When it comes right down to it, I think there are two kinds of people in this world:
Those who would work as prostitutes during dire straits, and those who wouldn’t, not for anything.
As for me, I think I fall into the first category. I would be a prostitute if I had to.
Now, before you all freak out about my rash indecency and flippant attitude, let me finish.
Ideally, I would never have to be a prostitute. I think it would be an awful way to live. I am unspeakably thankful I live in a time that affords so many more opportunities to women, than, say, the Middle Ages, when your only choices were to marry someone richer than yourself and hope you could provide a male heir for him (which is really just an unpaid form of prostitution when you think about it, and in the end, you might easily find yourself on the streets anyway should your fertility fail you); or to become a nun and live in a convent, where the odds of you being attacked and raped were still high; or trying to make it as a servant girl to a wealthy master who would very likely expect some sexual favours in your job description anyway, and if not him, than certainly his snooty son…
…I mean, there just weren’t many choices for women back then. As for me, I think I’m the kind of girl who, in a situation like that, might just weigh the odds and go straight to prostitution before wasting my time (and, let’s face it: revenue) with all that other nonsense. If I was just gonna end up there anyway, I mean.
It makes sense. Doesn’t it?
Certainly it would not be ideal. Certainly I would try as hard as possible to avoid falling into such dire straits. I would learn to juggle and try my hand as a traveling gypsy; I would take up sewing and knitting and laundry and cooking and anything else that might provide me with a better quality of life. But in the end, if I couldn’t make it (and indeed if I still, for some strange reason, had the desire to make it {because I’ve always found it amazing how more women back then didn’t just think to themselves, “This life sucketh; I might as well just lay here in the mucky muck and wait for a horse to trample me in the street”}), then I think I would be able to make it as a prostitute.
It would take a lot of detachment, but I could do it.
Fantine did it:
Image from here.
It’s the French Revolution, and people are barely making it as it is; Fantine hooks up with some fast-talking dirtbag, ends up pregnant with his child while he runs off, leaving her to fend for herself. She’s already working insane hours at a factory, but that’s just not cutting it, not with this kid to feed on top of the poverty that she and the rest of the country are already suffering. She has no skills, no education, no family connections, no dowry, not to mention no inheritance to invest or whatever they did before they invented Wall Street—but her daughter Cosette still gives her reason to live, reason to give a damn.
So she whores herself out—what else can she do?
I think I could do it.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately {in case you couldn’t tell}, and while I can make a pretty good case for myself working as a prostitute in a different era, under different circumstances, I really can’t picture it for me in this day and age.
Obviously.
A few years ago through a fated turn of events I can’t even begin to explain here, I found myself a tourist in Amsterdam, ambling down the seedy streets of the Red Light District.
As I walked, completely shocked at the women sitting on stools in the shopfront windows, touting their “merchandise” as casually as though they were selling lotion or hair straighteners at a kiosk in a mall, I found myself deep in thought (strange place for self-actualisation, I know): How is it that women in this day and age have found themselves in this position? Sure, I guess some might do it because they like it—there are kinky people out there, any episode of CSI: Las Vegas is evidence of that—but I would guess that, by and large, the majority of modern-day prostitutes do what they do because they have no other option.
And so I wonder, by what stretch of the imagination would I consider prostitution now, in 2010? I mean, I know that in the fifteen, sixteen, seventeen-hundreds I could wrap my head around that kind of desperation for survival; I know that I could do it if I had to—if I lived in a time that provided no other option for women, and I found something in my life worth fighting for, and prostitution was the only way I could make it—I would do it.
But now? Today? Even if I wasn’t married (because this really isn’t a discussion about fidelity so much as survival), and even if I lived in a foreign city with no friends or relatives or money or prospects?
It’s hard to say.
I, who am so blessed to have been raised with every opportunity my parents could scrimp for; I, who have been encouraged, motivated, supported, even threatened to get a university education, to have some knowledge to my name so I might support myself when necessary; I am so ridiculously blessed. During this past month, when Kyle’s job changed, I started thinking about all the ways I could potentially make money, from advertising on this blog, to teaching piano lessons, to working as a proofreader or editor—all profitable jobs I could manage from the comfort of my own home—and I relaxed a bit, knowing that I would be able to make it.
I, who during this past month have started to stress—really stress—about money for the first time in my life, and you know what it is I’m stressing about? Not whether I’ll have money for groceries this month—because that much is a given, always has been—but whether or not buying new contact lenses for both me and my husband might make it difficult to replace our busted water heater.
Really? So scary that our clean, contaminant-free, indoor-plumbed water might be too cold for a comfortable shower? Wow.
And today, while working on a research essay about the objectification of women during the Early Middle Ages—an essay about which, just moments earlier, I was whining like a child for having to open my laptop and do my research and type my thoughts and submit them to a professor who will read my words and provide feedback—it hit me, for just a moment, how stupid I really am.
During my research I stumbled across a passage that said something like medieval women who attempted to educate themselves were not considered ladies, and isn’t it interesting that today, by contrast, women who don’t bother to educate themselves when they have the chance are now the ones who cannot possibly be considered ladies?
Funny how that works.
It made me think of a blog post I read several months ago, of a blogger’s reflections on a poor time in her life. {By the way, if you guys aren’t reading The Trephine, you are missing out; it is easily one of the best-written blogs I’ve read since I started reading blogs three years ago. I’m not kidding; every time she posts [which is not nearly enough in my opinion], I save her posts for last in my Google™ Reader so I can really settle down and enjoy every single word. She’s good.}
Anyway, here is the bit that I haven’t been able to get out of my head since I first read it in December:
The really crazy thing about all of this is that I wasn’t ever REALLY poor, not for a moment. “Stubborn” is a much more accurate word. […] I have a degree from an excellent college, impeccable manners, and one hell of a pleasant phone demeanor. Long have I walked with the middle class, and lo, I know of their ways; I can make eye contact and shake hands and speak articulately and thank people for their time. You can’t put a price on that kind of cultural capital, and if you own it, you can never be as destitute as someone who doesn’t.
I am lucky to have it, lucky to have parents who put me behind a cash register and next to a phone starting at the age of thirteen and taught me well. And when I finally got back on my feet again, secured a few good contracts, and could afford my own caramel lattes once more, I didn’t kid myself that my promotion back into MiddleClassLand had been awarded on personal merit. I was just born fortunate, that’s all, growing up in a home full of as many books as I could get my hands on, with parents who weren’t too exhausted or overworked to make sure that I kept my grades up and stayed out of trouble.
This gives me goosebumps every time I read it. I, too, can safely say that none of these blessings I’ve been given are thanks to any merit of my own—not really. Any prostitute in Amsterdam might be living my life had she been afforded even a tiny percent of the good fortune that fell into my lap. What separates me from the Red Light District could be as simple as a mother who went to college and worked in education, a father who read his scriptures and said his prayers, or the Mesa Public Library being just a bike ride away from my childhood home.
I can’t imagine a time in my life that I will feel so wretched, so utterly despairing for money that I will be driven to prostitution. Should I ever find myself there, with my brain wiped clean of all I know, and no other options, yet still with the will to live…I think I could do it. That’s all I’m saying. I don’t think I will ever be in such a hopeless place, but if I am, I think I could do it. That’s the kind of girl I am.
Who knows why I am so blessed, why any of us are so blessed?
I don’t know. I’ll never know.
All I can hope is that I don’t dishonour those less fortunate women by blowing my opportunity.
