Sex Workers' Lit Ruined My Sex Life

By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet. Posted December 16, 2006.

She won't kiss them.

She'll spread her legs for them. She'll call them "honey" and "baby" and "darling" and even "snookums," and lube them up, though only with gloves on, and rub until they buck and moan. She'll tell them they're huge. But like most sex workers, Sarah Katherine Lewis won't kiss customers.

Her memoir "Indecent: How I Make It and Fake It as a Girl for Hire" (Seal, 2006) joins a string of new books about adult entertainers, along with Diablo Cody's self-consciously comic "Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper" (Gotham, 2006) and gender studies professor Bernadette Barton's polemical "Stripped: Inside the Lives of Exotic Dancers" (NYU, 2006). The publishing industry is funny that way. Some honcho sniffs a trend in the air, word leaks out like blood at the beach, then boom: one year it's all queer cowboys all the time. Or diets that let you eat lard. Right now it's lap dancers.

In this latter-day phase of stripper chic, academics such as Barton churn out doctoral dissertations about peep shows and shimmering poles. Middle-class 20-something smarties write memoirs about ditching drone jobs in cafes and offices for "the penis gallery," to quote prep-school grad Cody, whose Pussy Ranch blog led to a six-figure advance for Candy Girl, and who is now a millionaire screenwriter working on a project with Steven Spielberg. Ex-ballerina Barton toyed with but finally tossed the idea of "doing participant observation' by stripping, herself: "I had a 'good' body," reflects the author, who teaches at Kentucky's hilariously named but perfectly ordinary Morehead State. Married hipster Cody confides: "I desperately wanted to be a stripper."

Lewis, who picked the stage-name Emma to honor Emma Goldman and tried to chat with fellow dancers about Hawthorne and Poe, remembers her favorite childhood game: whore. "We took turns dressing up and being the whore," she writes. Lewis and Barton, one bisexual, the other a lesbian, both feminists, were lured by stacks of cash and by what Barton calls "attentive audiences" moaning "Nice ass," begging for licks.

These authors depict strip clubs as rank, jism-spackled. Barton calls them "the gut of patriarchy." But although she feels that adult entertainers "embody a nexus of oppression," they boast a strong sisterhood, making special meals for each other and sharing "an organic understanding of social inequality, including analyses of class, gender, and racial discrimination." Lewis concurs, dedicating her book "to the working ladies of Seattle ... the smartest, funniest, kindest, wisest, and most beautiful women in the entire world." Solidarity is super. What's icky is the sex.

"I imagined myself saying, This won't hurt a bit," Lewis writes, "and ripping his dick off like a Band-Aid. ... My crotch felt hot and infected."

"One man ... asked me to punch him in the stomach and testicles for ten minutes as hard as I could," Cody recalls. "He explained that he'd been raped as a child."

What happens for 50 bucks and tips at the Lips & Lace is one thing and what you do for fun is another. Right? Well -- less and less, as stripper chic and pimp-ho style become commodities. Mainstreaming the shiny outermost layers of sex work is a brilliant career strategy in every industry, from the media to merchandising to academia.

A D-I-Y porn course at Wesleyan University. Western Washington University's annual Pornfest. UC Santa Barbara's Pornography Research Focus Group. Porn Studies programs at schools nationwide. What a wet dream for right-wing radio hosts, who jeer that this is why jihadists hate us.

All this praxis and politics and glaring detail yanks sex from its original context into an alien and weirdly public one: semen as seminar. But hey -- if Lewis's description of how a customer "moaned and farted ... breaking chicken chow mein-scented wind" makes you flinch, or if Barton's musings about how "enduring oppression can foster a critique of social inequality" makes you yawn, then someone might call you a Republican.

None of which is to knock anyone for work well done. As revealed in these books, most sex workers start because they need the money. Strapped single moms. Students table-dancing for tuition. Escaped minimum-wage slaves such as Lewis who discover that paddling a stranger's buttocks for 10 minutes nets the same $40 that would require "eight hard, humiliating hours of work" in a restaurant. Sure, we wonder what goes on behind those marquees that say LIVE NUDES. So now we know. Are we having fun yet?

Yeah, if you like the smell of wigs and pee and the sound of women pretending to come.

