and Curtis’s research exposes the life of homeless, addicted, often pimp-controlled women on the streets, for whom prostitution becomes one of the very few “opportunities for revenue generation that are available in the informal economy.”31This study found that women did prostitution while men in the same neighborhoods stripped cars. “Men still very much control the informal economy in these neighborhoods and the street drug scene in which social and occupational relations are increasingly embedded.”32
Maher and Curtis’s findings reveal a pattern different from what we saw in the 1970s in relation to drug abuse. Crack-cocaine prostitution evokes a deeper desperation and reveals an abandoned self. Drugs become a reason for doing prostitution when there seems to be little reason to exist. Trespassing certain boundaries in which a self can be kept intact means giving up on survival. In homelessness, desperation reaches new extremes. By contrast the effort to survive, to keep oneself together even within prostitution by finding ways to try to protect oneself, reveals human beings who are somehow still engaged with themselves, still fighting for survival. Even if they are despairing of the present moment, they are surviving for a future moment when things might be different.
But, for many immigrant women, for women coming from prior sexual slavery and drugs, all of this—their efforts to survive—seems to have bottomed out. They have given way to deeper levels of deprivation wherein prostitution becomes the means by which they give up having a self. The possibility of being a whole person is thrown away in the despair of it all. Even that fact of desperation is trivialized in the superficial assumption that in bottoming out of prostitution, one does prostitution for the money for drugs. Bottoming out means that human agency is not there. Giving up on one’s survival becomes possible when there are no social conditions to support and promote survival. When the world of prostitution hits a new bottom, women become socially confused within a reality in which their survival is of no significance.
In both the Maher and Curtis research and that of Hoigard and Finstad, early childhood sexual abuse figured largely in the backgrounds of the women crack and smack addicts on the street. They had experienced the prostitution of their sexuality in incest assault, from which they, like every child subjected to it, learned to dissociate. They now do a prostitution from which they are disembodied, taking drugs through which they further dissociate from themselves. The desperation of homelessness and poverty added to the destruction from early childhood sexual abuse leaves young women and girls approaching prostitution without limits—there is nothing of the self left to save for survival. Trespassing those limits, where harm is contained, reduces the self to the sexually exploited thing that one is doing. The price is cheap because fast money is needed for another fix. But the price is also cheap because there is almost nothing of value left. Women are existing in their most severe conditions of dehumanization ever, for unlike the slave master who sold the body of another for a cheap price, these women sell themselves. There is not much of life left for them. Unlike women who distance themselves from prostitution, these women have little or no social space in which to be other than prostituted.
Murder
Systematic sexual exploitation reduces the value of female life to that of “throwaway women” who are like no-deposit, no-return bottles or cartons disposed and unaccounted for. When I first began my research in the late 1970s, I was shown some photos of prostitution homicides taken by the police. One file puzzled and horrified me. It contained a photo of a huge trash barrel in the basement of an old building. I peered at this photo for a few moments before I realized that a dead girl’s body had been stuffed into the barrel. Only her arm, circled above her head, was showing. In New York City alone in 1975, official police statistics documented 71 prostitution homicides. At least 54 of them were committed by pimps or tricks.33 This figure is undoubtedly conservative.
Maher and Curtis found that in 2 neighborhoods in New York City, at least 4 women in prostitution were killed during the time they were doing research: “One woman was hurled into a parking meter from a van being chased by the police; another was murdered and her decapitated body, minus her breasts, was found over by the railway tracks. Another woman . . . was beaten to death by a date.”34
The fate of prostituted immigrant women rarely surfaces. Mar-iscris Sioson was one of the many of the 80,000 Filipino women who immigrated to Japan for jobs and in the hands of the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia, were turned into bar women. When Sioson’s body was returned to the Philippines for burial, the Japanese medical determination of organ failure as the cause of death did not stand up to the evidence on her body of extreme brutality. The unexplained brutality, evidenced in severe head wounds and slashes on her legs and other parts of her body, would have been left unexplained had Sioson’s parents not taken the medical photographs to the press. However, after President Aquino dispatched an investigator to Japan for a fact-finding mission, reports began to equivocate on the charges of wrongdoing.35
Whether foreign immigrants or local runaways, it is difficult to determine the incidence of murders and suicides of prostitute women. No one counts. Prostitute women’s disengagement from former friends, family, and “straight” society makes them anonymous, then invisible. No one knows. Within the prostitution world, no one cares.
But when a prostitute kills a trick, the John, it is as if the world might come to an end. In 1992, Aileen Carol Wuornos was convicted and sentenced to death in the killing of a trick who may very well have been a serial murderer of prostitutes, as her story, reported by Phyllis Chesler, who has championed her case, suggests:
I said I would not [have sex with him]. He said, yes, you are, bitch. You’re going to do everything I tell you. If you don’t I’m going to kill you and [have sex with you] after you’re dead, just like the other sluts. It doesn’t matter, your body will still be warm. He tied my wrists to the steering wheel, and screwed me in the ass. . . . Eventually he untied me, put a stereo wire around my neck and tried to rape me again. . . . Then I thought, well, this dirty bastard deserves to die because of what he was tryin’ to do to me. We struggled. I reached for my gun. I shot him.36
In all, Wuornos killed 6 violent tricks. A woman serial killer. Chesler points out that “serial killers are mainly white male drifters, obsessed with pornography and woman-hatred, who sexually use their victims, either before or after killing them, and who were themselves paternally abused children.”37 They do not claim self-defense, nor are they threatened with beating, rape, and murder, as was Aileen Carol Wuornos.38 After being convicted in the first trial, she was convinced by her attorneys to plead guilty or no contest to the other charges.
As a woman serial killer of men, the Wuornos case has generated dramatic media attention and her acts have incited the full wrath of Florida justice. She has been sentenced to death 5 times, and given the state’s fury over the death of male tricks, it would seem, as Chesler points out, that “if the state of Florida could, it would electrocute Wuornos once for each man she’s accused of killing.”39 The murder of women is one of the occupational hazards of prostitution, clearly demonstrated in the court trial and treatment of her case, which was dissociated from the context in which she was prostituted and reduced to sex to be used at the will of her customers, which includes his will to kill, apparently.
In Rochester, New York, Arthur Shawcross was on parole from a manslaughter conviction when he killed 11 women between 1988 and 1989. Most of the women were prostitutes. He was sentenced
