“In prostitution, men remove women’s humanity. Buying a woman in prostitution gives men the power to turn women into a living, breathing masturbation fantasy. He removes her self and those qualities that define her as an individual, and for him she becomes sexualized body parts.” – Melissa Farley, Catholic Education Resource Centre.
Fair shake of the sauce bottle Mel – chicks like to masturbate too. Often in anti-prostitution literature like the one above, the author just assumes female sex workers are being used and abused because that’s how traditional values condition us to think. Obviously, if a woman is selling herself for sex than she must be an STD-ridden crack whore who stalks husbands and boyfriends like a hyena in the night. But I figure maybe it was worth asking an actual prostitute about the sex industry and her experiences in it before I go jumping on the bible-bandwagon.
Grace Bellavue is 26-year-old escort who’s been in the business for eight or so years. She’s an all-natural size 10 brunette with piercing green eyes and a ‘firm arse’ for good measure. In other words, she’s pretty fucking sexy, but that’s not really surprising. What is surprising however, is how ‘normal’ she makes sex work sound. In fact, during the course of our interview, not once did she try to seduce me or inhale my soul. She did however change my perceptions on the sex industry entirely.
How did you get into the sex industry?
I’ve been in and out of the industry since I was seventeen or eighteen so it was by choice, it wasn’t out of poverty or socio-economic reasons. I then had a career in digital media strategy and project management. For me sex work offers obviously a higher income and a lot of flexibility, the ability to run my own business, talk to clientele and I really enjoy it. Even though I was quite a creative industry and it was a lot of fun, the opportunity to own your own business and have that sort of flexibility and time is an appealing prospect.
I know that there are different types of sex workers. Some do the whole girlfriend experience while others just go for the porn star approach. Which sort of sex worker would you classify yourself as?
Everyone is really different on how they approach sex work. Some sex workers are really transparent and very much give a lot of themselves to their clientele. Others really enjoy having the alias and the secret life, secret name and dressing up and being that character, and that helps them with their work. Everyone’s got different ways of choosing their names and whether they want to perform or be more connecting with their clients or if they prefer the more porn sort of style sex or the outrageous fantasies or whether they want to do sort of more of the girlfriend experience and just sort of longer term mistress contracts. Everyone’s really different in what suits them better psychologically and physically. Some of my clients I’ve known for five or six years have lasted longer than some of my boyfriends (laughs). We’re really quite close but then you’ve also got on the other hand some clients who come in and we have really hot, almost porn style sex. They really want to try different fantasies and everything from anal to dressing costumes, role-playing, BDSM. So I cater for both sides of things and I’m pretty flexible as a person so I can cater for a lot of different kind of personalities.
Without breaking any rules of discretion tell me about some of the sorts of clients you see. I assume the large majority of them are rich, married men right?
I’d say probably 60 per cent are married and 40 per cent are single but actually I deal with a lot of female clients as well and couple clients. I really enjoy working with them as well because it’s quite a level of trust to enter someone’s relationship and sexually engage with them and see the power dynamics. Also if they’ve got any problems or they need any help or education or they just want to spice things up a little bit or something to share and discuss. So I find that side of work really fascinating as well and really enjoy doing that. Especially women that are looking to explore their sexuality or even their bi-sexuality. They go ‘I don’t know if I’m bi-sexual or if I just like kissing girls or the idea of being with a girl but I don’t know if I can date a girl’…so this way the boundaries are set and you can openly and really discuss what your looking for and what you’re looking to experiment with. It happens, you leave and the discretion, your private life remains. I had a female send her husband to me for oral sex on me. He goes ‘I need you to tell me how good I am at this’ and he was horrible, absolutely terrible. And I said honestly, that was probably some of the worst head I’ve had in my entire life. (laughs). It’s quite interesting some of the couples that come though as well. They’re like ‘uh it’s dead or what do we do’. Even just some basic skills set…she’ll be like ‘wow how did you do that? How do you give a blowjob like that? Or oh so that’s where my g-spot is.’ It’s where sex work becomes sex education as well.
You’re a bit different to most sex workers in that you have your face displayed on twitter and your website. You don’t really hide the fact you are a sex worker…
Grace Bellavue is basically me anyway really. I’m quite a transparent sex worker so I do give a lot of my private life out to my clientele. I’m very fortunate that my friends, family, even my old corporate bosses know what I do now so I don’t necessarily have to hide what I do. It’s no different to me discussing if I get home from work and if you’re a nurse or a doctor and ‘how was your day? What stressed you out? Did you have any weird clients? Any crazy things happen? What’s the politics like?’ It’s just like any other job basically. So you’ll have the same home discussions if you’re fortunate enough to have people around that will allow a better acceptance of your choice in life.
