Sitting in the row in front of me a handsome man in his forties. Fingers tattooed with black letters, silver rings on each, bracelets and dark earrings, leather wrist band, clear blue eyes under golden lashes, hair shaved at the sides and a long ponytail of blond and curly hair that almost reaches his butt, short boots, black jeans and a gray jacket with a dark shirt underneath. And a clerical collar. His name is Markus, he is a street priest: his assigned parish is the streets, at night, and his mission is to help the underprivileged and the exploited. Especially prostitutes. In Sweden, the Protestant Church often works like this, hands on in the dirt, like Christ with the lepers.
We are at a conference about prostitution in Gothenburg, Sweden. Many non-governmental organizations, Christian and secular, psychologists, anthropologists, political and institutional representatives, a chief magistrate who worked in the field of prostitution for decades, social workers, and the co-author of an essay on pornography titled “Visual Drugs”. There is also a guest from Moldova, Vladimir Ubeivolc, president of the organization “Beginning of life”.
Eight hours fly by in a second as I listen to the leading experts on the subject affirming with a single voice that prostitution is the exploitation (sometimes organized) of the bodies of young women made vulnerable through poverty or − in the rare cases of “voluntary” prostitution − sexual abuse experienced as a child. Buying sex is not a matter of erotic satisfaction for those who purchase it, but a need for power. What they buy is the right to (ab)use a person’s body, and their arousal comes from the pleasure of being able to have her without her refusal, to subjugate and coerce her.

As I previously wrote about in an article on the magnificent treatise by the policeman Simon Häggström, Shadows Law [translated by Selina Öberg and published by Bullet Point Publishing, from the original Swedish Skuggans lag, published by Kalla Kulor Förlag], since as long ago as 1999, prostitution in Sweden has been a crime for those who exploit it and for those who pay for its services, but not for the person whose body is being bought (whether she is selling it herself or, as happens much more often, through someone who is exploiting her), for the prostitute is considered a victim of sexual abuse even if she appears to be “consenting”. In fact, the women involved in this practice are considered either victims of force or psychological victims. In the former cases, this occurs through a system of slavery and blackmail (either physical or moral) by a pimp; or out of financial need, as often happens, for example, with foreign women that in their country of origin would live under the poverty threshold. With the psychological victims (who are often the same ones who end up caught in the grip of blackmail), they are almost always women who have experienced sexual abuse during childhood or early adolescence, especially if the abuse took place within the family. When a child experiences sexual abuse (whether it is carried out in a violent act or – as is more often the case – as psychological manipulation), it often indelibly shatters the sanctity of their bodies, obliterating their sense of worth and, above all, their integrity. An abused young girl loses her corporeal boundaries and the filth that has touched her remains inside like a sin that she didn’t have the means to return to the sender. In the most serious and fragile cases, with difficulty a woman finds within herself the means to cicatrize this type of experience and thus often the result is that she will set into motion a mechanism of paradoxical self-defense and self-damage: exposing herself, offering herself sexually, to the point of putting her own body up for sale. Behind every flirtatious and “voluptuous” woman, even to the point of prostituting herself, there is often an abused and very wounded woman, who behaves this way to obtain two emotional results. The first is the aleatory illusion of having control over men, a power ransom (“you are buying me because in order to have me you’re willing to pay even” = “I have power over you” = “I can manipulate you, in contrast to that monstrous feeling of abuse, impotence and submission that I experienced as a child”). The second, even more horrendous, is that the abused girls (and children in general who are mistreated) tend to blame themselves for what happened, in the irrevocable, fetid conviction that they deserved it. So, in this sense, prostitution becomes a way of continuing to punish themselves, in a perverse spiral of debasement and atonement.
The approach used by all organizations that deal with prostitution, including Talita and Göteborgs Räddningsmission (who recently opened two shelter apartments in Gothenburg), is not only to give support to girl victims of sexual slavery in practical matters (legal, material and financial issues), but also to give them psychological support, to help them cope with their self-destructing attitudes caused by the trauma of child sexual abuse.
That a prostitute would enjoy a paid sexual act is a pretense necessary to silence any moral qualms that a man might have when paying for sex.  Because no one can truly be that ingenuous as to not know that a woman who sells sex doesn’t do it for pleasure, and when she pretends to, it is so the client will finish quickly, and/or to avoid him hurting her – him or whoever is selling her.
There is no such thing as a dirty whore but only violated women who try to defend themselves, during the 15-20 times a day they are used as paid receptacles of rape.

Let’s start from here, from the words. Let’s begin by NEVER using any expression that hints at any kind of synonym for prostitute in order to offend someone. Let’s just leave that out of our vocabulary, stepping out of that mechanism of thought that makes us implicitly endorse one of three of the world’s most productive and organized forms of crime: human trafficking for sexual purposes. The other two are weapons and drugs, and for these, huge economic and human resources are employed: police and judiciary surveil the entire world and seek ways to stop these markets. But prostitution, say those who are dealing with this issue 100%, is fought against only when it falls into the same criminal network as the other two, or is dealt with using much lower levels of human resources and investigative investments. Yet human trafficking deserves much more attention because it has the highest profit margin of the three: weapons and drugs stop generating profit once sold; a woman can be sold hundreds of times until she is destroyed, that is, when she reaches age 22-23.
Again, let’s stop using any synonym for prostitute as an insult, including those that relate to the son of such. Not only because these insults are actually directed at victims of rape, but also because using them makes us accomplices of the same exploitation whose foundation is the hatred of woman; but also because by doing so we confirm a patriarchal system based on a male morality that allows a woman to be called a “slut” whereas a man would be given the generic epithet “asshole”. And going a step further, why should we insult and punish a woman for actually being a prostitute, after all? Ah, yes! Because “she enjoys the sexual act”. Do we realize how many thousands of years of social viciousness are creeping into this semantic construction?

Personally, my patience is exhausted. From today, March 8, 2017, I will firmly distance myself from any person who expresses any comment or addresses a woman with these epithets. With contempt if it is a man, with irritation if it comes from a woman.
Because what a man may fail to understand (even because of his physiological and sexual alterity), a woman must unfailingly comprehend.

[Originally published on Popoff Quotidiano, translation revised by Ellen McRae]

Photo taken during a video/photo shooting done for an art installation project called “The Evil in the Eye” which will be ready soon. No prostitute’s body has been used for this image. Cinzia Bolognini was behind this camera in this occasion.