Charlotte Shane was twenty-one and a graduate student when she started selling private sex shows on a Web site called Flirt4Free, in the early two-thousands. “I was a disaster on-screen: green, graceless, with a body too long and too soft,” Shane writes in “An Honest Woman,” in which she chronicles the nearly two decades she spent as a sex worker. But the fact that she might be bad at camming was also partly the point: it was a wager with herself, a way of figuring out once and for all whether she really was desirable. Her teen-age years were defined by an intense erotic longing, foiled by the sense that she was unattractive to boys: “I reasoned that if I were accepted into environments where women were expected to be sexy . . . there must be a seed of sexiness somewhere in me.” Shane’s takings would be irrefutable proof of her worth.
The money came quickly—forty-two thousand dollars in her first year and thousands more in her second—but the rate at which it flowed exposed more about the breadth of male desire than it did about Shane’s market value. Although clients might sometimes be “compelled by obvious embellishments” of orthodox femininity—blonde hair or implants—they could be just as enthusiastic about bodies that didn’t conform to this rubric. The attention and adoration was far more sincere than it was lascivious or disturbing, as sex buyers are often made out to be. After Shane began offering her clients erotic massage, and then “full service” work (meaning all-out penetrative and oral sex), her earnings and her esteem increased. She regularly came away from clients elated by her own accomplishment: “It didn’t just feel like being good at a job. It felt like being good at being a woman.”
Shane knows that her descriptions of sex work might be used as proof of the job’s perceived harms—the way it is said to subordinate women to their sexuality or commodify what should only ever be given for free—but she has little interest in sharpening the facts of her life to form a straightforward defense. Instead, Shane uses her experience as the basis for a sustained meditation on the misunderstandings that shadow male-female relations, whether paid for or not. Passages flit between her girlhood and significant events in her professional past: she recounts listening to her father loudly appraise the appearance of passing women, apparently oblivious of his capacity for hurt, and she writes about working a bachelor party where sex was a benign bonding agent and she felt “welcomed into a zone of masculine joy and fellowship.” Along with worldliness and financial security, what Shane gained from sex work was a familiarity with the male mind freed from the persistent sense that men are brutes, compelled by an “uncontrollable will to ejaculate.” Hers is a vantage on love and intimacy at once more dispassionate and more optimistic than the gloomy diagnosis of heterosexual relationships she inherited.
Shane’s writing has an exposing, unmediated style—the kind that’s formed on the Internet, where insight is reaped from the everyday. In 2008, she started a blog called Nightmare Brunette, in which she untangled the knot of her wanting to write honestly about sex work, but also wanting to have sex with men in a way that didn’t feel like work. When the blog’s readership grew too big, she launched an e-mail newsletter, “Prostitute Laundry,” in which she set her experiences of “home sex” and “work sex” side by side, revealing how little distinguished them: both could be damaging and degrading, both could be arousing and meaningful. These blog entries and e-mails have since been anthologized as books, and to read them is to be reminded of the frank, first-person essays by women which mushroomed on Web sites like Jezebel around the twenty-tens. But what makes Shane a more adept interpreter of gendered suffering and sexual autonomy than many of her contemporaries is her attunement to both the mechanics of the body and the ruses of the psyche. She catches glimpses of what is otherwise obscured, deferred, and distorted, and this gives her work a watchful and self-reliant quality that glides against the current of much millennial-feminist thought.
One target of “An Honest Woman” is the tendency among this cohort to treat straight experience as a foregone disaster. Certainly, evidence of bad male behavior accumulates in the book: there were clients who walled off sex from emotion, armoring themselves with “ego and disinterest.” This group gave credence to the “common social depiction of men as perpetually horny demons who want to put their penises in anything.” Shane also encountered the opposite: men who fused their “vulnerability and tenderness to sex,” for whom one could not be accessed without the other. And yet she never slips into what the writer Asa Seresin calls “heteropessimism”—a mood that has flourished online, in which women are encouraged to loudly announce their disappointment with men (though rarely to the extent of resigning from heterosexuality altogether). Shane is compelled by the numinous attraction that pulls her toward sexual partners, and the unguarded tenderness that certain clients feel toward her. The task of her writing is to take these appetites seriously. (She has recently spoken about men being her “muses.”)
