Documenting the lives of prostituted women: Red Light / Dark Room

From the margins to the centre

Melbourne photojournalist Gemma-Rose Turnbull writes:

I thought you might be interested in this project that I am doing. In early 2010 I started a residency with St Kilda Gatehouse, a refuge for street sex workers, teaching, photographing and interviewing the women who use their service. Red Light | Dark Room: Sex, Lives and Stereotypes is my attempt to document their day-to-day lives, and break down the inevitable stereotypes those lives entail. I received grants from the Australia Council for the Arts and the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust to complete it, which is great because it means all of the proceeds from book sales go straight back to the organisation.

It’s a journey I’m partially through, but have been detailing steps on the website I created for it (you can see it here - the blog updates section details my observations) and it’s been a really interesting and challenging experience so far. The book will be launched in conjunction with an exhibition April 9 in St Kilda.

Visit Gemma’s site. You’ll see some profoundly arresting and affecting photos of some of the most marginalised and oppressed women in our society. Trading sex for money or drugs is replete with hazards, and many suffer physical and mental health issues. Gemma-Rose brings these women from the margins of our gaze to the centre.

Gemma-Rose wrote the following piece about some of the young women she has encountered through this project. I hope you will be moved…I was.

I Heart you

She’s young, blonde and, dare I say it, a bit dumb (just in that distracted, self centered, teen way). She’s got a daggy boyfriend, and her clothes hang off her tiny hips. She likes raspberry licorice and red cordial, consuming both in vast quantities. She’s got terrible boundaries, and offends the older sex workers with her inappropriate and thoughtless remarks. Just your typical teenager really.

If I had to guess I’d put her at 16, though she could be younger. She’s says, of course, that she is 18 but I don’t believe her (unless of course her habit has already stunted her growth). The standard line when the very youngest ones walk in is “…I’ve just turned 18″. It’s the underage mantra.

She works for the both of them. Walks the street. I’m off to work she chirps, her youth emitting in the skew of her limbs that are still uncontrolled and angular as she moves. They have a heroin habit. They share it, and their homelessness, all terribly romantic and co-dependent. Excepting of course, that there is no romance left in this addiction.

He lingers after she has been taken by a car, stoned off his head, playing at being a spotter but mostly failing to take down the numbers plates like he is supposed to. He’s pretty dumb as well, and fairly monosyllabic. Again, a typical teen, complete with baseball cap, acres of boxer short above his waistband and slouchy ‘tude.

She is very sweet of course, naive and faintly annoying, but unarguably sweet. She came in yesterday and wrote on the whiteboard:

I (heart) you guys. thank-u for ur (heart) and support without this place I wouldnt get through (heart) J. L. xxx

And then added the moniker of teen love:

J. (heart) S. xxxxxx

I’m surprised she didn’t add a 4 EVA.

On Monday J. got raped. Raped by a client who beat her with his belt in the hotel room that he had booked for his lunchtime jerk-off. He pushed her on the bed and raped her from behind without a condom while she cried. It’s an awful picture isn’t it. This scrawny young girl being raped by some big guy who is, all the while, berating her for crying.

The hardest part is that she’s not the exception to the rule. The youngest ones are the easiest targets for violence at the hands of mugs. S. is another young girl who walked in today to ask in a tiny voice if she could drops some fits off in our yellow bins. She had two big hickies on her neck and I reckon she was lucky to be pushing 15. She talked so quietly, eyes darting this way and that, telling me about her habit and her baby and how guilty she felt not being able to breastfeed, and all the while I was looking at her skinny arms with scars and track marks and bruises.

She told me she was on the street for the first time after ten days in hospital, having been beaten by a mug and dumped unconscious in Richmond. I made inquiries into what sort of support she was getting to cover my dismay, and feel like I was being of some use. She was reluctant and left with a soft smile, back to business. And all I could think of was of the long and horrible future that stretched before her. She’s a baby, one that has a baby, and a habit, which she works on the street to support when she should be in school. Having fun.

A good friend and I had a discussion this week about the rhetoric that sex work is empowering. I’m not a sex worker so I don’t feel qualified to speak definitively against peoples individual experiences. But this sex work? Street sex work? This is not empowering. This seems like slavery. Slavery to a habit, sure, but more than that it is slavery to the idea that men are allowed to let their sexual desires run rampant regardless of who has to pay for it (and it’s almost always vulnerable women who pay for their most insidious fantasies). That the urge to fuck without showing any measure of self control is sanctioned because of the simple fact of your gender.

Every day our society postulates that men and women are inherently different. From the time our children are young we squeeze them into gender assigned roles, telling them what they can and can’t do. And muddled up in all that should and shouldn’t is the myth that somehow evolutionarily, biologically, sex is a male desire that society needs to cater for. It’s so ingrained that it filters through all areas of life, trickling down to street level to become an excuse that sees a middle aged man rape a young woman. I don’t buy it. I don’t buy that we have to sit back and indulgently support the unmeasured sexual desires of men.

But we do. The onus is almost always on sex workers stopping their ’socially destructive behaviour’. Very few countries target the men who solicit them instead. Very few cultures question a mans right to be oversexed. Most actively hail appalling standards of sexual behaviours (you only have to look as far as how we exalt the pack-raping antics of football teams to prove that point). And the problem with it is that these women are who that philosophy ends up being played out on. Which, combined with a steady diet of porn, advertising, movies, and music videos that stream the same damn message into our consciousness, see dangerous sex games enacted on a teenager in a hotel room.

And all the while we walk obliviously by, eating our lunches and failing to speak up about it. Because men are allowed to need sex. And because women are the vessels for sex. It’s biology baby, can’t do nothin about it. Now I just have to make sure I tell J. that next time she comes in. Only I suspect she already knows.

You can order Gemma’s book here . It will also be stocked in St Kilda Readings from April,  with the launch April 9. Proceeds go back to St Kilda Gatehouse. Cost is $50 (plus postage).