1

5. “Renting an Organ for Ten Minutes:” What Tricks Tell Us about Prostitution,
Pornography, and Trafficking

Melissa Farley

Farley, M. (2007) ‘Renting an Organ for Ten Minutes:’ What Tricks Tell us about
Prostitution, Pornography, and Trafficking.
In Pornography: Driving the Demand for International Sex Trafficking
Los Angeles: Captive Daughters Media.
<mfarley@prostitutionresearch.com>

The perspective of a trick:

“I was like a kid in a candy store. I mean, it was nothing for me to knock off four
broads in an afternoon. We’d go by the numbers. ‘Twenty-three A for Mr.
Lewis, Please! No, Twenty-four A is the blonde; twenty three A is the brunette.’
Jesus Christ….It was just wonderful! The thing that was not wonderful about it
was that there was no morality. I had no morality. I had no guilt. I thought: This
is what men do.” [author’s italics]1

The perspective of a woman in prostitution:

“Every day I was witness to the worst of men. Their carelessness and grand
entitlement. The way they can so profoundly disconnect from what it is they’re
having sex with, the way they think they own the world, watch them purchase a
female. I was witness to their deep delusions. Spoiled babies all of them, and so
fmany of them called prostitutes. I thought, maybe all men called prostitutes. It
was a terrible thought, but really, what did I care. There was a system in place
that was older and stronger than I could begin to imagine. Who was I? I was just
a girl. What was I going to do about it. If I had any power I would make it so that
nobody was ever bought or sold or rented…”2

Before I describe some preliminary results of research interviews with men who
buy women for sex, I’d like to tell you what we found out about the effects of
pornography on women in prostitution. When men use pornography, in that process they
are trained as tricks. Pornography is men’s rehearsal for prostitution. Pornography is

1
J. KAPLAN, The Laughing Game: Profile of Jerry Lewis, THE NEW YORKER, Feb. 7,
2000, at 61-62.
2
M.Tea & L. McCubbin, RENT GIRL 29 (Last Gasp 2004).
 2

cultural propaganda which drives home the notion that women are prostitutes. One man
who used pornography said “I am a firm believer that all women… are prostitutes at one
time or another.”3
New research on the effect of pornography on women in prostitution

Interviews with 854 women in prostitution in 9 countries4 women and men in

prostitution made it clear that pornography is integral to prostitution. In 9 countries,
almost half (49 percent) told us that pornography was made of them while they were in
prostitution. Forty-seven percent of our respondents were upset by tricks’ attempts to
make them do what the tricks had previously seen in pornography.5 These numbers are
similar to those reported by the WHISPER Oral History Project in 1990.6 Fifty-three
percent of the WHISPER interviewees reported that tricks made pornography of them.
Fifty-two percent of the WHISPER women reported that pornography played a
significant role in teaching them what was expected of them as prostitutes. Eighty
percent said that tricks showed them pornography in order to illustrate the specific sex
acts that wanted performed.
Andrea Dworkin wrote about prostitution in 1983:

“Her mind is hurt by rape and other physical assault on her body, it
fades and shrinks and seeks silence as refuge; it becomes the prison
cell inside her…..Every invasion of the body is marked in the brain:
contusions, abrasions, cuts, swellings, bleeding, mutilation, breaking,

3
S. HITE, THE HITE REPORT ON MALE SEXUALITY (New York, Knopf, 1981) p.
760.

4
Canada, Colombia, Germany, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, United States,
and Zambia.
5
M. FARLEY, A. COTTON, J. LYNNE, S. ZUMBECK, F. SPIWAK, M.E. REYES, D. ALVAREZ,
U. SEZGIN, Prostitution and Trafficking in 9 Countries: Update on Violence and
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, in PROSTITUTION, TRAFFICKING, AND
TRAUMATIC STRESS, 44 (M. Farley ed., Haworth 2003).
6
E. GIOBBE, Confronting the Liberal Lies about Prostitution, in THE SEXUAL LIBERALS
AND THE ATTACK ON FEMINISM 67-81 (D. Leidholdt & J.G. Raymond eds., Teachers
College Press 1990).
 3

burning. Each capacity of the brain – memory, imagination,

intellect, creation, consciousness itself – is distressed and deformed,
distorted by the sexualized physical injuries that girls and women
sustain.”7

