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In reality, while there are thousands of women prostitutes, doing a job where they seem very vulnerable, relatively little happens to them. The women who do prostitution don't do it because they were abused children who now need the affection of all these different men or something like that. And they're not just people with drug problems. In most cases, prostitutes are people who, at a certain point in their lives, choose not to take another economic alternative, one which is debilitating in its own way, but less remunerative.
In this culture one hears constantly about the sacrifice you have to make for doing prostitution. I've been attacked by everyone: by feminists who say, "You're soft-peddling prostitution; prostitution is
wrong,
" and by spiritual women who say you can't have all these sexual encounters without doing damage to your soul. But nobody criticizes the forty-hour workweek. Nobody criticizes the fact that for the most part people are trained into positive thinking about jobs that don't make use of half their talents. There are bad things about prostitution, but they're not the ones you see in the movies. It's not that the women get diseases or anything like that. Women who work in a brothel are probably safer from AIDS than anyone else, because they always use condoms. Street prostitution is different because it's tied up with heroin, and there are a lot of other factors. But the point is that the kinds of women
Working Girls
is about are very healthy. And they're not busted by the police, and they don't get hurt.
MacDonald:
What
are
the bad things?
Borden:
There's the difficulty with relationships. Either you're lying about being a prostitute or you're not lying. Both have consequences. It's really hard for some women to do prostitution and have a boyfriend. If he accepts it, he becomes like a pimp. If he doesn't, then there's a battle every time. So, one bad thing is a bit of schizophrenia. A lot of the women have double names and double identities. But schizophrenia happens in other work, too; it's just never talked about. "Normal" work is usually romanticized or ignored.
There's also a lot of damage if a woman does prostitution too long. She ends up buying into a fake world and, finally, has no alternative for that work and ages within it. The only alternative then is to become a madam or to work within the business in some other way, as a phone operator or something like that.
I can't stress enough how important it was for me to see how unsexual it is for women to be doing prostitution. Very few of them have any sexual response, and that can lead to problems. There was this one woman who was in a session and came out doubled over. People thought that somebody had hurt her. She called her gynecologist; it turned out that her resistance to feeling anything sexual during her sessions created a spasm in her body.