My Body, My Business

New Zealand sex workers in an era of change

Caren Wilton

• Publisher: Otago University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781988531434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In My Body, My Business, eleven New Zealand sex workers speak in their own voices about their lives in and out of the sex industry. Based on a series of oral history interviews, the book includes the stories of female, male, and transgender workers, upmarket brothels, escorts, strippers, private workers, and dominatrices. Caren Wilton prefaces the book with an introductory essay about the New Zealand sex industry, which in recent times has seen a lot of changes, the most profound being the decriminalization of prostitution in 2003. This engaging and highly readable book looks at what the changes have meant for the nation's sex workers.

THE INTERVIEWS

ANNA REED

ANNA REED

I WAS BORN in Dunedin in 1943, and we moved to Wellington when I was five. My father’s mother and stepfather were Polish Jews, and they came out to Dunedin as refugees in 1948. A lot of the European Jews had ended up in Wellington, and my grandparents went to Wellington to be around more of their own kind. We went too.

My father had come to New Zealand in 1938. He was very admiring of the Michael Joseph Savage government – equal opportunities and free education and health care. He was a communist and then a socialist, as many intellectuals were. He had gone to university in Zurich and studied architecture. He also went to university in Prague, and studied under Le Corbusier in Paris.

He came to Wellington and met my mother, and she got pregnant with my sister. I was born three years later, and my brother a year and a half after me. I think my parents got married on the understanding that if either of them wanted to have a relationship with anyone else, that was all right, as long as they were honest. We were aware that there were different people in their lives, and that was OK. They didn’t seem to like each other that much, which had quite a strong effect on me. He was always putting my mother down. He was intelligent and witty and could be very cruel with his wit. She used to cry a lot, and I didn’t like it at all.

In primary school I was the only child in my class that had a mother that went out to work. She could only do that because our grandparents lived with us. She worked in Wellington as a secretary for buyers for McKenzies, then secretary to biology professors at Victoria University. While she was there she did a degree in musical composition part-time. Then she went to library school. She ended up running the reference library at Victoria for many years. She was a composer, and she created a musical library database, and got a gong – a Queen’s Service Medal – the year before she died.

My mother liked to sunbathe naked down the garden, and we often had holidays where we went to remote places and all ran around naked. I remember giving a morning talk at school and saying, ‘The best thing about our holiday was we didn’t have to wear any clothes!’ Other people thought this was very strange. When I got older, my boyfriends could stay the night. I remember my father bringing us breakfast in bed on a tray, which wasn’t commonplace in those days.

At school I was good at art, and at college I went into an arts-focused stream. But I came to grief a bit. My older sister had always been a good girl, so I rebelled. Also, I think in pictures – I’m a visual person. A lot of the learning we did was meaningless. Copying huge amounts of text and swotting it up – it was like a foreign language to me. I found secondary school very boring and meaningless, and I don’t think it equipped me for what I needed in life. When I had children I vowed they would never go through a system like that.

I left school when I was just 16, at the end of the School Cert year. I didn’t turn up for all the exams. The ones I knew I wasn’t going to pass, I just didn’t bother. I didn’t do well at all – I passed English and I passed art. When I left school, my parents were horrified. Their children were all going to go to university – ‘You can’t leave school and get a job, Anna!’

I went to art school for a year. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I liked art. I’d always been top of the class at school, then I got to art school and people were so good, I just gave up. I wasn’t very focused. I used to sit around coffee bars – the Tete a Tete – with people like Bruno Lawrence and Mark Young. People who wrote poetry! I smoked my first dope. Had a lovely year doing nothing much, then my parents said they wouldn’t support me any longer. So I got a job as a photographer’s assistant for a studio in Wellington.

And I was planning to go to England with my friend and my mother. We booked, then I fell in love with somebody. So I decided not to go to England. My heart always won.

