Girls Like Us Read online

  As an award-show junkie, I was glued to my television for the 78th Academy Awards. I was always convinced, from a very young age, that I was going to be a famous actress, so I’ve had my acceptance speech prepared since I was five years old. Over the years, I’ve slowly come to terms with the fact that my dream of winning the best-actress Oscar would go unrealized. Still, I love the red carpet specials; the best- and worst-dressed competition; the drama of underdogs beating bookie favorites; and tearful, rambling actors onstage receiving the ultimate validation. That night, like every year, I curled up on the couch and prepared for an enchanted evening. I expected to be swept up in the glamour of the night, cheering for my favorites. And then the esteemed Academy honored “It’s Hard out Here for a Pimp,” which won the Oscar for Best Original Song, and I felt like I had been slapped in the face.

  I watched the audience in their Badgley Mischka dresses and Armani suits clap vigorously for Three 6 Mafia and listened as presenters spouted on about the historic moment for hip-hop. Having seen the earlier musical performance of the song, I thought it was pretty clear to anyone watching that the song denigrated women and positioned pimps as hustlers just trying to “get by.” Apparently the Academy had considered the word bitch to be too risqué for prime-time television, as it was replaced by witch, yet somehow they did not think that lyrics like Wait I got a snow bunny, and a black girl too / You pay the right price and they’ll both do you / That’s the way the game goes, gotta keep it strictly pimpin / Gotta have my hustle tight, makin change off these women, yeah were offensive. Admittedly this was the same venerable Academy that awarded Roman Polanski with an Oscar for Best Director, which he was unable to accept due to his still pending charges for raping a thirteen-year-old girl.

  As I watched the audience and subsequent presenters embrace the moment, perhaps because they thought it was a great song, perhaps because they thought they were embracing “black culture,” not understanding that these images did not represent or benefit it, or perhaps because to them, pimps were larger-than-life caricatures, driving Cadillacs and sporting diamond pinkie rings, I couldn’t help but think of all the girls I’ve visited in hospitals, girls with lifelong scars, girls traumatized and broken, girls who’ve been brainwashed, girls who’d been beaten for not meeting their “quota.” In my world, pimps are not managers, protectors, or “market facilitators,” as one research study euphemistically called them, but leeches sucking the souls from beautiful, bright young girls, predators who scour the streets, the group homes, and junior high schools stalking their prey.

  That night, furious at the Academy and the audience that was applauding, I imagined walking onto the stage, grabbing the mic, and giving them a reality check. As I fantasized, I struggled to think of an emblematic story but there were simply too many. How could I explain the violence, the devastation, the brainwashing with just one story? What could I say that would accurately convey the harm? Should I share the story of Jessica, who was fourteen when I met her in a detention center? Jessica is not entirely sure how her parents died. Recruited from a child welfare shelter by an adult man and his wife, she sleeps in their bed and they feed and clothe her. I first meet her when she’s locked up on prostitution charges, struggling to figure out this relationship with the people she believes to be her adopted parents. The following week when I go to see her, she’s shell-shocked. She’d taken an HIV test and it has come back positive. Jessica calls her pimp to say, “Daddy, I’m positive.” He’s nonchalant. “Of course you are; I’ve been positive for years.”

  Or would I talk about Sarah being beaten by a two-by-four, and like 50 Cent described, being left with “stitches in her head”—in her case over thirty. Or Naima, held down by her pimp and his friend while they used a home-tattoo kit to tattoo his name all over her body including on her hands and neck. Latavia, Tanya, Marie, Elizabeth, Jeanine, Markasia, all teenagers, all viciously beaten by pimps. Would I talk about Tiffany Mason, Christal Jones, or Hanna Montessori, all recruited by pimps, one in San Francisco, one in Vermont, and one in Los Angeles, and all later found murdered at the ages of fifteen and sixteen? These were of course just the girls who had made the paper, white girls who’d warranted a few lines. What about all the countless girls, especially those who were black and Latina, who had gone missing and were presumed dead? What would it take for pimps not to be seen as cool or sexy? For people to believe that they cause real harm?

  SPRING 1994, GERMANY

  JP is waiting for me after my shift outside the club. “How much?”

  “It was OK.” Stalling.

