Sascha Cohen at The Baffler:
“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.
more here.
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