Then I got pregnant. And it was very tricky in those days – abortion was not legal at all. Finding a termination and somebody to do it was very difficult, and dangerous. It cost about 50 pounds, which was about three weeks’ salary. A woman in Karori who we called Aunty Flo did it. She had been a nurse and had been shown how to do this procedure by a doctor. She was wonderful. I had to go home after she had inserted this flexible rubber tube into me, and ring her up when I started to feel some pains and let her know what was happening at each stage. It was good. The woman eventually got sent to jail, but I think she was as safe as you could get in those days.

After that, I didn’t really feel connected to that man any more. So I decided to go to Europe. I got a ship to Italy, got off in Naples. I thought, ‘Here I am! Here’s the world!’ I had 13, 15 pounds – not much, but I eked it out, hitched around. Sometimes teamed up with somebody, sometimes just stayed alone, slept in the fields and railway stations, didn’t eat much. I didn’t meet many young females on their own. My parents worried about me hitching round Europe, but I did it for years and I always felt very looked after. I looked a lot younger than I was – I wore my hair in two long plaits with flowers through them. I had a steel hair comb with a long thin handle as a weapon, but I never had to use it. I used to tell people I was 13.

In London I met my mother’s cousin, Alison Grant Robertson, who was in her sixties, and was a huge influence on my life. She showed me that it didn’t really matter what you did as long as you knew where you were going. You didn’t have to fit inside the square. She certainly didn’t.

Then I decided to have a baby. Some of my friends at primary school had had quite elderly parents, and I had a horror of being one of those grey-haired old mothers. I didn’t really want a partner. I found it easy to love lots of people, and I always got sexually bored with one person. I liked the energy changes and having butterflies in my tummy, and that never seemed to last very long.

I went off to Wales and found a little cottage, moved everything down there and discovered I was pregnant. So that was absolutely perfect. I started meeting other hippies dotted around the hills, and I ended up in a commune in an old mansion, in the servants’ quarters. The night Shanti was born I was sitting by the fire, as we all were, sitting and playing music and drumming. I stood up and my waters broke. Everyone else dropped another acid tab for the birth experience. I was lying naked by the fire and having contractions, and somebody went and phoned the midwife.

I came back to New Zealand when Shanti was about eight months old. Communities were taking off in New Zealand. Mum had heard of one in the Coromandel called Wilderland, so I went straight there, and stayed for maybe a year.

Later I moved up to Hokianga, and I had my second daughter, Ngahuia. Then we moved to a community near Nelson. When the Christchurch Rudolf Steiner school started up, I came and checked it out and moved down – though my children have never forgiven me for sending them to the Steiner school. They didn’t have a good time at all, for different reasons.

I was always fascinated by the sex industry. I remember when I was about 14, 15, reading the court write-ups in the Evening Post. Women would be sentenced to imprisonment for something called procuring. I was fascinated by this whole concept – somebody was being sent to prison for having something to do with prostitution. I didn’t really understand why that was wrong. I remember when the Profumo affair broke in England. This was a huge scandal, and there were these two prostitutes, Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler. I was absolutely fascinated by the whole thing.

The first time I went to Amsterdam, in the early 60s, I went one night and had a look at the window girls. I stood there, and I remember so clearly thinking, ‘I would like to do what they’re doing.’ And that didn’t mean sitting in the window. I knew that they were having sex. I liked having sex with different people, and you’d get paid for it. How wonderful. What a great way to make a living.

And that was really what sowed the seed. I did other things when I was living in the country, mulled over this and that. When I came to Christchurch, I used to make soybean coffee for health-food shops to pay the children’s school fees. Then I ran into somebody who was working for an outcall massage service. And I said, ‘You know, I’d love to do that. Could I work with you?’ She said, ‘Yeah, I’m sure you can.’ So I borrowed all these clothes, because I didn’t have anything that was right.

I remember the first client I had. He was a younger man. I was 34, and he was probably in his late twenties – he was a young rep staying in a motel. I remember him saying, ‘How long have you been doing this?’ I just said, ‘A while.’ A little while – that could be a few minutes, really. A few days, weeks, who knows.

And as soon as I had my first client, I thought, ‘Ha! This is exactly what I should be doing.’ I rang up my mother, the next morning. I said, ‘Mum, I’ve got this wonderful job. I don’t know what you’d call it, I just have hour-long love affairs with people and they give me all this money.’ She said, ‘Oh my god! Oh my god! I always have shocks from you, but now I know it can’t get any worse.’