Psychologists are usually not that specific, and certainly not that eloquent,
regarding the harms of prostitution and pornography. Post-traumatic stress disorder, or
PTSD, is a crude measure of the overall level of emotional harm against women in
prostitution. The psychiatric diagnosis of PTSD describes mental and physical avoidance
behaviors, psychological numbing, social distancing, flashbacks, and anxious physiologic
hyper-arousal. Some of the PTSD suffered by women in prostitution results from the
ways that men use pornography on them and against them.
Of 854 women, men and children in prostitution, across 9 countries, we found that
68 percent had PTSD.8 This is an extremely high prevalence of PTSD, and it tells us, like
Andrea Dworkin did, that prostitution causes great psychological harm to those in it.
As we analyzed our data, we investigated factors that might indicate what exactly it was
about prostitution that was causing such high rates of PTSD. We wondered: did
childhood sexual abuse, childhood physical abuse, or rape or other physical assault in
prostitution cause particularly high levels of PTSD in the people we interviewed? We
found that so many of our respondents had all of those types of violence in their lives that
we couldn’t differentiate how much each type of violence contributed to their overall
distress. This is called a statistical ceiling effect. Others have found ceiling effects for
certain phenomena. For example, two studies failed to find race differences in PTSD
symptoms among combat veterans.9 In these studies, combat, like prostitution, was the

7
A. DWORKIN, Suffering and Speech, IN HARM’S WAY: THE PORNOGRAPHY CIVIL
RIGHTS HEARINGS 31 (C. MacKinnon & A. Dworkin eds., Harvard University Press
1997).
8
M. FARLEY ET AL., supra note 5 at 44.
9
J. BEALS, S.M. MANSON, J.H. SHORE, M.J. FRIEDMAN, M. ASHCRAFT, J.A. FAIRBANK
ET AL., The Prevalence of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Among American Indian
Vietnam Veterans: Disparities and Context, 15 JOURNAL OF TRAUMATIC STRESS 89, 89-
97 (2002); J. MONNIER, D. ELHAI, B.C. FRUEH, J.A. SAUVAGEOT, & K.M. MAGRUDER,
Replication and Expansion of Findings Related to Racial Differences in Veterans with
Combat-Related PTS, 16(2) DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY 64-70 (2002).
 4

overwhelmingly traumatic event that mitigated differences in PTSD based on race. Their
PTSD was already so high from the trauma of combat that the traumatic effects of racism
could not be statistically demonstrated.
I mention these statistical effects because, frankly, we thought that prostituted
women’s PTSD was so high that it could not go up any higher. We did not expect to
show that the making of pornography or the coercion to imitate it had a statistically
significant effect on the PTSD suffered by the women we interviewed in prostitution.
But in fact our results showed that when women had pornography made of them, it hurt
them even more. It is data that causes you to weep.
Women in prostitution whose tricks or pimps made pornography of them in
prostitution had significantly more severe symptoms of PTSD than did women who did
not have pornography was made of them. 10

Where the tricks/customers/buyers/predators are despite their attempts to remain

invisible and anonymous

It is impossible to accurately estimate how many men in the world have bought
women for sex: they hide. Representative samples of customers of prostitutes do not
exist. Even where prostitution is legal, most of tricks’ behaviors are carefully concealed
from public view. Tricks are average citizens rather than abnormally sadistic
psychopaths. They are all ages and from all social classes. Most are married or partnered.
The following chart combines prevalence data from a chart by Mansson,11 and from my
remarks at last year’s conference.12 The following percentages are estimates of the
numbers of men who have ever bought or rented a woman in prostitution in different
countries.

10
Pearson r = .126, p=.001, N=749 .
11
S.A. MANSSON. Men’s Practices in Prostitution and Their Implications for Social
Work, in SOCIAL WORK IN CUBA AND SWEDEN: ACHIEVEMENTS AND PROSPECTS (S.A.
Mansson & C. Proveyer eds., 2004).
12
M. FARLEY, Who are Johns? CONFERENCE REPORT: DEMAND DYNAMICS, THE FORCES OF
DEMAND IN GLOBAL SEX TRAFFICKING, OCTOBER 18, 2003 (Captive Daughters and
International Human Rights Law Institute of DePaul University College of Law 2004).
 5

