Girls Like Us Read online

  Not only are choices these girls make shaped by external limitations decided by age, they’re also dictated by the psychological and emotional limitations that are adolescent development. In hindsight, as adults looking back on our teenage selves, we can recognize our own impulsivity, risk taking, our need for peer approval, our rebellion against our parents, our limited understanding of consequences—in short, all the characteristics that define being a teenager. Very few adults would honestly want to revisit the naïveté, vulnerability, and often flat-out ignorance of adolescence. Many parents don’t trust their own sixteen-year-old to drive their car, pick their own “good enough” friends, or stay home alone for the weekend without hosting a party. Yet interestingly, I’ve met lots and lots of adults who feel that a sixteen-year-old is completely mature enough to be considered fully capable of making the choice to be in the sex industry.

  Given their age and psychological development, children and youth often make decisions that are not in their best interests, or that perhaps are unsafe. It’s an unwise choice to meet a stranger in person whom you’ve met only on MySpace, not brilliant decision making to get into someone’s car when you barely know them; nor is it a great idea to run away from home with six dollars in your pocket and nowhere to go. Yet none of these “choices” is the same thing as “choosing” to be in the commercial sex industry—even if they end up leading down that path. It can also be an unwise decision to go home with someone you’ve just met, particularly if you’ve been drinking, and yet making that decision in no way means that you “chose” to get raped.

  The discussion about lack of choice based on age is not to suggest that teenage girls and young women are mindless, helpless, or totally without agency. One of the greatest joys of my work is getting to spend time every day with girls and young women who are smart, insightful, thoughtful, capable of real leadership, and have much to offer the world around them. Girls are capable of making choices—within a safe and healthy context, and with the safety nets of responsible, caring adults ensuring that those choices are age appropriate. Yet for most sexually exploited and trafficked girls, the safety nets aren’t there, and they are left choosing the lesser of two evils. Children who are abused or neglected at home cannot simply “choose” to go get a job, earn some money, and move out into a safer or more pleasant environment. In the mind of a child or teenager, running away from a bad situation may seem like the most logical option, yet it’s the context of the choice that’s most important. It’s a concept that seems clearer when applied to trafficking victims from other countries who are rarely presumed to have made “bad choices.” Some of these women are cognizant of the fact that they will be working in a brothel when they reach the United States, but they are in no way prepared for the brutalities that they will face, the slavery which they’ll endure, or the reality that they can’t just leave once they’ve earned enough money—no matter what they were originally told. Still others may enter into a “marriage” only to find out that they will be a sex slave. These victims, many of whom are adults, have made choices. But their choices must be seen in context. Most of them have little to no other legitimate options. Desperation and lack of options make for poor decision making, but provide ripe pickings for the traffickers. Their choices do not mean that they deserve to be trafficked, or want to be enslaved. In the same way, neither do the decisions that girls in the United States may make with the hopes of securing a better future, someone to love them, food and clothing, a sense of family, or a chance to escape their current abuse mean that they deserve, want, or choose the life that awaits them.

  Nicole and I are working together on a writing exercise I’ve assigned about what she likes about herself. Not only is the entire concept tough for her to wrap her mind around, but she’s struggling with the writing. I know that she feels limited by her literacy skills and sees herself as stupid and worthless, so the exercise feels like a good way to figure out where exactly she’s at, skillwise, and to encourage her self-worth at the same time. It’s not going well. She can come up with only two things she likes about herself, her hair and her feet, so I give her ideas: You’re kind, You’re funny, You’re a good friend. She screws up her nose in disbelief at them all but with much prodding tries to write them down anyway. She writes slowly and carefully, putting a lot of thought into each word, and it quickly becomes clear that she has very little basic knowledge even of phonics and how letters combine to make different sounds. At nineteen, Nicole’s literacy skills are equivalent to those of a first grader. It’s obvious that she has a pronounced learning disability, and I’m angry that she was able to make it through to the sixth grade in the New York City public school system without anyone taking the time to help her build the most basic skills. I try to imagine how difficult it is for her to navigate a world surrounded by words that might as well be in Greek. I understand why she feels that being in the life is the only thing that she’s capable of doing. It’s hard to imagine a life of possibilities when she can’t even read a book, fill out a job application, or decipher a street sign.