She was really upset. She’d come and stay with me sometimes – ‘Don’t tell me about your work, you know it shocks my Victorian soul to the nth degree. I don’t want to know. I can’t bear the thought of a daughter of mine sleeping with so many men.’ I said, ‘Mum, don’t worry, I never sleep with them.’ ‘Oh! That’s worse!’

She said, ‘Darling, you just don’t seem to see that there’s anything wrong with it.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t.’ She couldn’t quite get her head around that to begin with, but as years went by, she talked with a very few friends, and she said, ‘They’re quite envious actually of the way you’ve just gone ahead and done things when you wanted to do them. You wanted to have the baby without the partner – you’ve done what you wanted.’

Even though she did get used to it, she’d always say, ‘Promise me I’ll never see you on television.’ I said, ‘Why ever would I be on television?’ It just seemed too remote a possibility. When I became involved with the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective, I did it in a voluntary capacity for about three years. But as soon as I got a paid position, she accepted that television would be part of the job. In the end I think she was quite pleased with the way I turned out.

The first place I worked, in the summer of 1977, was called Pamper Visiting Massage Service. There were two outcall agencies in those days in Christchurch, and there were probably about four massage parlours and a handful of street workers. There was quite a lot of money around. It was before things happened that took a lot of money out of the economy – before we had a big drought, which affected a lot of farming money. When I was first working we saw a lot of farmers. Then we had the share-market crash, so that took away a lot of income that might have gone to the sex industry. Then the casino opened. People coming to town might have once upon a time got an escort or gone to a massage parlour, but now might take that money to the casino.

A call would come in to the base, and we would go out to wherever that person was, in their hotel, motel or home. So we would turn up with a towel and talcum powder or oil, you gave the client the choice. You laid him down and gave him his massage, and generally that would extend to something we called extras. You had to be very careful about how you worded anything, because you could be arrested for soliciting. So you played this silly little verbal ping-pong game. He’d say, ‘What extras do you offer?’ and you’d say, ‘Well, what do you have in mind?’ Always trying to get him to say it. It was silly. And you couldn’t say anything on the telephone at all.

Usually they wanted sex, or sometimes oral. Men often think that because they’re not having a full sexual service they’re not being unfaithful to their partner or wife. Or, especially with older men, they haven’t had oral sex with their wives ever, so that’s a whole new thing for them.

We used to stay an hour. We had a driver, and you’d be picked up and taken to another job. We’d go from job to job to job. The driver would come in and take the money for the agency, $30 or $40. You would ring in to say that you were OK, using the client’s phone – this was the days before cellphones. When you were ready to be picked up, if it was before an hour, you’d ring the agency and say ‘I’m ready now,’ and wait for the driver to pick you up.

The first person I worked for was the best person. He was an ex-policeman. He had a very strong sense of service in what we were doing, and I did too. Clients loved him. They would ring up and tell him all their problems – he’d spend ages on the phone. After that, I went to work for a woman, actually a transsexual. That’s when I first met trans people. She had worked in a little rap parlour. Rap parlours were places that hadn’t managed to get a massage parlour licence for whatever reason. You had to have a licence under the Massage Parlours Act 1978. She worked for this rap parlour, and she decided, no no no, she’d just set up a little house and have a couple of people working there and do jobs herself, and keep all the money rather than have to give some to the agency.

I worked for her for two or three years – I didn’t want to work in a parlour. Then she and I fell out, and that was that.

When I was first working, I would always say, ‘I’m a whore. I think this is great.’ ‘Oh, don’t say that! That’s terrible!’ I’d say, ‘I think it’s a great word. That’s how I feel.’ Then I decided I was a paid lover.

