March 25, 2025 • 46 mins
Hello, Sealed Section listeners! We’ve got something special for you today—an episode from our MID podcast that we think you'll really enjoy.
In this episode, Holly Wainwright interviews Antonia Murphy, a woman who knows every intimate details of sex and the sex work industry.
Antonia’s life took a dramatic turn when her marriage fell apart while raising three kids. Many women make big changes after divorce, but Antonia took it to a whole new level—she opened a legal, ethical brothel.
In this candid, shame-free conversation, Antonia shares the events that led her to this path, what she learned about the women working at the brothel, what they truly needed, and what the clients—almost all men—wanted (and yes, it’s surprising).
If you'd like to listen to more MID you can listen to season four here.
You can follow Antonia on Instagram here
You can find her book, Madam, here
Listen to my conversation with Rachel Griffiths, who plays Antonia in the TV series, Madam, here.
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Share your feedback! Send us a voice message or email us at podcast@mamamia.com.au
Follow us on Instagram @MidbyMamamia or sign up to the MID newsletter, dropping weekly here.
Mamamia's new podcast BIZ is rewriting the rules of work with no generic advice - just real strategies from women who've actually been there. Listen here.
CREDITS:
Host: Holly Wainwright
Executive Producer: Naima Brown
Senior Producer: Grace Rouvray
Producer: Tahli Blackman
Audio Producer: Jacob Round
Mamamia acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Land we have recorded this podcast on, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to their Elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures.
Support the show: https://www.mamamia.com.au/mplus/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
So you're listening to a Mother Mia podcast. Mamma Mia
acknowledges the traditional owners of the land. We have recorded
this podcast on the Gadigul people of the Eora Nation.
We pay our respects to their elders past and present,
and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Raight
Islander cultures.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Hello, Sealed Section listeners, Thank you for letting me pop
into your ears. My name's Holly Wayne Wright and I've
got something special for you today. It's an episode from
our podcast, Mid Conversations with gen X Women who are
anything but hosted by me, and in this episode that
we're popping in your feed, the reason we thought that
you might like it in particular is it's a frank,
(01:03):
shamefree and very interesting conversation about sex. I interviewed a
woman called Antonia Murphy and her life took a very
dramatic turn when her marriage fell apart when she was
raising three kids in a small town in New Zealand.
Lots of women make big changes after divorce, but Antonia's
was kind of unexpected. She opened a legal, ethical brothel,
(01:27):
and in this candid conversation, Antonia shares the events that
led her to that what she learned about the women
working at the brothel and what the men who went
to the brothel wanted they were mostly men, and a
great deal about sex and shame in a small town.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Here.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
It is our very frank mid episode with Antonia Murphy.
Ask for what you want, know your ground rules, and
do not budge. Age is experience, and experience is hot
and comforting and kind and hot. Say what it is
(02:06):
you need and ask for what you want. It's not
always about sex. It's about touch and connection and wanting
to be wanted, and for some people some of the
time it's as essential as breathing. But sometimes it's about sex,
of course. Just ask for what you want. Welcome to
(02:29):
a shame free zone. What a midlife madam learned about
sex from years of juggling, pimping, as she somewhat ironically
calls it, with the school run and a divorce. If
you have questions, I'm glad because this is an extraordinary
story of love and connection and lots and lots of
pretty honest sex, of what men want and what women
(02:51):
want and why. A lot of the stories we tell
ourselves about all of that are nonsense.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
So please just ask for what it is you want.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Hello, I am Holly Wainwright, and I am mid midlife,
mid family, mid blush. This is a first for us
on mid Today, I'm interviewing someone who's already been here
sort of. A few weeks ago, I spoke to the
incredible Australia actress Rachel Griffiths about her midlife sabbatical, about
having been on all ends of Hollywood, about actresses aging,
(03:29):
about the role she's currently playing on our screens, a
woman called Antonia Murphy in a show called Madam. And
now today I'm interviewing Antonia Murphy herself. Antonia was raising
three kids, including one with a serious disability, in a
small town in New Zealand when her marriage unraveled.
Speaker 4 (03:50):
She's going to tell me.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Today how that set of events led her to opening
an ethical brothel in a tiny coastal town. I know
it's not what everybody would do in that situation, but hey,
Antonia has a very specific story. Sex work is decriminalized
in New Zealand, so there was nothing illegal about what
she was doing. But that didn't mean there wasn't a
lot of judgment, and judgment is something we do a
(04:13):
lot of unpicking today from all sides, because as well
as understanding what the women who worked at the brothel
wanted needed, she learned an enormous amount about what the
clients and in this example, they're almost all men wanted
and needed. And that is a lot more nuanced and
complex than you might think.
Speaker 4 (04:32):
I promise stay with us.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
You're going to hear stories about the men who were
dropped off by their mothers or their wives, a surprising
fact about the preferred age of the women. About the
worst thing any parent can imagine happening happening to Antonia.
And generally you're going to be with me in the
presence of a woman who looked at how you're supposed
to carry on when you're a midlife regional mum and
(04:56):
said fuck that. And of course you are going to
hear about what it's like to have written a book
about your life, have it turned into a TV show
and for Rachel Griffiths to be playing you in a
version of your life. Here we go, Anthony, your book
is brilliant. You're a writer, of course, so you obviously
(05:19):
know what you're doing, but the story is fascinating to
put the audience in place as it were. Can I
read the intro to an article that you wrote in
the Huffington Post back in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 5 (05:31):
Oh sure, I think I know which one it is.
Go ahead.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
I think this article kickstarted a few things. I think
it was after reading this maybe that the TV people
contacted you.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
Is that correct?
Speaker 5 (05:40):
An article that got optioned?
Speaker 4 (05:42):
Yeah? So are you right? Bye?
Speaker 2 (05:45):
Mom, I'll see you tomorrow morning. It's eight am on
a Tuesday, and my workday probably started out a lot
like yours, packing lunchboxes, making sure the kids eat a
healthy breakfast, finding socks and shoes, and homework. But when
my nine year old daughter Miranda kisses me goodbye to
catch the school bus, she knows I won't be home
until long after bedtime.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
That's because I'm a pimp. More politely, I'm.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
The Madam of the Batch, a feminist escort agency I
own in the North Island of New Zealand. So let's
get this part out there so a mid audience know
what we're talking about. An ethical pimp, a feminist escort agency.
Speaker 4 (06:23):
What's that and how did it work?
Speaker 5 (06:26):
Well?
Speaker 3 (06:26):
I mean, let's be clear, I used the word pimp
in that article because I was deliberately being inflammatory, right,
I could they have thought, yeah, readers, readers on words.
But what I meant when I said and still say,
that we were an ethical and feminist escort agency is
that we were constantly guided by consent at every stage
of the process. The women were always in control of
(06:48):
who they saw and what they would and would not
choose to do with that client.
Speaker 5 (06:52):
And that went.
Speaker 3 (06:53):
From making the booking to allowing him into the room,
to every step of the way during the appointment.
Speaker 5 (07:02):
And if for any.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
Reason he left and didn't pay, if they had taken
off their clothes or sexual contact had started, I would
pay them out anyway, So nobody was ever worried about
all I've got to go through with this dodgy booking
because I have to pay my electrical bill kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
So you are, as the listeners will be able to
tell from your accent originally from America, from the West coast. Yes,
But by the time you open the batch, you're living
in a tiny town, like not in Auckland, but like
a in a little country town in Northland, which is
a beautiful part of New Zealand. And you're there, your
(07:39):
marriage is rocky, falling apart at this particular point.
Speaker 4 (07:44):
You've got two kids.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
You do your start doing your research, knowing you want
to open a an escort agency, but you're starting from nothing.
How did you learn that you know the sort of
rules and guidelines that you've just spelled out for us
that made this a feminist, safe place to work for
the women. How did you learn that's what you wanted
to do?
Speaker 3 (08:07):
So women always exchange information with each other, whether they're
talking about something legal or not. Right, I think at
every stage in my life, I've always had a woman
or a girlfriend who I could and get the honest
truth about something. And it turns out there's this whole
online community of anonymous sex workers and people who work
(08:31):
in the business who exchange information everything about what makes
a good agency to work at, somebody who protects your rights,
to how to stay safe in a booking And it
was they who taught me how to design a place
where the women's rights were held at the forefront of
everything that we did. And then, you know, this didn't
(08:53):
make it into the book. But when I was still.
Speaker 5 (08:55):
Married to my husband, I sent him down to a.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
Couple of places in Auckland, like so called good brothels
or escort agencies to check it out, and he came
back and he said, oh my god, it's so depressing,
Like it's you go into this place. It's sort of
lit by these cheesy Christmas lights. There's like a vinyl
couch that gets wiped off between bookings. He's like, there's
(09:19):
a lot of glitzy gland me stuff that's supposed to
look elegant and classy, but it's just makes me sad, like, oh,
I think we could do things a bit better than that.
Speaker 4 (09:30):
And so the.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Batch you end up opening is in a motel and
you make it bright and breezy and like a beach almost, like, well,
that's what a batch is in New Zealand, right, is
a beach house. And so everything from the inception of
what it would look like and feel like to the
way that the workers.
Speaker 4 (09:47):
Were treated was very different.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
I was really interested in the process that you were
just talking about about the research going and talking to women.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
You talk to a woman in.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
The sex industry who tells you that it's all about
being a madam or a sex worker is all about
hold your power, she said, And I'd love you to
talk a bit about what that means, because to be honest.
When I read examples in the book of where you
helped you thought about that and implemented it. I think
it's something that all women sex workers are or not
(10:21):
could get a lot better at. Does it kind of.
Speaker 4 (10:24):
Mean whole know you're worth?
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Yeah, I think that's part of it, and we can
get into that part of it too. In that I
learned a lot from the men about asking for what
you want and not being afraid to ask, even if
it comes off as a bit cheeky.