Which brings us back to the question of why we read explicit accounts of sex anyway. Ever since the Kama Sutra, the answer has been: to get turned on. Simple. Such a gorgeous application of human circuitry. But in more and more new books like these, fuck narratives serve other functions. To test boundaries. To spark water-cooler buzz in a competitive, crowded, media-driven market. To proclaim authors and readers as transgressors slashing and burning sexual clichés: brave soldiers who are not what Lewis calls "passive victims" of the patriarchy but empowered. Starting to strip made Lewis feel "like a special, chosen person, a girl so pretty and smart I could make money using only my wits and my courage and my body, trusting my instincts and accruing knowledge in a steep learning curve that was both exhausting and exhilarating." Part of that learning curve entailed figuring out how "to squirt hair conditioner on my pussy and my butt to make fake cum."

These books are part of the postmodern bent for shock: that endless game of chicken in which some say How Gross and some say How Great and they blame each other for ending Western civilization. A standard shock-shortcut is to sidestep comfort and whatever else passes for privilege as you perform what used to be called slumming. Describing her first sex-club shift, Cody enthuses: "I felt like a common whore. It was the best day of my life." It's different when you pretty much have no choice, when you're like the immigrants and dropouts and addicts and self-cutters she met, the desperate ones who sold used tampons to customers and the sick-skinny one with an "acne-ravaged face" whose breasts "reminded me of the slack teats I'd gawked at in National Geographic as a kid."

Funny she should mention that. Cody's whole book evokes National Geographic, as do the others in this genre, and college porn courses too. They are excursions into dimly lit, dangerous terrain boasting its own secretive subculture. This new kind of sex book isn't about arousal, by a long shot. It's armchair anthropology and circus sideshow in a safely hipster guise. These well-educated authors with their fine orthodonture are your tour guides. Their predecessors launched imperialistic and politically incorrect incursions into rainforests, filming ring-nosed chiefs and pagan rites.

Lewis fixes her virtual lens on "Luis the Mexican Ass Man," a coprophiliac to whom she sells her thong. Cody lingers with "Shitty Booty Jeff" and a beaming "Buddhist businessman" who says, as she bounces on his lap: "When you talk about media criticism, it gives me an instant hard-on."

It's not that we aren't intrigued. Our comfort zones have sliding doors. As for why publishers risk six-figure advances on the idea that we want to know more and more about how men sound when they jerk off in small rooms with insincere strangers, perhaps it's because a certain class of writer and reader is now ashamed to approach sheer circuitry without a trendy/brainy/transgressive gloss. Reading plain old porn for pure pleasure is so ... what? Un-ironic? Lowlife? Naïve? The sole province of frat-boys and priests? If you call it lit or discourse, if your narrator is -- as Cody puts it -- a geek or punk-rawk, then with a sigh of relief you can still settle down to read about the old in-out-in-out.

Yeah, but the hate. These books are really less about sex than about loathing the customers. We see them depicted as groveling, foul-smelling, pathetic, perverted, laughable in their need and their loneliness. Cody mocks the "standard model short, pink Minnesota dick," the glaze-eyed losers who "point dumbly" and beg. Lewis, whose honesty makes hers the best in this trio, makes no bones about wanting to kill the men who ask her to help them ejaculate. "As I ran my hands over Steve's spine, I imagined myself stabbing him in the back. For maximum damage I'd have to work the knife in between the bumps of his spinal column. ... Fuck you is what I'm thinking. ... Stabby stabby."

Confronting another customer, she dreams of seizing a plastic fork and "stabbing his eyes out. I could almost hear his screams." To her eyes, an erect organ is "flushed and angry, like a pimple." Men "spewed their filth" and their "sexual feculence." Being touched by them was "like being brushed with dog shit."

Perhaps that's only natural when you're in the sex business -- and Lewis still is. But even if you're not, and even if you're not that into guys, all this I-feel-sexy swirling into a sour effluent stew is enough to make you not want to have intercourse again, ever, with anyone. It's as if someone up there planned this, nursing a secret agenda to make us all celibate. And as porn studies and stripper chic soak into real life -- from the Juniors racks at Target to Sociology 101A to the way you do your nails -- how long will it be before those visions of daggers and feculence and dialectics won't stop dancing in your head?

See more stories tagged with: sex trade, sex lit, authors, sex books

Anneli Rufus is the author of several books, including "Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto."

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