Here is some non-fiction about being a sex worker. What I really can’t get is the cover: it’s a sexy pair of female lips. What? Who agreed to this image, which to me at least is both cheesy and reductive?
For a book all about the author’s experience, I felt I learnt curiously little about the author. For example, it’s not clear why she gets into ‘full service,’ For a relatively well-off, well-educated person, it’s an unusual career choice, being simultaneously high-risk and repetitive, but we don’t hear too much about it. Mostly, she seems to have enjoyed the validation of being sexually desired by so many.
Another example is her relationship with her main client, who was about half her income. She tells us a lot about him, including that she would not have spent time with him for free ‘either platonically or sexually,’ but still, she is greatly upset by his death.
Of most interest to me was her time in high school. She becomes enamoured of a group of kids at neighbouring school, and especially of the boys:
“My objective as a teenagers was to find the boys, to link up with them because they were the party, they were the event. Years passed, and the objective stayed the same, with the focus shifted to sanction my own creativity: find boys to make a band, find boys to make a movie – find boys because they’d supply the verbs that would propel my life. It wasn’t just that they were necessary for sex or romance, though they were for me. More than that, they were the only means of getting at all that life has to offer. . . . A woman’s life is fundamentally inert, no matter how busy or accomplished a woman might be because that the nature of an object, even important or well travelled objects like the Hope Diamond or the Olympic Torch . . . I could fling myself into a situation like a skydiver jumping from a plane, but in my mind, I couldn’t forment the situation on my own . . .”
Unpleasantly, I sort of recognize this problem from my own adolescence, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it described so clearly before.