Talking with Women: Stella Marr

Stella Marr is the second to participate in this ongoing series, Talking with Women. We hope to continue for as long as we can. We want to talk candidly with women about matters of sexual violence, gender, sexuality, courage, strength, healing and more. We want to speak with rape survivors, mothers who have struggled, authors who feel ignored, you. We want to hear your stories. If you want to participate but are uncomfortable talking to us, please feel free to interview with a friend and send it to us, here, or to usedfurnituresubs@gmail.com (audio interviews are also acceptable). No issue will be dismissed.

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Stella Marr was prostitute in New York City for almost ten years. Then a London-based Oxford professor gave her a grand piano, a beautiful condominium across from Lincoln Center, and kept her for nearly two years. She sold the condo, using the money to finish her BA at Barnard College, Columbia University where she studied extensively with Kenneth Koch. She graduated with distinction, majoring in writing. She’s deep into a memoir about these experiences. She can be found online at http://www.stellamarr.com/.

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Used Furniture Review: On The Rumpus, Antonia Crane mentions that you two got into an argument and that it finally resolved. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Marr: Trauma tears out your tongue. For thirteen years I couldn’t talk or write about prostitution because it triggered terrible flashbacks. When I was able to write and speak of it after such a long silence, it felt urgent, like I’d been shot from a cannon  It felt like these lines from  Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”:

Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns,
And till my ghastly tale is told
This heart within me burns.

I was bringing all this energy to my comments on the Rumpus. I didn’t mean for it to be an argument, but a lot of other people felt it was. I’m a hothead and I’m proud of it in a way that makes me lose track of the effect of my words — it’s a big character flaw.

UFR: How did the conflict actually start?

Marr: It started in the comments section of the Rumpus regarding a post Antonia wrote about a topless bar house mom. I equated the house mom with a madam in a brothel, and in my experience those women are vicious. That memory put me back in time, to when I was locked in a room in a brothel. I wrote comments like I was fighting for my life. I suggested that perhaps Antonia was a madam, which was ridiculous — but I hadn’t read her other writing so I didn’t know who she was. I was thinking of the women I knew who’d been murdered or died in the ‘sex industry.’ I wanted people to understand it’s a horrible, underground gulag that grinds up vulnerable young women. It’s not a game and it’s not edgy or cool.

People  responded to my comments as if I was making an ego-based challenge.  That’s not what it was. I was a survivor crying out to be heard. Antonia understood this — she didn’t argue with me, I was the one who was a hothead.

UFR: To clarify, what’s the difference between a house mom and a madam?

Marr: I’ve never experienced a house mom, but from Antonia’s piece in the Rumpus I gather it’s a woman who hangs out in the dressing room at a strip club, brings lots of grooming supplies with her, and helps the girls get ready. I think one commenter on the piece said house moms “keep the girls in check.” In return they pay her a percentage of their tips.

A madam is a female pimp. All my madams were backed by the mafia, and worked alongside violent gun-toting men. I can count on one hand the prostitutes I met in my ten-year ‘career’ who hadn’t been  initiated into the ‘business’ by gang- rape, being held against their will, and brutal beatings. The people who profit from the brothel control the women with violence. It works on the same model as international human trafficking. The difference is that the US residents targeted by pimps are all abused, vulnerable women who almost never have people in their lives that will look for them or report them missing.

UFR: What’s so vicious about a brothel? You say you’ve known people who have been murdered; how do things go that far?

Marr: In my brothel we often saw 16 men a day — although we weren’t technically raped by the clients it felt very similar because we’d been forced into the situation. I lost count of the number of Johns who hit me, choked me, and tried to strangle me in the brothel, because it happened so many times. You get so used the violence, it seems more ordinary than coffee in the morning.

After a time in the brothel I began working as a call girl. I’ve had MS from age 18, though I wasn’t diagnosed till later, so I ended up in the ER a lot. Every time I was there they’d do a pelvic exam and the doctors would think I’d just had an abortion. The ‘work’ is that hard on your body.

I knew girls who died at the hands of Johns or madams and pimps, the poor darlings. Alicia would offer to go see the Johns the rest of us were afraid of. One of us would have to go, and Alicia wanted to protect us. She was like the soldier who dies because he runs straight toward gunfire to distract the shooter and save his unit. This didn’t happen in the brothel, it happened when I was working out-call.  The public thinks that pimps or madams ‘protect’ their call girls from violent Johns. In my experience, this is a myth. If a John is hurting a girl and she manages to phone her pimp for help,  the pimps hang up on her, and destroys anything they have that might connect them with the violent John.  If the girl is living in her own place and she doesn’t make it home, they’ll send people to destroy anything in her apartment  that might lead back to them and their business. They never call 911 or rush to help.