Speaker 5 (10:39):
But I think.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
When she taught me about hold your power, I think
there's a reason why madams traditionally have been sexually unavailable
to the clients for the most part, and often older,
so that culturally they're considered no longer sexually interesting. Right
Because I had on regularly, I would get proposition by clients.
(11:01):
They would try to find their way in around the
cracks and ask.
Speaker 5 (11:04):
All, will you see me? I'll pay top dollar? How
much would you charge? How can I please? Please? Please?
And what that's about is they feel like if they
can conquer.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
You sexually, then they've won you over and they don't
have to play by your rules anymore. So I think
it's that's why it's so, That's why I think that
madam position has existed traditionally, is that you need a
woman in charge who is sexually unavailable and completely unmoving
in her ground rules.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
That's interesting what you just said about how age plays
into that, because it is true, of course that the
stereotype of a madam in my mind is definitely she's
older than the women who work who do the sex work.
In your experience, I mean, I want to I'm going
to get to all the things you've learned about men
doing in that process.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
But is there an age cut off? Do you feel
like not at all?
Speaker 3 (11:57):
In fact, when you said that, I wanted to jump
in because the lady who made the most money at
our agency was older than me. And the reason why well,
there's a few reasons why she made the most money.
She was highly professional, and she organized, and she would
come in with a large Duffel bag for what we
called her day at the office because she had back
to back bookings of these elderly gents who would book
(12:18):
her for two and three hours at a time, and
she would put on a different lingerie.
Speaker 5 (12:23):
Outfit for each one, and there was very little sex.
It was largely companionship. But she was really intuitively kind.
She was so genuinely kind. People really responded to that,
and she made the.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
Most money, so it really And the other reason is
that a lot of these guys who come and see
sex workers, if they're in their seventies and eighties, they
don't want to see a lady in her twenties. They're like,
my granddaughter is in her twenties. That makes me feel
like a pedo. So there really isn't a cutoff, I
would say in age for sex work, and quite often
the older ones do better. And in fact it was
(12:58):
a bit of a red flag for me and the
other managers when we would get a new client in particular,
who would say who's the youngest?
Speaker 5 (13:06):
Who's the youngest?
Speaker 3 (13:07):
Because what that means is is either a he thinks
that women's quality degrades with age, which is a big
red flag, or more likely B he thinks he'll have
a better chance pushing her boundaries if she's young.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Absolutely, and there is an experience in there with a
man like that. Just back for one more second to
hold your power. One of the first times in the
book that you like you think about doing that is
when a client is trying to talk you down on price.
And this is what I'd love to get to about
that idea of saying what you need and what you
want trying to talk you down in price. And this
(13:43):
is when the batch has just opened, and so you're
kind of like figuring it out and you were like, no,
I'm going to hold it and see what happens. And
of course he caves and says, sure, is that also?
Is it about also not.
Speaker 4 (13:56):
The people pleasing the man pleasing reflex?
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Oh, it was really hard to deprogram ourselves from that.
I can still remember.
Speaker 5 (14:05):
You know.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
We had a confirmation text that we would send when
people made a booking that said you must park in
this place, arrive on time for your booking, do not
arrive early, do not arrive late, and so on. And
the first draft I looked at it and I saw
that we'd started almost every sentence with please, and I
was like, we got to take the pleases out of
this one, because I'm not asking them, I'm telling them.
Speaker 5 (14:26):
So that was really a process for us to work
that out.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
And yeah, I mean it became quite clear early early on,
so early the men would would push back on the rules,
and also they would always ask for discounts and then
and then not always, but very often they would want
to know, can I do this? Can I do that?
How about three of this? How far can I go?
(14:50):
How hard can I say bad words?
Speaker 4 (14:51):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (14:52):
With you hard? Can I fuck her?
Speaker 3 (14:53):
Things like that, I mean, sometimes quite gross, But I
think a lot of them just thought they were being
clear about the boundaries and they wanted to make sure
they got the best deal possible for their money, which, Okay,
it annoyed us, and sometimes we laughed uproariously about it,
but also like, why.
Speaker 5 (15:11):
Don't we do that more as women?
Speaker 3 (15:13):
I don't know about you, but me personally, Like even
the least I negotiated on the motel. A year down
the line, it was quite clear that I had made
some mistakes in my negotiation where I could have I
could have had that motel ticking along at a much
better clip, but I just hadn't. I hadn't pushed back
with the landlord because I think I thought if I pushed,
he'd yank the whole thing away, which is not the case.
(15:36):
It's not You're not going to lose everything. If you ask,
people are just going to say maybe no, And it
doesn't hurt.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Right, I know, but I mean such a stereotype, but
I know it certainly is true of myself and lots
of midwomen. I know in particular that's what they're afraid of.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
But I could lose it all. I don't know if
I deserve it. I don't know if I'm gonning. And it's.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
A few of the conversations I've had on this show
that have been enlightening is when people say, very often,
when you ask for what you want, you get it.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
You know, but it's all about how you do that
I did. There isn't There isn't a moment in your
book where which i'd like to think is known in
New Zealand moment but maybe not where one man offers
to pay and crayfish.
Speaker 5 (16:18):
Is particular to New Zealand. But I wouldn't be surprise
the burter is pretty calm.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
I mean, I can tell you for real. Border for
drugs is definitely yes.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Antonia and I are going to be back in a
minute to talk about the kinds of men who pay
for sex and the unconventional way in which she ended
up with her now husband. It does involve somebody getting
punched in the nose, just stepping back a little bit.
You say that, and I felt a gen x camaraderie
with you about this. You were sort of saying that
(16:50):
you had quite you had an adventuress, You had a
non conventional childhood, you say. I seen you rite When
I was six months old, my mother's went. My mother
went to the United Nations Women's Conference in Mexico City,
leaving me with my dad.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
My father decided this.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Was a good time to attend the Hooker's Ball at
the San Francisco Higatt Regency with me swaddled in a
blanket in the backseat of his car. It was nineteen
seventy five. These things happened back then, and indeed they did.
Our nineteen seventies upbringings were kind of different.
Speaker 5 (17:18):
I think, and whearin as she got on the next
flight home.
Speaker 4 (17:22):
I'm sure she did.
Speaker 5 (17:25):
But I think the reason.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Why he went to that is because my mother was
sort of somewhat friends are at least friendly with Margo
Saint James, who was a big sex worker rights activist
and feminist in San Francisco.
Speaker 5 (17:38):
So they were peripherally around that scene.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
And I know my mother as a second way a
feminist would talk a lot about the crossover between sex
work and being a housewife.
Speaker 5 (17:49):
For example.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
I want to ask you about that too. But that's
interesting because you also say in the book at some
point that the rules you'd internalize from your dad were
around like don't be a prick tease, don't wear a
short skirt, don't do this and that.
Speaker 4 (18:05):
So it's like they're conflicting.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
You obviously had a sort of compared to a conventional
straight lag childhood, a relatively what's the right word, I
guess put me in there you go, But you also
were still internalizing all that messaging that women, young women
always do right about, like protect yourself, make sure you know,
don't lead men on, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 5 (18:29):
Yeah, well, I think a lot of that is generational.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
So my dad was born in the twenties and my
mom was born in the thirties. So even though my
mom was a strident feminist, I think her attitude was like, look,
if you you know, you show nipple and and wear
a really short mini skirt, you're gonna get aggressive attention,
so be prepared for that. It can make you, know,
(18:52):
your walk home that much more dangerous. Nowadays, you know,
people say, oh, it's not her fault, it's his fault.
She should be able to wear what she wants, and
they're absolutely right. Women should be able to wear what
they want. Also, I don't think my mother was wrong
that the micro mini is gonna make.
Speaker 5 (19:06):
Your walk home a lot more complicated.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
To be honest, it makes it's interesting because I have
a fifteen year old daughter. You know, we would it's
we're so much further along from this idea of like
keep yourself safe, do your top up, as your dad
would say. But there's a part of you that has
learned those lessons yourself from being hyper visible at that
(19:28):
moment where you become hyper visible and you want to
kind of protect them from it, and it's it's complicated.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
It is complicated, and in fairness, I think we've come
a long way, and we've also taken a huge step
backward with the amount of pornography that is so easily
accessible in everybody's back pocket and that apparently everyone's watching.
Speaker 5 (19:49):
From the age of ten.
Speaker 3 (19:50):
I know, and I saw how that played out at
the batch, and it was everything from asking for sort
of further and further out fantasies and it would be
quite clear when a certain fantasy was trending in porn,
because more and more men would ask for it. Two
men who literally could not orgasm having vaginal sex with
(20:11):
a woman because they were so used to jacking it
with porn, and so they got used to this very
specific touch and they could no longer orgasm with a woman.
So oh, and then just like the total death of foreplay,
Like how many young men would get in there and
think that all they had to do was put her
legs up over her head and pound away, and she's
going to have nine orgasms.
Speaker 5 (20:30):
I mean, these ladies, they would I talk about it
in the book.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
They at first they would say, Oh, I don't want
to see it. He's so old, you know, he's fifty.
He's gonna smell like old man. And then they'd finally concede,
and when they came down, they'd be like, holy shit,
that was the best shag of my life, Like no,
no one's ever been that that courtly with me before,
you know, And he kept he was so important to
(20:55):
him that I feel good. I mean they were just
like baffled.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
And I guess also that because that's a generation that
hasn't grown up with the pawn in the pocket. It's
interesting about this because I would imagine, I mean, so
you were running the batch from in the sort of
late teens, right the late twenty teens, and so you know,
we are living in this in the iPhone world, we're
living with pawn in the pocket. I imagine that Tinder
(21:20):
only fans in those things are very much disrupted brothels
and agency work.
Speaker 4 (21:25):
Have they No, I.
Speaker 5 (21:27):
Don't think so. I mean they may have. I couldn't
speak to the before.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
Times because I wasn't in the industry before, but I
will say this, something that really surprises people outside the
industry is how little sex.