Why did you decide to be so open about sex work?
a) I’m a terrible liar and b) I’m a big believer in a do as I do not what I say sometimes. It’s pretty hard sometimes when you’re dealing with stigma and discrimination and even politics as well. You feel it’s a bit of a blurred line because giving away so much information puts me a risk of even more violence so you can get stalkers and makes it much easier for people to find me. But at the same time it can also protect you because if something happens I’m not silenced. For example I can go to my family or I can go and say look even though I technically work in a criminalized environment down here in South Australia I can still got my local police station and I’m quite happy to admit that I’m a sex worker and that something happened. Or I can go to counseling or I can go to my friends and my family and say look ‘something happened at work can I talk about it with you? Whereas unfortunately the majority of my fellow sex workers don’t have that opportunity. I mean if they get raped or assaulted at work and they want to tell – even just for counseling or to help offload some of the mental stress – if they go and approach their friends and family who don’t know what they do then they’ll doubly risk being ostracized or disowned and often it just becomes a culture of silence. What you often find too with a lot of the stigma around sex work too, approaching legal avenues – unless you get a sympathetic case worker or a sympathetic police officer – sometimes too their judgment will carry on. ’It’s what you do so it should be part of the job’…it becomes frustrating. People sit down and say I may lose my father, I may be kicked out of home, I may lose my friends, I may be judged, I may be called names, you know, it’s just not worth telling them (police) about it. So they have to internalize a lot of problems. It’s frustrating and it’s quite an unfair aspect of the industry too.
You mentioned that your parents know about your career in the sex industry. When you told your mother, how did she take the news?
I actually told her I was a drug dealer first because I had a lot of money and was buying a lot of things. For me in my head that was a more acceptable thing to tell my parents then to tell them the truth. But she said ‘no, you’re not. I’ve been finding certain things’. I think she followed me in the car once when I was catching a bus into town and turns out she saw me walking into the brothel and she said she knew what I was doing. Eventually when I told her my dad cried and she started vomiting. They had a full reaction and said ‘we’d prefer if you’d leave and go on your own path because this isn’t how we raised you. What’s wrong with you? What did we do wrong? Did someone try to touch you? Or did we fail? Did we not feed you properly’ (laughs). Suddenly they started blaming themselves because for some reason it meant I was inherently flawed. Now they’re quite supportive. I don’t go into details obviously too much with dad (laughs) but mum doesn’t mind the odd interesting anonymous client story. But like I said the journey has taken me eight-nine years but it’s taken them the same amount of time to really come around to my way of thinking and it’s still probably gonna be a longer process over time as well. It doesn’t happen over night basically.
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At this point, the interview takes a turn as Grace details how mundane the administrative side of sex work can be. For every hour spent with a client, it takes four to five hours of emailing, texting, calling, twittering, booking hotels, making appointments and all the other monotonous bullshit most would associate with a ‘real’ job. It’s actually gotten to the point where Grace now employs a personal assistant to help with all the administrative stuff.
But that doesn’t make sense. Sex work is just rocking up to a dodgy hotel, getting laid, giving head, maybe having a bit of the old crack pipe then fucking off to the next client, right? Nup. We are told to view sex workers as untrustworthy, dirty whores who must have had an abusive childhood, but if you step back and actually just think about the simplicity of it all, sex work isn’t really that big of a deal. Even Grace’s parents have learned to accept her career. Maybe one day the same can be said about society as a whole, but right now sex work cannot be separated from issues of morality with Western society’s clear fixation on Christian values making the industry a sinful endeavor that in turn, one that must be full of sinners. But sex itself is neither a sin nor evil – in fact sex, according to most reports, is actually a lot of fun.
Even as a Catholic myself – albeit a bad one – I still think there’s moral wriggle room in the sex industry. After all, Jesus Christ did spend an awful lot of time with the former prostitute Mary Magdalene, and considering he could turn water into wine at any point, you can’t tell me he didn’t get on the sauce and tap that ass. Son of God or not, he did have a penis; probably a big fucker too. Back to the point though; there are many different perspectives surrounding the sex industry that revolve around some sort of spectrum – street-based hookers down one end and the high-class glamour escorts at the other. The reality is different though, as Grace Bellavue informs me.
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The prominent image of sex workers is that of the crack junkie with daddy issues or the harlot mistress type deal. When you see these stereotypes perpetuated in the media how does it make you feel?