Benjamin & Masters (1964) 80% USA

Thai Public Health Ministry (1990)13 75% Thailand
Kinsey (1948) 69% USA
Ann Dahl (1999) 60% Netherlands
Monto (1998) 45% USA
Leridon et al (1998) 39% Spain
Leridon et al (1998) 19% Switzerland
Michael, Gagnon, Laumann & Kolata (1994) 16% USA
Lewin et al (1998) 13% Sweden
Haavio-Mannila & Rotkirch (2000) 13% Finland
Prieur & Taksdal (1989) Cited by Anne Dahl 13% Norway
Haavio-Mannila & Rotkirch (2000) 10% Russia

Today tricks are everywhere and they are almost everyman. What word should we use in
English to describe men who buy or rent women in prostitution? I use the word trick
because that is what women in prostitution call the men who buy them. The word trick
refers to the multitude of ways that men trick women into performing more or different
acts of sexual exploitation than the men pay for, or the way that men sexually exploit
women in prostitution and then refuse to pay, cheating or tricking the women. Other
words for them might be sex predators.
Tricks travel everyplace, and they are all over the Internet. Pornography’s
champions separate pornography from other sectors of the sex industry. Yet feminist
survivors of prostitution who have analyzed it, Evelina Giobbe, for example, tell us that
pornography simply means that pictures were taken of their prostitution. Men who buy
women in prostitution confirm Giobbe’s analysis. One trick we interviewed in 2004
explained that he made no distinction between prostitution with or without a camera. He
clarified exactly who was pimping her: “Yes, the woman in pornography is a prostitute.
They’re prostituting before the cameras. They’re getting money from a film company
rather than individuals.”
The arbitrary separation between pornography and prostitution makes as little
sense as the separation of domestic prostitution from its international counterpart sex
trafficking. The same factors that compel women into prostitution/trafficking – poverty,
racism, childhood physical and sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and abandonment – also
 6

compel women into pornography. The sex industry, like any other industry, has domestic
and international sectors, marketing sectors, a range of physical locations out of which it
operates in each community, is controlled by many different owners and managers, and is
constantly expanding as technology, law, and public opinion permit.
The Internet has created and expanded opportunities for men to sexually exploit
women. The Internet has amplified the psychological humiliation and the physical
violence of prostitution, and it has expanded the reach of sex trafficking.14 Prostitution is
advertised online, where it is indistinguishable from pornography. Pornography
advertises women for rent and sale, and they are moved across town, across the country,
and from one country to another. Pornography is one specific means of trafficking
women for the purpose of prostitution. Pictures of prostitution are used to advertise
internet websites, which are then used by tricks in their masturbation activities. Internet
prostitution and pornography offer the trick anonymity. Mansson described increasing
numbers of online trick communities who support each others’ predatory behaviors and
who exchange information regarding where and how women can be bought in
prostitution.15 As one young woman said, “They can do more extreme things and keep a
double life. They can have a life with the wife and kids and have a fetish, porn thing
where they are beating chicks on the side.”16
Internet advertising for prostitution appeals to young women who are sexually
and economically vulnerable. For example, Craigslist is a website where people can post
at no cost what they want to buy and what they want to sell. In March 2005, Craigslist
averaged 25,000 new ads every 10 days for “erotic services,” which are most likely
prostitution. A cell phone and an ad on Craigslist set a teenager up in the business of
being sexually exploited in exchange for housing, drugs, or cash. A Boston youth shelter
worker confirmed that Craig’s List was used by most of the homeless and prostituting
adolescent girls at her agency.

14
See Kenneth Franzblau, this volume.
15
S.A. MANSSON, supra note 11
16
Anonymous, personal communication, 2005.
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Today, many tricks buy and sexually exploit women in indoor prostitution such as
massage parlors, brothels, saunas, nail parlors, and strip clubs. Escort prostitution might
be more accurately described as prostitution via cell phone, in which a trick calls a
phone number that he obtains online or via a free magazine. He then orders the woman
to be delivered to his hotel room, home, or a meeting place. Indoor prostitution is
strongly promoted wherever there is a political movement promoting decriminalized or
legalized prostitution. Indoor prostitution, as opposed to street solicitation, is a way of
protecting the trick’s anonymity. One proponent described indoor prostitution as
discrete, with the implication that indoor prostitution not only protects the trick’s privacy,
it also is out of the sight and often out of the minds of the community.17 In indoor
prostitution, the trick is much less likely to be arrested even where prostitution is illegal.
He can hide indoors, and they sure do just that.
What effect does the trick’s anonymity have on prostituted women? The social
invisibility of indoor prostitution may actually increase its danger for women. When
women prostitute indoors, the community is less likely to see them. Sometimes, when
prostitution is indoors, neighbors do not even know that prostitution is occurring next
door. Although the need for services remains the same regardless of the location where
prostitution takes place, the invisibility of indoor prostitution makes it less likely that
services for escape will be funded and more difficult for women to access services for
escape.