In 2004 the (annual) murder rate for ‘known’ prostitutes was 204 per 100,000 while the murder rate for the general population was 5 per 100,000. The true murder rate for prostitutes is almost certainly much higher, as most murdered hookers will not be ‘known’ as such by the police. Because prostitutes are rarely reported missing, it is highly likely many more are murdered but their bodies never found. There are approximately 3,500 unidentified murdered women in the US each year. Given the fact that these women don’t have families or friends actively looking for them, most are probably prostitutes, but their numbers aren’t included in the prostitute murder statistics.

Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer who murdered at least 48 prostitutes, said, “I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.”

UFR: Back to Antonia — how did you two mend your relationship?

Marr: Antonia responded by dedicating a beautiful Rumpus piece called “Why am I a Prostitute” to me.  A lot of people were commenting that even though I’d been gang-raped, tortured and held against my will, the ‘sex industry’ was good. I did not share their opinion, and this got me commenting intensely. Because the violence that marked my initiation into prostitution is the norm, not the exception. Most women writing about prostitution are madams, not prostitutes. For example, Xaviera Hollander, the Happy Hooker, was a madam. I never knew a madam who worked as a prostitute, though they might sleep with their mafia backers or pimp partners. But they’d tell the Johns they were prostitutes. The Johns love that idea, so it was good for business.

People thought I was saying Antonia’s experience was not authentic. Now, to me, that would be like saying she didn’t exist. I never said that.

I posted a note on Antonia’s blog, leaving my phone number and telling her I loved her writing. I told her to call me if she ever needed anything.

To my amazement she called the same evening. I told her it was wrong of me to jump to conclusions — I’d read more of her writing, and thought she was a super person and artist. She embodied grace, telling me she knew I was speaking from trauma and she understood. We talked and  laughed into the night. Shortly after this Antonia and Cheryl Strayed discussed me in a great Rumpus Originals Piece about the sex industry. Since then, Antonia and I have exchanged emails and encouraged each other about our writing. I feel very protective of her. Antonia’s writing is fascinating and original. She’s finishing a memoir, which is desolately beautiful. It will make a big splash. I can only speak for myself, but I feel like we’ve become friends. I hope some day we’ll meet. We’d have a great time together.

I told Antonia we’d be discussing our Rumpus argument in this interview. She emailed back: Shoulder to shoulder, we’ll tell our truths.

UFR: I love that. But so what’s your truth? What’s your story? Where have you come from?

Marr: I grew up in an anachronistic little New England farm town where the only thing to do was 4-H.  My mother is an artist and she taught me to see wind, light, shade and sunsets as important events. When she was happy each moment with her was poured full of beauty — you’d feel the drama of each breath and the passage of time.

Mom was also isolated and troubled, so I’d get beaten all the time for things like trying to steal her friends or making noise that woke her up when I came home from school. Much of the time I was confined to my room. That was life in the house. But I’d run with wild freedom into the woods, ravines, brooks, overgrown pastures and  burned-down farmhouse basements — they were right out our door.

Most of the time Mom didn’t notice I was gone, so I’d stay outside as long as I could. Dad was a receding presence, he gave in to Mom, and escaped in his work, which put us solidly in the middle class. On his own he’s an idealist. He kept  the house full of books, which saved me. But when he got with Mom things could get crazy. Every day he’d say “don’t upset Mom.” Because when Mom was upset Dad’s life was hell. But how do you not upset someone who thinks you’re stealing their friends at age four?

UFR: Did your home life effect the rest of your life, then?

Marr: My parents love to be outdoors. As a family we were at our happiest hiking, swimming, canoeing or skiing. It was spiritual. I feel like we were all kids together in a shipwreck and I’m glad we survived. Anything I write about my family — my Mom, Dad and little sister — ends up being a love story, because there was good there, and now that’s the good, the strength in me. But I was the family scapegoat which thwarted me. I loved my parents, so when they were cruel the grief would choke me. Sometimes I hated them but most times I just wanted them to love me. Things occasionally swerved into the sexual with both, but it wasn’t intentionally evil,  it was part of the craziness. As I got older Mom would tell me the only thing I could do was be a hooker.