It’s frustrating. I mean you have to understand there are street based workers but I think people sort of see it as a spectrum, like a horizontal spectrum. So they see street-based workers as the lowest of the low and then you’ve got the high class ‘happy whores’ deal at the other end. The reality is that it’s actually more of a diamond so there’s actually not a large amount of street based workers. I know there’s probably about 20 at any given time in Adelaide. Also the choices for street-based work aren’t necessarily what people often think they are. If I want to work in a brothel I don’t get paid just for turning up so I can just sit there and if no client has booked me I’m sitting at work for 12 hours and I don’t get paid. But then I still have to pay for my transport, my own supplies, my own clothing. So a lot of people choose street-based work because it’s readily accessible and there’s no outlay for them, so apart fro putting their clothes on basically, they don’t have to worry about advertising, they don’t have to worry about staffing, they don’t have to worry about marketing, they don’t have to worry about – apart from condoms supplies, sex toys and what not – they don’t have to worry about hiring hotels or organizing apartments or phones. Moving up to the higher echelons of the industry, even though it seems all glamourous and fun, I’m constantly managing phones, or constantly answering emails or constantly trying to have to be in contact almost 24/7 with clients, managing apartments, managing tours, all this sort of stuff. So I think rather than looking at the spectrum as people of bigger or lesser worth I think people should just start actually looking at the industry in terms of ease of accessibility and work choices. For some people who may only want to pay the electricity bill all they have to do all they have to do is one night of street-based work and there’s your electricity bill paid and they don’t have to get into it full time. It may not necessarily be drug driven, or poverty or socio-economic sort of stuff, it’s just more so that they don’t have to have a boss. They can come in and work one or two shifts, done, easy and you’re not having to commit to an agency.
I find it interesting how honest and open you are with what you do. It reminds me of how gay men and women started coming out of closet in the 1970’s and 80’s as a way to confront society, challenge negative stereotypes and change perceptions. Is this something that can be applied to the sex industry?
I definitely think it is. It’s a gradual process too I mean eight years ago I told my parents and they kicked me out of home and it’s taken me eight years to this point of freedom to a degree so it’s not an overnight process. Also in term of my journey as a sex worker I’ve had to also…(missing!!)…work kind of healthier and happier and more professional and run my own business and evolve. So you go from working under aliases, to working for other people to running your own business and having your own brand and identity to manage to then deciding ‘do I show my face?’ ‘Do I give out my real name or even just my real first name?’ So it becomes a slow sort of process and I think because we really fortunate that the media is starting to become a lot more sex worker friendly and a lot of journalists are seeking out sex worker voices and there’s been this backlash: ‘why all these happy hooker stories what about all the trafficking?’ It’ll never end to a degree. But it’s helping slowly too and it’s also starting conversations. I think with the advent of new media as well, it’s connecting a lot of sex workers rapidly across the world. So there’s a lot of resource materials too for sex workers looking at come out to their friends and family and looking for support. For example I had this girl who wanted to come to her mother recently and I said to her well if you want, if it helps my mum and call your mum and they can have a cup of coffee because they can have a discussion. The typical response of mothers is ‘what did I do wrong?’…Even getting through her stigma and trying to educate her on what the industry actually is versus what it is in her head can be a long process. It can be a long process too you know, the eight years you have to go through to evolve as a sex worker then they’ve got to start from the beginning themselves. It’s not an overnight situation.
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All this considered I find it hard to understand why sex work remains criminalised in many states, including Grace Bellavue’s home of South Australia. Even in Queensland, where members of the former Joh Bjelke-Petersen government actually owned and ran brothels, our prostitution laws try to contain the sex industry rather than make it a safe working environment. I mean strewth, one of the laws in chapter 22(a) of our criminal code prohibits more than one prostitute seeing a client outside of a legal brothel. Shit, haven’t the police heard about threesomes yet?
The simple fact is that until society’s perception of prostitution changes, the laws will remain the same, which is strange considering that there are three types of law in this world: at the top we have God’s law, closely followed by the law of nature. Lastly, there are man-made laws that try to govern us all. For these legal structures to be made, a group of people have to get together and decide what constitutes the ultimate truth, and what punishment a breach of that truth deserves. The only problem is that these people are usually politicians, meaning this ‘truth’ is whatever upsets the fewest voters. So in turn, changing prostitution laws to suit reality won’t happen until society accepts that, due to the laws of nature, people love to fuck.
Until then I guess the sex industry will continue marching away, mostly in the shadows, but I think slowly but surely, there’ll be more Grace Bellevue’s out there: unashamed, vocal and happy to be a sex worker.
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Dominic Cansdale is a budding journalist and an avid political nerd. You can follow him on Twitter @DominicCansdale.
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