I’ve always been addicted to love in whatever form it takes. It was just very natural and easy for me to go off on that little tangent, the dance you do with somebody. But really it’s because when I was 27, when Shanti was a baby, a beautiful, beautiful being came into my life and showed me who I was. His name is Maharaji.¹ He was only 13. I went to London and somebody I knew said, ‘Anna, you’ve got to see him.’ I went into this room and he came in and sat down, and I was just totally bowled over by him. He was kind of golden. I’d never seen a golden person before. He was just emanating something. He started talking, speaking in parables, all relating to your inner person. I thought, he knows more about me than I do myself.

He showed me how to look inside myself, and it was a total revelation. I didn’t understand it at the time. But after a while I noticed that I was relating to people in a different way. I knew who I was, and I could see who they were. Not all this stuff that you think you are and you think you might be, but just going into a deeper place with them. So that was great for working, because there would be somebody who would come into my domain who I might not be physically attracted to at all. And every single time I’d just look into those eyes and see what I wanted to see, and it turns into a beautiful thing. It’s always, always been like that. If it stopped, I would have stopped working.

I believe some sex workers have a colder approach. But I don’t know how you could do something that’s really intimate without being intimate yourself. I’d come out of a room looking like I’d been in bed with somebody for a weekend. And I’d sing. I’m also a very noisy lover, and every parlour I worked at, people would say, ‘I could hear you down the corridor.’ I’m just very noisy, always have been. Some men really like that, and some people didn’t like it.

People think I must know all this stuff and have all these secrets. But I wouldn’t ever do anything to anyone that I wouldn’t like done to myself. That was really my bottom line. Some people would want me to stick my fingers up their bums, and I don’t like that myself, so, ‘I’d rather not do that.’ I was into major kissing for a long time. I always thought, how can you make love with somebody without kissing them? When I had to become more health-conscious, I had to revise that, learn to kiss in different ways.

Sexually I’ve always been very multi-orgasmic. With clients it was often better than with lovers, because it was all new and exciting. I always got bored with one person – I don’t like predictability. Sex work just was made for me, I tell you. And I believe that in other civilisations, other times, that we were highly revered, we were the wise women. We were often nurtured into this role. And I really understood that.

Years later I went to a workshop with Annie Sprinkle at an international sex workers’ symposium in LA. There were various streams of things you could do, and one was Annie Sprinkle, who’s a porn star. She did this workshop on sacred sex, and it was a very profound experience for me. It was the first time I had been in a room with other sex workers who were going along a similar path – they had an understanding of sex work that was deep inside. It was great. I didn’t feel alone any more.

I hadn’t realised that I felt alone until I went to that workshop. It’s just doing sex work from a place of love inside yourself. A lot of people that I worked with had a totally different experience. The word ‘love’ would never have entered the equation in their understanding of what they were doing. But the workshop was very enlightening – it was like, yay! There are lots of us out there!

When I worked from the trans woman’s house we also did outcalls, and I did my own driving. I had a funky old two-tone purple bus, which was very noticeable. I used to park it down the street from where I was going, so the neighbours wouldn’t say, ‘What was that bus doing outside your house?’ I drove myself to deserted old factories and all sorts of things. Looking back now, I did go to some pretty strange situations, and there were a couple of times that could have been challenging. But I always felt looked after. I think that if something is happening and you react with fear or anger, it’s likely to manifest and grow into something else.

I remember being at a motel. I was in the shower, and the man took my money out of my bag. I knew he had, and he totally denied it. It was money he had given me, and then it wasn’t there. I was so hurt that I had given him my love and he had done that to me. That was probably the most overwhelming feeling that I had. How could you do this to me, when I’ve given you my love? Because that’s how I always was with my clients.

I wanted him to pay for it in some way. Part of me was really angry. I remember coming down the steps – it was about two o’clock in the morning – and I screamed out, ‘You’re a liar! You’re a thief! And what’s more’ – I was trying to think, what’s the worst thing I could say to him – ‘and what’s more, you’ve got no love in you whatsoever, no love in you!’

Another time I went to a motel. I’d seen the man before, and there wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION: A brief history of sex work in New Zealand
• THE INTERVIEWS
• EPILOGUE
• GLOSSARY
• THE PHOTOGRAPHS
• FURTHER READING
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS