What are we owed from a sex worker memoir?

I can’t remember when Charlotte Shane’s writing first entered my orbit. I’m guessing around 2015/2016ish when copies of Prostitute Laundry – a collection of her tinyletter blogs on sex work - were mentioned in sex worker circles. In the years since reading Prostitute Laundry, I’ve read N.B, another collection of her blogging, and her chapbook with merritt k, 3 conversations. I’ve read a lot of her non-sex work writing as well, often in Bookforum where her reviews are often my favourite and her chapter in Can We All Be Feminists? on the failures of mainstream feminism was one of the first writings I turned to when I started my PhD. Her claim that “feminism should expand our commitment to each other as human beings, not contract it by replicating the same power structures we should be decisively overthrowing” was, and is, a core tenet of my praxis.

While I remain a huge fan of her article writing, I can’t say the say same for her memoirs (three at the last count). Part of this is bias; as someone who has worked in the sex industry myself, hearing tales of men’s sexual tastes, kinks and desires along with a sex workers’ search for meaning behind them isn’t particularly interesting  - I live it, and since 2015 when I first read PL, I’ve read countless sex worker memoirs, essays, articles and books, more or less building a career off analysing sex worker writing. While I don’t think I would ever consider her books ‘tender’ or ‘thought provoking’, I can see the appeal in reading about a sex workers’ life.

And yet, there was always something jarring about her books that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, though I knew it stretched beyond a simple “not for me” reaction. Her memoirs spoke at length about men’s desires, how their “wide-ranging, easily triggered appreciation felt wholesome and joyous” and it felt uncomfortable because Shane has critiqued this foci in writing. Her 2021 review was an excellent take down of men lyricising their own desire:

He wants to publicly luxuriate in the nooks and crannies of his lust while passing it off as an intellectual inquiry. He writes that he’s “obsessed” with sex, and “a lot of what I want to do is think about it.” But “think about it” here only means “dwell upon it,” not interrogate or complicate or learn. Ideas don’t develop or expand. We only look on as he presents variations on the same scenario, reaffirming that it turns him on.

Reading her most recent memoir An Honest Woman it crystallised for me: Shane has done exactly the same thing. She has stripped the events in her memoir of any broader context and depolitisised her writing entirely, while still passing it off as intellectual inquiry. It’s weak of any writer who has built their canon on writing about gender, sex and power, but especially  inadequate of someone who is working what is basically a criminalised and massively stigmatised job,

Take this this passage in AHW about a booking with client who has a known history of abuse and boundary pushing:

I was there because of my curiosity and my arrogance, and many escorts I’ve known, the expensive ones anyway, are the same. Barring a history of nonpayment, stalking, or physical abuse, we say yes because we believe we’re tough and special. We want to prove that our peers don’t have our unique skills—they can’t seduce or civilize the way we can […] I spent more time with him than anyone I know. I took pride in being able to endure.

Or later in the book she writes,

Sometimes they asked if I was afraid. One man tied me up and went through my purse […] No, I wasn’t afraid. I felt no alarm, only disdain for his ineptitude. Whatever the men told themselves about who had the upper hand, I was my only boss.

Compare this writing to an article in Luxe which came out earlier this year, where Shane addressed and critiqued the power structures which protected Epstein and his cronies. She concludes that,

To be a feminist, or to be any person who truly cares about the ubiquity of sexual violence, is to be vastly outnumbered by the coalition and the enemy who together insist that rape is a private anomaly, a union of unfortunately circumstances.

An issue I consistently battled with throughout sex working, that my friends did too, was of seeing men who, while not abusive, were not respectful or kind or even pleasant to sex workers. In not saying anything, in keeping our mouths shut, we were sending them back into the world allowing them to think that their way of treating women is acceptable, perhaps even welcome. Battling with those thoughts and not knowing where to land is one thing: writing about them in a book and not interrogating them is another, especially when you write so pointedly on how powerful men are protected. It reads as myopic at best, and misogynist at worst, to decontextualise the situation that allows men to feel they have the upper hand in a room alone with a woman society constructs as disposable. What is Shane telling us with this story of hers? And why is it so important, to her, to tell it?

The script that sexual violation is a fate worse than, or tantamount to, death is not a script we all follow. Not all of us identify as victims or survivors after rape, sexual violence, or not-entirely consensual sex (the difference is subjective, but it’s real). Shane’s Live Through This essay delicately and effectively critiques the conceptual framework that “if it does not ruin you, it will at the very least change you forever for the worse. This is the only allowable truth about rape. There are no alternatives.”

