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.

Doring describes how the offer of cash for sex erased all notions of consent or mutuality. Her human rights were nullified by the cash payment including the right to object, the right to be safe, the right to respect: “I had been bought off and was muted, rendered silent by all of the possibilities £100 could bring,” she writes.

The cash transaction shields prostitution from critique. Terms like “sex worker,” sound  “reassuring — a cushioning, disguising language,” she writes.

In one instance an African woman who was trafficked to Ireland — held for two years, of multiple rapes — when she escaped she had no idea what country she was in.

Men as well as women should read this book. Doring makes the point that men have a major part to play in ending violence against women and girls.

Doring’s testimony exposes and counters the dangerous disinformation currently prevailing that prostitution is a sort of valid career choice for young women. She openly describes her own mental trauma and details the disassociation she experienced when selling sex.

The book exposes the liberal fantasy that campaigning for regulation in prostitution really is. She rightly makes strong links between the everyday sexism that all women endure and how such entrenched views prop up the sex and porn industry.

Now a feminist, Doring concludes: “I am not a man hater ... I’ve never harmed a man. I have never hit one, abused one, cheated on one. I have never betrayed or raped a man. I have never sexually exploited a man.”