Happy Ending

An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work by Charlotte Shane. Simon & Schuster, 192 pages. 2024

“People look for themselves in books and movies,” Lily Burana wrote in her 2001 memoir Strip City. “But for strippers, there is no Giovanni’s Room . . . no Well of Loneliness.” Times have changed. Over the past two decades, dozens of writers with experience in the sex industry—former strippers, escorts, porn performers, and dominatrices—have built a canon of their own. As masters of carnality (what Mary Karr describes as the most “primal and necessary” element of memoir), sex workers are well suited for the genre. Despite the accusation regularly lobbed by sex industry abolitionists that the prostitute “sells their body,” they in fact sell a fantasy, which is just another word for a story. “Performing intimacy is also work I know how to do,” writes conceptual artist and escort Sophia Giovannitti in her 2023 book Working Girl of the similarities between her creative and erotic labor. “The studied reveal is the specialty of the whore.”

Although sex worker memoirs now appear in greater numbers compared to when Burana’s book came out over twenty years ago, they tend to be published by indie presses rather than the Big Five, and often generate less attention than the fictions of prostitution found in novels written by civilians; I’m thinking of Emma Cline’s The Guest, Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, and, further back, Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, and Émile Zola’s Nana. Sex worker memoirs seldom make literary careers or appear on “best of” lists due to lingering queasiness over the subject matter and the bourgeois sensibilities of the publishing industry. The ways they have been marketed and reviewed have shaped—and often limited—the potential of the genre, which grew alongside the “girl blogger” phenomenon and the female personal essay boom of the early to mid 2000s. The beating heart of this writing was always women’s candid discussions of sex and self, which reliably attracted readers looking for both vicarious thrills and the chance to condemn young women as solipsistic, attention-seeking oversharers.

Books about sex work during this period garnered an intensified version of the skepticism cast upon female confessional writing more broadly. Alt-lit It Girl Marie Calloway’s semi-autobiographical 2013 story collection, what purpose did i serve in your life, especially frustrated critics. Calloway wrote of dalliances with clients and older men in a detached, glib tone that suggested she wasn’t treating sex or her body with the requisite reverence. Like other millennial women (most famously, Lena Dunham), she was accused of narcissistic self-debasement, and nobody could decide whether this was boring or terrifying. Writing in the Chicago Review, Denise Dooley called Calloway’s narrator a “girl-object” who “makes what appear to be bad decisions” but doesn’t actually “sustain much harm. Her harm is not the point.”

In fact, publishers, editors, and critics have trouble conceiving of a plot for the modern sex worker in which harm doesn’t come into play. Our reactions to prostitution are steeped in what Melissa Gira Grant calls “the prostitute imaginary.” They may feel visceral, rooted in some primal disgust reflex, but often derive from a combination of American puritanism and second-wave feminist rhetoric. Increasingly, we project our helplessness in the face of capitalist exploitation onto the sex worker, using her to signify human commodification distilled to its basest form. This collective psychic baggage primes us to see certain stories as more satisfying, more palatable, and more true.

The most familiar narrative arc, which appears in memoirs like Rachel Moran’s Paid For and Melissa Febos’s Whip Smart, includes some version of surviving trauma, overcoming drug addiction, or otherwise finding redemption. Michelle Tea’s The Chelsea Whistle and Isa Mazzei’s Camgirl both have third acts that hinge on the narrator coming to terms with the fact that she was violated by a man as a child; these revelations have an explanatory power that helps readers make sense of what happens afterward. No one knows quite how to respond to stories that deviate from the expected plot; incredulous critics write of sex workers’ “maddening” choices, their “purposeful self-annihilation,” their audience of strange, “paunchy” perverts. In these memoirs, there can be fucking and sucking, but only if there is also learning and reckoning: about the insidious harms of the industry, about the writer’s dark girlhood secrets, about the predatory nature of men.

Sometimes all three themes are bound up inextricably. Adult star Linda Lovelace’s Ordeal was the blueprint; coauthored and published in 1980, it detailed coercive, humiliating sexual encounters, claiming that nothing audiences watched in Deep Throat, the film that catapulted Lovelace to stardom, was consensual. Gloria Steinem, Catharine MacKinnon, and Andrea Dworkin saw Ordeal as a chance to promote their war on porn—the book may have been coauthored by a man, but they believed it spoke to the sex industry’s innumerable harms against women. Lovelace’s abuse seemed to embody what activist Robin Morgan meant by her statement that “pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.” Ordeal’s sordid content made it too lowbrow for serious literary consideration, but it nonetheless became a bestseller (Nothing pays off like appealing to the public’s prurient interests—just ask a pornographer). Lovelace later understood herself to have been a pawn in the radical feminist movement, stating, “The feminists used me too . . . they made a few bucks off me, just like everyone else.” Hers was a lifetime of other people putting words in her mouth.