There is much in the book about the “socially mandated trouble” between the sexes—ideas Shane assimilated as a teen-ager, “like accidentally swallowing a piece of broken glass.” Boys and girls could be friends, but relations between men and women were either erotic or adversarial. From romance novels, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and sex-ed class, she got the impression that intercourse was especially dangerous for girls, always leading to some kind of disaster: blood, pregnancy, rape, mental breakdown, or an S.T.D. “Intimidation and harm seem foundational to, definitional of, straight sex itself,” she writes. And yet, in the folds of her grandfather’s porn magazines, Shane happened upon something that troubled this absolutist idea of female vulnerability: blissful expressions on some of the women’s faces suggested that they found pleasure in sex. Or, at the very least, that “they were fucked, and fucking didn’t harm them.” The models offered up a template of sexuality undiminished by the threat of punishment and shame that stalks women, in particular. Sex, it turned out, could do something other than shore up the couple form.
Not that Shane’s work was particularly sexy. Although she writes with real exuberance about clients with whom she shared a “wordless chemistry” and paid encounters that had the condensed intensity of a psychedelic trip, tedium is the prevailing feature. The job requires much mollifying, flattering, feigning interest—skills women instinctively acquire as “designated emotional custodians” of the species. Shane was particularly good at performing “a certain blankness,” the practiced dissociation of emptying herself out to be filled with whatever fantasy or need the client decants into her. There were the hobbyists who collected encounters with sex workers like rare vinyl; the fetishists who came with hyperspecific role-play requests too rarely indulged; and the romantics who wanted an attractive conversationalist to take to the Boston Symphony.
This is the kind of high-paid work that gets called “private escorting” or “the girlfriend experience,” but, as Shane writes in an essay from 2015, she prefers “prostitute,” because what she sold was the “promise of heterosexual, penetrative sex,” even if much of the job was spent clothed and engaged in conversation. Her point is to adopt an “unapologetic and unashamed” position toward a job veneered in euphemisms, for reasons of both legality and stigma. Even the term “sex worker,” which has tilted debates about paid sex toward workers’ rights, can sometimes swallow its specificity, as if “there really is something bad and wrong about charging money to engage directly with someone else’s genitals.”
“Men,” Shane thinks, “have an easier time respecting prostitutes than women who hate prostitutes care to admit.” There were, of course, clients who pushed the boundaries of what was agreed on with her, and whom she “blacklisted with abandon.” She can remember only one, though, whose disregard for her was so profound that he kept his eyes fixed on the TV as she fellated him. “I might as well have been a Roomba gliding over his dick.” To be treated like an object is also what made Webcamming so gruelling. Men regularly requested that Shane penetrate herself with a stripper heel, apparently oblivious of the idea that women have “nerve endings and pain receptors and intimate vascular tissues that weren’t hard to tear.” In real life, the majority of her clients were courteous, even “decent.” Whether or not they’re paying, people tend to want to at least feel like they’re fucking a sensate person and maybe even giving them pleasure—though Shane admits that simulating climax was perhaps the part of the job she resented most, since her orgasm “mattered not because of how good it would feel to me but because of how good it would feel to them.”
It is less the intensity of passion than the simple, almost infantile need for attention that keeps one regular client, a man she calls Roger, involved with Shane for nine years. Their relationship also provides the book’s organizing arc, which begins with an overnight session in a Marriott hotel and terminates with Roger’s death, from brain cancer, in 2020. He is an atypical protagonist, the antithesis of what a john is imagined to be: a polite and unassuming middle-aged lawyer, whose “old-fashioned air of dignity” and portly constitution reminded Shane of a patriarch in a Victorian novel. When they had sex, it followed “the standard heterosexual sequence,” meaning kissing, fondling, oral, vaginal. He was neither prone to jealousy nor especially demanding, except for a sustained need for “psychic and emotional unburdening” and some assurance that Shane liked him back, or at least liked him more than his wife seemed to. When Roger professes his love, and promises to stop seeing other sex workers in an act of make-believe monogamy, Shane is moved to study the shape of his infatuation. Through the keyhole of Roger’s unhappy marriage and his infidelity, she fixes upon the bad scripts and the thicket of delusions that keep men and women in a state of ritualized misalliance.
