An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work by Charlotte Shane

Author:Charlotte Shane [Shane, Charlotte]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Autobiography, Memoir
ISBN: 9781982126889
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2024-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

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IT’S COMMON FOR CLIENTS to fall in love with their sex workers. Infatuation can be about the worker, kind of, who she really is and how she behaves. But the rush and weight of feeling come from the container of the interaction. The situation is compelling—its taboo, the associated risks, the way it distills sex—and it crystalizes sex into a unit so it can be served up like a line of cocaine. As is true with a lot of drugs, the high isn’t just about the product but the drama of arranging and indulging in it. There are secret accounts and second phones, lies about business obligations and furtive visits to the ATM.

If you market well enough, your reputation can do a lot of the work. No one likes to feel that they’ve wasted time and money or that they have bad taste or are easily duped. Circumstances primed clients to feel that they were with an irresistible woman, a woman most men yearned to be with and never would. There’s also curiosity and the fear of missing out. When a woman charges a lot and seems to be working a lot, it follows that there’s a reason for her success—she’s exceptionally beautiful or a sexual expert or both. Clients want to find out for themselves. They don’t want to pass up the opportunity to meet someone extraordinary. Sex workers are hopelessly fascinated by sex workers, too. They’ll arrange threesomes to meet a girl they’re curious about, stalk each other’s personal social media, gossip about colleagues on message boards. They can pretend it’s professional competition or due diligence, but it’s not.

When I worked on webcam, Aaliyah, one of the other women at my studio, told me she kept our site open in the background of her screen to watch girls in free chat during her shift. I tried her tactic in case it would improve my salesmanship, but it didn’t. It plunged me into a miasma of jealousy, envy, and uncertainty. The girls were so pretty, or not that pretty but still magnetic, and sometimes so bitchy. If I typed in a nice comment and they didn’t acknowledge it, I tried again. If they ignored me several times, I became enraged. If a girl was in private for a long time, the deprivation was unacceptable, like a targeted insult.

Being attracted to the models, being interested in them, somehow felt like being manipulated and mistreated. Seeing a woman on a screen suggests there’s something special about her, and as a viewer you want to crack open the special thing and poke around inside, squeeze and taste the center. It didn’t matter that I was on-screen, too, or that I knew how easy it was to get there. Their self-presentation felt like a provocation. The physical nearness of in-person work defangs this, dilutes the rage. But sometimes, it roots the reaction even deeper down in a client’s psyche, where it takes on a cast of profundity.

In Yasunari Kawabata’s “House of

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