Speaker 5 (21:38):
There is in it.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
I mean, it may be different in the sort of
street walker economy where people are paying for fifteen minutes
in the back of your car or whatever. That's not
the experience I can speak to. What we sold was
minimum thirty minutes, most often an hour, sometimes two or three,
and during that time there was like maybe five minutes
(22:01):
of sex. So men aren't booking escorts, at least not
at the price point and the time span that we
were offering for the shag. They were booking for the
companionship conversation. Someone to pay attention to them and make
them feel like they were important and really for the touch.
Like that was a huge wake up for me, is
(22:23):
how there just seems to be this epidemic of loneliness
and of lack of human touch that people are just
hungry for and will pay And yeah, okay, we are
only charging two hundred and forty dollars an hour, but
in twenty eighteen in Fungaday, New Zealand, let me tell you,
that was a big chunk of less people pay check.
(22:44):
That was a big payout, so they were that starved
for it.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
It's interesting because you'd think in this porn saturated world
that you know that if anything, people were more, that
there's more sex. But then study after study is saying
that young people now are having less sex than they've
ever had. Right, And anecdotally it seems to me, I
work with lots of young women. Attitudes to sex and
(23:12):
monogamy are still quite conservative in some ways, I think
more conservative than gen x is are. Don't you think
I think that the intimacy and monogamy and finding your
person is still very much the ideal that is upheld.
Speaker 4 (23:31):
What do you think about that?
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Well, I think a lot of things. Some of the
thoughts that came up as you were talking were, it's
true we were shagging so much more than kids are
these days, and we had the specter of aids over
our heads.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
I can imagine I know when as we came of
sexual age with that idea and the fear around that.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
I can tell you I'm not gen z and I'm
old and cringed to them right. But the one person
who will talk to me still touchwood is my daughter
who's fourteen. And one of the comments that she's made
which really resonated with me, is she said, I could
be photographed, Like every time I'm out in public, I'm
really careful about how I present myself because I could
(24:13):
be videoed or photographed at any time or recorded, and
then that can never go away, like it can ruin
your life. So I think there's more of a self
censorship because kids are worried about like just that it
can ruin your life, like we would do, get drunk,
do dumb stuff, be bad in bed with a lover
(24:36):
you didn't sync with, and like that's it.
Speaker 5 (24:38):
It's forgotten.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
It's washed off, like the cigarette smell on your clothes
after a night at the clubs, right, they can follow
them forever into jobs, any future relationship.
Speaker 5 (24:50):
I mean, what an enormous.
Speaker 4 (24:52):
Wait, No wonder that anxious. This is depressing, depressing. I
wonder it's it's true, it's this. I wonder if we.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Could look back on our young adulthood and think we
were allowed to mess up an experiment and have adventures
in a way that they're probably not. I wanted to
get back to two things, well many things, but we're
jumping all over the place. But when you were running
the batch, so you're also parenting three young kids, your
oldest Silas had significant disabilities, your daughter Miranda's little and
(25:25):
you had a brand new baby Matisse. So you were
a hustling working mother, which was one of the real
impetuses for you wanting to do that. And as it
turned out, so are a lot of your ladies. You
even run a crache at the batch for a while.
How does motherhood and sex work intersect? You mentioned it before.
How does that work?
Speaker 5 (25:42):
Well?
Speaker 3 (25:43):
I think a lot more than most people would think,
because mothers need flexible schedules, and mothers who've been left
alone with their kids need to make the money for
the whole household because the vast majority of absent men
aren't paying enough, right, so they needed to be able
to make real money to run a real safe household
(26:03):
for their kids. Sometimes they were in an educational program
to launch themselves under professional life, so they.
Speaker 5 (26:08):
Needed even more childcare and even more of an income
to pay for that.
Speaker 3 (26:13):
And you know, how are you going to make that
work if you've only got a high school degree and
the only jobs out there are for you with that,
or like call center or working in a cafe for
minimum wage. Like it's just that the math doesn't math, yeah,
with that, which is why a lot of women, have
mums in particular, have turned to sex work. And then
(26:34):
I guess the other part of that question is like, oh,
how do you reconcile your life at home with your
life at the batch? But I mean, I don't think
in that sense it was really much different from any
working mother, Like when I'm at work, I'm at work,
and when I'm home, I'm mumsy.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Well, there are some really interesting scenes in the book though,
when you are sort of dealing with your kids, but
your phone the phone was pinging with messages, and this
bit I found really interesting. Well, it's near the beginning
of your book, you're talking about you.
Speaker 4 (27:06):
You've run quite a lot of.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
The text messages you got sent, and they are quite shocking,
Like if you're not in that world, they're quite shocking.
So I'm going to read a couple albums. So you're
you know, you're doing what you're doing with the baby
on your boom and everything and you and you're getting
messages that are like, hey, do you have toys or
suck without a condom? Show me pussy face, tits and
ass And you say, is this because this is obviously
(27:29):
early in your experience, You're like, is this how they
talk when they don't have to pretend? And I found
that a really interesting insight because that's exactly what I
thought when.
Speaker 4 (27:40):
I was reading it.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
I don't think a lot of those messages would shock
a lot of my midlife friends are on the dating apps,
to be honest, they get a lot of that stuff,
and that not from people who were looking to pay.
But did you feel like you were getting, at least
at the at the beginning, that you were getting an
insight into the male psyche that was really disturbing? Do
(28:03):
you and also do you think that is how they
talk when they don't have to pretend that they respect us.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
Well, look, I have four older brothers, so I think
I had a bit of insight into the male psyche anyway,
and they would talk and say all kinds of outrageous
things about women when they were around me. I think
that I think probably all men think those things. I
think most men say them, and I think for many
(28:30):
men there is no contradiction between that and the fact
that they also respect women and their intellect. Like, I
think you can want to slap that ass and then
also have a conversation about civil rights. I don't think
that is necessary necessarily cancel each other out. But in
terms of an insight into you know, again, I think
(28:52):
men thought that they were being clear when they rang
up and they asked for, you know, can I get
a size six double D blonde please?
Speaker 5 (29:04):
And that. But still, even though.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
I knew they were not trying to be offensive, it
would it would just get, it would get. It would
wear you down because it was like, oh, they just
think of us as a collection of body parts. And
so that's why very quickly we realized like the batch
ran the best way, and we had three managers who
each just work two days a week because we were
(29:26):
just it would just be so emotionally exhausting to deal
with that.
Speaker 5 (29:33):
Thirteen fourteen hours a day.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
But that's an interesting point you make that it's not
that because when you wrote you know, is this how
they talk when they don't have to pretend. I think
that sometimes when a curtain is pulled back a little
bit on that kind of language whatever, I can find
myself thinking they hate us, you know what I mean,
They really they hate us, and that's how they would
(29:59):
like to see all of us all of the time.
But that's a very simplistic way of thinking about it,
isn't it. It's these men are messaging you for a
very specific purpose.
Speaker 4 (30:09):
This is your job to.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Find them the person who possibly is going to fulfill
their fantasy. It's not as black and white as good bad.
Speaker 4 (30:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
And I think that's a mistake that a lot of
activists make when they talk about sex worker really people
in general, when they talk about it without.
Speaker 5 (30:28):
Firsthand knowledge of it.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
Is you know, feminists in particular in Europe will say
all selling women's bodies for sex devalues women, and it
encourages men to treat us like objects to be used,
and I think again, that's assuming that because a man
(30:50):
wants sex with a woman, therefore he is a predator
who doesn't see her as a valuable human being.
Speaker 5 (30:58):
I don't think. I don't think that's the case.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
I mean, look, there are jerks out there, for sure,
and we had a few of them come to the batch.
But for the most part, I think men have all people.
I think have a need for sex and intimate touch
and to feel loved and appreciated, even if it's an illusion.
Speaker 5 (31:19):
But I think men really feel it like a drive,
like eating.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
There's a point in the book where you sort of
run through this almost profiles of.
Speaker 4 (31:29):
A few of the guys. I'm just going to find him.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
Ben is a widower in his sixties who spent his
whole life on his sheep farm. He is cripplingly shy,
and he has a bit of a speech impediment. So
these are kind of some of your regulars. Michael is
a local salesman. Seems to be in a happy marriage,
but he has an enormous sex drive, and his wife
is agreed that he can regularly go to escorts as
long as she doesn't have to hear about it. Eric
(31:52):
is autistic, and he saves up his disability checks for
his visits, which his mum drives him to and from.
I think it's really interesting to consider this variety of
people who come, and I'd love to know because, as
I was just saying about hormone a lot for a
lot of mid women, sex can become a bit of
(32:12):
a battleground because your hormones might have been smashed and
so your libido is low, or you're in the familiarity
of a long relationship and that erotic charge is really
hard to find.
Speaker 4 (32:25):
Did you see lots of that?
Speaker 2 (32:27):
Have you seen that kind of outsourcing of sex that's
maybe depicted there by Michael the guy whose wife agrees?
Speaker 4 (32:34):
Did you see a lot of that? And does it work?
Speaker 5 (32:36):
Absolutely? I saw a lot of it.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
And it's interesting to me when people talk to me
about the threat that sex work poses to marriage, because
I think actually the reverse is true. A lot of
men would reach out to sex workers because their wives
were uninterested in sex sex had completely left the marriage,
but they didn't want to divorce and lose their families,
and they didn't want the risk of having an affair,
(33:02):
which could bring with it emotional attachment and all of
those complications, and so this for them was a way
to get their physical.
Speaker 5 (33:08):
Needs met without putting their families at risk. Does it work?
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
I have no way of following up and finding out
if they're still married or divorced five or ten years later.
Speaker 5 (33:21):
I can tell you.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
That somebody I know and my personal life has done
that and it has saved his marriage. That he says
his wife told him explicitly that she was no longer
interested in having sex, and they were in their sixties,
and he said, I'm not ready to die yet. Now.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Your own marriage, which is talked about in the book
of Course with Patrice, started in quite an unconventional way too.
So you were married to the father of your two
older kids and you opened your marriage.