She goes on,

The truth is that it does not suit our social narrative to recognize that a woman can be raped and get on with her life, can maintain sexual and romantic relationships without counselling, won’t think of her rape every day, and won’t see herself as a “survivor” or different in any material way.

I have been raped more than once: the rape I experienced at 16 blew my life apart in ways that haven’t been put back together over 20 years later. I was raped again at 28 and I never think about it, or the man who did it. Both experiences are valid. Reading, through Shane, the kaleidoscopic shift of rape from identity breaking to awful-but-not-going-to-ruin-me was illuminating, and her writing felt therapeutic. I’d thought I was the only one. This beautiful nuance is imperceivable to some, but thoughtful and deeply human.

And yet, her memoir writing  where she dismisses men enacting violence as pathetic reminded me of a passage in N.B from a few years earlier,

Where do we get our ideas of sexual fragility? I might know the answer to that, but I wonder why we all believe it without pause. Why are women assumed to be so sexually unstable as to be blown to bits by even one unpleasant encounter? The mind is strong. It doesn’t have to be cowed by an ugly touch. Why would this ruin me? […] It’s a miraculous body but it is temporal and it is not ultimate and it is capable of healing, capable of forgetting.

It reads differently to the article. Here, it is stripped of all political and historical context, only the belief that rape won’t ruin her, not how hard women had to fight to show that it can. It’s not that Shane is wrong – she can’t be, it’s a memoir – but in her books she does not situate what is happening in that room, with that client, in the world in which its happening. I know Shane knows this, because she writes about it outside her memoir.

What troubles me in her memoir writing is not Shane’s desire for endurance, to prove she is stronger than other workers, but her utter lack of curiosity about it. As a writer Shane is so deftly able to tune into deeply human topics, so her lack of self-awareness is problematic. Why was it so important to Shane that she took pride in being able to endure, that she saw an abusive man for longer than anyone else? What was such a feat able to provide her? She tells us that she “didn’t need the money enough to use the word ‘need’” so beyond an unquestioning acceptance of the boundary pushing, all that she is telling us is that she is able to put up with the least amount of respect for the longest period of time. In a way, I suppose I can see the point: I remember a violent and frightening boyfriend, one I had stayed with for a long time, long past the point in which I was safe. I had taken pride in how much I was able to take from him, and assumed that those around me would admire me and my strength at putting up with it; admire that I needed so little and could live with such pain. It’s taken ten years of unpicking to figure out what that was all about, and the idea of bragging about it years later leaves a sick taste in my mouth. It’s not the kind of world I want to build for other women.

Shane’s narrative point as sui generis happens constantly through An Honest Woman. I found another example particularly telling when Shane tells us that she “has trouble relating to working women who spilled over with messy rage”;  

When one client wrote a bad check to a friend of mine, she enlisted her social circle to enact an elaborate revenge—or justice—involving a camera, the man’s father, and the threat of violence. It worked; she got her money. But her measures alarmed me. I never had to do anything like that, and I don’t know that I’d have been able to. Any drama is too much drama; I require all my dealings to be neat.

 I like to think, given the choice, most sex workers would want all their dealings to be neat as well. Alas, sex work is criminalised in most of the US, and so options are limited if you’ve been robbed or raped by a client (and having sex on the understanding that you’re going to be paid, and then not be paid through a bad cheque, is a violation of consent). The woman in question couldn’t complain to a boss or go to the police, but rather than linking this story to the broader argument of sex work decriminalisation and the need for worker rights, or even how Shane’s privilege at not having to resort to “messy” behaviour, Shane’s decision to use the story to talk about her own professionalism and boundaries reads as off-tone and quite cruel.  I read this and was furious. This client took away a sex worker’s decision to be drama-free by writing her a bad cheque. It is no wonder that the utter powerlessness of sex workers who have been ill-treated and violated by clients leaves many of us spilling over with rage, unable to place our grievance anywhere but cannon-balled right back at the client.

 In an interview with Shane about this book, she says how she “tried to make the book complete in the way a seed is complete, endowed with everything it needs to do its specific job—and not a single extraneous element. […] it diffused the focus too much.” While the book is ultimately an ode to how much she loves men, and how “men and women are meant to love each other because people of all genders are meant to love each other” this explanation feels like a cop-out. As Shane said,

I think it’s fruitful and indispensable to consider yourself in relation to other people. But to really drill down into what you’re doing and thinking—in a way that hopefully doesn’t become narcissistic or navel-gazey—is just responsible.

Quite.

 Huge thanks to you-know-who for your feedback and comments