In Her Own Words... Interview with a London Call Girl (Soul Destruction)
by Ruth Jacobs
by Ruth Jacobs
Description
This is the unedited
transcript from a video interview Ruth Jacobs undertook with a London call girl
in the late 1990s. Please note that it is only 6 pages long.
It is an
enlightening and moving, firsthand account of a woman’s life affected by
prostitution, exposing the emotional, psychological, and social effects of
living that existence.
With this
publication, Ruth hopes to show the reality of life for women working in
prostitution, the effects it has on them psychologically, emotionally, in
relationships with men, how they are viewed and how they feel they are viewed
by society as outsiders and outcasts, often judged and looked down on. Seeing
them as real people, with real feelings, and acquiring an insight into their
tormented childhoods and painful present lives, allows people who are not in
that life to gain an informed perception of who these women really are, and
with that knowledge, are less likely to judge.
In Her Own Words... Interview with a London Call Girl is available for only $0.99 (US) or 77p (UK). All royalties
received from the sale will be donated to Beyond
the Streets, a charity helping
women exit prostitution.
Excerpt
From a young age, from like being fifteen, I’ve been hardened to it. The
first…when I first started doing it, I cried my eyes out every day and just
scrubbed myself in bleach and…I felt like I’d been raped. It was just…it really
screwed my mind up. And there’s this feeling when you get…when you’re with a
client and it’s like sometimes when you feel like…you grab your fists and it’s
like, “Get off me! Get off me!” And it’s like…you know you can’t push them off
you, right? Because you know you’re getting paid for it. So it’s basically
allowing yourself to be raped, right? But you can’t even fight them back or
say, “Get off me.” It’s like…and you cry while it’s happening and all this
shit, and you go home and you cry yourself to sleep after all that shit, and it
happens to you a lot of times until eventually that feeling goes away, and that
feeling…you don’t get that feeling anymore.
Review
The beauty of this
powerful and short piece is that it allows the reader to feel the despair
behind the woman, the fear that any intimacy will shatter her world. Although
you know that she is not having "fun" when working, she has no idea
what fun is, so everything short of utter degradation is called
"fun." Her tragedy becomes visceral knowing that she cannot voice her
nightmare, her language had to shrink and twist itself into her reality. Or
perhaps, she never experienced a reality much outside the prison walls she
speaks from. Either way, the readers' heart aches knowing that her world is
closing in on her rapidly.
Should anyone from
the porn/sex industry take her words literally, know that they lack empathy
utterly and are sociopaths. This is a piece to be read with a wide-open heart
and a box of tissues nearby.
From the Author
The video interview has been transcribed completely unedited, including
every broken sentence and pause. I have considered editing, but as the woman I
interviewed (referred to as Q) is no longer alive, I feel it would be wrong to
make any changes without her consent. The words in this book are Q’s, and to
respect her, her memory, and the fearlessness and courage she showed in
disclosing her innermost self, I have left her words untouched.
This charity publication and the cause is very close to my heart, even
more so because the woman I interviewed was a dear friend, a wonderful person,
and who had a painful life, with childhood sexual abuse and then being pimped
on the streets from the age of fifteen. After escaping from her pimp, she moved
to London and began working as a call girl.
From making this publication available, I hope to change the stigma some
of society has against women who work in prostitution, which is mainly through
lack of knowledge. 75% of women working as prostitutes have been sexually and
physically abused as children, 70% have experienced multiple rapes, and 67%
meet the criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder, which is a major cause of
suicide.
About the Author
Ruth Jacobs studied prostitution in the late 1990s, which sparked her
interest in the subject. Her novels dispel the 'happy hooker' myth and expose
the dark world and the harsh reality of life as a call girl. She draws on her
research and the women she interviewed for inspiration. She also has firsthand
experience of some of the topics she writes about, such as posttraumatic stress
disorder and drug and alcohol addiction.
Soul Destruction: Unforgivable, Ruth's debut novel, follows Shelley Hansard, a heroin addicted, crack psychotic,
London call girl who gets the opportunity to take revenge on a client who raped
her. Her second novel, Soul
Destruction Diary, can be read on her website. The story follows Nicole
O'Connell, Shelley Hansard's closest friend in the first book, as she travels
to Sydney, Australia, in the hope of breaking her heroin habit. The diary
charts Nicole's time there - the numerous people she meets and the situations,
some dangerous and life threatening, in which she finds herself.
More information on the Soul Destruction series can be found on the website.
Links
