‘C’ sent this harrowing account of her experience of child sexual exploitation, prostitution, and extreme BDSM through our Share Your Story page. This provides a space for women (and men) to write about their experience of the sex industry in their own words.

I ran away from sexual abuse that included torture and bestiality at home when I was still a child. I made my way to the closest big city, NYC, where I was tricked by an attractive young couple who pretended to be concerned for me. They took me home and chained me up to a pole by a dirty mattress on the floor of their basement. They took my ID and gave me a fake one that said I was 18, and they attempted to force me to dance at a club called Sin City, which has since been shut down for a myriad of very valid reasons. I balked. I could not make myself go on. I received a beating, and a few days later, I was brought to another club. I was told that this new club wasn’t as nice, and this was my last chance. It’s not so much that I refused as I was frozen with fear.

Then they put me on the street. I was told that people were always watching me. My family were threatened. I was to suck and fuck whatever disgusting dirty old man wanted me at $40 a go. I was too scared to flee and went along with it. I did not escape until a kind business owner took me home with the intention of having sex with me, but didn’t force me when I said I didn’t want to, and offered to put me on a train.

That was my first time being forced into prostitution. I was similarly violently coerced into sexual slavery again, this time while hitch hiking through Ohio, before coming of age. There were also many unwanted sexual experiences that don’t fall under the umbrella of prostitution during this time. Men would do what they wanted to me whether I consented or not. Increasingly, I just let them. I would get it over with, and if I was really “good”, I might be rewarded with food, a place to sleep, drugs to numb the pain.

By the time I actually was 18, I had already been a sexual plaything to men for over a decade. They were going to fuck me whether I wanted or not. I might as well get paid for it. But I still didn’t want to have sex with them. I became convinced, with the help of some very bad advice from other women just as lost and hurt as I was, that extreme kink BDSM domming was the answer. “You don’t even have to sleep with them! You are the one in power. You get paid to hurt and humiliate them, it’s almost payback! It pays much higher than street prostitution.” Many such misconceptions abound.

The sex acts I was performing now were indeed just as disgusting to me, more physically and emotionally labour-intensive than ever, and exposed me to a wider range of dangerous and gross bodily fluids.

I was by now settled in Seattle, where supply and demand soon cemented me into the niche of forced feminization/sissification. Many men wanted to be dressed in floofy dresses, lingerie, hair, nails, and makeup, or diapers. They wanted to have tea parties where they were chastised as a dirty little slut and told to close their legs. They wanted to be spanked, punished, and sexually abused by a mommy. I was frequently asked to pretend to be someone they knew who would be upset to find they were unwittingly part of these men’s fetishes. A boss, a wife, a parent, a rival.

And fetishes they had, in spades. Pegging, nipple torture, urethra insertion, cock and ball torture, paedophilia role play, voyeurism, cuckolding, pregnancy and lactation, menstruation, race degradation, animals, leather and latex, terrible and creative uses for random objects like dirty socks or toothpicks, food, feet, scat, blood. If you can think of a noun, it was somebody’s kink.

Never, ever, even while literally standing over man holding a switch, was I actually the one in control. I was a slave whose owner got off on pretending he was the slave.

For three years I was trapped in this revolving door. By 22, I had escaped for good, but the trauma continued to fester until I was about 30 years old, when the pain spilled over the edge and I had a breakdown. I trauma dumped everywhere, very publicly.

I thought my story would be shocking to others, that people who knew me but didn’t yet know that part of me, would be outraged, that we would rage against the machine together, but instead, overwhelmingly, I was blamed. I was told that I abused those men, not vice versa. That I was hurting sex workers. That it was an empowering job and a choice made freely I was trying to take away from other women.

I was told that I was only hurt by my time in sex work because I was weak and couldn’t hack it. I began searching out other survivors, who actually listened to and agreed with me, and I found them in droves. They saved my life. These brave women are called SWERFs. That stands for Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminists. It’s a slur in “progressive” circles. But it sure seems to me the ones excluding us are those who try to shut us up when we speak on our experiences. The master has a kink for pretending they’re the slave, after all.

Share your story

If you’ve been in the sex trade, or have been affected by it in other less direct ways, and would like to share your story anonymously, please see our Share Your Story page.