Any Girl
by Mia Doring
Hachette £14.99

ANY GIRL takes an uncompromising look at the Irish sex trade. Author Mia Doring works now as a psychotherapist specialising in sexual trauma, but this book is her harrowing personal account of how she ended up in the Irish sex trade.

Doring chronicles the rape, the sexual abuse and the emotional scaring that led her into prostitution. Her gradual sexual exploitation reinforced the perception that her sole value lay in her sexuality. This all gave her a false sense of power and control.

The fallacy that prostitution is a deliberate, conscious and empowering choice for young women is turned on its head by Doring’s powerful testimony.
 
She writes about the “dead eyes” and the “cold gaze” of one punter who she felt could comfortably have killed her and how the threat and reality of violence was all too often part of the exchange with men who feel entitled to access women’s bodies, wanting to “try her” and “rent her” as a present or a treat for themselves.