These days, an emphasis on representing voices from the margins means interest in stories that are unmediated by ghostwriters has ramped up, although the hunger for authenticity is its own sort of trap. The sex worker memoirist confronts a set of competing demands: she must balance artistry with reality, victimhood with triumph. She should resist the urge to glamorize the work, even though the cover of her book will invariably feature images of high heels, stockings, or lipstick. She should be liberated and empowered, but not if she’s only pretending—everyone knows when a woman is faking it. “It’s doubtful readers will believe that a National Merit Scholar and self-described feminist is actually happy peeing herself for the camera,” Publishers Weekly wrote of Sarah Katherine Lewis’ 2006 memoir Indecent. A “sad exercise in denial.”

It’s no wonder, then, that so many sex workers feel they must justify their choices—to strip, make porn, escort, or write a book about it—to a skeptical public, with memoirs that answer a single question: How did a girl like you end up in an industry like this one? The sense that selling sexual services or entertainment is not relatable to the average female reader—who is presumed to be a professional, wife, or mother but never a whore herself—means that many of these stories are presented as “unlikely.” Kirkus Reviews summed up Diablo Cody’s memoir Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper as “geeky girl from the ‘burbs enters a life of sin.” The central conceit of Belle de Jour: Diary of an Unlikely Call Girl—a university student turns to escorting in search of excitement and extra cash—was considered so absurd that before the author was confirmed as scientist Dr. Brooke Magnanti, many people assumed a man had made the whole thing up. “[Belle] found that being a high-priced escort created the perfect synergy between her desire to make a lot of money and her avowed love of sex,” The New Yorker wrote. “I know what you’re thinking: I wished I’d thought of that.” The middle-class, suburban girl-next-door stripping or hooking her way through college is a well-worn porn trope, but the reality of it strikes us as somehow bewildering.

A casual reader of the prostitute’s archive will notice a pattern in the titles: Rent Girl, Some Girls, Girl, Undressed, Last of the Live Nude Girls, Neon Girls, and so on. Using the word girl is, of course, a riff on the favored parlance of the industry, but it also conveys a certain narrative naivete, evoking the wide-eyed babe in the woods, seduced into a den of vice—a dynamic that doubles as literary cliché and erotic fantasy. Over the course of the sex worker’s short career, the story goes, she loses her innocence, she’s chewed up and spit out, and fed into the proverbial meat grinder (Hustler magazine satirized this accusation on their June 1978 cover with the illustration of a woman’s legs emerging from a mincing machine; anti-porn activists were not amused). The idea that transactional sex is uniquely and permanently life-ruining dates back at least to the moral hygiene campaigns of the early twentieth century, when reformers called prostitutes “fallen girls” and “soiled doves.” It resurfaced in the 1980s Hollywood erotic thriller, a genre littered with the dead bodies of sex workers. And it undergirds the radical feminist assertion, circular in its logic, that commercial sex is the cause, the result, and the very essence of misogynist violence. “When men use women in prostitution, they are expressing a pure hatred for the female body,” Dworkin wrote. “Pure as anything on this earth.”

Is there any room in this cultural landscape for an adult woman who sells sex out of her own volition, takes from it what she needs, and ends up fine afterwards? Essayist Charlotte Shane’s new book, An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work, about escorting in Manhattan in the mid-aughts, questions the axiom that whores must get punished. Previously, Shane wrote and edited the blog Tits and Sass, which for many years existed as one of the only online spaces by and for sex workers (its tagline: “one big service piece”) and an early site for hashing out ideas that made their way into contemporary discourse on sex worker’s rights, now seen all over social media and in the literature of decriminalization campaigns. She then cofounded TigerBee press, which published Prostitute Laundry and N.B., collections of entries from her online newsletter, in 2015.

Shane’s latest book, from Simon & Schuster, offers a happy ending—self-actualization, edification, and a stable romantic partnership—so elusive to many sex worker narratives. While it’s not unheard of for writers to parlay their internet posting histories into book deals (Cat Marnell and Emily Gould, both part of the blogger cohort mentioned above, are early examples), it’s rare for frank writing about sex work to be validated as worthy of the Big Five treatment, and to be featured as recommended reading in the New York Times and New York magazine, the latter of which ranked An Honest Woman as both “brilliant” and “highbrow” on their weekly Approval Matrix. We’ve come a long way, perhaps, since Elizabeth Spiers likened Calloway’s book to a “dirty YA novel.”

An Honest Woman traces Shane’s journey from webcam model to busy escort to contented wife, driven by an almost beatnik thirst for intensity of emotion as well as the sense that intimate proximity to boys and men offered access to a “bigger, freer world.” She chased the sensation of feeling desired, which produced a real (if politically incorrect) type of gratification. “I wanted to treat sex the way men did,” she explains, “for the pleasure of confirming the self.” Escorting felt like the closest thing to “living like a gay man at a sex club,” and when Shane worked bachelor parties, she felt “welcomed into a zone of masculine joy and fellowship, embraced by the occupants, and made delirious by their exuberance.” Her love for men propels both her work and her decision, later on, to settle down with her husband, “which felt like an inevitability and also a miracle.” Unscathed by her time in the industry, Shane retained “an invincible dignity. An irreducible core.”