I mention my childhood because people inevitably ask about it after I tell them I was a prostitute. When I was in junior high and high school, teachers and my friends’ parents sensed something was wrong and tried to reach out to me, but I didn’t understand it. I thought most families were like ours. We kept up appearances. I was good at that. I was also good at school even though most nights Mom wouldn’t let me do any homework. I was the editor of the yearbook senior year, but when we had to get pages to the publisher, Mom wouldn’t let me go to meetings.

UFR: How did you become involved in prostitution?

Marr: I got recruited by Barnard College, Columbia University, enrolled and was getting good grades.  But I was so traumatized from our home life. I couldn’t tell anyone the truth about my childhood, except for my best friend and sometimes lover, Gabe. A poet like me, he was also a hustler. He knew I knew he was a hustler, but he pretended I didn’t know, and I pretended I didn’t know, too. We pretended because we were trying to make a safe place of beauty for each other, where we could be wild and free.

We spent afternoons and evenings walking in the woods of north Central Park, talking about Pasternak, Hart Crane and Frank O’Hara. We’d walk through the Harlem Meer across Central Park to the east side and up Fifth Avenue. We’d take off our shoes, roll up our pants and wade in the fountains in front of the Metropolitan Museum. He died of AIDS at 24.  I still think I see him sometimes, in the produce section at the grocery store or sitting in an outdoor cafe. I miss him.

The better I did in college, the more Mom focused on me with crazy violence and the more she involved my Dad in it. I’ve always been a fighter which made it worse.  We were above the tree line when they pushed me down a steep ravine in Norway. I tumbled over sharp rocks and goat shit for more than 100 feet. When I came to they were kicking me. This escalated into more attacks during the month that followed. Then Mom said I couldn’t continue school and I couldn’t live at home. They’d claimed me as a dependent in their taxes so I couldn’t get a student loan.

I slept on a friend’s Formica dorm room floor and looked for a job every day but I couldn’t stop crying. My eyes would overflow during interviews so of course no one hired me. I felt so ashamed that I lied and told the friend I was staying with I’d found an apartment share and ‘moved out.’ Actually I was sleeping on the ripped vinyl couch in the dorm’s fourth floor lounge. The security guards knew me so they’d let me in. It was the 80s, I didn’t have a phone.

There’s an incredible poem by Sheila Fiona Black, “This Slow Ache Within Music,” that ends:

…we
are walking among the silent lost crush
where the city opens itself to us like a great bell a stoked furnace.

New York felt like that. I was so broke that I’d walk from 119th and Amsterdam to midtown to save subway fare. My grief made a micro-climate around me that drew pimps. They’d match my stride and walk next to me for blocks. I met Johnny, a gray-eyed man in a leather jacket, on Broadway and 23rd. He said he had a friend who needed a roommate, and that her family owned a restaurant and could give me a job. When we got to the apartment Johnny and two other guys who were waiting there jumped me, beat me up and raped me. They locked me in a tiny room without a window. They broke me like you’d break a horse. It was systematic. They’d rape me, beat me up, and then they’d be ‘nice,’ and give me a tuna sandwich. Again and again and again. It was torture. They dislocated my shoulder, and gave me codeine. I didn’t know if it was day or night. I didn’t think there was anyone I could turn to.

UFR: Who were these people? How did they keep you there?

Marr: One of the men was in the NYPD. He showed me his badge and gun and told me if I went to the cops, they’d kill me or beat me up and bring me back to the House. There was a madam working with them.  In the beginning they’d lock me in the room with a padlock and chain. After a time the padlock wasn’t necessary. There were invisible chains that were even stronger.

Traumatic bonding enslaves you to the people who hurt you and threaten to kill you. You bond with them to save your life.

I lived and worked in their ‘House,’ which is what hookers call a brothel. The other girls in the House were terrorized too. When we’d meet we’d say “I know your sad story.” But we couldn’t say much more because the madam would have the guys beat us up if she thought we were becoming friends. There were intercoms in all the rooms, and the madam set them so she could listen to our conversations.

It was a strictly anti-drug House.  If a man brought in drugs, he was thrown out. Prostitutes who are drug addicts are the most visible to the public, and the poor darlings have it very rough.  But these girls are more profitable for drug dealers than their pimps.  Most of the pimps I worked with were fastidiously anti-drug towards us girls, because wealthy men don’t want the health and legal risks of having sex with drug addicts.  And wealthy men are the best customers.

