I have published a volume of interviews, so far only in Dutch, with prostitutes I met while living in and managing a brothel in Amsterdam. I am now in process of recycling this raw material into a new book called Games Prostitutes Play.

I taped most of the interviews published in the first volume during the first months of my involvement with that brothel; the second book relies on them, or course, but I make use of the thousand or two pages of notes I collected during the subsquent years of my studying prostitution. The earlier book gave the interviews in raw form; the new one will explain systematically how things work between men and women in a brothel. The earlier book quoted verbatim interviews; the following uses them as raw material. The second has a section called Prostitute Styles, in which the various women speak in their own voices to describe their individual ways of doing the job: the Romantic, who has limited but real affairs with her clients; the Psychotherapist, who listens and advises husbands with limping marriages; the Rapist, who hates men in general and clients in particular; the Dominatrix, who physically and mentally attacks her men; the Masochist, who earns a living by being beaten; and so on down the line.

The new book will have chapters about brothel-management, the brothel's quirky owner; sexual techniques prostitutes employ to manipulate male sexuality with minimal effort and damage to their bodies ("I am a sexual engineer"), and my place in the picture.

My book describes what I saw and quotes what the prostitutes and their clients told me. If I have a thesis, it could be summarized thus: almost all prostitutes come from backgrounds of very extreme abuse, of which paternal rape is the most common form. As prostitutes, they control men. This mastery takes many forms, from giving advice, to making them fall in love with her, to jumping up and down on a masochist's balls, but a prostitute leads the dance, at least in a brothel of the kind I know. I entered that place with neither of these opinions in mind; what I know is what those people taught me.

I seek an agent or publisher for the English-speaking world. Many people think that this book will be easy to publish, because "sex sells", but it is not. The following problems present themselves:
A) People tend to prefer prostitutes to be either filthy rich and romanticized, or pathetically miserable, diseased, and dying. Most of those I met are neither. They are ordinary women who have been denied ordinary lives. They suffered enormously as children, but as prostitutes they fight back and function quite well. Only a few of those I met inspire pity.
B) I favor allowing voluntary prostitution. Those who agree with me try to present prostitution as a good thing; I believe it should be permitted, although I know it is not. I therefore contradict those who view prostitution as being inherently degrading or immoral, and simultaneously those who seek to present it as "just a job".
C) The third big problem comes from editors who have been clients: "I do not believe prostitutes fake orgasms, because I have heard them groaning myself", as a major figure in the publishing world put it. "Lighten up! Let's hear more about the fetishists and the other funny parts". Most clients realize that an illusion is somehow being worked, but very many refuse to believe the extent to which they are being manipulated. Some of these fundamentalist customers alas occupy senior positions in the publishing industry.

Here are a few of the prostitutes' interviews. They tell their stories in their own words. I have dozens more, edited and not. These interviews are lengthy and in places meandering, but they give a picture of what I saw. Some were published in my earlier Dutch book. None will appear in the new one in the same form it takes here.

MARIJKE. This project having been thrust upon me, I walked into the brothel one evening perfectly cold. I had never been in a house of prostitution. The women found me comical during my first evening. When I was not far from walking out, Marijke approached me and began questioning me about myself. I evidently passed her test. She decided I was well-meaning, if naive and ignorant of prostitution, but educable. Marijke so indicated to her friends. They began telling me about prostitution as they practiced it. I had no problem with its manipulative character - as long as it was not done to me. I thought my book would be a humorous piece about all the funny things they do to their clients, most of whom struck me as pretty silly.

The second interview with Marijke took place several weeks later. Marijke became the first prostitute to tell me about child-abuse, and the fact that most prostitutes had that experience as children. After the conversation you are about to read, Marijke told the others that I could handle this subject, and many told me of their rape-experiences. That was the period when I wandered the streets of Amsterdam in terror of what I would hear that night. I resolved to make the relationship between early rape and present employment the major subject of my investigations. I concluded that a book of intellectual and moral worth could be written about prostitution as actually practiced. I made that my aim.

SAMANTHA was a "rapist prostitute". Her anger at men in general and hate for clients in particular jumps out of everything she told me. Most prostitutes who have boyfriends or husbands are beaten by these hideous pimps, who get no small space in my book, in spite of the extreme distaste I felt while meeting them, but Samantha was very dominant over and aggressive to her man. Samantha reversed the common situation, but she was not the only prostitute I met who organized her life this way.

VALERIE differed from other prostitutes. When my book was in bookstores, clients arrived asking to meet her. Valerie no longer worked there. Prostitutes being enterprising souls, they took turns as the Designated Valerie for that night, telling clients that they were the woman in my book. A self-confident and fiery woman, but even Valerie went home to a pimp who beat her and took her money. He eventually hospitalized her.

SANDRA is one of the prostitutes who do not use prostitution to increase her power and self-esteem. Her miserable interview speaks for itself.

ROBYN's is a vocational and an avocational masochist. She accepts payment from men who beat her, and she has a pimp at home who was among the worst I ever heard of or met.

SEAN was a male sadomasochistic prostitute who performed sadism to homosexual men. I met him at the brothel, where he worked as an assistant manager. Sean has much to say about the nature of prostitution as he sees it.

LUCY's chapter, like many in my earlier book, is organized like a scene, with other people and events in the background.

ROSE is a dominatrix. She is a highly paid professional with an international reputation among masochistic men. The first two thirds or so detail what one does if it is a dominatrix that one happens to be. When a man reads this chapter, I always know when he gets to one particularly explicit passage describing an excruciating act Rose performs, because the readers always cross their legs: the male self-protective reflex.

Rose tells what her father did to her as a child in the last third of this chapter. When I told Rose that a Dutch social-worker had vomitted on the floor of my home after reading this passage, Rose first laughed out loud, and then insisted on meeting that woman. I organized a meeting of friends of mine in a bar, none of whom was from the prostitution world. Rose walked in, looking like an accountant or a young lawyer - she looks rather ordinary when not dressed up in her work-clothes, which are things like boots and SS uniforms. None present knew he was meeting Rose herself. Everybody at that table had read bits of my interviews, including Rose's and others' abuse narratives. All expressed their outrage and horror at Rose's father's depraved torture of his child. Rose quizzed them all in turn about their reactions; she had been under the impression that most men would become sexually aroused at such a story.

Rose thereafter became very involved in helping me with my book and introducing me to her friends, so that I now know much more about sadomasochism than I did when I wrote this chapter. Rose and I remain in frequent contact, and we are good friends.

Rose once mentioned that a certain friend of hers would not tell me about her childhood, because "it was so much worse than mine was." One of the reasons why I value Rose's friendship as much as I do is that a woman who suffered as much as Rose did is able to perceive somebody else as having suffered more, and of feeling compassion for that suffering.