Speaker 4 (33:51):
Right.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Is that the right terminology, I guess. And Patrice went
at some point from being your lover to your partner
when you got pregnant with Matisse, and your husband went
and punished him in the nose.
Speaker 4 (34:00):
And then I don't know why I'm laughing.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
That's not really funny, but it's just it's quite a scene.
And then you say that your small town turned on
you at that point. To a lot of people stopped
talking to you, and I wanted to hear about your ins,
and then you opened brothels. So I'm sure that, really,
I'm sure that really sorted out.
Speaker 4 (34:20):
All that judgment.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
How did that community handle you in a way, and
how did you learn to deal with those really entrenched
conservative attitudes about both your personal and professional.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
I'm not sure if it's a blessing or a curse
how completely non confrontational quies are, because nobody ever said
to my face that they disapproved of what I was doing.
But it did hurt when friends just stopped, like literally
just didn't call back, didn't email back, just just cut
us dead. And Patrice had lived in the community a
lot longer than I had, and these are people who
(34:56):
he'd cared for their kids over the school holidays because
during periods of time and he was only working part
time or between jobs, he like basically conducted a summer
camp at his house and took care of all their kids.
Speaker 5 (35:08):
And they just cut us out.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
So yeah, that hurt would have Yeah, And you know, honestly,
as an American, I'd rather they had had a conversation
with me, because maybe we could have, you know, salvaged
some of the friendships. But alas that was not to be.
And I think I was so overwhelmed at the time
with new baby and profoundly disabled child and two businesses
(35:30):
and all the rest of it. I was on a
go door to door and say, Hi, do you still
want to be my friend? Like, I just didn't have
time for that.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
I had to simplify, you know, the judgment that you
were copying for both for both that and then I
assumed that it was public knowledge about the batch, right
like the town all knew about the batch. Did you
also cop a lot of judgment about that and did
you care?
Speaker 5 (35:52):
Well, it's hard to say.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
I only felt the judgment when I tried to advertise,
both for staff or for clients, or when I tried
to rent to premises, and I was getting blocked at
every point in the way. When I when counsel tried
to give us the boot, that's when I felt the pushback.
The rest of the time, people really just did not confront.
(36:15):
I sometimes felt a bit of a chill in the air,
but nobody said anything. And look, you know, I've worked
out that fun Today had a population about eighty thousand
people of whom, let's say half were men forty thousand
and like maybe a quarter of those are children. So
of the thirty thousand adult men in town, I had
(36:37):
three thousand names on my work phone. So like judgment
are no judgment? They were still ringing that phone.
Speaker 4 (36:46):
Yeah, absolutely absolutely.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
It was obviously a service that was needed in that community,
whether they approved of it or not.
Speaker 4 (36:54):
So you didn't.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
It wasn't like they're trying to run you out of town.
It was just more like icy, an icy, like not
looking at you in the shop.
Speaker 4 (37:03):
Well, yeah, when we come back.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Anthonya tells me about her experience parenting a child living
with a disability while also running a brothel. Stay with us.
Everything changed in twenty nineteen. You lost your son, Silas.
He died suddenly, and that obviously changed everything. You packed
up and left and went to live in France for
a year with your family. And you didn't go back,
(37:28):
did you. You've gone back to New Zealand, but you've
never gone back.
Speaker 5 (37:32):
No, I have not been back.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
I assume that there's a that's a massive life before
and life after moment.
Speaker 5 (37:39):
Yeah, well, I mean from Gaday.
Speaker 3 (37:41):
For me, it was the years when I was parenting Silas,
which were really hard. I mean, I love that kid,
but it is so hard and isolating to have a
child who is so profoundly disabled. He was basically nonverbal,
he was incontinent. He would yell nonsense words repeatedly. And
(38:04):
so you know, people people shoot you are either really
uncomfortable or they shoot you annoyed looks because they think
your child is acting out. They don't realize that he
can't help it.
Speaker 5 (38:15):
I think we have a ways to go. I mean,
that's another taboo.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
We have a ways to go before we're fully accepting
of THELED.
Speaker 5 (38:21):
And so there's just a lot of pain wrapped up
for me in that town.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
I think the way that you write about with such
honesty about parenting Silas, mothering Silas will make a lot
of women I'm sure they say that to you already,
but will make a lot of parents feel very seen
because I think I think you like you. You bring
You're very I mean as in all of the book.
You're very honest, You're very straightforward about it. You know,
(38:48):
you you talk about how difficult it it is and was,
and I think it's a real gift that because you know,
we we like to put little bows on difficult situations,
don't we.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
Totally And thank you for saying that, because I feel
like that that the book does make tries to ship
away a little bit at that taboo that we have
around disability, and it's bo is exactly the right word
for it. There's another writer, Andrew Solomon, who writes brilliantly.
Speaker 4 (39:22):
From the Tree Fall from the Tree.
Speaker 5 (39:23):
Loved that book.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
He says, there's a tendency that people have of calling
them pillow angels. You know these Hugh at the time
was writing about I think a pair of twins that
were so profoundly disabled that they couldn't even sit up
on their own. They were basically lying flat on their
backs with the tube in their bellies to feed them
on pillows. And I can't remember if it was the
(39:45):
mother the people around them calling them pillow angels.
Speaker 5 (39:47):
I thought, wow, that's so what.
Speaker 3 (39:49):
It is is it's a racing of the child, and
it's a racing of the parent. Because look, Silas could
be a real little shit sometimes like every other kid,
and that's part of his humanity. He has the right
to be a little shit. And I have the right
to feel really unhappy about going into his room every
morning and changing an adult sized Pooh, you know, and
(40:11):
that's also human, that's part of my humanity. And so yeah,
I think too often what happens is that the parents
of people who are disabled, and very often into adulthood
of the child end up isolated at home because no
one is able to They're either ostracized or there's this
(40:34):
weird angelic halo put on them, but either way, nobody
wants to see them.
Speaker 2 (40:39):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and they don't want to hear They
don't want to hear your story about that, you know,
I'm so playing on an animal level. I think that's
exactly right. I think people don't want to look at it,
which is like, deep down don't want to look at
that experience, which I really appreciated it being in the book.
(41:00):
You did go back to New Zealand though, And I'm
really interested in post batch life because obviously you've written
this book, and this book has been adapted into a
TV show which is very successful. Has Rachel Griffi is
playing you. I don't know how that feels. How does
it feel to have Rachel Griffiths playing you?
Speaker 5 (41:14):
Is it really real?
Speaker 4 (41:18):
It's great?
Speaker 2 (41:19):
But so how did life play out post that did you.
Speaker 4 (41:24):
You.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
Obviously you all went back to France. I can't imagine
what a difficult time this was COVID hits.
Speaker 4 (41:29):
But you did go back to New Zealand.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Why did you go back to New Zealand And how
has life changed since you wrote the book?
Speaker 3 (41:37):
Well, I mean the quick reason why we came back
to New Zealand is that we both have shared custody
of children with partners. Of course you do short of
abandoning those children, which I could never do.
Speaker 5 (41:48):
We need to be in New Zealand of course from them.
Speaker 3 (41:51):
But really the only other option I think for me
would be France because the United States I feel less
and less American.
Speaker 5 (41:59):
It's been sixteen seventeen years now.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
Did you write the huff Post essay and it got
optioned for the movie? But had you'd already been you
You've sailed through this book that you always knew it
was going to be a book, really, this Batch Adventure?
Speaker 3 (42:14):
Oh right, yeah, so you were asking me about life
since then, I always wanted to write about it, and
I had been writing about it during the time of
running the batche. I would jot down notes and I
would talk about it whenever I could to a couple
of podcasts and so on, because I thought what we
were doing was really important and low key revolutionary, actually
(42:37):
putting the power in the hands of the sex workers.
Speaker 2 (42:40):
Near the beginning of the book, you're like, you're in
this little town in New Zealand and you're kind of
going and you've got these little kids, and as discussed,
you know, life isn't easy, and you're working out what
to do. And you say, when you're young and w
you make choices on a whim because you think everything
is reversible, and then one day you realize it's not.
And that's one of the things about aging that I
(43:03):
bump up against a lot. I'm like, the choices I've
made that I didn't even really think about have now
led me to be in my life. For example, I
live on the other side of the world to my
family and all those things. When you look back at
this time, at that time in your life that this
book is about.
Speaker 4 (43:22):
How do you feel about it?
Speaker 2 (43:24):
Do you regret being there? Do you wish that life
had been different already? Glad that it played out the
way it did.
Speaker 5 (43:31):
I think it has to play out the way it does.
Speaker 3 (43:34):
I mean, look, if I was gonna tell you one regret,
I'd say, I wish I hadn't dropped out of university
level chemistry because I was really getting interested in endochronology.
But I think, look when my husband left and I
was so terrified, and I had all these kids to
take care of, and Patrece, my now husband, said he
(43:58):
would be with me and help me raise this child.
Speaker 5 (44:00):
But I didn't know if he was stick or not.
Speaker 3 (44:04):
I think something rises up in mothers in particular, or
we just go nothing gonna put my babies in danger,
and I just I was able to find a strength
of a hundred wildcats.
Speaker 5 (44:20):
And I'm not flexing here like that.
Speaker 3 (44:22):
I think it's I think it's a physical brain reaction
when a mom is backed against the wall.
Speaker 5 (44:27):
And I'm proud of what we did, and I think
I did it because I was backed up against the wall.
So yeah, I think all that bad shit had to happen.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Thank you so much, Anthonia. It's been a really good conversation. Friends.
This has been the last traditional episode of season four
of mid We're going to be back in your ears
in April, and until then, I want you to keep
your ears free for a few little treats that might
drop your way in this feed. Also, I asked you
(44:59):
last week to rate and review and please continue to
do that wherever you're listening to MID. If you like
the show, If you love the show, if you have
opinions about the show, tell us jump into wherever you're
listening to this and rate and review. Five stars would
be great. Also, if you have thoughts and feelings about
what we should be talking about next on MID, we'd
(45:20):
love to hear it.