  Many girls, even in this country, are growing up in a society that does not provide real and viable opportunities for the future. At the same time, they’re living in a culture that increasingly teaches them that their worth and value are defined by their sexuality. Parallels can be found between girls in poverty in this country and girls in poverty internationally, as well as with girls growing up over one hundred years ago. In an article on the commercial sexual exploitation of girls and the abolitionist movement in Victorian England, author Deborah Gorham writes of a young woman who “allowed herself to be entrapped in a French brothel because life had given her little reason to believe that any genuinely satisfactory possibility existed for her. In a society that told a girl who had no possessions that her chastity, at least, was a ‘precious possession,’ some young girls might well have been led to believe that they might as well sell that possession to the highest bidder.” If the word chastity were replaced by sexuality or body, then this paragraph could easily have been written about commercially sexually exploited and trafficked girls today in the United States.

  With this in mind, the issue of choice must be carefully framed and understood in the context of the individual and cultural factors facing girls at risk. The sex industry may initially appear to provide a life of economic freedom, independence, and a secure future with someone who loves them, in contrast to the bleak futures that they may believe are their only alternatives. Selling sex may seem like a small price to pay, particularly for girls who have been abused and raped. Combine the power of media images of young women as sexual objects with the girls’ familial and environmental situations and the trap is set. It is often not until the reality of the situation begins to sink in, when the situation becomes too toxic or when she finally accepts the reality that her boyfriend is actually a pimp, that a girl may choose to leave. At that point it is no longer a matter of choice, but rather a matter of escape.

  Chapter 5

  Pimps

  “You know what? I think it just got a little easier out here for a pimp.”

  —Jon Stewart, Academy Awards, 2006

  WINTER 1993, GERMANY

  The guy who walks in toward the end of the afternoon shift is much younger than our usual lunchtime crew, but after a few instructive months of working in one of Munich’s largest strip clubs, I’ve learned not to be surprised by anything. Bella, the bar manager and my boss, gives him a disapproving look. She’s been working here for years and can sniff out money like a bloodhound on a fresh scent. To make matters worse, he looks “ethnic”—Turkish, Middle Eastern, perhaps Yugoslavian—which, according to Bella, means if he does have money, he’ll be cheap with it and possibly rough with the girls. I’ve already heard Bella’s lectures on the various sexual and financial proclivities of every race and ethnicity and know that her preference is for white businessmen in their forties or fifties, German or British, but not American (“too loud, too che
ap”). Of course, her protests about us “girls” talking to the less desirable customers is disingenuous; she would have a fit if we actually didn’t try to make some money or didn’t quietly endure being roughed up. In this case, he’s the only customer and with only thirty minutes left before the shift ends, she sighs dramatically but gives me the nod to proceed. I sidle up next to him at the bar, and start my usual spiel—broken Deutsch (with an Asiatic twist, as I’m learning the language from the Filipina bar girls), topped off with an English accent. “Vilcommen. Vee gates? Miena namee est Carmen.”

  He responds briefly, says his name is Fazil, and up close I see that he is probably early to midtwenties, and fairly handsome. He’s dressed in the style popular with the eastern European guys: leather jacket, T-shirt, tight jeans, and a chain. He speaks a little English, as broken as my German, but it saves me from having to rack my brain for the remaining four sentences I know. Bella hovers, not particularly subtly, waiting for the champagne order. I know if he were German, or British, that she’d give it more time. He finally buys me a drink, although I hear Bella sigh loudly again, as it’s the cheapest variety of champagne we serve. Either I’m already three sheets to the wind or it’s been a busy shift, but I’m relieved to finally be talking to a guy who’s close to my age and not one of the pervy older men who make up the majority of our clientele. At seventeen, anyone over thirty-five, particularly if they’re wearing a suit, seems old to me. Twenty-four in a leather jacket? That’s boyfriend material.

