Shane, an author and essayist, chronicles her years as a sex worker. Her path to sex work was freely chosen. She became a sex worker at 21, while attending graduate school, not to finance her education, but to validate her sex appeal. “I felt highly desired, and I was verifiably, highly desired. Coveted, even. There was proof: the messages, the money, the affirmations. I became a sex worker because I suspected, and hoped, it would be this way: a private, minor form of celebrity.” Shane concedes that she is not the best looking woman in a room but, thanks to sex work, she trusts her capacity to charm and seduce so to convince many that she is the best looking. She also assures “civilian woman” that men’s tastes are expansive and they overlook cellulite, stretch marks and scars that make women uncomfortable in their skin.
As a teenager, Shane engaged in scientific sexual exploration with boys. “My priority was information-gathering, not enjoyment.” She moved on to webcams, working at an incall where “I worked like I was trying to make partner,” and then became self-employed. She dismisses the sex worker tropes of debauchery and exploitation, claiming that the majority of her clients were “polite and decent.”
She focuses on a particular client, Roger, a middle-aged litigator whom she first saw in 2011 (along with 53 new clients and 167 dates). Their relationship endured for more than a decade until his death from brain cancer. Although Shane seems genuinely aggrieved about Roger’s medical condition, and laments that “[w]e’d played a prominent role in each other’s lives for almost a decade, but I couldn’t talk to anyone in his family,” the relationship remained transactional. Shane stopped advertising in 2015, and saw just a few trusted friends, including Roger, who accounted for at least half of her income since her semi-retirement. Yet, she acknowledges, “I wouldn’t have spent time with him for free, not platonically or sexually, but I appreciated him.”
This slim memoir is compulsively readable and remarkably candid. Shane illuminates how capitalism and the patriarchy impact every union. Thank you Simon & Schuster and Net Galley for a memoir about a subject that is rarely addressed in such lucid prose.
An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work
3.5 | 99 ratings
Price: 11.8
Last update: 09-03-2024
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Stevie
A Candid Look at Sex Work
Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2024