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Cynthia Connors, who now runs a computer business and volunteers for the advocacy group PONY (Prostitutes of New York), describes her experiences as a teenaged prostitute: "I was a very bad prostitute. See, I believed that prostitution involved exchanging sex for money. Wrong. It involves exchanging perfunctory sex followed by a great deal of psychological hand-holding, and a kind of psychology and nursing care. Basically you're a social worker...
"I had very few encounters where it was simply a straight exchange of sex for money . . . That was what was so hard about the job. It was exhausting. I felt so badly for these people.
"What I've come to decide is that in this society men are not allowed to say they have problems, and not allowed to go to social workers, not allowed to go to psychiatrists. It is manly, however, to go to the peeps, to go to visit a prostitute, and so those people are forced to become their educators in sex and become their marriage counselors, and also become their psychologists.
"To this day I still am in shock . . . I was too young to understand how ridiculous this was . . . But I would love to find some of these men who used to be my regular clients and say, 'I was a 13-year-old heroin-addicted little street kid. Why did you think I should be your marriage counselor? Why did you try to impress me so?'"
-- from Red Light by James Ridgeway and Sylvia Plachy
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