Speaker 4 (45:21):
Follow us on instert and send us.
Speaker 2 (45:22):
A cheeky DM at Mid by Mamma Mia or me
at Waynwright, Holly, and last, but not least, if you
want more MID conversations about sex, scroll back to our
conversation with Leslie Morgan, who got divorced at forty nine
and embarked on quite the sexual adventure, or with the
author Julie Cohen about coming out as bisexual as a
(45:43):
married mom of forty. Both of those episodes are in
our feed, And of course, a massive thank you to
the executive producer of MID. Her name is Niama Brown,
the senior producer is Grace Ruvray, the producer is Charlie Blackman,
and we've had audio production from Jacob Brown.
Speaker 4 (46:02):
And I will see you next season. Bye,
So you're listening to a Mother Mia podcast. Mamma Mia
acknowledges the traditional owners of the land. We have recorded
this podcast on the Gadigul people of the Eora Nation.
We pay our respects to their elders past and present,
and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Raight
Islander cultures.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Hello, Sealed Section listeners, Thank you for letting me pop
into your ears. My name's Holly Wayne Wright and I've
got something special for you today. It's an episode from
our podcast, Mid Conversations with gen X Women who are
anything but hosted by me, and in this episode that
we're popping in your feed, the reason we thought that
you might like it in particular is it's a frank,
(01:03):
shamefree and very interesting conversation about sex. I interviewed a
woman called Antonia Murphy and her life took a very
dramatic turn when her marriage fell apart when she was
raising three kids in a small town in New Zealand.
Lots of women make big changes after divorce, but Antonia's
was kind of unexpected. She opened a legal, ethical brothel,
(01:27):
and in this candid conversation, Antonia shares the events that
led her to that what she learned about the women
working at the brothel and what the men who went
to the brothel wanted they were mostly men, and a
great deal about sex and shame in a small town.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Here.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
It is our very frank mid episode with Antonia Murphy.
Ask for what you want, know your ground rules, and
do not budge. Age is experience, and experience is hot
and comforting and kind and hot. Say what it is
(02:06):
you need and ask for what you want. It's not
always about sex. It's about touch and connection and wanting
to be wanted, and for some people some of the
time it's as essential as breathing. But sometimes it's about sex,
of course. Just ask for what you want. Welcome to
(02:29):
a shame free zone. What a midlife madam learned about
sex from years of juggling, pimping, as she somewhat ironically
calls it, with the school run and a divorce. If
you have questions, I'm glad because this is an extraordinary
story of love and connection and lots and lots of
pretty honest sex, of what men want and what women
(02:51):
want and why. A lot of the stories we tell
ourselves about all of that are nonsense.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
So please just ask for what it is you want.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Hello, I am Holly Wainwright, and I am mid midlife,
mid family, mid blush. This is a first for us
on mid Today, I'm interviewing someone who's already been here
sort of. A few weeks ago, I spoke to the
incredible Australia actress Rachel Griffiths about her midlife sabbatical, about
having been on all ends of Hollywood, about actresses aging,
(03:29):
about the role she's currently playing on our screens, a
woman called Antonia Murphy in a show called Madam. And
now today I'm interviewing Antonia Murphy herself. Antonia was raising
three kids, including one with a serious disability, in a
small town in New Zealand when her marriage unraveled.
Speaker 4 (03:50):
She's going to tell me.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Today how that set of events led her to opening
an ethical brothel in a tiny coastal town. I know
it's not what everybody would do in that situation, but hey,
Antonia has a very specific story. Sex work is decriminalized
in New Zealand, so there was nothing illegal about what
she was doing. But that didn't mean there wasn't a
lot of judgment, and judgment is something we do a
(04:13):
lot of unpicking today from all sides, because as well
as understanding what the women who worked at the brothel
wanted needed, she learned an enormous amount about what the
clients and in this example, they're almost all men wanted
and needed. And that is a lot more nuanced and
complex than you might think.
Speaker 4 (04:32):
I promise stay with us.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
You're going to hear stories about the men who were
dropped off by their mothers or their wives, a surprising
fact about the preferred age of the women. About the
worst thing any parent can imagine happening happening to Antonia.
And generally you're going to be with me in the
presence of a woman who looked at how you're supposed
to carry on when you're a midlife regional mum and
(04:56):
said fuck that. And of course you are going to
hear about what it's like to have written a book
about your life, have it turned into a TV show
and for Rachel Griffiths to be playing you in a
version of your life. Here we go, Anthony, your book
is brilliant. You're a writer, of course, so you obviously
(05:19):
know what you're doing, but the story is fascinating to
put the audience in place as it were. Can I
read the intro to an article that you wrote in
the Huffington Post back in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 5 (05:31):
Oh sure, I think I know which one it is.
Go ahead.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
I think this article kickstarted a few things. I think
it was after reading this maybe that the TV people
contacted you.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
Is that correct?
Speaker 5 (05:40):
An article that got optioned?
Speaker 4 (05:42):
Yeah? So are you right? Bye?
Speaker 2 (05:45):
Mom, I'll see you tomorrow morning. It's eight am on
a Tuesday, and my workday probably started out a lot
like yours, packing lunchboxes, making sure the kids eat a
healthy breakfast, finding socks and shoes, and homework. But when
my nine year old daughter Miranda kisses me goodbye to
catch the school bus, she knows I won't be home
until long after bedtime.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
That's because I'm a pimp. More politely, I'm.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
The Madam of the Batch, a feminist escort agency I
own in the North Island of New Zealand. So let's
get this part out there so a mid audience know
what we're talking about. An ethical pimp, a feminist escort agency.
Speaker 4 (06:23):
What's that and how did it work?
Speaker 5 (06:26):
Well?
Speaker 3 (06:26):
I mean, let's be clear, I used the word pimp
in that article because I was deliberately being inflammatory, right,
I could they have thought, yeah, readers, readers on words.
But what I meant when I said and still say,
that we were an ethical and feminist escort agency is
that we were constantly guided by consent at every stage
of the process. The women were always in control of
(06:48):
who they saw and what they would and would not
choose to do with that client.
Speaker 5 (06:52):
And that went.
Speaker 3 (06:53):
From making the booking to allowing him into the room,
to every step of the way during the appointment.
Speaker 5 (07:02):
And if for any.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
Reason he left and didn't pay, if they had taken
off their clothes or sexual contact had started, I would
pay them out anyway, So nobody was ever worried about
all I've got to go through with this dodgy booking
because I have to pay my electrical bill kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
So you are, as the listeners will be able to
tell from your accent originally from America, from the West coast. Yes,
But by the time you open the batch, you're living
in a tiny town, like not in Auckland, but like
a in a little country town in Northland, which is
a beautiful part of New Zealand. And you're there, your
(07:39):
marriage is rocky, falling apart at this particular point.
Speaker 4 (07:44):
You've got two kids.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
You do your start doing your research, knowing you want
to open a an escort agency, but you're starting from nothing.
How did you learn that you know the sort of
rules and guidelines that you've just spelled out for us
that made this a feminist, safe place to work for
the women. How did you learn that's what you wanted
to do?
Speaker 3 (08:07):
So women always exchange information with each other, whether they're
talking about something legal or not. Right, I think at
every stage in my life, I've always had a woman
or a girlfriend who I could and get the honest
truth about something. And it turns out there's this whole
online community of anonymous sex workers and people who work
(08:31):
in the business who exchange information everything about what makes
a good agency to work at, somebody who protects your rights,
to how to stay safe in a booking And it
was they who taught me how to design a place
where the women's rights were held at the forefront of
everything that we did. And then, you know, this didn't
(08:53):
make it into the book. But when I was still.
Speaker 5 (08:55):
Married to my husband, I sent him down to a.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
Couple of places in Auckland, like so called good brothels
or escort agencies to check it out, and he came
back and he said, oh my god, it's so depressing,
Like it's you go into this place. It's sort of
lit by these cheesy Christmas lights. There's like a vinyl
couch that gets wiped off between bookings. He's like, there's
(09:19):
a lot of glitzy gland me stuff that's supposed to
look elegant and classy, but it's just makes me sad, like, oh,
I think we could do things a bit better than that.
Speaker 4 (09:30):
And so the.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Batch you end up opening is in a motel and
you make it bright and breezy and like a beach almost, like, well,
that's what a batch is in New Zealand, right, is
a beach house. And so everything from the inception of
what it would look like and feel like to the
way that the workers.
Speaker 4 (09:47):
Were treated was very different.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
I was really interested in the process that you were
just talking about about the research going and talking to women.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
You talk to a woman in.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
The sex industry who tells you that it's all about
being a madam or a sex worker is all about
hold your power, she said, And I'd love you to
talk a bit about what that means, because to be honest.
When I read examples in the book of where you
helped you thought about that and implemented it. I think
it's something that all women sex workers are or not
(10:21):
could get a lot better at. Does it kind of.
Speaker 4 (10:24):
Mean whole know you're worth?
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Yeah, I think that's part of it, and we can
get into that part of it too. In that I
learned a lot from the men about asking for what
you want and not being afraid to ask, even if
it comes off as a bit cheeky.
Speaker 5 (10:39):
But I think.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
When she taught me about hold your power, I think
there's a reason why madams traditionally have been sexually unavailable
to the clients for the most part, and often older,
so that culturally they're considered no longer sexually interesting. Right
Because I had on regularly, I would get proposition by clients.
(11:01):
They would try to find their way in around the
cracks and ask.
Speaker 5 (11:04):
All, will you see me? I'll pay top dollar? How
much would you charge? How can I please? Please? Please?
And what that's about is they feel like if they
can conquer.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
You sexually, then they've won you over and they don't
have to play by your rules anymore. So I think
it's that's why it's so, That's why I think that
madam position has existed traditionally, is that you need a
woman in charge who is sexually unavailable and completely unmoving
in her ground rules.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
That's interesting what you just said about how age plays
into that, because it is true, of course that the
stereotype of a madam in my mind is definitely she's
older than the women who work who do the sex work.
