Read Online Eight Pieces on Prostitution by Dorothy Johnston, Port Campbell Press - Free Book Online Page A

the prostitutes’ point of view.
    Gail wanted nothing to do with it, neither the meeting nor the leaflet; but for once I didn’t go along with Gail.
    â€˜Another thing a group like ours could do,’ said a tiny woman who introduced herself as Bonny. ‘We could put together a booklet on the legal stuff – you know, what to say when you get busted, stuff like that. When a girl starts working, she’s often told to use a false name. But that can work against you when you get to court.’
    Not everyone agreed with her. Someone told the story of a case in America where a girl was charged with soliciting and pleaded not guilty, using the defence that the cop had solicited her, and won her case.
    Fifteen women came to our second meeting.
    â€˜We don’t want it legalised,’ said Bonny. ‘It’d mean more compulsory visits to the VD clinic.’ Bonny had three rows of sleepers on her ear-lobes. When she shook her head, shells and silver charms made small, determined sounds.
    â€˜But the law should be changed,’ said someone else. ‘When you’ve been busted once, the cops can pick you up going to buy cigarettes. Especially in St.Kilda. The girls who work here get hassled all the time.’
    We talked about how we’d started working. Bonny laughed and said, ‘I got my first job through the CES. “Would you like to work as a masseuse, dear?” We laughed with her because it was a familiar story.
    Gail looked sceptical when I told her about the group. I told her when our next meeting was, but I knew she wouldn’t come. All she wanted was to finish her studies and go overseas.
    A lawyer called Therese rang me and said she’d been asked to get in touch. When I said one of us intended speaking at the public meeting, she said, ‘You’ll be crucified.’
    I told her we planned to go around the parlours, handing out our leaflet, and that a lot of girls were suspicious of the Council. They were suspicious of what legalisation would mean. ‘But some of us want the laws repealed.’
    Therese offered to help us get more copies run off.
    She brought a plate of cheese and biscuits to the next meeting of our group. Somehow the conversation got around to marriage.
    Therese told us she’d been married for seventeen years to a man she hated. ‘He used to come home and fuck me when he was drunk. You know something? I couldn’t kiss him. I could bear to have him fuck me, but I couldn’t kiss him.’
    We stared at her uncomfortably, wondering what would come next.
    â€˜Changing the law is one thing,’ Therese said. ‘Of course it should be changed. But it’s only my experience of being married to that bastard that makes me even want to understand what it’s like for you.’
    I felt embarrassed and looked down. But Bonny and some of the others were nodding enthusiastically.
    I thought about this afterwards. Therese was very up-front with her opinions, but then weren’t we planning to be up-front as well? Wasn’t that how we’d decided to be? What was it that made her so different from us, after all, but an ascending scale of boredom, the one-two, one-two rhythmic attrition of the work itself? That and a law degree.
    The evening of the public meeting was dark and wet. Cars edged into parking places around the town hall, windscreen wipers batting ineffectually. Cars queued in the driveway. Drivers sat bent over steering wheels while their tyres disappeared under the overflow from gutters, covering the road with a foam that looked yellow in the streetlights and made me sick with nerves.
    We shook out our umbrellas in the foyer and spoke in lowered voices.
    â€˜D’you think the weather’s on our side or theirs?’
    â€˜Bloody Melbourne spring.’
    The mayor came in, shaking out his black umbrella. He had a red carnation in his button-hole; his hair was combed into a neat page boy.
    â€˜There