But when you’re a call girl there are always some Johns who want you to snort coke or freebase with them, so we all ended up doing drugs with clients.  I was enormously lucky  –  I don’t have the brain chemistry to be an addict.  It had nothing to do with inner strength or willpower, drugs just don’t affect me much. But doing drugs with these Johns turned some girls into addicts. They’d been born with the chemistry for addiction, and drugs became a way for them to deal with the trauma. Then they’d be passed on to drug-dealing pimps who use hookers to deliver drugs to their customers. I believe a large percentage of the drug-addicted hookers  people see working the streets were prostitutes before they were addicts. Their drug habits are the result of their life in prostitution, not its cause.

UFR: How did that feel? Claustrophobic? Violating? Something else?

Marr: It was like I died after being smashed into a million tiny pieces sharp as broken glass. Then someone glued my body back together but inside I was a ghost. I became a completely different being. A huge empty skating rink moved into my mind. It stretched me wider than I’d ever been.  It was hard to hold that emptiness. Falling asleep I’d see and feel pounding cocks, the way after a day at the beach, as you fall asleep, you see and feel the pounding waves. It was a cruel alternate universe. When people made quick movements or walked past me I’d jump and tremble, because my body felt like it was going to be hit.

I felt like I’d been turned into something subhuman and I could never turn back, that there was no chance I’d be accepted in the ‘civilian’ world. I’d become a hooker.

UFR: So there was ‘the civilian world’ and then your world. What did your world look like?

Marr: Trauma changes your brain. Your hippocampus, which is where you form narrative memory, shrinks till your sense of linear time is gone. You’re re-experiencing rather than remembering, which means you’re continually reliving the trauma. This was happening to all of us in the brothel, so we reinforced each other’s fear. It was like the evil enchantment from a fairy tale, but we didn’t believe the spell could be broken.

This gave the pimps power over us. People always say, why didn’t you run away, why didn’t you get help. But we’d  been brainwashed and tortured into believing help’s not possible. And we experienced society as complicit in our slavery. Because  most of the men we saw knew the people we worked for threatened and beat us. They understood it’s a living death for us. They’d lie to themselves because they wanted to partake. We were gourmet food to be devoured. When you’re in a situation where people are treating you this way, you don’t believe they will help you.

There were cops working with our pimps. The first out-call my pimp took me to was a party with fourteen policemen. He  wanted me to see  he had lots of cops in his pocket. The cops were drinking beer in a hotel suite bedroom, standing around a king-sized bed, where one cop after the other pushed himself inside me or into my mouth. Sometimes there’d be two at a time. Water flowed from my eyes, I couldn’t stop it. The cops egged each other on, and they were really drunk. One sensitive cop not much older than me saw my tears. He kept saying to his buddies, “she’s a really good whore,” and they’d agree. Then the sensitive guy would look at me like he hoped that would cheer me up.

We were the pimps’ source of income, so they spent all their time and energy keeping us afraid. All my pimps were white, some were women. They were all backed by organized crime, and the mafia were treated as very important clients. I was often sent after hours to restaurants in Little Italy and Brooklyn where mafia guys were celebrating a buddy’s return from prison (they’re usually released at midnight) and I was the welcome home present.

UFR: What’s different about that life and the life you live now?

Marr: When you’re a hooker no one believes you and you have to hide who you are from everybody. Which means you’re so lonely it feels like an ice cream headache all over your body. I was scared all the time and I’d have nightmares while I was awake. I had MS, but I didn’t know, so I had trouble walking sometimes, and I’d lose and regain my vision.

Now life is very different. Thirteen years ago I met my soul mate, Yarik, in a cafeteria at Columbia University. He’s a Siberian-born physicist with sculpted lips and dark brows so thick they seem to live their own life. We married after three months. He’s been through terrible things too, we both have a lot of baggage, but we’re each other’s safe house.

When I told him I’d been a hooker for ten years, I started shaking. We were in bed. He kept hugging me, saying “don’t be anxious.” In the morning he left and came back with two dozen pink roses: “Because you are rosy.” He likes puns. We have a big yellow lab who thinks he’s a person and dances Merengue. I’m on a fantastic MS medication which really helps. I still have nightmares about when I was a hooker, but mostly I feel safe and loved. I write and read every day. I’ll write for a few hours, take a long break to play the piano, and write again. I do a lot of bodywork such as Gyrotonic and Yamuna body rolling. I’m a Gyrotonic Instructor. It took years to heal, but my body’s brought me back from the trauma. Now I can use my body as instrument to express my love for my husband, to write, to play the piano. Transcendence is indelible. We can find our way back to it.