In your experience, I mean, I want to I'm going
to get to all the things you've learned about men
doing in that process.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
But is there an age cut off? Do you feel
like not at all?
Speaker 3 (11:57):
In fact, when you said that, I wanted to jump
in because the lady who made the most money at
our agency was older than me. And the reason why well,
there's a few reasons why she made the most money.
She was highly professional, and she organized, and she would
come in with a large Duffel bag for what we
called her day at the office because she had back
to back bookings of these elderly gents who would book
(12:18):
her for two and three hours at a time, and
she would put on a different lingerie.
Speaker 5 (12:23):
Outfit for each one, and there was very little sex.
It was largely companionship. But she was really intuitively kind.
She was so genuinely kind. People really responded to that,
and she made the.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
Most money, so it really And the other reason is
that a lot of these guys who come and see
sex workers, if they're in their seventies and eighties, they
don't want to see a lady in her twenties. They're like,
my granddaughter is in her twenties. That makes me feel
like a pedo. So there really isn't a cutoff, I
would say in age for sex work, and quite often
the older ones do better. And in fact it was
(12:58):
a bit of a red flag for me and the
other managers when we would get a new client in particular,
who would say who's the youngest?
Speaker 5 (13:06):
Who's the youngest?
Speaker 3 (13:07):
Because what that means is is either a he thinks
that women's quality degrades with age, which is a big
red flag, or more likely B he thinks he'll have
a better chance pushing her boundaries if she's young.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Absolutely, and there is an experience in there with a
man like that. Just back for one more second to
hold your power. One of the first times in the
book that you like you think about doing that is
when a client is trying to talk you down on price.
And this is what I'd love to get to about
that idea of saying what you need and what you
want trying to talk you down in price. And this
(13:43):
is when the batch has just opened, and so you're
kind of like figuring it out and you were like, no,
I'm going to hold it and see what happens. And
of course he caves and says, sure, is that also?
Is it about also not.
Speaker 4 (13:56):
The people pleasing the man pleasing reflex?
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Oh, it was really hard to deprogram ourselves from that.
I can still remember.
Speaker 5 (14:05):
You know.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
We had a confirmation text that we would send when
people made a booking that said you must park in
this place, arrive on time for your booking, do not
arrive early, do not arrive late, and so on. And
the first draft I looked at it and I saw
that we'd started almost every sentence with please, and I
was like, we got to take the pleases out of
this one, because I'm not asking them, I'm telling them.
Speaker 5 (14:26):
So that was really a process for us to work
that out.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
And yeah, I mean it became quite clear early early on,
so early the men would would push back on the rules,
and also they would always ask for discounts and then
and then not always, but very often they would want
to know, can I do this? Can I do that?
How about three of this? How far can I go?
(14:50):
How hard can I say bad words?
Speaker 4 (14:51):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (14:52):
With you hard? Can I fuck her?
Speaker 3 (14:53):
Things like that, I mean, sometimes quite gross, But I
think a lot of them just thought they were being
clear about the boundaries and they wanted to make sure
they got the best deal possible for their money, which, Okay,
it annoyed us, and sometimes we laughed uproariously about it,
but also like, why.
Speaker 5 (15:11):
Don't we do that more as women?
Speaker 3 (15:13):
I don't know about you, but me personally, Like even
the least I negotiated on the motel. A year down
the line, it was quite clear that I had made
some mistakes in my negotiation where I could have I
could have had that motel ticking along at a much
better clip, but I just hadn't. I hadn't pushed back
with the landlord because I think I thought if I pushed,
he'd yank the whole thing away, which is not the case.
(15:36):
It's not You're not going to lose everything. If you ask,
people are just going to say maybe no, And it
doesn't hurt.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Right, I know, but I mean such a stereotype, but
I know it certainly is true of myself and lots
of midwomen. I know in particular that's what they're afraid of.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
But I could lose it all. I don't know if
I deserve it. I don't know if I'm gonning. And it's.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
A few of the conversations I've had on this show
that have been enlightening is when people say, very often,
when you ask for what you want, you get it.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
You know, but it's all about how you do that
I did. There isn't There isn't a moment in your
book where which i'd like to think is known in
New Zealand moment but maybe not where one man offers
to pay and crayfish.
Speaker 5 (16:18):
Is particular to New Zealand. But I wouldn't be surprise
the burter is pretty calm.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
I mean, I can tell you for real. Border for
drugs is definitely yes.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Antonia and I are going to be back in a
minute to talk about the kinds of men who pay
for sex and the unconventional way in which she ended
up with her now husband. It does involve somebody getting
punched in the nose, just stepping back a little bit.
You say that, and I felt a gen x camaraderie
with you about this. You were sort of saying that
(16:50):
you had quite you had an adventuress, You had a
non conventional childhood, you say. I seen you rite When
I was six months old, my mother's went. My mother
went to the United Nations Women's Conference in Mexico City,
leaving me with my dad.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
My father decided this.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Was a good time to attend the Hooker's Ball at
the San Francisco Higatt Regency with me swaddled in a
blanket in the backseat of his car. It was nineteen
seventy five. These things happened back then, and indeed they did.
Our nineteen seventies upbringings were kind of different.
Speaker 5 (17:18):
I think, and whearin as she got on the next
flight home.
Speaker 4 (17:22):
I'm sure she did.
Speaker 5 (17:25):
But I think the reason.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Why he went to that is because my mother was
sort of somewhat friends are at least friendly with Margo
Saint James, who was a big sex worker rights activist
and feminist in San Francisco.
Speaker 5 (17:38):
So they were peripherally around that scene.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
And I know my mother as a second way a
feminist would talk a lot about the crossover between sex
work and being a housewife.
Speaker 5 (17:49):
For example.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
I want to ask you about that too. But that's
interesting because you also say in the book at some
point that the rules you'd internalize from your dad were
around like don't be a prick tease, don't wear a
short skirt, don't do this and that.
Speaker 4 (18:05):
So it's like they're conflicting.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
You obviously had a sort of compared to a conventional
straight lag childhood, a relatively what's the right word, I
guess put me in there you go, But you also
were still internalizing all that messaging that women, young women
always do right about, like protect yourself, make sure you know,
don't lead men on, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 5 (18:29):
Yeah, well, I think a lot of that is generational.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
So my dad was born in the twenties and my
mom was born in the thirties. So even though my
mom was a strident feminist, I think her attitude was like, look,
if you you know, you show nipple and and wear
a really short mini skirt, you're gonna get aggressive attention,
so be prepared for that. It can make you, know,
(18:52):
your walk home that much more dangerous. Nowadays, you know,
people say, oh, it's not her fault, it's his fault.
She should be able to wear what she wants, and
they're absolutely right. Women should be able to wear what
they want. Also, I don't think my mother was wrong
that the micro mini is gonna make.
Speaker 5 (19:06):
Your walk home a lot more complicated.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
To be honest, it makes it's interesting because I have
a fifteen year old daughter. You know, we would it's
we're so much further along from this idea of like
keep yourself safe, do your top up, as your dad
would say. But there's a part of you that has
learned those lessons yourself from being hyper visible at that
(19:28):
moment where you become hyper visible and you want to
kind of protect them from it, and it's it's complicated.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
It is complicated, and in fairness, I think we've come
a long way, and we've also taken a huge step
backward with the amount of pornography that is so easily
accessible in everybody's back pocket and that apparently everyone's watching.
Speaker 5 (19:49):
From the age of ten.
Speaker 3 (19:50):
I know, and I saw how that played out at
the batch, and it was everything from asking for sort
of further and further out fantasies and it would be
quite clear when a certain fantasy was trending in porn,
because more and more men would ask for it. Two
men who literally could not orgasm having vaginal sex with
(20:11):
a woman because they were so used to jacking it
with porn, and so they got used to this very
specific touch and they could no longer orgasm with a woman.
So oh, and then just like the total death of foreplay,
Like how many young men would get in there and
think that all they had to do was put her
legs up over her head and pound away, and she's
going to have nine orgasms.
Speaker 5 (20:30):
I mean, these ladies, they would I talk about it
in the book.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
They at first they would say, Oh, I don't want
to see it. He's so old, you know, he's fifty.
He's gonna smell like old man. And then they'd finally concede,
and when they came down, they'd be like, holy shit,
that was the best shag of my life, Like no,
no one's ever been that that courtly with me before,
you know, And he kept he was so important to
(20:55):
him that I feel good. I mean they were just
like baffled.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
And I guess also that because that's a generation that
hasn't grown up with the pawn in the pocket. It's
interesting about this because I would imagine, I mean, so
you were running the batch from in the sort of
late teens, right the late twenty teens, and so you know,
we are living in this in the iPhone world, we're
living with pawn in the pocket. I imagine that Tinder
(21:20):
only fans in those things are very much disrupted brothels
and agency work.
Speaker 4 (21:25):
Have they No, I.
Speaker 5 (21:27):
Don't think so. I mean they may have. I couldn't
speak to the before.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
Times because I wasn't in the industry before, but I
will say this, something that really surprises people outside the
industry is how little sex.
Speaker 5 (21:38):
There is in it.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
I mean, it may be different in the sort of
street walker economy where people are paying for fifteen minutes
in the back of your car or whatever. That's not
the experience I can speak to. What we sold was
minimum thirty minutes, most often an hour, sometimes two or three,
and during that time there was like maybe five minutes
(22:01):
of sex. So men aren't booking escorts, at least not
at the price point and the time span that we
were offering for the shag. They were booking for the
companionship conversation. Someone to pay attention to them and make
them feel like they were important and really for the touch.
Like that was a huge wake up for me, is
(22:23):
how there just seems to be this epidemic of loneliness
and of lack of human touch that people are just
hungry for and will pay And yeah, okay, we are
only charging two hundred and forty dollars an hour, but
in twenty eighteen in Fungaday, New Zealand, let me tell you,
that was a big chunk of less people pay check.