  “I understand . . .” He motions to Bella and makes a drinking sign. “I buy you another drink outside—I give you the money if you want,” he says.

  I know the rules about dating outside of the club, but Bella has been annoying me all day and I feel like telling her to take her little racist attitude and shove it. I know that if we get caught, I’ll get fined, but fuck it. I make a plan to meet Fazil around the corner after my shift ends.

  We go to a bar, where he orders us some cognac. The champagne plus the cognac plus not having eaten anything all afternoon has the room spinning a little, although in a pleasant way. I don’t understand much of what he’s saying. The music’s loud, his accent strong. But I don’t care that much. He’s cute, seems to like me, and I’m desperate to have a romantic, physical, something interaction with someone who isn’t paying for my time. It feels like a date. He’s talking about money, percentages, some other shit. Thirty, seventy. You’d still get thirty, I hear him say. I try to snap back into focus. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Business. You and me. I manage you.”

  I’m a little too drunk to pick up right away what he’s talking about. Why on earth would I want a manager? Sixty-five percent of my money now goes to the club. I already have a boss and she gets on my nerves. This doesn’t seem like a good deal, drunk or not, but he’s persistent. “OK, sixty, forty,” he says.

  It finally dawns on me: He doesn’t want to date me, he wants to make money off of me. I already have enough people in my life doing that. I ask him to drive me home. The alcohol has made me groggy and I doze off in the car. When I come to, Fazil has stopped in a part of town that I’m not familiar with, but it’s easy to figure out where we are by the number of women and girls in the street leaning into cars, the men lingering in doorways, and the dope fiends shooting up in the open. I try to shake myself awake. “What are you doing?”

  “You going to work here for me. This is you.” He points to a couple of girls, and says, “Hure,” the Deutsch word for whore. Believing as I do, and as Bella has taught me, that working in the club is really just being a hostess and that the taking-your-clothes-off-onstage part and the going-into-the-VIP-booths is just something you don’t really think about or talk about, I’m horrified. What I do has nothing to do with what these women are doing, I tell myself. I know I don’t want to “work” for him, and I say so. His demeanor immediately changes and he becomes rough and threatening. I realize that no one knows where I am and that I don’t even know if the name he has given me is real. I’m crying but compliant and when he begins to drive me home, I’m relieved. When we get to my apartment building, he insists on coming up with me and forces me to show him where I live. He rapes me, telling me that it is only fair, as he has to try it first. Afterward he throws a gold necklace worth about twenty-five marks on me and laughingly tells me he’ll be back to collect his money. I throw the necklace out the window when he leaves and lie awake all night, still not really understanding how things went so bad.

  When I tell one of the older women at the club what happened, she explains that “Fazil” is a pimp looking for girls to sell. While I’m aware that pimps exist, I’ve never given them a lot of thought. Growing up, we would say pimp but not really have a clue what it meant. There was a guy in our town called Luther Cool, who was rumored to be a pimp. With a body like an upside-down triangle, all shoulders and pecs and chicken legs, and a perpetual uniform of huge, oversize sunglasses, a muscle shirt, and high-water sweatpants in every color, Luther Cool was just one of those odd characters that every town has and that every kid makes fun of. We didn’t really understand the concept of pimping; we just knew he was sleazy and we snickered every time he walked by. It’s this image of a pimp, a caricature, that more than anything is stuck in my head. Fazil didn’t fit this image at all. I feel stupid and vow never to get caught up with anyone like him again. Fazil does come calling for his money, but I hide from him for weeks and eventually he seems to give up. One afternoon, I see him trying to recruit a teenage girl at the Bahnhof, and I turn and speed-walk in the opposite direction.

  Just a few months later I’ll meet JP. Ex–U.S. Army, currently unemployed but with so much potential. Strikingly handsome, with his huge doe eyes and high cheekbones, it will be love at first sight. Hearing his sexy baritone voice and strong southern accent, I want to melt every time he speaks. He’s funny and smart and we click together from day one. I’ll be so enraptured with him that I’m happy to give him anything and everything he wants, until of course it’s no longer a choice. I’ll love JP with all my heart and soul and feel sure that I never have and never will experience anything like this again. I’ll think I could die for him—and I nearly do.

