Huschke Mau worked as a prostitute for ten years. Voluntarily, as she believed at the time. Today she is committed to a ban on buying sex.
Huschke Mau is angry. The night before she left the NDR talk show “deep and clear” prematurely. You can watch the scene online. Before she picks up her mic, she says, “To sit here with such privileged people and listen to this shit…” and stalks out of the studio. The “shit” was the many statements, some naïve, some offensive, that wanted to explain prostitution to her, the victim. The “privileged” the moderator duo and the guests, including blogger Sascha Lobo, who, when it came to her topic, almost had more of a say than she did.
The morning after, she comes just as energetically into the lobby of a Hamburg hotel. The hair is very blond, the skirt is very short, the face is heavily made up – “waterproof concreted over”, as she will say later, when nothing has been smudged despite the tears. She hardly closed an eye at night. She kept asking herself why she was actually doing this to herself. “But the women standing there in minus five degrees on Kurfürstendamm in mini shorts and with a black eye, the pimp right behind them, because only he speaks German – that’s real! But in discussions like yesterday and in society, they play they don’t matter. As if they weren’t human!” Anger, she says, is what drives her. Where else should she go with it?
Huschke Mau is a pseudonym, a makeshift attempt to protect her present from the past. Her present is the university, where in her mid-30s she is writing her doctoral thesis in a humanities subject, and her life somewhere in East Germany, she does not name the exact place. Her past: a childhood full of violence by her stepfather, escape from her parents’ house at 17, stay in a psychiatric ward, at 18 her first pimp – a police officer. Then ten years as a prostitute in apartment brothels and as an escort, alcohol, drugs.
The triggers stayed
It’s all not something to be left behind, even if beneath the tattooed flowers on her arms it’s hard to see where she used to hurt herself. To this day, she still finds it difficult to endure certain smells or noises, a special aftershave, smacking lips or stomping steps on the stairs are triggers that take her back to traumatic experiences. She says she’s not very good with people. What she likes: Animals, spending time in nature and books. Preferably those for children and young people.
Externally, too, Huschke Mau has torn down the boundary to her previous life. Since 2014 she has been committed to the so-called Nordic model, the sex buying ban, which makes it a punishable offense to offer or pay people money for sexual services. She founded the Ella network, an association of women from prostitution, which also provides some financial support to those who have left. And she wrote down her story (see below). “It’s super uncomfortable to go through the university and imagine that this or that professor read about it and recognized me,” says Huschke. “But it’s also liberating to talk about it and let the anger out. You can only do that when you’re outside.”
She was “still someone who got off relatively well,” as she says in her style, which one notices the East German. “When I was writing the book, it all came back up. But I want people to understand not only with their heads but also with their hearts what it means to have to prostitute themselves.Studies she cites say that 83 percent of women in prostitution have childhood trauma from family violence or abuse, nine out of ten have a pimp, up to 90 percent have clear signs of forced prostitution, between 80 and 90 percent of prostitutes come from abroad If you ask women in prostitution what they need most urgently, 89 percent answer “an exit”.
Taking advantage of an emergency
“Prostitution is always taking advantage of an emergency,” says Huschke. The women don’t want sex, they need the money: for her rent, her pimp, alcohol, drugs. But money can never replace sexual consent. “Punters accept sleeping with a woman who actually doesn’t want to sleep with them – and that’s clearly abuse.” That applies to those who humiliated her, treated her brutally and got excited about her pain and tears, as well as to those who wanted to save her because she was “too good for the brothel”. Punishing customers, as the Nordic model envisages, is only the logical consequence.
Whoever hears these statements for the first time is usually irritated. Probably even more so in a country that has very liberal legislation when it comes to prostitution and is considered “Europe’s brothel” and “number one target country for human trafficking” by experts. In which the police come to the apartment brothel, in which Mau buys for an intensive offender who has been convicted several times, who tattooed some of “his” wives like a piece of cattle, but the officers do not ask the women how they are doing and where the bruises came frombut only explain after the ID check that they have to pay tax on their income.
Huschke Mau knows the arguments against the Nordic model, and she was confronted with it again on the talk show: what about those who do the job voluntarily. “Everyone can do what they want with their body. But this one woman who thinks it’s fancy somewhere in Berlin and who I don’t begrudge it, is a total minority“, she says. For a long time, she too considered her decision to become a prostitute to be voluntary. But how self-determined can one make decisions when one has learned from an early age that women are only good for one thing and that one is worth nothing anyway “Of course it feels like power at first, now at least getting money for it. But soon there are only shame and disgust and drugs and alcohol to numb yourself. She was asked why she didn’t just leave, didn’t report her pimp. For her, these are questions from another world: “In prostitution, one is only concerned with surviving.”
A cat to rescue
Huschke’s salvation was Alvin. When she talks about him, she has to cry and interrupt the conversation briefly. The cat recently died at almost 15. “It wasn’t like I said to myself, I deserved better. Where did that self-esteem come from? But this kitten that the brothel manager brought in and that had been separated from its mother far too early was worth it to me.“
She wants to create security for him. For him, she begins the exit. It lasts a long time, she keeps falling back into old patterns, her trauma is too strong, her new everyday life is still too fragile. Huschke first learned from Alvin that you can eat when you’re hungry and sleep when you’re tired. What it means to be tender. And what, drawing boundaries and snarling when someone crosses them.
“Apparently I’m really out, for now and hopefully longer,” she writes in her book. “Forever” she would never say. After all, right from the start she experienced that bad things can happen at any time and that other people have power over her. “Who’s going to tell me that in ten years I won’t be sitting unemployed in a prefabricated building with three children and I’ll be the one whose electricity is cut off?
I hear almost every day from women who are faced with the choice of going into business for precisely this reason. Only a few lucky circumstances separate every woman from prostitution.
Up to 1.2 million men go to prostitutes in Germany – every day. “These are our brothers, bosses, friends, men,” says Huschke Mau. This is another reason why prostitution concerns everyone. “The question is: do we want to live in a society in which women are commodities and in which men say: I slept with one last week and I don’t even know if that’s what she wanted and I don’t care?“Of course it’s convenient not to deal with it and instead to use prostitution as a fig leaf to be able to define yourself as progressive. Just like on the talk show.
Leaving the studio wasn’t an escape from a discussion that hurts her. It wasn’t the anger of not being heard again. Above all, it was this freedom: to get up and go.
Huschke Mau prefers not to give her real name. In the East Prussian dialect, Huschke describes a woman who is not really there. Mau added her cat to it.
The Nordic model
In 1999, Sweden was the first country to introduce a ban on buying sex. Prostituting yourself is not a criminal offence, instead clients, pimps and brothel operators are punished. There are also exit aids, prevention and education. It applies today in variants among other things in Ireland, Canada and France. In 2014, the EU called on member states to punish clients; voluntary sexual services against payment would also violate human dignity. In Germany, the women lawyers’ association and the Diakonie, as well as prostitute groups such as Hydra, have taken a stand against a ban on buying sex.
The whole story In “dehumanized” (432 p., Edel Books) tells Huschke Mau ruthlessly about her life and the prostitution system.