  “How much, Raych?” JP refuses to call me by my working name, “Carmen.”

  “Six hundred.” As I turn it over.

  “Six hundred?” He’s pissed. I knew he would be.

  I consider giving up the two hundred that I’ve got stashed in my underwear, but realize that I’ll just get in more trouble for trying to stash, and that money’s for food this week. All of his/my money, he’ll spend on crack in the next twenty-four hours. We’ve been eating corned beef hash and eggs for weeks now, as it’s the cheapest food to buy, and we rarely have any money left over once he’s gone on another binge.

  I get the choking up and a smack on the side of the face, hard enough that it’ll show tomorrow. I was expecting both, having walked out of a twelve-hour shift with only six hundred marks to show for it. There are people walking and driving by, but no one pays us any attention. After all, we’re outside under the neon flashing light of a strip club.

  JP disappears off into the night with my money to score. I know he’ll be back soon; he always is. I walk a different route home and stop by the Turkish kebab shop. I haven’t eaten anything in here for months since I got food poisoning, but the guys are cool and constantly worried about me and the never-ending new bruises that appear on my face and body daily. I give them my night’s stash; they’ve been holding my money for a few weeks now after I ran out of places to hide it from JP in the house. It strikes me as sad that I feel safer with these relative strangers in a restaurant than I do at home. I don’t have a lot of time to dwell on that, though, as I’ve got to get back home before JP starts wondering where I’ve been.

  Demetrios, one of the cuter ones, tries to persuade me to stay, but he knows the deal. “Leave him, he no good,” he calls after me. This much I do know.

  I’ve already stayed out too long, as JP has beaten me home, but he’s already too busy lighting up his rocks to care where I’ve been. He’ll be calm for a little while now. It’s when the high starts wearing off that I need to worry. I go into the bathroom to wash my makeup off, put a cool rag on my swollen face, and looking in the mirror, I wonder just as I do every night, how I got here: trapped with a man who’ll beat me as soon as look at me, taking my clothes off onstage every night for a bunch of men who don’t care about me. I’m so numb most of the time that I try not to even think about it, but I never imagined my life would be like this. I thought I’d be a lawyer or a journalist or a petite-size model or even a teenage mom living in Portsmouth. Working at a factory doesn’t sound that bad anymore. I stare at the eyes reflecting back at me, the eyes my mother had recently called “dead,” and I wonder if that’s a premonition. I already feel like my life won’t last much longer. I’ve made arrangements with some of the girls at work that if I don’t come in for a few days, they should know that JP definitely did it, the spare keys are under the mat, here’s my mum’s address, get my stash money from the kebab shop to pay for shipping my body home. I’ve just turned nineteen, but I doubt I’ll make it to twenty. This man will take my life. I’m not even scared anymore, just resigned to the fact.

  “Raaaaayyyychh.” He’s yelling for me like we live in a mansion, not in a one-bedroom apartment. I switch the bathroom lights off and come into the living room, where he’s bent intently over his crushed Heineken can scouring for any semblance of leftover rock from the piles of ash. In a little while, he’ll be on his hands and knees searching the carpet and will i
nvariably have tried to smoke several pieces of lint before the night is over. He looks up long enough to see my face, which is rapidly swelling and darkening. “Aww, shit baby. You know I didn’t mean to hit you that hard. Daddy’s sorry.” His southern baritone makes everything sound so sincere.

  “You just gotta try harder and make more money.”

  “I know.” Too tired to argue.

  “Come here, baby, I saved a little hit for you.”

  I put the can up to my lips and he lights the ashes for me. Within seconds the sickly sweet taste is in my mouth, my heart is speeding up, and for tonight dreams of ever leaving this man, this place, drift away with the smoke that rises up through our apartment and out into the street.

  Just as there is no single profile of men who are batterers or child abusers, there is no single profile of pimps or traffickers. There are pimps who may have been abused themselves, whose fathers, brothers, uncles were pimps, who have grown up in the life, and who know nothing else. There are pimps who are mostly drug dealers but have one girlfriend whom they put out on the streets. While a few pimps have only one girl that they are selling, most pimps are committed to finding multiple girls. After all, half of the alleged glamour of pimping, much like the fantasy version of polygamy, comes from the macho ideal of having multiple women meeting your needs.