UFR: You combat loneliness with writing, then? You’ve seen a lot of darkness, but how do you see light?

Marr: When I was a hooker I used to pretend poets like Frank O’Hara, Rimbaud and Tsvetayeva were my big brothers and sisters, and I’d sculpt stories and poems for them in my mind. Which is still why I write — it’s an eternal conversation. I love the readers I haven’t yet met, and I love the writers that inspire me. I write to them. It’s an act of ecstatic devotion. Of course revisiting the past can be draining and harrowing — but the writing itself is bliss.

I have a few good friends. My husband and dog feel as much a part of me as my hand or solar plexus, but they’re sweeter and more tender. I’m rarely lonely when they’re around.

I love the way you said “how do you see light?” I feel it in my body: Each cell holds darkness and terror but it also holds exquisite joy and light. “The darkness is as light.”

I believe the perception of beauty is linked to survival. So is the ability to be happy. I’m lucky — I’ve always had a happiness engine revving inside me. When a sentence or line moves me, I usually remember it without trying, so by the time I became a hooker I’d memorized tons of Rimbaud, Pasternak, Rilke, Wallace Stevens, Dickinson, Tsvetayeva, Frank O’Hara and others. These writers lived in my mind and no one could take them from me. So when I was pinned under a big John I could look out the window to a stormy sky and imagine it was Yeats’s “dolphin-torn…gong-tormented sea.” I could hold its beauty in my mind till it was me, like an oyster grows pearls. I’d write stories and poems in my head and memorize them. They’d shield me from the terrible things that happened. I get drunk on the beauty of words.

Stephen Elliott’s written wonderfully about happiness in his Daily Rumpus emails:

I thought of the mountain above Park City when it was snowing flakes the size of weightless marshmallows and we plummeted into the trees where the ground was soft and dry. This ability to be happy has nothing to do with art. It operates on another line entirely.

“Something to cling to, happiness, the least and best of human attainments,” wrote Frank O’Hara. He’s right.

UFR: What about the others you worked with? Can you talk a little about them?

Marr: I was much luckier than most prostitutes I knew, in that I was twenty when I was gang-raped, broken, and my life as a hooker started. I actually looked much younger which is probably why I was targeted. I didn’t have the defenses most women have at 20. It happens younger for most prostitutes — 13, 15, 17… Being older made me more resilient.

I had it easier because I’m white. I was groomed for the highest paying men and as a result worked in better situations than most prostitutes. With few exceptions, women of color are funneled off to work in the  most dangerous circumstances, they see the most brutal Johns.

I haven’t been a hooker since the nineties, but at that time a brothel or an ‘escort service’ with white girls work usually only had one or two women of color. Most Johns who chose these girls sexualized their race completely, using racial slurs. The madams and pimps said degrading things about their ethnicity, telling them they could be sent somewhere worse in a heartbeat because there were so many others who could take their place. They had to work ten times as hard as I did.

It’s no accident that as a white girl from a middle class background I’m the one who escaped prostitution after so many years, and was able to heal and write about. Every morning I wake up thinking of the women who didn’t get out.

UFR: What about the people you worked for, your clients? Can you talk about them, too?

Marr: One of my clients, Steven, an Oxford professor with almond eyes, told me he came to life when I squeezed his hand. He gave me a grand piano and a beautiful condominium across from Lincoln Center.  As a small boy he’d been sent away from his family during WWII, so he’d be safe if the Nazis invaded England. He saw something of his refugee self in me. “You’ve been through the wars,” he’d say. He ‘kept’ me for nearly two years.

UFR: That seems so extraordinary, that kind of humanity after all you’ve been saying.

Marr: It was amazing. I was ridiculously lucky. I knew prostitutes who were kept women, but usually it wouldn’t last more than a few months. I never knew anyone who had a client give her a condominium. I never knew anyone who was kept by someone living on another continent. This gave me a tremendous amount of freedom because I’d only see Steven when he came to New York or we travelled together. I’d have four to six weeks on my own between visits. For the first few months I didn’t  leave the condominium because I was afraid the pimps would find me, so I had all my food delivered. Slowly I thawed back to life.  I sank myself into  literature, music and spirituality. Later, most nights I’d stand outside the Metropolitan Opera, the New York State Theater or Avery Fisher Hall at intermission, asking the people leaving early for their ticket stubs, so I could go in for the last half of the performance. I took classes at Juilliard. I did lots of bodywork like Alexander technique, Rolfing, Feldenkrais and Yoga because it helped heal my body. It exorcised sexual ghosts.

