At the age of 16, Mia Döring was raped by an acquaintance of her own age. The trauma of this event and her inability to make sense of it reverberated through the next 10 years. She was victimised again and again through sexual exploitation, including for a period in the sex trade. After finishing art college, she moved to Berlin, where she began to confront the reality of what had happened to her, and to understand her life choices and the impact of trauma on her body and her sense of self.
Any Girl is subtitled “A memoir of sexual exploitation and recovery”, and true to the subtitle, the book principally recounts the exploitation to which Döring was subjected, and the arduous day-to-day work of accepting her traumatic past and learning to survive. Movingly, she reflects on the dividing line in her life: “Before and after are now two different places. I was an un-raped 16-year-old, and now I am a raped 16-year-old.”
In the aftermath of her rape and a subsequent suicide attempt, the teenage Döring was groomed and abused by an adult man over the course of three years. “J”, the man who exploited her, is appalling: a creep who chooses to get kicks from the power he can wield over a schoolgirl. He contacted her regularly by phone, and arranged to meet her secretly, paying her to be at his beck and call. Döring deftly juxtaposes J’s abusive behaviour (making intimate, personal and hideously inappropriate demands of her in exchange for cash) with her guileless responses; juxtaposes this in turn with the mundane middle-class life that continued even as a man used her for his pleasure.
Abusive encounters
At the time, her teenage mind confused these exchanges for consent and, when she went home with €100 in her pocket, power. “I was being exploited and valued at the same time,” she reflects. “The two merged.”
This is an impressive and dizzying feat of writing, demonstrating the way a young woman’s sexuality can be ordinary, shameful and threatening to herself, all at the same time. In her late teens, Döring shows how she held herself relentlessly accountable for things that were not her fault: “I’d agreed. I’d said ok.” After three years she extricated herself from J’s control and became involved in the sex industry, an act she later comes to understand as self-harm.
As much as Any Girl is a memoir, it is also a call to action against the twin structures of the sex industry and pornography, pillars of the rape culture in which we unquestionably find ourselves. This polemic aspect of the book is less successful than the personal narrative.
There are two main limitations in this respect. First, while the personal narrative is rich in detail, nuance and insight, the social analysis is notably lacking in specificity. The broad strokes with which Döring portrays Irish society are given no detail and hence can be easily challenged. Terms such as “media narrative” and especially “advocates for the sex trade” allow Döring to make sweeping and unsubstantiated statements, which add nothing to a reader’s understanding, even if they happen to agree (sometimes I did, often I didn’t).
A second limitation is Döring’s tendency to universalise out from her own experience, to assume that the harm she experienced sheds clear light on the harm experienced by others. The concerns that she expresses are frequently about migrant women: she refers variously to “vulnerable foreign women” and “vulnerable female residents in direct provision centres”. Döring’s personal story, though, tells us very little about the circumstances of such barely-sketched individuals.
Although she does not name any specifics, the position that Döring advocates is, broadly, the so-called Nordic model: the criminalisation of the purchase of sex without criminalising the individual selling or being sold for sex. In 2017, Ireland introduced the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act, enacting the Nordic model with the support of most politicians and most large NGOs in the sector. Last month, Amnesty International launched a report documenting how individuals remaining in the sex industry face a greater risk of violence now than before the introduction of the law. The “sex trade advocates” denounced by Döring, including Amnesty International and the World Health Organisation, promote a harm reduction model over one of total abolition.
This is the context in which Döring’s book intervenes, although no specific reference is made to any of it. Rather, Döring employs the rhetorical trick of the underdog, taking issue with an imagined social consensus in Ireland that defends the sex industry in the name of female empowerment and choice. In doing so, she plays directly into the polarisation that she denounces. While Any Girl makes the case that consent is never possible in the context of the sex industry, it never acknowledges the practical challenges or indeed harms that can ensue from this position.
Döring’s courage and psychotherapeutic insight are immensely valuable, and this raw and vulnerable testimony shines a light on the complex ways in which sexual violence can devastate a life. As a polemic against the sex industry, however, it lacks serious engagement with the subject and leans heavily on unsubstantiated generalisations.
Carol Ballantine researches and teaches in the area of gender, migration and refugee rights.