  There are guerrilla pimps who are known for their violence and brutality. There are sneaker pimps, subway pimps, or simps as they’re known, who are considered low-rent pimps at the bottom of the food chain. There are pimps who are sophisticated and savvy. There are pimps who are clearly sociopaths. Yet there are also pimps who probably wouldn’t meet the clinical definition and who simply follow the cultural verity that we all do what we need to do to survive. As there are damaging racial stereotypes that have begun to be linked with pimping, it’s critical to note that anyone who makes money off the commercial sexual exploitation of someone else is pimping them, be they a parent, a pornographer, or a member of an organized crime syndicate. Pimps can be male, female, or transgendered and come in all ages, races, and ethnicities, especially in different areas of the commercial sex industry such as escort agencies, brothels, and strip clubs. In a culture that has already done a good job at demonizing low-income young men of color, and that has increasingly conflated pimps with black men, it’s important not to play into these stereotypes. Most people making money off the commercial sex industry are not men of color, yet that tends to be the first image people bring to mind when you mention the word pimp. Calling him a trafficker, on the other hand, tends to bring to mind a broad range of ethnicities and roles, from white American men who run child sex tourism agencies, to Korean massage parlor owners, to Mexican brothel managers, to eastern European men who traffic girls from Ukraine.

  We know that in every country, pimps/traffickers tend to prey upon those that they have the most access to, girls and women from their own culture. So it is not surprising that since the vast majority of the girls I work with are girls of color, they have been under the control of street pimps who are men of color. Yet the faces of the men who own and operate strip clubs, brothels, escort agencies, and online “adult services,” who are also exploiting and profiting from women and girls, are far more diverse. This reality must be acknowledged to avoid further demonization or a knee-jerk response to those in the sex industry who need to be held accountable.

  In over a decade of listening to the stories and the tears of hundreds of girls who have experienced violence and exploitation at the hands of pimps, I’ve learned that pimp tactics of control and coercion rarely vary much from the script. Not only do pimps all seem to use the same tactics, but they also all seem to have graduated from the same mind-control training camp as cult leaders, hostage takers, terrorists, and dictators of small countries. While most of these groups may not have used the techniques of seduction and promises to initially lure their victims, pimps employ many of the same brainwashing and violence strategies to keep their victims under their control.

  There is actually a framework for understanding this dynamic. It’s a tool created by Amnesty International called Biderman’s Chart of Coercion to explain the tactics used in controlling political prisoners and hostages. I showed it to a group of girls one night, wondering if they would agree with my assessment that it perfectly described pimp behavior. Clinical terms such as monopolization of perception or enforcing trivial demands sounded too removed from real-world application until we began to discuss them—“Oh, you mean like not letting you talk to anyone outside of the life,” “Making you do dumb shit, little shit, just to see if you’ll obey?” We drafted up our own adaptation of Biderman’s list and the parallels were obvious. No wonder the tactics that were designed to work on hostages work so well on vulnerable girls and young women.

  Like any subculture, American pimp culture has its own terminology and slang, all of which is about humiliation and degradation. When a pimp uses the phrase pimps up, hos down he means that you need to be in the street while he walks on the sidewalk. Being out of pocket refers to showing disrespect for your pimp or another pimp and can apply to infractions such as looking another pimp directly in the eye, disagreeing with your pimp, or not making enough money. Punishment for breaking the rules ranges from a beating from your own pimp, being put into a pimp circle, where a group of pimps harasses you and tries to force you to make eye contact so they can beat you if you do. Your fine for breaking the rules is a charge and you can be kidnapped by another pimp in order to make back the money that you owe. There are myriad rules and codes—all designed to break down individual will. In the beginning, you rarely understand all the different rules, until of course you break one.