UFR: Did this lead to your departure from this kind of work?

Marr: Yes. Steven wanted to save me. My education is a big part of why he kept me. When he broke up with me I sold the condo and used the money to finish my BA at Barnard and take graduate classes at Columbia. I got treated for PTSD through the University. I was a full time student and lived on campus in International House, a graduate dorm. I worked at a bank, taught music, worked as a personal assistant. I still felt like a hooker, but I was no longer in that world.

I knew tons of prostitutes who were kinder than me, smarter than me, more charming than me. I didn’t escape prostitution because I was stronger, better, or more special than the women who never got out. I escaped because I was lucky and because I wasn’t as good as them. I could be fierce, even ruthless, when I needed to. I feel shame when I think of this ferocity — it’s an animal reaction. But it’s highly effective in dangerous situations, and it’s why I survived. (It’s also probably why I got in trouble commenting on the Rumpus.)

UFR: Did other people judge you as a person when you were a prostitute?

Marr: I’m sure people judged me all the time, but I was rarely aware of it. Each day was like wide water without sound that I could never swim across — it was a struggle. When I went out at night, I could feel people recognizing I was a call girl, but it felt encoded in my DNA, like the fact I have green eyes. In my first days as a hooker the part of me that cared about being judged burnt off like the surface of the space shuttle as it re-enters the atmosphere.

I lived inside sex, in a world where my being a prostitute served the interests of nearly everyone I met. The Johns wanted me to suck them, or they wanted to fuck me, or they wanted to scare me, or they wanted to believe I ached for them. The pimps wanted me to be like the girl from Andersen’s fairy tale, who puts on a pair of red shoes and dances and dances until she dies.

I did feel my life, and the lives of my sister prostitutes, were seen as expendable. We were trapped in an underground gulag because we didn’t have the safety nets most women did. But people could see our circumstances were terrible. Some women wanted to look down on us, because it made them feel better about themselves. Some men wanted to denigrate us because they were sexually insecure. This was a kind of judgment.

UFR: Did you judge yourself?

Marr: I didn’t judge myself while I was prostitute, and I don’t know one girl who did. We’d experienced cataclysmic trauma and it blasted the idea of choice from our lives. We didn’t think there were people we could turn to for help.

UFR: But so what do you want to say to people who don’t understand?

Marr: After getting out of prostitution, I felt more judgment. Most of this came from people who have no idea what we experience. When you try to explain the coercion involved, people dismiss it. I try to talk about it and people say I’m a “victim” like it’s a bad word. Sometimes they react aggressively, as if by talking about the violence and coercion in prostitution I’m attacking their sexual freedom. But prostitution has nothing to do with that. They want to shut me up. When I say most Johns (not all) are complicit in the violence my sisters and I endured, they call me a judgmental prude, even though I’ve had sex with thousands of men. You can’t make this stuff up.

These aren’t bad people, but they’re not seeing the circumstances most prostitutes are in — they’re seeing their own sexual fantasies, conceits and fears. Well-meaning people talk about how difficult it must be for prostitutes to have sex with men they don’t find attractive, as if we’re pondering dates for the prom. It’s like saying life in a Soviet Gulag must have been difficult because there were no designer shoes.

The point of all this is I feel judged when I try to explain what my life as a prostitute was like. Anyone who went through what I or my sister prostitutes did would never ask the questions that come up: Why didn’t you run? Why didn’t you fight back more? Why didn’t you go to the police?  You must have liked it, you must be lazy. But I realize why people ask these questions. They want to understand. Often their intentions are very good.

UFR: How has your experience changed you?

Marr: Roxane Gay wrote brilliantly of the effects of gang rape in her Rumpus piece, The Careless Language of Sexual Violence:

There is something particularly insidious about gang rape, about the idea that a pack of men feed on each other’s frenzy and both individually and collectively believe it is their right to violate a woman’s body in such an unspeakable manner….The actual rape ends but the aftermath can be very far reaching and even more devastating than the rape itself.

We knew the violence had taken something from us and changed the way we fit into the world, turned us into hookers, into women on the outside looking in. It splintered us to pieces.

It’s in the spaces between those pieces where life billows through you. Where you learn to feel how other people are feeling. Where you find hope like mica stones at the bottom of dark water. That never leaves you.

More Talking with Women at Used Furniture.