Testimony in Minneapolis: Prostitutes and Porn (explicit language)

Citizens gave testimony about their encounters with porn and those who consume porn to the Minneapolis Government Operations Committee on December 12, 1983. This account appears in In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (p.114-120). Portions of it have appeared in earlier posts.

Testimony of T. S.

I am speaking for a group of women. We all live in Minneapolis and we all are former prostitutes. All of us feel very strongly about the relationship between pornography and prostitution. Many of us wanted to testify at this hearing but are unable because of the consequences of being identified as a former whore. This is absolutely incredible to me that prostitution is seen as a victimless activity, and that many women are rightly terrified of breaking their silence, fearing harassment to themselves and families and loss of their jobs.

We have started to meet together to make sense of the abuse we have experienced in prostitution and how pornography endorses and legitimizes that abuse. These are some of our stories. The following has all happened to real women who are the exception because they have survived both pornography and prostitution…

One of the very first commonalities we discovered as a group: we were all introduced to prostitution through pornography. There were no exceptions in our group, and we were all under eighteen.

Pornography was our textbook. We learned the tricks of the trade by men exposing us to pornography and us trying to mimic what we saw. I could not stress enough what a huge influence we feel this was. Somehow it was okay. These pictures were real men and women who appeared to be happy consenting adults, engaged in human sexuality.

Before I go on–one might make the assumption that if a woman got involved with pornography and prostitution after she was eighteen, that she is a willing participant. And since the women I speak for were all underage when they began, it is easier to see them as victims. Personally, I feel this to be very dangerous. By talking to women who got involved with prostitution and pornography in their early twenties, the powerlessness and victimization they described and experienced is the same that younger women and children feel…

One of us had the experience of being paid by a client to go to a house located in the 6th Ward. When she got there, she found a group of physically disabled men and a group of physically abled men. Everyone was watching pornographic films–movies of men fucking women, women doing oral sex on men, and women being penetrated by animals. The movies were played continuously.

The able-bodied men were joking and making comments like, “That’s how real men do it,” instructing the handicapped men, teasing them that if they watched enough of these movies they would be able to perform normally. There were constant remarks made about what normal male sexual experience was. Then the disabled men were undressed by the abled men and the woman was forced to engage sexually with the disabled men. There were two weapons in the room. The woman refused and she was forced, held down by the physically abled men. Everyone watched and the movies kept going. There were various physical deformities, amputees, paraplegics. Some were able to perform. Some weren’t.

After this, the able-bodied men said they were going to show the handicapped men how “real men” do it. They forced the woman to enact simultaneously with the movie. In the movie at this point a group of men were urinating on a naked woman. All the men in the room were able to perform this task, so they all started urinating on the woman who was now naked. Then the able-bodied men had sex with the woman while the disabled men watched.

Another story is, a woman met a man in a hotel room in the 5th Ward. When she got there she was tied up while sitting on a chair nude. She was gagged and left alone in the dark for what she believed to be an hour. The man returned with two other men. They burned her with cigarettes and attached nipple clips to her breasts. They had many S and M magazines with them and showed her many pictures of women appearing to consent, enjoy, and encourage this abuse. She was held for twelve hours, continously raped and beaten. She was paid $50 or about $2.33 per hour.

Men would constantly want to do what they have seen in pornography. If pornography was not actually in the room with the client, there would be constant reference. One example is that a woman was in a room with two clients, one man told the other that he had seen some pictures of women who had shaved their pubic hair and that it had turned him on. They then proceeded with a jackknife to remove the woman’s pubic hairs, plucking and burning what the knife had missed. They made comments of how her hairless vagina reminded them of their young daughters’ genitals. They then, of course, engaged in intercourse.

Women were forced constantly to enact specific scenes that men had witnessed in pornography. They would direct women to copy postures and poses of things they had seen in magazines and then they would take their own pictures of the women…

When Deep Throat was released, we experienced men joking and demanding oral sex.

It is very amazing to me what happens when a group of ex-prostitutes get together in one room and tell stories. One of the things we discovered was that the men we had serviced were very powerful men in this community. Especially interesting to us are the amounts of men involved in the media in this community that use prostitutes and pornography. These are the same men that perpetuate the myth that Minneapolis is a clean city with exceptional morals and a high quality of life.

In closing, I would like to say that, in my experience, there was not one situation where a client was not using pornography while he was using me, or that he had not just watched pornography, or that it was[n’t] verbally referred to, and directed me to pornography…

My wish is that you could see with my eyes just for a day how clear the relationship is between pornography and the systematic abuse of women.

I would also like to say that I’m petrified and scared for young women today. I believe the pornography that is published today is more brutal and dangerous than when I was involved. And because I understand clearly the direct relationship between the material and the abuse of women, I am very terrified of the consequences of what that means…

I also have a couple written testimonies of women who were not able to speak tonight for the reasons I already gave.