  Pimps use the divide-and-conquer tactic that has been so popular historically to control girls and young women. One girl, the bottom, is set up as the head girl, who may get certain privileges or perhaps less abuse, until she does something wrong and is punished more severely because she is expected to “know better.” The head girl is generally the girl who makes the most money, although it may be the girl who has children with the pimp, the one who’s been there the longest, or the one’s who’s the best “behaved,” and it can change accordingly. Like Holocaust victims who cooperated with their abusers to stay “safer,” and like house slaves versus field slaves, the dynamic of one oppressed person set in a position of relative power over other oppressed people helps to ensure that there is little solidarity and therefore less likelihood that there will be an uprising against their oppressor. For trafficked girls their energy is consumed between alternately competing with one another for Daddy’s attention and affection or trying to avoid being the one getting beaten, even if it means snitching on or throwing another girl under the bus. The rule is generally Peter pays for Paul, so it’ll be in Tanya’s best interest to snitch if Melody tries to run away; otherwise they’ll all be beaten. At the very least, Tanya will earn some brownie points that will keep her in his good graces for a couple of days or might even get her some attention and affection.

  While there are various historical comparisons to be made, the analogies to antebellum slavery are perhaps the most pertinent. One night, several GEMS girls and I were guests on a radio show when a pimp called in to disagree with our assertions that pimps were abusive. “The girls need protection. They wouldn’t know what to do with their money, so I manage it for them. They’re lazy. They like it. I’m giving them guidance because they’re kinda dumb. I use violence only when I have to—it’s more discipline than anything else. The only way they listen is if you’re mean to them.” Listening to him, I became aware that his justifications sounded strikingly similar to the paternalistic and condescending justifications of slave owners in the 1800s. Only today, our equivalent of slaves on the auction block is the ads on Craigslist, Backpage, and numerous other online sites, the street corners in certain neighborhoods, the stages of strip clubs. Four hundred years after slavery, pimps and traffickers are using the same lines, the same ration
ale, the same tactics as their predecessors in the antebellum South. Pimps thrive in America, a country where a modern-day slave system is too often justified and ignored.

  In addition to their strategies of control and their paternalistic rationalizations, the other thing that pimps have in common, regardless of who they are, are the damaged lives they leave in their wake. To a girl who’s been beaten because she didn’t make her quota, or put out on the street after a rape and told, “There’s nothing wrong with your mouth,” it doesn’t really make that much difference whether her pimp was a sociopath or not, if he had one girl or ten, if he ever felt bad about what he was doing, if he wished he could do something else with his life. The humiliation, the physical and emotional pain, the trauma, the nightmares all feel the same. The damage is done.

  One night, by a set of bizarre and unfortunate circumstances, I am stuck in an ICU waiting room next to a man who, after a few minutes of pleasant conversation, I realize is the former pimp of one of my girls, Penny. The conversation quickly turns to his current girls, not a conversation I really want to have at 1 a.m. in the hospital. I tell him that perhaps it’s not the time or the place to debate his pimping. He insists. And so begins a two-hour intense conversation in which he shares his upbringing, his father’s pimping, his mother’s being in the life, and his own entry into the game as a homeless seventeen-year-old. For me, it’s both horrifying and fascinating to listen to his rationalizations. I’m angry just being around him, and yet sitting in the emergency room, I listen to a young man, twenty-four years old, who has experienced his own share of extreme trauma and abuse, who is smart and reasonably self-aware once he tries to stop justifying his actions and who is conscious that he’s doing harm—even if over the years he’s tried to make himself believe that “hos” are different. His experiences of growing up in violence, poverty, and neglect could be the story of one of the girls—except that he has become the perpetrator, not the victim. He talks about wanting to quit the game, about being addicted to it, about not knowing what else he would do. I tell him if the girls can leave, after the abuse that he and his cohorts put them through, he really has no excuse. I point to Penny, his ex, as an example. She is also the mother of his child and for most of their involvement, she was his only girl. It’s clear, in a very distorted way, that his feelings for her go beyond the economic. I try to point out how much damage he’s done to her, the conversation emotional and full of memories for me of sitting on the other end of the phone with Penny when she was screaming hysterically that he had a gun to her head or of going to get her in the middle of the night after he’d beaten her. In over two hours of intense conversation, it’s only when I make the comparison to slavery and tell him that he put the mother of his child on the auction block and that he’s no different from any of the white slaveholders that he’s grown up loathing, that something registers. He’s quiet for a long time and when he finally looks up he has tears in his eyes. On some level he is conscious of the damage he’s done and continues to do but like the slaveholders, he is the one benefiting. He’s not the one being sold, being scared, being hurt. His motivation to change is minimal, therefore fleeting. Before long I hear from Penny that he’s pimping several more girls.