I'm in Prostitution, I Hate My Life, I Have No Place in the World for Me

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I think the real expert in every single individual case is the woman herself, Michael. She'll know what she needs. And I never met a woman in prostitution who was just happy as Larry to just keep on going here. So you have to get a core connection to your true self before you can make behavioral changes. What I resent is the public kind of perception of what they call sex work and all the agency talk. Where are the women with options who just decided to give prostitution a go? You know?

Shermer and Moran discuss: her dysfunctional family background • her boyfriend who pimped her • the women who sell sex and the men who buy it • why other prostitutes have attacked her • agency and volition in prostitution: women and men • why “prostituted” as something done to women (instead of choosing it)? • what she thought about when having prostituted sex • drugs, depression, and suicide as responses to prostitution • the myths of prostitution • feminism and prostitution • how she got out of prostitution • the harm in consenting adult women selling their bodies for sex • what should be done about prostitution, if anything?

Rachel Moran is the Director of International Policy and Advocacy for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE, a leading non-partisan organization exposing the links between all forms of sexual exploitation such as child sexual abuse, prostitution, sex trafficking and the public health harms of pornography). Her work has been endorsed by Jane Fonda, U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan and many others. Her bestselling memoir, Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution, is regarded by legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon as “the best work by anyone on prostitution ever” and has been published in more than a dozen countries and numerous languages including German, Italian, Korean, French, and Spanish.