Paid For – My Journey through Prostitution

When you are 15 years old and destitute, too unskilled to work and too young to claim unemployment benefit, your body is all you have left to sell. ‘THE BEST WORK BY ANYONE ON PROSTUTION EVER.’ Catherine A. MacKinnon Rachel Moran came from ... Read more

When you are 15 years old and destitute, too unskilled to work and too young to claim unemployment benefit, your body is all you have left to sell. ‘THE BEST WORK BY ANYONE ON PROSTUTION EVER.’ Catherine A. MacKinnon Rachel Moran came from a troubled family background. Taken into state care at 14, she became homeless and got involved in prostitution aged 15, ending up isolated, drug-addicted, outside of society. Rachel’s experience was one of violence, loneliness, and relentless exploitation and abuse. Her story reveals the emotional cost of selling your body night after night in order to survive – loss of innocence, loss of self-worth and loss of connection to mainstream society, which makes it all the more difficult to escape the world of prostitution. Paid For reveals the raw reality behind prevailing myths about sex work: that working indoors is safer; that some forms of sex work are ‘classier’ than others; that selling sex can be empowering; that a ‘happy hooker’ exists. The biggest lie of all, Rachel says, is that women can choose to be in prostitution. At the age of 22 she managed, with remarkable strength, to liberate herself from the cycle of drug abuse and prostitution. She went to university, gained a degree and forged a new life, but she always promised that one day she would complete this book. Paid For is her story, in her own words and in her own name. ‘Striking, saturated with sad and angry detail and raw, effective analogy.’ The New York Times ‘This is surely the best, most personal, profound, eye-opening book ever written about prostitution – irrefutable proof of why it should NEVER be legalized.’ Jane Fonda ‘Rachel Moran’s Paid For should be required reading in courses on human rights, in police training and law schools, and in sex education courses that separate welcome sex from body invasion.’ Gloria Steinem Less