Free Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution by Rachel Moran

one and he was standing at the far end of the street. I decided that it'd be all right and went ahead and got in the car. When I got back, he was angry and panicked that something had happened to me. In my naivete I interpreted this as caring, rather than the fear for his own skin he was more likely feeling. That night, when I lay down beside him to go to sleep, tears came from some indefinable place inside me. I'd have had trouble even naming it, the thing that was hurting me. I felt as though I'd woken up as one person that morning and was going to sleep as another; and in many ways, that was exactly what had happened. These words are coming much more slowly now. At this moment I am experiencing what must be the literary version of stuttering. I will write a line and stare at it for ten minutes. A decent-sized paragraph is an arduous feat. I am sure a psychiatrist, if I had one, would be inter.ested to dissect the material that must be wrung out, but I don't need a psychiatric dissection of the subject matter; I know why this is hard for me. Entering prostitution is to slip from one world to another and to remember the transition is to mourn again the loss of something pure, something good. I remember one other thing that really bears recording. It reminds me of the very odd feelings I had, so ill-matched to the situation, when walking out into my very first day of homelessness. Strangely, and conversely, in the moment I allowed myself to be coerced onto my first red-light street, I felt a surge of powerful decisive direction. I felt, for the first time since I had walked out of my mother's house, as though I were taking control. How stupid I felt when, in some later year while casting a contemplative look over the past, I realised that that feeling had been in response to giving my control away. Prostitution is widely recognised among those who have conducted research into it as a sphere of life often entered into by young teenaged girls who have left home much younger than is usual or recommendable. I know this now. I didn't know it when I most needed to. The major problem as I see it now was that the place I had come from made any extremity a perceived possibility. I was so ignorant of the nature of the world that to have gone on to be wildly successful in some respectable fashion seemed to have been every bit as likely as to have stepped, as I did, from the footpath straight into the gutter. I was so innocent I suppose, I just didn't realise how close I was to the edge. I understood, to a much minimised degree, the way the world worked. I knew while I was living in hostels that I was on the lower rungs of the social ladder; homes for the teenagers of dysfunctional backgrounds are clearly not distinguished places to be. I knew that at that time, I was living a lifestyle I didn't want as opposed to one that I did, but the handicap on my part was one of perception: I simply didn't comprehend the link between the conduct of today and the consequences of tomorrow. As I see it now, I was balanced on the outermost edge of society and the likelihood was always that I would encounter much adversity. I wildly underestimated the struggle ahead and the dedication and clarity of mind it would take to avoid such a probability; and that really was where the matter of misjudgement came strongest into play: I did not regard a future of disadvantage and destitution as a probability, but rather a possibility, as likely as any other outcome. In fact, it was more than a probability, much more. At fifteen, I had a well-developed body and a pretty face: the twin worst curses God could put on a homeless young girl. The likelihood always was that men would seize the opportunity to exploit me sexually, but when I first became homeless, I was patently unaware of that. I see prostitution now as an enemy that was able to sneak up on me because I hadn't the wit to expect it. A term which is commonly used by the proponents of prostitution is