows it’s fake. As I show in my memoir, I found acting this role repeatedly over the course of a shift a particular kind of exhausting psychological burden, and later I realised it was also a betrayal of self. And you cannot betray yourself over and over without destroying an important part of your being ‒ some might call it your soul.
Another exhausting psychological burden for me was when the sex buyer was ‘nice’. Here are some lines about that difficulty:
and he always asked
before touching me, then asked again, if it was OK
hands like feathers
that felt like tarantulas
or tonnes; time
stre..............................................................tched
how the assholes were easier, mostly
than the ones I liked
enough to wish this was not how I knew them
but deep breath
think of the vodka I’d swigged in the toilet stall
(extra swigs because it was Rick)
wait for that to kick
in
think of my body as a shell
that I could vacate, not as metaphor, or symbol
but as a real possibility
A lot of men think they’re doing us a favour by being supposedly “nice” sex buyers. They congratulate themselves that they’re helping us by paying us. And, as mentioned, women in the industry actively sell the lie that we are doing this work because we love it, or at least don’t mind it so much, since doing so gets us better tips, fewer complaints, and less anger from buyers—and because it’s our default act by that stage. Many men accept this lie because it suits them. Yet I believe many of them would not be sex buyers if they truly understood how it was for us. I’m not talking about the men on internet message boards rating us, or the men who will say outright that they are paying to abuse us—most of those men are probably beyond hope. But there are men who are otherwise mostly decent in their lives, and are simply taking advantage of what their money can buy them, because our society says it’s fine, and they too have heard it’s a job like any other. These are men we can reach. I’ve received messages from men like this since the publication of my memoir. They’ve said they used to buy sex and had second thoughts and now don’t anymore.
I was always trying to get out of the industry, as were most of the women I knew. I descended into alcoholism, which mostly, but not fully, replaced my eating disorder. I added sedatives to the alcohol in order to calm my anxiety, and to sleep. And a violent boyfriend I ended up having to get a restraining order against.
So those are just a few of the problems I had, when I would have passed as a functional “sex worker” who was freely “choosing” all this.
And yet my memoir shows how I came to consider this industry my home, albeit a sad and lonely one. Here are some lines from the end of my book. In this scene I’ve just returned from a “call.” In my case this was massage-parlour-style work in a hotel, which was what I did for the last five years or so in the industry:
sit cross-legged on the hardwood floor
with favourite lowball glass
a smooth cube, a warm block of ice
with two-inch base, platform
like lucite heels
the clunk it made when I put it down
deep-toned and like I am really here
to count the bills
even though I knew how much I had
(usually), but to feel the matte and slippery
paper in my fingers
brown, red, and green
bend them lengthwise slightly
so they sat flat in their little stack
I had value in the world
here was the paper proof
and how that proof came in, and went back out
(so slippery), and later I couldn’t understand
how I’d kept none of it
but in the meantime
floorboards and bills, with music playing
and vodka going down like easy; yes
this was what a friend was, what a home was
I thought
Back when I was in the industry my political opinions about what I was doing were very limited. I knew what to do to reduce my chances of getting arrested—although that too was at times foggy knowledge. I had never even heard of the Nordic Model, and I had no considered opinion about full decriminalisation—except for the observation that the more “legal” this business got, the cheaper the prices got, which I didn’t think was positive. I don’t recall knowing any women who were involved in debates about this issue. In my experience, most of us just wanted to get through our shift, and not have to think about any of it until the next shift.
And yet, since the publication of my memoir I’ve been told by certain members of the literary community (women, sadly), that my experiences should not be listened to because “most sex workers support full decriminalisation.” How do these well-off women with massive amounts of cultural capital, who would never have to do this work themselves, come by this belief? I think there are a few reasons. Firstly, the loudest voices are often not the most representative ones. This is true in many arenas. Certainly these women have seen the “empowered sex worker” stories in the media. These stories are adored by our patriarchy. They are not representative of the vast majority of women in this industry, who have no access to media companies. And yet, because of their prominence, many casual observers—which is to say most people—are led to believe these media-friendly “happy hooker” stories are representative.
I’ve also observed that some of the women who say they were “sex workers” and talk about how good or acceptable their experiences were, weren’t really in the sex industry. As a fellow survivor friend of mine said: “they did it for a minute and have an opinion about it for life.” These women remind me of tourists who go visit a country, then turn around and tell the locals how it is to live there.
When I was in the industry I did not go so far as to think of myself as a happy hooker—although, as mentioned, I often pretended to be one. However, if you’d asked me back then how I really felt about what I was doing, I would have said it was fine; it was good enough for me. A lot of people who are being abused every day will say something similar. It’s often only years later you can see how bad a situation was. At the time, you’re in survival mode, and you tell yourself what you need to hear to get through the day.
How can a woman who is in the sex industry properly criticise the industry—when she is still dependent on it for her next rent payment? I’m sure some can (because there are always exceptions), but for me and many others, I think it’s a really difficult ask. Like asking a woman who is currently in a domestic violence situation to give a clear accounting of the wrongs her partner is doing. Some of the time she will end up defending him, even if he has just beaten her up. I know I did. We don’t turn around and say, well, what he did is all okay then. We understand there are other factors at work here.
What I needed was to be offered another viable option. These are the exit programs that form part of the Nordic Model. I never heard of any such thing during my time in the industry.[2] I often imagine how differently my life might have gone if I had. Given an alternative and some support to exit, I believe I would have ceased to defend (even in the lukewarm way that I did)—this “job.” What I needed was help for underlying mental health issues, trauma and domestic violence counselling, and help for my alcoholism and pill addiction.
As it was, I blamed myself entirely for the mess my life had become. It never occurred to me that I was worthy of being helped.
So I want to approach the end of my talk here today by returning to this issue of choice.
How much “choice” did I have when my culture told me this industry was okay, my university told me it was okay, when I’d grown up believing I wasn’t worth anything, and when I was suffering from post-traumatic symptoms, and when I was an alcoholic and sedative addict? And when the industry is like quicksand. So many were like me: we thought we’d do it for a little while to get out of a financial problem, and then we were still there years or a decade later.
Again the parallel with domestic violence comes to mind: a woman may stay with an abusive man because she’d be on the street if she didn’t, but we don’t say oh, so the abuse here is all okay because she chose it. She did choose it in a way, but it wasn’t a choice between any good options. Our culture seems to be starting, at least, to better understand the nuances involved in the word “choice” with regard to domestic violence. But few in the mainstream seem to have the same understanding about the sex industry.
How can we say domestic violence and men’s violence against women is wrong (as we must), but then turn around and fully decriminalise the abuse that is inseparable from prostitution, like my state, Queensland, has just done?
We have to oppose all men’s violence against women. That includes the sex industry.
Thank you for listening today.
[1] The spotlight in the media in Australia on men’s violence against women just before I gave this speech was sparked by the stabbing murder of five women in a shopping mall in Bondi in Sydney in April 2024: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-13/westfield-bondi-junction-evacuated-after-alleged-stabbing/103705022,
along with a rise in the number of women killed by men in Australia this year compared to last: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-24/eleven-more-women-have-died-violently-compared-to-last-year/103759450. The media coverage was extensive, and, as mentioned here, took place alongside a consideration of the harms of pornography: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-01/national-cabinet-meets-to-address-violence-against-women/103789304.
[2] I finally exited the industry in 2008, before the introduction of a version of the Nordic Model in Canada in 2014.