In their own words: new research on men who are customers of prostitutes.

Last year at this conference, I spoke about the invisibility of customers of

prostitutes, and the necessity of exposing their behaviors as the driving force that keeps
the institution of prostitution alive and expanding. Since then, Prostitution Research &
Education, a San Francisco nonprofit organization, has begun an international study of
customers of prostitutes. Today, I’ll present some preliminary findings from that ongoing
research.

17
J. ADAMS & J. RILEY, After Spas’ Boom, Enforcement Affects Illicit Sex Business,
COURIER-JOURNAL, July 11, 2004, at 1-2.
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Although some research on customers of prostitutes interviewed men in diversion

programs who had been arrested for soliciting a police decoy,18 we interviewed men who
had not been arrested in part because we wanted to interview men who bought women in
indoor prostitution. We ran advertisements in local newspapers seeking interviews with
customers of prostitutes. Tricks who are not in a police-sponsored program tend to
exhibit more “trick-like” behaviors. All four of us encountered verbal and sometimes
physical sexual harassment from the non-arrested johns while conducting the research.
` We interviewed men who used women in indoor prostitution a majority of the
time, but they also located women outdoors. They hunted women via cell phone
prostitution also called escort prostitution—the internet, massage parlors, phone sex, strip
clubs, street, and bars. The 142 tricks we interviewed were men from rural Kentucky,
Phoenix, Arizona, and Madrid, Spain. We conducted a semi-structured interview with
the tricks. Co-researchers in this ongoing research are Adam Ruiz, Odette Levy, Ann
Cotton, Roop Sen, and Barb Strachan. We are currently analyzing data that investigates
how men’s use of women in pornography and their use of women in prostitution may be
factors that increase men’s sexual aggression.
Some analysts have observed that men who buy women in prostitution objectify
the women. “I use them like I might use any other amenity, a restaurant, or a public
convenience.”19 Paying for a woman in prostitution provides the trick with the power to
turn women into what Davidson termed “the living embodiment of a masturbation
fantasy.”20 One trick told us, “ [In prostitution] you can pick who you like, it’s like going
to a vending machine.” The tricks confirmed what survivors of prostitution have told us
about prostitution and pornography. Feminists have spoken about prostitution as the

18
M. MONTO & N. HOTALING, “Predictors of rape myth acceptance among the male
clients of female street prostitutes.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Pacific
Sociological Association. San Francisco, CA (1998, April).
19
J. SEABROOK, TRAVELS IN THE SKIN TRADE: TOURISM AND THE SEX INDUSTRY 193
(Pluto Press 1996).
20
J.O. DAVIDSON, PROSTITUTION, POWER, AND FREEDOM 209 (The University of
Michigan Press 1998).
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buying and selling of women’s bodies. One trick graphically explained what he did in
prostitution as “renting an organ for ten minutes.” In his definition of prostitution, the
trick removed her humanity, depersonalizing her, disappearing her name and identity.
Women in prostitution become “something for him to empty himself into, acting as a
kind of human toilet.”21 Her self and those qualities that define her as an individual are
systematically attacked and destroyed in prostitution. He reduces her to vagina, anus,
breasts, and mouth, and she then acts the part of the thing he wants her to be.22
There is a massive power imbalance in prostitution, where johns have the social
and economic power to hire women, adolescents, girls or boys to act out their
masturbation fantasies.23 The tricks we interviewed confirmed that the relationship in
prostitution is one of dominance and subordination. One man told us, “Prostitution says
that women have less value than men.” In prostitution, another trick explained, “She
gives up the right to say no” during the time that he has paid for. Another man told us
that he clarifies the nature of his relationship to the women he buys, “I paid for this. You
have no rights. You’re with me now.” Another trick explained to us:
Guys get off on controlling women, they use physical power to control
women, really. If you look at it, it’s paid rape. You’re making them
subservient during that time, so you’re the dominant person. She has
to do what you want.