This is a story of a woman who works at the University of Minnesota and could not speak for herself. She was involved in prostitution between 1970 and 1974.

I remember a house on Second Avenue South, near 22nd Street which I was asked to go to by a trick. He told me that I would be able to make a lot of money there. It turned out to be the same house that my pimp had been urging me to go to where he told me young pretty girls could go and get tied up, beaten and burned with cigarettes, and earn $500 for a short half hour’s work. I had steadily refused to go, but when my pimp found out that I had been invited, so to speak, I had to go there.

The woman who ran the place actually lived there with her children. She kept a room upstairs for the tricks to use. It had a projector to show porn films and there was stacks of pornographic material in the room. The tricks would go in there, look at the porn to get psyched up and then the girl would be sent into the room. The youngest girl I know about who went there was only 13.

When I went into that room, the trick said that I was almost too old, but he was pleased with me because I looked young. He stripped me, tied me up, spread-eagled, on the bed so that I could not move and then began to caress me very gently. Then, when he thought that I was relaxed, he squeezed my nipple really hard. I did not react. He held up a porn magazine with a picture of a beaten woman and said, “I want you to look like that. I want you to hurt.” He then began beating me, and when I didn’t cry fast enough, he lit a cigarette and held it right above my breast for a long time before he burned me. I told him that as God was my witness, he had better kill me or untie me right now, because if he didn’t, I would turn him in to the police and that I would call his wife and tell his family about him. He believed me and let me go. But I know that this house continued to provide that service for those who could pay.

When I worked at massage studios, the owners had subscriptions to Playboy, Penthouse, Penthouse Forum and the like. These magazines were arranged in the waiting area of most of the massage places which I worked in. If a girl was not inside with a trick, she was expected to sit out front with the men who were waiting or who were undecided and to look at the magazines with them in order to get them titillated. The men would ask me questions like, “Do you really like it when more than one man fucks you?” “Do you really like to suck men off, like this hot little number who wrote the letter to the Forum?” et cetera. They used the soft porn to help them work up the courage to try the acts described in the magazines with the prostitutes at the massage studio. At one point, I was on the company payrolls of a couple well-known businesses in Minneapolis. One of these companies, an insurance firm, kept an apartment in Edina which was used as a place to entertain big clients when they came to town. The place was very expensively furnished, had parquet oak floors, a well-stocked bar, and in the closets, stacks of pornographic films and magazines and pictures, as well as lingerie for the women to wear. When I was there, what usually happened was that the man in Minneapolis who was in charge of “entertainment” would invite some local associates who wanted to have a good time along with any visiting big shots who needed or wanted to be entertained by the apartment. The men would usually get there first, and start drinking and watching porn movies. Then three or four women, always a lesser number than the number of men present, would arrive. They would ask us to get into the lingerie and maybe show another film or bring out pictures. And then the intercourse would start, all in one room, so that some men were watching. This was all straight sex and the men were never coercive, but I got paid extra money if I could find prostitutes who were willing to have anal sex or who were willing to perform oral sex on another woman in front of the men. These slightly deviant acts were depicted in the films and photos in that apartment. Although I don’t know one way or the other, I have no reason not to believe that this apartment still exists today.

This is another story of a woman who is currently working downtown in Minneapolis.

I was the main woman of a pimp who filmed sexual acts almost every night in our home. The dope man, who supplied us with cocaine for free in exchange for these arranged orgies, was a really freaky man who would do anything. They arranged to have women, who I assumed were forced to be there, have sex with dogs and filmed those acts. There were stacks of films all over the house, which my pimp used to blackmail people with.

One morning I came downstairs in time to see a very young girl run naked out of the house. I found her friend, also naked, tied up in the closet. The one who ran away, after being forced to perform sexually all night, went to the police. I don’t know what my pimp did with the other girl. I do know that he kidnapped them and felt safe, because they were foreign and alone. The girl came back with the police, but nothing ever happened. My pimp continued to make films of people doing every kind of sex act in the living room of our home…

[Andrea Dworkin:] Could you…talk about the relationship between the pornography shown and pictures actually taken of the young women that it was being shown to?

How it was introduced was that young women would be picked up on the street, off the street, and everyone’s first experience was always the same, which was that the man would show either magazines or take you to a movie and then afterwards instruct her to act in the way that the magazines or the films had depicted. Usually after, I call it a training period, what would happen then is that these men or different men would set up scenarios of usually more than one woman to very, very specifically copy and reproduce scenes that were portrayed in magazines and books that they had witnessed. And then they would make their own movies using home video equipment and also Polaroid cameras and they would collect their own library of pornography involving these women.