Photo credit: Kandie Stroud
“Paid For” – a good thing? Not always. Just ask Rachel Moran, author of Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution. It’s a stamp she never wanted. This is her story and it’s nothing like Pretty Woman. “I personally wasn’t all that offended by Pretty Woman,” she told Hollywood on the Potomac. “I know a lot of women who were and it’s important to say so; but I personally thought it was too ridiculous to be offended by. It was completely bubble-headed – a fantasy – and it to me seemed to be trying to present prostitution in a certain light. It was too ridiculous.”
The publisher (Gill & Macmillan Ltd) describes Paid For this way: “When you are fifteen years old and destitute, too unskilled to work and too young to claim unemployment benefits, your body is all you have left to sell. Rachel Moran came from a troubled family background. Taken into State care at fourteen, she became homeless and got involved in prostitution at age fifteen. For the next seven years Rachel worked as a prostitute – 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 a loss of connection from mainstream society that makes it all the more difficult to escape the prostitution world. At the age of 22 she managed, with remarkable strength, to liberate herself from that life. She went to university, gained a degree and forged a new life, but she always promised that one day she would complete this book. This is Rachel Moran’s story, written in her own words and in her own name.”
Rachel Moran at MSNBC
Hollywood on the Potomac sat down with Rachel on a blustery day at 3:00 PM at Peacock Cafe in Georgetown. She was calm, her voice was mellow, she had a sense of humor – we weren’t expecting that. She wasn’t angry, we weren’t expecting that. She was, however, determined to get her message across: “Legal or not legal, prostitution is a crime.” We also weren’t expecting the restaurant to be packed, so bear with us and tune out the background noice because her words are best consumed in context with her physical being.
Rachel Moran on her childhood, her time as a prostitute, her thoughts on legalized prostitution and where she is now:
“I am thinking now of the wind-up toys I remember me and my brother playing with as very young children in my granddad’s flat. I had a tin penguin and he had a motorbike with a rider attached. We would wind them up at the back and my big penguin would walk unsteadily around the room while his smaller motorbike would whiz around it. When they’d used up all their energy they’d stop – frozen, inanimate objects again – until someone (not they) decided it was time again for them to start moving. I see now that’s what we were, us young women and girls. Money was our wind-up mechanism.” Page 284 – Paid For
Rachel Moran with Kandie Stroud
“No amount of theory from those who have never been prostituted can replace the truth and power of experience. 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. She has given us the gift of Honesty. Now it’s up to us.” Gloria Steinem
“People who are working to end sexual exploitation will take heart from Moran’s example of transformation and an insistence on basic human dignity.” President Jimmy Carter
“Surely the best, moral personal, profound, eye-opening book ever written about prostitution – irrefutable proof of why it should NEVER be legalized.” Jane Fonda
