Introduction
Judging from the action on the streets, the members of the world's oldest profession seem to be getting younger and younger. To be sure, prostitution has always been a young woman's game-one of the saddest sights imaginable is an aging hooker that nobody will raise the ante for. Concubines in various countries around the world are often quite young by American standards, many societies having cults that breed girls for such purposes to this very day. But in this country there are no such rituals. Young girls of high school (and some of even junior high school) age have begun to moonlight in prostitution, many of them to support a drug habit for themselves or a boyfriend, others doing it for other motives. Gail Sheehy points out the full time call girl's disdain for these amateurs, whether they be teenagers or housewives making a little extra bread behind hubby's back, in her excellent book on the New York City trade, Hustling.
Historically, girls in their teens were highly prized by customers in bawdy houses. For centuries, up to this day, the practice of inducing young girls barely into puberty into prostitution has been practiced in parts of the Orient, the Middle East and Africa. In many instances, the girl's own family is responsible for her induction into prostitution, an impoverished family selling a daughter into sexual slavery is a fairly common practice in many parts of Asia, for example.
In this country, however, it has been quite uncommon for girls to ply the oldest trade before they are eighteen or so, at least not until they are of age to leave the parental nest. There are, to be sure exceptions, particularly among the uneducated and poor, particularly among racial minorities such as Blacks and Puerto Ricans. But by and large child labor of most forms has disappeared during the past seventy or eighty years, the laws passed to prohibit such misuse of children apparently extending to occupations outside the law as well.
The phenomenal thing about the recent wave of young teenagers going into prostitution is that they are often from relatively stable homes in the economic sense-girls from middle income families. It is not easily explained, this trend displayed by certain girls from middle class families to turn to prostitution, either full or part-time, but most professional observers feel that it has some correlation with the anti-establishment movement on the part of young people that began in the middle to late 1960's.
There seemed to be a prevailing mood of apathy among the girls interviewed in conjunction with this book-the revolutionary rhetoric of the 60's seems to have led many of the 70's generation into a rather apolitical resignation to the fate of their country, and consequently their own lives. Many of the teenagers who have gone into prostitution on a part or full time proposition display a sense of alienation and boredom with their society. While some of the girls have turned to hooking for monetary reasons, such as a need for extra money for drugs, etc., still more seem to have seen it as a new kick.
The young lady I have chosen as representative of teenage hookers in general, is a plethora of anxieties and contradictions as the reader will see. At the same time, Annette, is an intelligent and attractive young woman of nine ten who can look back at nearly four years of part time prostitution and shrug her shoulders. What follows is her own story told in her own words.
The Author