I was a prostituted teenager, not a "sex worker". Adult men paid to fuck me because paying is a bribe for not resisting and paying buys silence. They paid to fuck me because they liked fucking teenagers and they wanted to fuck their daughters.
They paid me to fuck older prostituted women while they watched because they like fantasizing about mothers fucking their teenage daughters. They paid me to fuck other young prostitutes because they fantasize about teenage lesbians.
Men who buy sex are pedophilic, incestuous and dangerous. I want girls and women to be free from the sex trade and I don't care if that means that the hypothetical "happy and autonomous sex worker" is out of a job and here's why:
Because I was also in prostitution "by choice". Well meaning feminists sometimes make the point that "little girls don't grow up aspiring to be in prostitution", but the thing is that I actually DID.
I was groomed for prostitution by my father's porn addiction and his sexism and lechery, and by my experiences of molestation and rape, while also growing up bombarded by images of sexually objectified women in advertising and media.
I learned very early what a girl is for. And by the time I hit puberty I had stopped dreaming about being an archeologist or artist and started looking forward to "growing up" so I could live a glamourous lifestyle where I could use my body to get power.
Maybe by dancing on a bar (Like the pretty and well paid girls in Coyote Ugly!), prostitution (like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, that lovely fuzzy fairytale), or porn (like those sexy women who were able to command my violent, controlling father's attention)
So nobody enslaved me or held a gun to my head to make me prostituted myself. But I don't think "choice" is the right word for it because the disgusting actions of adult men and a sexist culture groomed me for it from an extremely early age.
Thank you to everyone for reading and retweeting. I'd like to add a couple of things to this that are relevant. One being that other girls around me were groomed the same way. By age 10 most of our imaginative play involved themes of prostitution and stripping.
Which is not something that decent adults want to imagine 10 year old girls doing but it needs to be said because 10 year old girls understanding the concept of prostitution and porn and aspiring to it is a terrible indictment on our culture and the men who drive the sex trade.
The things that the girls who did this had in common was that we were all poor and had been sexually abused at a young age. I mentioned the movie Coyote Ugly in an earlier tweet and I can't forget it because despite not being sexually explicit it was very effective grooming.
It was rated PG 13+ and the hit song "Cant Fight The Moonlight" was the favourite song of every other 10 year old I knew in 2000/2001. The actresses were beautiful and their characters were cool and relateable. We loved the music and dancing and clothes.
So we were a bunch of broke girls who had already had men take what they wanted from us and then this movie came along and showed us that being sexy for a living was a glamorous and fun option and punctuated the message with a catchy tune and romantic subplot.
I wouldn't hang it all on that movie but it stands out to me because I would say it played an equal role in my grooming as the literal pornography I was exposed to. It was all part of the same big ugly picture.
The other thing I'd like to say is that if you're a man who's read this and nervously wondered if I was one of the teenage girls you've paid to fuck: good. I hope there's a hell for you to burn in.
