[This text is the weekly newsletter of EL PAÍS Fem]
What’s up, queens. I come today to tell you something I’ve been thinking about telling you for years. Literal years because it has to do with an article I wrote eight years ago that haunts and terrifies me every day.
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On April 4, 2018, at 10:27 in the morning, I published a piece called Girls by day, whores by night on the Mujeres blog ―which no longer exists because it was replaced by this newsletter on May 4, 2022―.
You need to know a bit of the story to later understand why it has been hurting me since then.
That text began like this:
“One mid-March morning, like many other mornings, the mail was delivered and a package was left next to the computer. It barely weighed anything, at least until it was opened. It was made of thin plastic, long-haired and yolk-colored, pink heeled sandals, two pieces of frayed fabric as a top and skirt, and a horrible bag with a few shiny stones to decorate it. It was called Aminata, The Prostitute Doll, and it not only weighed, it also puzzled, confused, and bothered. Until you turned it over: the back of the box was a press call from the Salesian Missions to attend the presentation of the documentary Love about the prostitution of girls in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone.”
I told that Aminata exists. That she was 13 years old when she became a prostitute, that she charged 20 cents of a euro for sex and 1.50 seemed like a small fortune to her.
That she got sick, was raped and abused. That she contracted sexually transmitted diseases, that she didn’t even remember her father and that her mother died, that she lived among garbage and slept while rats fell through the tin roof.
I told that Aminata painted her lips and eyelids and eyelashes in front of a dirty plastic mirror surrounded by candles always about to burn out, and went out to the street, to look for a place where clients passed by, at dawn, without condoms and with no certainty about whether she would return to the slum she came from, almost every night.
I told that Aminata never dreamed of being a prostitute. Just as the other teenagers who appeared alongside Aminata in the documentary did not aspire to sell their nights or their bodies.
I told all that and I told that Raúl de la Fuente, the director, told me it was the “most sensitive and hardest and most aberrant” story he had ever come across and the horror with which he remembered the first time he entered the hovel where Aminata lived: “It seemed like a Grimm brothers’ tale. The girls were in a circle, one against another, telling those nightmares.”
In his memory also lurked the pimp, whom the minors called Daddy, for whom submission and control were so normalized and so unpunished that he didn’t even mind being filmed.
The words rage, helplessness, and disbelief were those De la Fuente used to describe the emotional shock it meant to see them smile like girls while recounting the little hells they had gone through.
In the documentary Jorge Crisafulli, a Salesian and director of the Don Bosco Fambul house, of the Salesian Missions, who produced it, speaks. He was the one who one day found Aminata.
It was September 2016. He approached, scaring away the men who surrounded her and her friends, and in 15 minutes of conversation explained who he was, where he worked, and what he could offer them: a medical check-up at Connaught Hospital in Freetown, a roof, and food. Aminata, Teresa, and Victoria laughed and left.
The next day, six of the seven showed up at the house. “The youngest was nine years old, the oldest hadn’t turned 15,” Crisafulli says in the documentary.
They took them to the hospital, gave them a plate of rice that they wanted seconds of, and then the stuffed animals came into play. “Before going to the doctor I remembered I had a sack of teddy bears that had been sent. I gave one to each and they started playing and placing them on their backs with a cloth, like African women carry their babies. I realized then, very clearly: they were girls. They felt, looked, thought, laughed, and lived like girls.”
Why I told you this
Because that article that talked about a documentary in which Crisafulli says he sees how “dogs are treated better than girls” is still, day after day since 2018, among my articles that the most people are reading. I keep publishing and the rest changes, but that one doesn’t, that one is always there.
This house, like any other media, has internal measurement tools. Ours is Marfeel and that’s how we know how many people are reading the pieces at any given moment, how they ended up reading the articles, how much time on average they spend on them, from where they connect.
And being able to know all that also makes me know that every day, every day since then, dozens or hundreds of people arrive at that piece who have been searching on the internet for “whores,” “young whores,” “young prostitutes,” “teenage whores,” “raped whores,” “abused whore.” And I don’t know this but I suppose: they are men.
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I know that most have typed those keywords directly into Google and others have ended up there through dark social, which are links sent through private networks like WhatsApp or Telegram.
I know they come from any location, and although most are from Latin America and Spain, it ranges from the Netherlands to Mexico, from Aruba to Canada, or from Portugal to Luxembourg.
I know there are no people subscribed to the newspaper who usually open that piece, that almost all users are anonymous and that they are among those who open the phone with private browsing.
And I know they barely spend a few seconds on the article. They open it, see what it really is, and leave.
Since I know all that, I know that every time I open that measurement tool, no matter when, no matter what time, I will see that there has been a more or less large handful of gentlemen who have taken their phone and typed to search not only “whores” but “young whores.”
And every day I open that measurement tool I ask myself the same questions:
Who are you? Do you have telework a couple of days a week, do you get up to go to school?, do you put more plates on the table on Sundays because your grandchildren come to eat, are you widowed, never married?, do you live in a house with a garden and pool, do you look for offers at the butcher’s?, do you take care of taking your sons or daughters or children to school or have you never been parents or have you never taken care of anything?
How are you in the world? Who do you vote for: left or right or don’t you vote or do you vote blank or null?, do you hate women or do you think you do but don’t or don’t but do?, do you feel power searching and ending up finding what you look for that clearly isn’t here?
And how is your life? Do you go shopping and give up your place in line to someone with only a couple of things, do you park in the exact spot in parking lots so as not to invade the next one, do you have a criminal record or do you sit with your legs open on public transport?, do you cook, iron, do a double spin in the washing machine so clothes dry faster in winter or do you have crumbs in the sofa crevices and grime in the drains?
What do you like? What music do you listen to? Do you go to the movies, to festivals, do you have a state museum pass? What else do you look for on the internet? Do you watch tutorials on caring for tomato plants, fixing a plug, a cold cake recipe, or how to remove a dent from a car without going to the workshop?
I wonder all those things not randomly. I do it because in the last 15 years I have known who hundreds of men are who abuse their power against the women they know and fit into some of those questions.
I have known who hundreds of men are who humiliate and beat the women they say they love and I have known who dozens are who have murdered them and who fit into some of those questions.
I have known who other hundreds are who have raped their friends, their daughters, their daughters’ friends, their granddaughters, their nieces, their partners, their exes, a date, their cousins or aunts. And prostitutes, exploited or not. And they fit into some of those questions.
They are not all. I know they are not all, also that it could be anyone: What are you thinking while typing “whores” and “young”?, what do you want?, what is the bottom of what you are looking for?, why?
Why?
Here, your requests
[Or suggestions, or doubts, or complaints, or whatever you want. To this email ivaldes@elpais.es]
P.S. If you want that full article, it’s at this link.
P.S. (again) I almost forgot. I ask myself those questions also because I know there is something I will never know, that we will never know: how many girls and teenagers are sexually treated and exploited in the world, how many girls and teenagers are whores freely because there is nothing else to be in the worlds they inhabit to survive those worlds or because they can’t imagine anything else or because no one has told them, taught them that they can do it.
And that’s it, hugs always ✨
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