Some time ago I discovered the reason

by Beatriz Mercado

Some time ago I discovered the reason why prostitutes have always drawn my attention. There are people on the streets who you see but don’t notice, people who don’t attract your attention. On the other side there are people you notice immediately, that you even subtly watch, because you’re intrigued by them. Sometimes you know why, most times you don’t. I’ve always been intrigued by prostitutes. I’ve always had a sad feeling about them. I don’t take their clothes, their make up, their laughter as a proof everything is fine with them. I can perceive something tragic, something deeply sad behind all that.

Lately I’ve been talking to a friend who I hadn’t seen in many years. Of course we told each other what we had been doing all this time. Eventually, the subject came up: my friend had been in prostitution for some time. This finding made me to begin a journey with her, a journey in which she remembered her experience and I got in touch with sexual violence issues, something that I’ve never lived myself but always thought about wondering what would I do if it happened to me. My friend told me sexual violence isn’t really related to sex, it is about power and abuse. This way I understood better why prostitution caught my attention. I’ve been through experiences which, while not related to sexual violence, have to do with abuse and power. I could understand that well.

As I listened to her story my first reactions were surprise, horror, pain. Then I felt an intense need to help her heal somehow. Finally I began to relate her experience with some other stories that I’m familiar with, stories which give me clues to understand the world, to have some answers as to why pain exists and what purpose there is in suffering and death. The similarities between experiences became evident and one story helped me to make sense of the other one. The main story I’m referring to is the story about Jesus Christ’s Passion, which is my key to understand , my own perspective to see the world. Prostitutes, as Christ, are persons, their dignity coming from being human (human dignity is never lost, it doesn’t matter what the person might do). Both are in a situation in which they are suffering in a horrible way. Neither one has “looked for it” because is there a chance that a human being may willingly seek out for pain for no reason, unless she/he is very sick and wishes to hurt himself/herself?

Christ and prostitutes were simply there, bearing physical pain but mostly dealing with the pain that comes from being hurt with no chance to defend themselves, having no one to stand by them, feeling the worst of loneliness, getting mockery and scorn from everyone around. Every pain is easier to bear if we can share it with somebody, when we have a familiar friendly face near by. There was no friendly face near Christ’s cross, except for his mother and a friend. But there was a mob making fun of him and finding pleasure in his suffering. There’s also no friendly face near prostitutes, only people interested in what they can get or people ready to scorn them. And a lot of people that enjoy prostitutes suffering or finds it fair or even exciting. Jesus being tortured to death was found fair by people in Jerusalem. Many persons enjoyed it, gathered together to watch the spectacle.

To me, today’s prostitutes are hanging from the same cross that Jesus Christ was once hung from. For all of us, who call ourselves Christians, this should be a strong call to not lose what’s essential: God’s will is done when we become more human . . .and we become more human when we can look into anybody’s eyes and feel that his/her pain isn’t really unconnected to us, that we can also feel it, that somebody else’s pain is our own pain and that the world can’t be a good place to live as long as there are persons suffering alone.

For people who are not, or don’t feel themselves as Christians, Jesus’ story is the story of a tortured person which enables us to understand better all tortured people, the ones who get our attention, but also the ones we think of as part of the scenery. As happens with prostitutes. It is horrible to say that a person which is systematically tortured is part of the scenery. But it is so. Maybe making a parallel between Christ and prostitutes allows us to consider prostitutes stories from a perspective which their suffering as persons will stand out and not fall so easily under judgment and stigmatization.

When the gospels say Christ took on himself our sins I realize the same can be said about prostitutes, even though they do it without knowing, involuntarily: they take on themselves everybody else’s sins, violence that people don’t dare inflict on anyone else, irresponsibility, the lack of ability to take out the best we have, the best and not the worst, to establish a relationship with another human being. Prostitutes take on themselves our lack of respect for human beings as society, our drive to discriminate, our need to believe that we are “superior” because there is somebody we believe we can call “inferior”. They take on themselves our lack of ability to build a world in which all beings, absolutely all of them, can be happy and to give and receive the best they brought to the world when they were born.

My father used to say prostitution was “the oldest profession in the world”. That sentence now makes me think that from the beginning of the world we’ve had these broken relationships, affected by abuse and power, where there must be always a group of people ready to receive violence from others, doing a so considered “necessary” function, a horrible function anyways. Prostitution has existed in most cultures at all times, as far as we can remember. However, the need to abuse others, even if it occurs within a commercial frame, indicates human relationships are plagued with fear and anger. I don’t believe that’s good for us as a society. But we can change that, we can end that type of relationships, replace them by relationships based on respect, peace which arises from real acceptance of others, as the other person is. When our way to relate to each other , human beings and also animals and nature, doesn’t include anger or fear anymore, need to abuse will disappear. Then prostitution will be, at last, a bad memory from the past.