(22:44):
That was a big payout, so they were that starved
for it.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
It's interesting because you'd think in this porn saturated world
that you know that if anything, people were more, that
there's more sex. But then study after study is saying
that young people now are having less sex than they've
ever had. Right, And anecdotally it seems to me, I
work with lots of young women. Attitudes to sex and
(23:12):
monogamy are still quite conservative in some ways, I think
more conservative than gen x is are. Don't you think
I think that the intimacy and monogamy and finding your
person is still very much the ideal that is upheld.
Speaker 4 (23:31):
What do you think about that?
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Well, I think a lot of things. Some of the
thoughts that came up as you were talking were, it's
true we were shagging so much more than kids are
these days, and we had the specter of aids over
our heads.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
I can imagine I know when as we came of
sexual age with that idea and the fear around that.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
I can tell you I'm not gen z and I'm
old and cringed to them right. But the one person
who will talk to me still touchwood is my daughter
who's fourteen. And one of the comments that she's made
which really resonated with me, is she said, I could
be photographed, Like every time I'm out in public, I'm
really careful about how I present myself because I could
(24:13):
be videoed or photographed at any time or recorded, and
then that can never go away, like it can ruin
your life. So I think there's more of a self
censorship because kids are worried about like just that it
can ruin your life, like we would do, get drunk,
do dumb stuff, be bad in bed with a lover
(24:36):
you didn't sync with, and like that's it.
Speaker 5 (24:38):
It's forgotten.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
It's washed off, like the cigarette smell on your clothes
after a night at the clubs, right, they can follow
them forever into jobs, any future relationship.
Speaker 5 (24:50):
I mean, what an enormous.
Speaker 4 (24:52):
Wait, No wonder that anxious. This is depressing, depressing. I
wonder it's it's true, it's this. I wonder if we.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Could look back on our young adulthood and think we
were allowed to mess up an experiment and have adventures
in a way that they're probably not. I wanted to
get back to two things, well many things, but we're
jumping all over the place. But when you were running
the batch, so you're also parenting three young kids, your
oldest Silas had significant disabilities, your daughter Miranda's little and
(25:25):
you had a brand new baby Matisse. So you were
a hustling working mother, which was one of the real
impetuses for you wanting to do that. And as it
turned out, so are a lot of your ladies. You
even run a crache at the batch for a while.
How does motherhood and sex work intersect? You mentioned it before.
How does that work?
Speaker 5 (25:42):
Well?
Speaker 3 (25:43):
I think a lot more than most people would think,
because mothers need flexible schedules, and mothers who've been left
alone with their kids need to make the money for
the whole household because the vast majority of absent men
aren't paying enough, right, so they needed to be able
to make real money to run a real safe household
(26:03):
for their kids. Sometimes they were in an educational program
to launch themselves under professional life, so they.
Speaker 5 (26:08):
Needed even more childcare and even more of an income
to pay for that.
Speaker 3 (26:13):
And you know, how are you going to make that
work if you've only got a high school degree and
the only jobs out there are for you with that,
or like call center or working in a cafe for
minimum wage. Like it's just that the math doesn't math, yeah,
with that, which is why a lot of women, have
mums in particular, have turned to sex work. And then
(26:34):
I guess the other part of that question is like, oh,
how do you reconcile your life at home with your
life at the batch? But I mean, I don't think
in that sense it was really much different from any
working mother, Like when I'm at work, I'm at work,
and when I'm home, I'm mumsy.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Well, there are some really interesting scenes in the book though,
when you are sort of dealing with your kids, but
your phone the phone was pinging with messages, and this
bit I found really interesting. Well, it's near the beginning
of your book, you're talking about you.
Speaker 4 (27:06):
You've run quite a lot of.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
The text messages you got sent, and they are quite shocking,
Like if you're not in that world, they're quite shocking.
So I'm going to read a couple albums. So you're
you know, you're doing what you're doing with the baby
on your boom and everything and you and you're getting
messages that are like, hey, do you have toys or
suck without a condom? Show me pussy face, tits and
ass And you say, is this because this is obviously
(27:29):
early in your experience, You're like, is this how they
talk when they don't have to pretend? And I found
that a really interesting insight because that's exactly what I
thought when.
Speaker 4 (27:40):
I was reading it.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
I don't think a lot of those messages would shock
a lot of my midlife friends are on the dating apps,
to be honest, they get a lot of that stuff,
and that not from people who were looking to pay.
But did you feel like you were getting, at least
at the at the beginning, that you were getting an
insight into the male psyche that was really disturbing? Do
(28:03):
you and also do you think that is how they
talk when they don't have to pretend that they respect us.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
Well, look, I have four older brothers, so I think
I had a bit of insight into the male psyche anyway,
and they would talk and say all kinds of outrageous
things about women when they were around me. I think
that I think probably all men think those things. I
think most men say them, and I think for many
(28:30):
men there is no contradiction between that and the fact
that they also respect women and their intellect. Like, I
think you can want to slap that ass and then
also have a conversation about civil rights. I don't think
that is necessary necessarily cancel each other out. But in
terms of an insight into you know, again, I think
(28:52):
men thought that they were being clear when they rang
up and they asked for, you know, can I get
a size six double D blonde please?
Speaker 5 (29:04):
And that. But still, even though.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
I knew they were not trying to be offensive, it
would it would just get, it would get. It would
wear you down because it was like, oh, they just
think of us as a collection of body parts. And
so that's why very quickly we realized like the batch
ran the best way, and we had three managers who
each just work two days a week because we were
(29:26):
just it would just be so emotionally exhausting to deal
with that.
Speaker 5 (29:33):
Thirteen fourteen hours a day.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
But that's an interesting point you make that it's not
that because when you wrote you know, is this how
they talk when they don't have to pretend. I think
that sometimes when a curtain is pulled back a little
bit on that kind of language whatever, I can find
myself thinking they hate us, you know what I mean,
They really they hate us, and that's how they would
(29:59):
like to see all of us all of the time.
But that's a very simplistic way of thinking about it,
isn't it. It's these men are messaging you for a
very specific purpose.
Speaker 4 (30:09):
This is your job to.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Find them the person who possibly is going to fulfill
their fantasy. It's not as black and white as good bad.
Speaker 4 (30:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
And I think that's a mistake that a lot of
activists make when they talk about sex worker really people
in general, when they talk about it without.
Speaker 5 (30:28):
Firsthand knowledge of it.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
Is you know, feminists in particular in Europe will say
all selling women's bodies for sex devalues women, and it
encourages men to treat us like objects to be used,
and I think again, that's assuming that because a man
(30:50):
wants sex with a woman, therefore he is a predator
who doesn't see her as a valuable human being.
Speaker 5 (30:58):
I don't think. I don't think that's the case.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
I mean, look, there are jerks out there, for sure,
and we had a few of them come to the batch.
But for the most part, I think men have all people.
I think have a need for sex and intimate touch
and to feel loved and appreciated, even if it's an illusion.
Speaker 5 (31:19):
But I think men really feel it like a drive,
like eating.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
There's a point in the book where you sort of
run through this almost profiles of.
Speaker 4 (31:29):
A few of the guys. I'm just going to find him.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
Ben is a widower in his sixties who spent his
whole life on his sheep farm. He is cripplingly shy,
and he has a bit of a speech impediment. So
these are kind of some of your regulars. Michael is
a local salesman. Seems to be in a happy marriage,
but he has an enormous sex drive, and his wife
is agreed that he can regularly go to escorts as
long as she doesn't have to hear about it. Eric
(31:52):
is autistic, and he saves up his disability checks for
his visits, which his mum drives him to and from.
I think it's really interesting to consider this variety of
people who come, and I'd love to know because, as
I was just saying about hormone a lot for a
lot of mid women, sex can become a bit of
(32:12):
a battleground because your hormones might have been smashed and
so your libido is low, or you're in the familiarity
of a long relationship and that erotic charge is really
hard to find.
Speaker 4 (32:25):
Did you see lots of that?
Speaker 2 (32:27):
Have you seen that kind of outsourcing of sex that's
maybe depicted there by Michael the guy whose wife agrees?
Speaker 4 (32:34):
Did you see a lot of that? And does it work?
Speaker 5 (32:36):
Absolutely? I saw a lot of it.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
And it's interesting to me when people talk to me
about the threat that sex work poses to marriage, because
I think actually the reverse is true. A lot of
men would reach out to sex workers because their wives
were uninterested in sex sex had completely left the marriage,
but they didn't want to divorce and lose their families,
and they didn't want the risk of having an affair,
(33:02):
which could bring with it emotional attachment and all of
those complications, and so this for them was a way
to get their physical.
Speaker 5 (33:08):
Needs met without putting their families at risk. Does it work?
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
I have no way of following up and finding out
if they're still married or divorced five or ten years later.
Speaker 5 (33:21):
I can tell you.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
That somebody I know and my personal life has done
that and it has saved his marriage. That he says
his wife told him explicitly that she was no longer
interested in having sex, and they were in their sixties,
and he said, I'm not ready to die yet. Now.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Your own marriage, which is talked about in the book
of Course with Patrice, started in quite an unconventional way too.
So you were married to the father of your two
older kids and you opened your marriage.
Speaker 4 (33:51):
Right.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Is that the right terminology, I guess. And Patrice went
at some point from being your lover to your partner
when you got pregnant with Matisse, and your husband went
and punished him in the nose.
Speaker 4 (34:00):
And then I don't know why I'm laughing.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
That's not really funny, but it's just it's quite a scene.
And then you say that your small town turned on
you at that point. To a lot of people stopped
talking to you, and I wanted to hear about your ins,
and then you opened brothels. So I'm sure that, really,
I'm sure that really sorted out.
Speaker 4 (34:20):
All that judgment.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
How did that community handle you in a way, and
how did you learn to deal with those really entrenched
conservative attitudes about both your personal and professional.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
I'm not sure if it's a blessing or a curse
how completely non confrontational quies are, because nobody ever said
to my face that they disapproved of what I was doing.