Many of the tricks expressed unveiled hostility toward women. “I think about
getting even [during prostitution] – it’s like a kid’s game, you’re scoring points,” one
man told us. Another trick said, “Prostitution is an act of force, not of love. She gives up
the right to say no.”
Mansson noted that the Swedish tricks he interviewed had greater problems than
other men in maintaining relationships with women.24 We also found this to be true. As

21
C. HOIGARD & L. FINSTAD, BACKSTREETS: PROSTITUTION, MONEY AND
LOVE. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press (1986).
22
A. DWORKIN, Prostitution and Male Supremacy, in LIFE AND DEATH (Free Press 1997).
23
DAVIDSON, supra note 20 at 209.
24
S.A. MANSSON, Men’s Practices in Prostitution: The Case of Sweden, in A MAN’S
WORLD? CHANGING MEN’S PRACTICES IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD 135-149 (B. Pease &
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one trick told us, “If you can’t communicate with your partner, you can go to a
prostitute.” Unable to meet or communicate with women who were his equals, another
man we interviewed went to homeless shelters to pick women up, asking them whether
they wanted a place to live in exchange for tolerating his sexual assaults. Stein explained
that prostitution sex is “undiluted by intrusion of an unpaid partner’s own desires and
personality.” 25 One interviewee explained that men buy “sexual acts without
compromise” in prostitution.
Many, although not all, tricks seemed to have a nuanced awareness of exactly
what being prostituted is like for the women. One trick explained that “[Prostitution]
takes away a part of themselves that they can’t get back. They can’t look at themselves in
the mirror.” Another understood that “Prostitutes [get into it] because they got beat,
molested, or something by their families.” This knowledge did not however affect tricks’
behavior. Distancing themselves from these negative aspects of prostitution, the tricks
saw themselves as nicer and more considerate than average: “There are weirdoes out
there, [but] I’m not one of those who go out to hurt or rape, I’m just into sex.”
Sometimes the tricks’ rationalizations for what they did to women defied any
logic. One man stated that he knew that women felt cheap, degraded and used-up in
prostitution. But, he went on to say, “They should feel happy. Hey, she’s doing a job,
and when I do my job I get job satisfaction and so should she.”
Other rationalizations included, “By giving her money, I’m helping feed her
child.” Another, “I know porn stars. They enjoy sex on film more than other
prostitutes.”
The tricks we interviewed were observant about the brutality of pimp-prostitute
relationships:

“The pimp controls her and forces her to do things she’s not ready or wanting to do.”

“She is definitely afraid of him. She’ll get slapped around if she don’t do what she’s
told.”

K. Pringle eds., Zed Books 2001).

25
M. L. STEIN, LOVERS, FRIENDS, SLAVES: THE NINE MALE SEXUAL TYPES, THEIR
PSYCHO-SEXUAL TRANSACTIONS WITH CALL GIRLS 19 (Putnam’s, Berkeley Publishing
Corporation 1974).
 11

“He controls her by hitting her. And by playing mind games with her.”

“It’s sad and obviously exploitive. One person is compromising themselves in manner
that they’d rather not for the benefit of another.”

“The pimp is the owner and the prostitute is the slave to make money for the pimp.”

“Death is the end result of her relationship with a pimp.”

Many of the tricks expressed ambivalence or guilt about prostitution.

“Sometimes I feel it’s wrong. You just have to block that out.”
“High class prostitutes have no problems, emotionally.” Yet he also stated in the
interview that “[prostitution] is a lie for both people, I wouldn’t recommend it to
anyone.”
“I know what they go through as prostitutes. I know what they do – it bothers me
but I still have sex with them”.
Stating that prostitution had no negative effect on prostitutes because they had no
feelings, one man at the same time said he had never tried to rescue a prostitute because
“you can get killed doing that.”
This preliminary look at interview data with tricks indicates that prostitution is a
brutal institution that causes immense harm, confirming what survivors have told us. We
need laws that protect women from the sexual predation of men who buy, rent, or sell
women. We need prostitution prevention programs for young men - really young men -
probably when they have not yet reached adolescence. We must be able to speak to
young men about non-exploitive sexuality and about prostitution. If we do not speak of
these things, men will continue to have their first lessons in sexuality from prostitution
and trafficking in pornography, and from renting women in prostitution with friends and
relatives.