Student job prostitution
Student with an offensive side job: Sonia Rossi works as a prostitute
If a man comes into a Berlin brothel, books a quickie, immediately throws himself at the selected lady, comes, gets up, to get dressed with the hurry of a firefighter. A quickie is available in Berlin for 30 euros. But then it does not have to go that fast again, which is why the prostitute asks him wondering why he is in such a hurry. "My wife is looking for a parking space."
Oh, right. Yes, sure. Again, something learned.
The scene can be found in the book "Fucking Berlin", in which an Italian student tells of her time as a part-time prostitute. As a heterosexual average woman you think after reading not only about the parking and the ignorance of wives after new. Also about the public representation of prostitution for example. In fact, for years, it has been made up of three beliefs: All women who earn money through sex are forced prostitutes, some forced by men, others by a childhood trauma. Men do not go to the brothel because they want non-committal sex, but because they want sex with a degraded to the object woman. Together, dogma number three makes prostitution the symbol of the oppression of women.
This was about my knowledge when, a few months ago, a friend made me aware of the Internet diary of her fellow student, who financed her life through prostitution. Sonia Rossi, so called the 25-year-old, reported in short pieces about her experiences in Berlin apartment brothels. Not that there were no nasty men in it or women who drank alcohol and cocaine. Erwartbarerweise. But I found it much more interesting that among the suitors there were plenty of nice men, attractive men, lonely men, tender men and a whole army of howling men. A visit to a brothel apparently fulfills the same function for lovesick men as a wellness weekend for women. Surprisingly, I also found the author's attitude, which insisted that she was not forced into the job by either a husband or a childhood trauma. Her way into the milieu was rather a process of desensitization: from the webcam stripper via erotic massage to the full program.
"You mean, in principle, this could happen to any woman?" I wanted to know. "Well, if poverty is big enough, all sorts of thresholds will sink." - "But not that," I insisted. "Then you've never experienced what it's like to only have ten euros left," she said. After all, she admitted that many newcomers stop immediately, no matter how desperate their financial situation: "Either you go the first week, or you overcome the disgust of tails."
Sonia was self-confident enough to talk aloud about these things between mothers and babies in Prenzlauer Berg cafes. Besides, she was eloquent and funny. I told her that I thought that was a great topic for a book, and she confessed to me that she already had several chapters in her computer. When I had the manuscript in my hands a few months later, I stumbled from one surprise to the next: it played where good stories play, in the confusing terrain beyond dogma. Because it was not about monsters and victims, but about men and women.
The woman who calls herself Sonia Rossi: student, prostitute, author of "Fucking Berlin"
There is Wolfgang, the nice pensioner from Marzahn, whose only pleasure is to fiddle now and then with jazz and red wine on a call girl. He revels in old stories from the East Berlin theater scene. When he ends up with a heart attack in the intensive care unit, a volleyball team of worried call girls watches over his bed (he survives). Of course there are many brutalos and idiots among the customers. But there is also the spindly construction worker, who first had a girlfriend and eagerly instructed by Sonia in the basic knowledge of good sex and thereby falls in love with her. A New York gallerist becomes their regulars for a summer, and in the end, they both are not sure if the other one believes that their relationship is over. On the last evening he gives her embarrassed his e-mail address: Who said again that men pay for sex, so they would feel nothing and would not have to give it?
The housings in which Sonia works are mostly run by women. For example, there are pimps, she says, on the street in Schöneberg, for example, where foreign women are working, who are carted from one city to the next, many being addicted to drugs, some being underage. But she never had anything to do with this scene.Most of her colleagues are single mothers, some also feed an unemployed bad luck. You can not get rich in Berlin puffs, but you can earn more money there at crib-compatible times than at Schlecker. It is a decision between two evils, but it is not described by Sonia as a compulsion, but as a predicament. Even some prostitutes from Eastern Europe, who were lured to Germany under false promises, confess in discussions with colleagues that they had already suspected at home that they would not work in Berlin as service. Only one woman, whom Sonia met in the five years, was actually what one imagines as a forced prostitute. For three years Vera was arrested by a Russian gang who had taken her passport. But dealing with traffickers in the book is as short a process as it is with clichés. "Igor was killed in a gang shooting and since then Vera has enjoyed her new freedom, now living with an Arab who had a solarium, and diligently sending her money to Estonia, where her parents and four-year-old daughter still live."
And Sonia Rossi herself, the student? "I hated being constantly broke," she said when we met. "I never had to do without as a kid, and when my parents later got worse financially, I was not used to saving." Of course I did not believe her. I thought that someday I would understand what injury might have caused her to submit to this job.
But the one I met was a 25-year-old, whose thirst for adventure was obviously bigger than anything else. In fact, she could not handle money at all, and her masculine taste did not do her any good either - she fed her heavily stoned friend on her earnings. She was also ambitious and did not want to waste any time studying. She just seemed to find it less of a problem to prostitute herself than to go out to eat, drive a taxi or drop off her boyfriend. Probably it also matters that it seems to draw from the fact that a man - any man - finds it exciting, She says her sex life has been excessive before. Presumably, this form of sex narcissism is a prerequisite to even get the idea to enter the trade. This may be testimony to low self-esteem, but it is not the same as being sexually abused as a child.
Sometimes Sonia's book reads as if it was about collecting as many stories as she could one day tell. As a child in Italy, she dreamed of becoming a writer, as a teenager, she won a literary competition.
In France a year ago a book was published in which a student describes her experiences in brothels, in England there was "Belle de Jour", the memoirs of a London luxury call girl, similar books came out in Sweden and Brazil. In these texts, prostitution is described as a further development of the "Sex and the City" lifestyle, only that there is now practical money for anonymous sex.
That's not how Fucking Berlin sounds. There is no danger that someone considers prostitution afterwards a dream job. But it's not a book about shit types and poor women, but about people in need of different treatment. Sometimes, something like sympathy and solidarity flares up between them, in a place that seems inappropriate.