  His growing addiction to crack and my addiction to him make for a volatile combination, but in my mind it’s just the way love is supposed to be. We’re Romeo and Juliet; I’m Billie Holiday, he’s “My Man”; I’m Carmen, he’s my jealous lover. The one thing I never see him as is my pimp. It isn’t until much later that I remember the conversations that we’d had about his father being a pimp, that I’d been told to call him Daddy, that he had twisted some wire coat hangers together into a “pimp stick” to beat me, that I turned over all my money to him every night and got beaten. It’s not until I start hearing the stories from other girls and women that I’m able to contextualize my experiences. At the time, he’s just my boyfriend and I’m just a girl who dances in a club.

  The average American adult probably imagines a pimp as a cross between a caricatured seventies Huggy Bear or a sleazy, leather-jacket-wearing, drug-dealing scumbag from an early Law & Order episode. Most teenagers, however, inundated as they are by glamorous, sexy, relatively benign images of pimps on television and music videos, have a very different view. The distorted glorification of pimp culture began in the seventies with the blaxploitation films and Iceberg Slim’s pulp fiction. Today pimping has gone mainstream. It would be easy, as some do, to point to hip-hop culture as the primary culprit in this tidal wave of acceptance of pimps. Hip-hop clearly needs to take responsibility for its ongoing misogynistic images and lyrics, but rappers alone could not have achieved what has become a mass acceptance of pimp culture.

  The tipping point came in 2003, when 50 Cent released his platinum-selling song “P.I.M.P.,” in which he describes one of the girls working for him as having “stitches in her head.” Several months later, Reebok rewarded him with a fifty-million-dollar sneaker-deal endorsement. A few years later,
Vitaminwater did the same. Why wouldn’t they? “Fiddy” proved unequivocally that no one was objecting to his blatant degradation of women and girls when “P.I.M.P” went platinum three times and reached the top ten in eighteen countries.

  50 Cent isn’t alone in his corporately sponsored pimping. Snoop Dogg (Calvin Broadus), who is infamous for bringing two women on dog leashes to the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards, was featured on the cover of the December 2006 issue of Rolling Stone in a Santa Claus red hat and a copy line reading America’s Most Lovable Pimp. In the article, Snoop brags about his pimping, which he claims he took up during his successful rap career because it was a “childhood dream”: “’Cause pimpin’ aint a job, it’s a sport. I had a bitch on every exit [in Los Angeles] from the 10 freeway to the 101 freeway ’cause bitches would recruit for me.” Snoop’s endorsement deals range from Orbit gum to Boost Mobile cell phones, and he was even featured in a General Motors commercial with former Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca.

  HBO has made a deal with the Hughes brothers, makers of the movie American Pimp, to produce a scripted series about pimps titled Gentlemen of Leisure. Ice-T, a self-described former pimp, now plays a sex-crimes detective on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit on NBC, despite still making yearly appearances at the Players Ball, a convention that awards real-life pimps with trophies for Player of the Year, Mack of the Year, and Number 1 International Pimp of the Year.

  Examples of pimp references permeate every aspect of popular culture. Some argue that the meaning of the word has changed and now reflects something positive. The rapper Nelly had a short-lived scholarship fund called PIMP (Positive Intellectual Motivated Person), ostensibly to promote education but more likely to promote his energy drink Pimp Juice. The word pimp has become a verb, as in the name for the TV show Pimp My Ride and for a campaign by a Christian youth organization in Finland, called Pimp My Bible. Yet when MSNBC reporter David Shuster commented during Hillary Clinton’s campaign that it seemed as if Chelsea Clinton was being “pimped out,” people were aghast and Shuster was suspended for two weeks by the network. The connotation of the word remains the same. It’s society’s attitude toward pimps and pimping that has changed.