By GEORGIA WESTGARTH
Prostitution has taught ‘Carmen’ how to love her 130 kilogram body.
“Before I became a prostitute I was very jealous of thinner girls, but this industry made me really love myself,” Carmen, a working girl at Garden of Eden (GOE) in Dandenong told The Journal.
“I love my body, I know I’m chubby but I’m beautiful.”
The 22-year-old, who grew up in northern Africa has worked in the commercial sex industry since she was 19 and had just $2 in her bank account.
Carmen already has seven brothels under her belt and moved to Australia four years ago to study chemistry and science at a Melbourne University.
With bills and rent to pay and dwindling working hours, Carmen replied to an online advertisement for prostitutes.
“I had never met a stripper or a working girl but when you don’t have a lot of money you start to consider a lot of options. My parents back home don’t know what I do,” Carmen said.
“I remember looking up the laws and I called a parlour one day and they were so nice.
“I thought it’s not so scary.”
At 19 years old, Carmen wasn’t a virgin but she hadn’t had much experience.
“I didn’t have a huge sexual life before I entered the industry, I felt I was worthless in my private sex life, I felt undesirable, but when I started to work I could see men were turned on by me.
“I grew confidence and got into my role play – I have very few insecurities now.”
Carmen has been married to her 21-year-old husband, also a university student, for one year and said her sex life with her husband was “really good”.
“I can be totally free with him, I just am the way I am with him, but at work you put on a face and a certain look, but that’s not to say I don’t have fun and enjoy my time with my clients, but I love him beyond words,” she said.
“Spending one hour with someone every two weeks is not the same as your husband, the person that turns on the electric blanket, cooks you dinner, looks after your home and cat, and is there emotionally for you, it’s a totally different ball game.”
Carmen estimates about 50 to 60 per cent of working girls are married or in long-term relationships and that about 70 per cent of those girls’ partners would know what they did.
“You can absolutely do this job and be married and if anything it’s taken a lot of money stress away, which is one of the biggest stresses for couples,” she said.
“I don’t want to sit on my ass and get benefits, I have a job and I’m trying to get my life on track.
“I want to achieve the best of my ability, I don’t want to be handed a life and frankly I’m proud of the things I’ve achieved with this job and the flexibility and freedom this job offers.”
Carmen sends money to her husband’s family overseas to help them build a house and said once they’d ticked that box she would start saving to buy a house of her own.
But Carmen has chosen not to tell her in-laws how she makes her money because she fears they wouldn’t take it if they knew.
“I don’t want them to think I am making a huge sacrifice, which I don’t consider it to be.
“I’m not ashamed of my job, but I know others think differently, that’s why I don’t get around telling everyone,” she said.
Carmen is one of several girls at the GOE who have disabled clients.
Actually, it’s a topic she is quite passionate about.
“There is no reason why you should deny somebody such a basic right (sex).
“It’s just sex, man, it’s just sex for crying out loud,” she said.
“Disabled men, for example, who come in here, they don’t feel they have the right to talk to women or to ask them for a relationship or they don’t feel like they deserve emotional closeness or physical closeness – and why?
“Why, why, why not?” Carmen said.
“What’s so different between me and him?
“I am with people who have no use of their legs or who have a mental disability, or some people come here with mental health problems, depression and they still want that closeness.”
Carmen said disabled clients were the best to be with because they left “significantly happier and in a better mental state than when they came in”.
She said: “At least I’ve done some good in the world.
“All types of men come in here, every man is a candidate.
“If you have 10 male friends I guarantee at least half of them have been into a brothel with some regularity, and I would say two out of that 10 come very often.”
When asked how she feels about being with married men, Carmen said she didn’t push them up the stairs and in the brothel door.
“They come here of their own accord and I don’t deserve to be judged because if it wasn’t me it would be another girl, it would be an affair, it would be someone on Tinder.
“I’m just one of the many options that married man could have taken, it just so happened that that night it was me,” Carmen said.
“At the end of the day it’s safe sex practices – I use a condom, I don’t emotionally get involved with him – it’s just sex, that’s the only thing that it is.
“He’s not taking diseases home to his wife and children and some wives know and some don’t care.
“Some wives are busy having children and some wives are disabled or too old or don’t want to do it anymore.”
She is the largest prostitute at the GOE – but that’s the way she likes it.
“The most erogenous part of the body is the brain and people forget that.
“Confidence is sexually attractive no matter your size.”
[ Return to ‘Behind the brothel door’ feature page ]