Shane’s affection for the men she encountered challenges the popular progressive view of clients as ontologically abusive. Upon comparing notes with escort friends, she realizes, “clients treated us better—exponentially better—than most of the men we fucked for free.” If selling sex has been called, by its defenders, a crime in search of a victim, then the prostitute’s narrative is a story in search of an antagonist. The anti-trafficking movement, an alliance of feminists and right-wingers originally forged to fight porn during the Reagan administration, has lately attempted to make “sex buyers” the enemies. This strategy has succeeded; it dictates prostitution policy (known as the “Swedish Model”) in Nordic countries and, as of last year, in Maine, where the governor signed a bill criminalizing the paying client in consensual sexual encounters under the cover of preventing exploitation. Imagining all clients as predators or maladjusted creeps is a refusal to admit they’re just as likely to be the businessman next door—an ordinary person with whom you share a neighborhood, a workplace, or even a bed. For Shane, the majority of these men were “polite and decent,” if occasionally prone to infatuation.

This isn’t to say that the job was without downsides. An Honest Woman touches, briefly, on the problem of stigma: the maligned status and precarious social position of the hooker, an object of love and reverence in private who cannot be acknowledged in public, circumstances which produce a “radical loneliness.” Prostitutes are said to occupy the position of “public” women, but their relationships transpire almost entirely behind closed doors. And although a “whore can roam the streets, stay out at night, sleep late, [and] sleep around,” her freedom is double-edged; she’s still living outside of the law and protective social norms, vulnerable to the violence of the state. But if Shane ever feared arrest, we don’t hear about it. She’s less interested in the perils of criminalization than she is drawn to the pleasures of transgression. The jouissance of her work comes from being someone’s secret, a kind of sexual outlaw, slinking through hotel lobbies, hiding in plain sight. As Camille Paglia, the rare full-throated defender of prostitution as something sacred rather than merely inevitable, has pointed out, “the heat is in the violation of the taboo.”

And indeed, when Shane calls escorting “the most exhilarating thing I’d done in my life,” it feels like she’s admitting to something forbidden. Anyone who has ever sold sex or lap dances knows that you’re supposed to say, sheepishly and remorsefully, that you did it to pay rent, or to leave an abuser, or to save up for grad school—anything else is likely to provoke, at the very least, a raised eyebrow. Even the OnlyFans model, the type of sex worker closest to “legitimacy,” is presumed to be acting out of desperation, and only when we learn that some of these models are also underpaid nurses and teachers with kids to feed do we withhold a bit of our judgment. Anything but a slut who likes it! Yet Shane continues: “I fell in love with the job completely: the pageant of characters, the cash, the sex. I worked like I was trying to make partner.” An Honest Woman contains no discussion of labor rights or capitalism, which may surprise readers who have come to expect these topics in books about the sex industry. Instead, the language lives in the realm of rapture, ego, prowess, and seduction. “Work turned me on even when I wasn’t at work,” Shane explains. “The idea of it, the fact of it, sat like a vibrating egg in the back of my mind.”

This is all refreshingly out of sync with our prudish cultural turn. It’s a gentle rebuke to a creeping puritanical zeitgeist in which Zoomers retreat from casual sex, movies contain fewer sex scenes, Heritage Foundation ghouls conspire to push a total porn ban, and every year a new book comes out declaring that the sexual revolution was a mistake. Shane, in contrast, describes her first glimpse of pornography as feeling like “a single shaft of light beamed into an otherwise windowless cell.” In the pages of her grandfather’s old magazines, she discovered that “women had sex and felt good. They were fucked, and fucking didn’t harm them.” An Honest Woman is an antidote to reanimated Dworkinism and its inability to envision heterosexuality free of patriarchal woman-hating. Instead, the memoir explores multiple types of love—romantic, libidinal, compulsive, pure. There’s the puppy love Shane feels for boys growing up (their “relentless physicality” enraptured her), the deep love she ultimately shares with her husband (“so extraordinary that it exists beyond the horizon of belief”), and the sometimes-clumsy expressions of love from her clients, who had “an easier time respecting prostitutes than women who hate prostitutes care to admit.”

Critics may claim Shane, with her abundance of options, is non-representative of the average sex worker, too insulated from the ubiquitous harms and inherent violence of the industry—in other words, too unlikely. Those who oppose sex work often engage in a sort of prostitute exceptionalism, dismissing women who confess their positive or even mundane experiences as outliers, unreliable narrators, possibly even delusional. But are we not allowed to wrest moments of pleasure and joy from labor that is supposed to be all abject, all the time? And is this not actually preferable to an imagined world in which all sex workers are miserable, imperiled, and condemned to be alone? Shane never claims that her own story is universal, but neither does she rely on tedious disclosures of her individual privilege. This pays off by communicating a level of trust in her readers. “I was afraid of what men as a violent and volatile class could do, might do, were rumored to habitually do,” she writes of her reservations when starting the job. But these worst-case scenarios never materialized; instead, Shane “had the time of [her] life.” She’s honest with us. Will we believe her?