But it did hurt when friends just stopped, like literally
just didn't call back, didn't email back, just just cut
us dead. And Patrice had lived in the community a
lot longer than I had, and these are people who
(34:56):
he'd cared for their kids over the school holidays because
during periods of time and he was only working part
time or between jobs, he like basically conducted a summer
camp at his house and took care of all their kids.
Speaker 5 (35:08):
And they just cut us out.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
So yeah, that hurt would have Yeah, And you know, honestly,
as an American, I'd rather they had had a conversation
with me, because maybe we could have, you know, salvaged
some of the friendships. But alas that was not to be.
And I think I was so overwhelmed at the time
with new baby and profoundly disabled child and two businesses
(35:30):
and all the rest of it. I was on a
go door to door and say, Hi, do you still
want to be my friend? Like, I just didn't have
time for that.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
I had to simplify, you know, the judgment that you
were copying for both for both that and then I
assumed that it was public knowledge about the batch, right
like the town all knew about the batch. Did you
also cop a lot of judgment about that and did
you care?
Speaker 5 (35:52):
Well, it's hard to say.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
I only felt the judgment when I tried to advertise,
both for staff or for clients, or when I tried
to rent to premises, and I was getting blocked at
every point in the way. When I when counsel tried
to give us the boot, that's when I felt the pushback.
The rest of the time, people really just did not confront.
(36:15):
I sometimes felt a bit of a chill in the air,
but nobody said anything. And look, you know, I've worked
out that fun Today had a population about eighty thousand
people of whom, let's say half were men forty thousand
and like maybe a quarter of those are children. So
of the thirty thousand adult men in town, I had
(36:37):
three thousand names on my work phone. So like judgment
are no judgment? They were still ringing that phone.
Speaker 4 (36:46):
Yeah, absolutely absolutely.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
It was obviously a service that was needed in that community,
whether they approved of it or not.
Speaker 4 (36:54):
So you didn't.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
It wasn't like they're trying to run you out of town.
It was just more like icy, an icy, like not
looking at you in the shop.
Speaker 4 (37:03):
Well, yeah, when we come back.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Anthonya tells me about her experience parenting a child living
with a disability while also running a brothel. Stay with us.
Everything changed in twenty nineteen. You lost your son, Silas.
He died suddenly, and that obviously changed everything. You packed
up and left and went to live in France for
a year with your family. And you didn't go back,
(37:28):
did you. You've gone back to New Zealand, but you've
never gone back.
Speaker 5 (37:32):
No, I have not been back.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
I assume that there's a that's a massive life before
and life after moment.
Speaker 5 (37:39):
Yeah, well, I mean from Gaday.
Speaker 3 (37:41):
For me, it was the years when I was parenting Silas,
which were really hard. I mean, I love that kid,
but it is so hard and isolating to have a
child who is so profoundly disabled. He was basically nonverbal,
he was incontinent. He would yell nonsense words repeatedly. And
(38:04):
so you know, people people shoot you are either really
uncomfortable or they shoot you annoyed looks because they think
your child is acting out. They don't realize that he
can't help it.
Speaker 5 (38:15):
I think we have a ways to go. I mean,
that's another taboo.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
We have a ways to go before we're fully accepting
of THELED.
Speaker 5 (38:21):
And so there's just a lot of pain wrapped up
for me in that town.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
I think the way that you write about with such
honesty about parenting Silas, mothering Silas will make a lot
of women I'm sure they say that to you already,
but will make a lot of parents feel very seen
because I think I think you like you. You bring
You're very I mean as in all of the book.
You're very honest, You're very straightforward about it. You know,
(38:48):
you you talk about how difficult it it is and was,
and I think it's a real gift that because you know,
we we like to put little bows on difficult situations,
don't we.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
Totally And thank you for saying that, because I feel
like that that the book does make tries to ship
away a little bit at that taboo that we have
around disability, and it's bo is exactly the right word
for it. There's another writer, Andrew Solomon, who writes brilliantly.
Speaker 4 (39:22):
From the Tree Fall from the Tree.
Speaker 5 (39:23):
Loved that book.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
He says, there's a tendency that people have of calling
them pillow angels. You know these Hugh at the time
was writing about I think a pair of twins that
were so profoundly disabled that they couldn't even sit up
on their own. They were basically lying flat on their
backs with the tube in their bellies to feed them
on pillows. And I can't remember if it was the
(39:45):
mother the people around them calling them pillow angels.
Speaker 5 (39:47):
I thought, wow, that's so what.
Speaker 3 (39:49):
It is is it's a racing of the child, and
it's a racing of the parent. Because look, Silas could
be a real little shit sometimes like every other kid,
and that's part of his humanity. He has the right
to be a little shit. And I have the right
to feel really unhappy about going into his room every
morning and changing an adult sized Pooh, you know, and
(40:11):
that's also human, that's part of my humanity. And so yeah,
I think too often what happens is that the parents
of people who are disabled, and very often into adulthood
of the child end up isolated at home because no
one is able to They're either ostracized or there's this
(40:34):
weird angelic halo put on them, but either way, nobody
wants to see them.
Speaker 2 (40:39):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and they don't want to hear They
don't want to hear your story about that, you know,
I'm so playing on an animal level. I think that's
exactly right. I think people don't want to look at it,
which is like, deep down don't want to look at
that experience, which I really appreciated it being in the book.
(41:00):
You did go back to New Zealand though, And I'm
really interested in post batch life because obviously you've written
this book, and this book has been adapted into a
TV show which is very successful. Has Rachel Griffi is
playing you. I don't know how that feels. How does
it feel to have Rachel Griffiths playing you?
Speaker 5 (41:14):
Is it really real?
Speaker 4 (41:18):
It's great?
Speaker 2 (41:19):
But so how did life play out post that did you.
Speaker 4 (41:24):
You.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
Obviously you all went back to France. I can't imagine
what a difficult time this was COVID hits.
Speaker 4 (41:29):
But you did go back to New Zealand.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Why did you go back to New Zealand And how
has life changed since you wrote the book?
Speaker 3 (41:37):
Well, I mean the quick reason why we came back
to New Zealand is that we both have shared custody
of children with partners. Of course you do short of
abandoning those children, which I could never do.
Speaker 5 (41:48):
We need to be in New Zealand of course from them.
Speaker 3 (41:51):
But really the only other option I think for me
would be France because the United States I feel less
and less American.
Speaker 5 (41:59):
It's been sixteen seventeen years now.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
Did you write the huff Post essay and it got
optioned for the movie? But had you'd already been you
You've sailed through this book that you always knew it
was going to be a book, really, this Batch Adventure?
Speaker 3 (42:14):
Oh right, yeah, so you were asking me about life
since then, I always wanted to write about it, and
I had been writing about it during the time of
running the batche. I would jot down notes and I
would talk about it whenever I could to a couple
of podcasts and so on, because I thought what we
were doing was really important and low key revolutionary, actually
(42:37):
putting the power in the hands of the sex workers.
Speaker 2 (42:40):
Near the beginning of the book, you're like, you're in
this little town in New Zealand and you're kind of
going and you've got these little kids, and as discussed,
you know, life isn't easy, and you're working out what
to do. And you say, when you're young and w
you make choices on a whim because you think everything
is reversible, and then one day you realize it's not.
And that's one of the things about aging that I
(43:03):
bump up against a lot. I'm like, the choices I've
made that I didn't even really think about have now
led me to be in my life. For example, I
live on the other side of the world to my
family and all those things. When you look back at
this time, at that time in your life that this
book is about.
Speaker 4 (43:22):
How do you feel about it?
Speaker 2 (43:24):
Do you regret being there? Do you wish that life
had been different already? Glad that it played out the
way it did.
Speaker 5 (43:31):
I think it has to play out the way it does.
Speaker 3 (43:34):
I mean, look, if I was gonna tell you one regret,
I'd say, I wish I hadn't dropped out of university
level chemistry because I was really getting interested in endochronology.
But I think, look when my husband left and I
was so terrified, and I had all these kids to
take care of, and Patrece, my now husband, said he
(43:58):
would be with me and help me raise this child.
Speaker 5 (44:00):
But I didn't know if he was stick or not.
Speaker 3 (44:04):
I think something rises up in mothers in particular, or
we just go nothing gonna put my babies in danger,
and I just I was able to find a strength
of a hundred wildcats.
Speaker 5 (44:20):
And I'm not flexing here like that.
Speaker 3 (44:22):
I think it's I think it's a physical brain reaction
when a mom is backed against the wall.
Speaker 5 (44:27):
And I'm proud of what we did, and I think
I did it because I was backed up against the wall.
So yeah, I think all that bad shit had to happen.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Thank you so much, Anthonia. It's been a really good conversation. Friends.
This has been the last traditional episode of season four
of mid We're going to be back in your ears
in April, and until then, I want you to keep
your ears free for a few little treats that might
drop your way in this feed. Also, I asked you
(44:59):
last week to rate and review and please continue to
do that wherever you're listening to MID. If you like
the show, If you love the show, if you have
opinions about the show, tell us jump into wherever you're
listening to this and rate and review. Five stars would
be great. Also, if you have thoughts and feelings about
what we should be talking about next on MID, we'd
(45:20):
love to hear it.
Speaker 4 (45:21):
Follow us on instert and send us.
Speaker 2 (45:22):
A cheeky DM at Mid by Mamma Mia or me
at Waynwright, Holly, and last, but not least, if you
want more MID conversations about sex, scroll back to our
conversation with Leslie Morgan, who got divorced at forty nine
and embarked on quite the sexual adventure, or with the
author Julie Cohen about coming out as bisexual as a
(45:43):
married mom of forty. Both of those episodes are in
our feed, And of course, a massive thank you to
the executive producer of MID. Her name is Niama Brown,
the senior producer is Grace Ruvray, the producer is Charlie Blackman,
and we've had audio production from Jacob Brown.
Speaker 4 (46:02):
And I will see you next season. Bye,
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