“Bed death” was the reason commonly given by clients to explain why they saw escorts. It was an excuse offered up with less resentment than regret at the slow evaporation of intimacy with their wives. When a client was physically grotesque or hapless at sex, Shane would feel suddenly twinned to his partner: “If I could have outsourced or refused this onerous chore, I would have.” But, when a man was especially pleasant or sexually proficient, she felt disappointed by the wife’s lack of interest: “Throw the fish back if you’re not going to eat it.”
Of course, what compels many couples to stay in sexless marriages is the familiarity; the comfort of a “not tonight, honey” can be more bearable than the potential “no” of a new sexual prospect. Roger incarnated this repetition compulsion: slowly, he and Shane stopped consummating sessions and stuck to spa weekends and Michelin-starred restaurants. Though taboo and risk compress paid sex “into a unit . . . served up like a line of cocaine,” what Roger got from her was a second wife—“more stylish or flashy,” perhaps, than his real one, but with a celibacy that was markedly the same.
There’s a disaffected tone to much sex-work writing that perhaps demonstrates some of the strict boundary management that keeps workers safe. The strip club where Mary Gaitskill worked is described, with stony efficiency, as a place where “women stomped across the stage . . . and squatted to let men finger-fuck them for tips.” Sophia Giovannitti, in her own recent memoir, writes about licking the ass of a “graying sugar daddy” with all the impassivity of someone who has just mowed the lawn. “An Honest Woman” stands apart as a work blotted by grief; part memoir, part memorial. Shane and Roger shared the pool of cultural references and private jokes that build between real-life lovers or friends. The depth of his affection for her translated into a steady stream of regular income and financial advice, less transactional than symbiotic. Perverse, perhaps, to equate love and money like this, and yet Shane describes the bond between her and Roger as “one of the most honest and equitable and respectful relationships I’ve had.”
Things change when Roger’s brain starts to deteriorate and the overnight visits tail off. Shane frets about his surgery and fantasizes about his wife, who seemed “shrewish and emasculating,” startlingly absent from his bedside. How, Shane wonders, will she find out when Roger eventually dies? Periodically, she searches for him online, until she comes across an obituary, written without any mention of his ebullience or his humor, like the outline of a portrait yet to be colored in. That we rarely get a complete picture of our partners is also what Shane and Roger’s wife shared—bonded by the provisional, tenuous nature of intimacy. Shane witnessed the version of Roger that wanted red wine and human touch; Roger’s wife got the part of him that was lacquered with “marital virtue” and spousal duty. Integrating the disparate parts of the self that have been split off or disavowed is an interminable task, but one of Shane’s hopes for Roger in his last days was that he might live more honestly alongside his desire. Sex work exposes with brute efficiency how difficult it is for both men and women to fully assume their sexuality. The social code punishes men who do not harden their desire into those brutish forms which can defend against the possibility of being humiliated or rejected, and it berates women for daring to satisfy their attraction to men. “We’re drilled to be vigilant against a man’s presumed lack of integrity so we can’t trust, let alone enjoy, our emotions of closeness,” she writes in “Prostitute Laundry.”
For Shane, prying out the splinters of masculine threat lodged inside her has been the work of a life. Since adolescence, wanting sex and closeness with men propelled her into “loosely knit” romantic relationships. Escorting satisfied some of her thirst, but the work was also a way to defy the laws and prescriptions that govern so much of monogamy. Marriage, she writes, always seemed best suited to those who wanted to lead “the least challenging lives they could manage.” But then Shane lobs her own marriage like a grenade into the end of the book. She met a man named Sam on Tinder, and the sudden compulsion to marry him surprised her. Coupledom can certainly look like a cure for the bad habits of sexuality, a means to straitjacket the more unruly elements of eros. This is especially true if one is a sex worker, for whom retirement is always perceived as a kind of betterment. Shane worries, too, that “commitment” is “synonymous with suffering and sacrifice, a trial you withstand through sheer fortitude.” And so part of her motivation for tethering herself to Sam is to place another wager with herself—one as audacious, in its way, as her decision to start selling sex. If the work had been the way to determine whether she really was desirable, marriage would test the limits of her belief in the possibility of successful male-female interrelation. Call it an act of hetero-optimism. ♦
