A memoir of sex work that is also a poignant love story

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Review by Becca Rothfeld

In America, land of the prudes and home of the Puritans, every popular portrayal of sex work is essentially the same. In “Pretty Woman” (1990), Julia Roberts plays a prostitute who confesses to a client that she has long harbored dreams of being whisked off by a knight on a white horse. It’s a trite and sentimental movie — and its right-wing analog, a superficially different but deeply similar effort, is “Sound of Freedom,” a 2023 blockbuster beloved by Trumpian die-hards. In that film, a federal agent goes rogue in hopes of rescuing the figure that remains, for Donald Trump’s base, the archetypical sex worker: the trafficked child. The assumption of both movies is that sex workers are only ever helpless victims in want of male saviors.

The writer and sex worker Charlotte Shane defies this dire picture. She is not desperate or downtrodden; she was never kidnapped and sold into sex slavery; and as far as I can tell, she has never longed for the sudden appearance of a white knight. “An Honest Woman” is Shane’s second memoir about her profession, and like her first, “Prostitute Laundry” (2015), it is a corrective to incurious narratives in which sex work is assumed to be nothing but an unrelenting debasement. Shane’s path to the world of escorting was sometimes bumpy, but it was freely chosen.

As Shane explains in the book, she opted for sex work in large part because she craved erotic knowledge. Her approach to sexual experimentation in high school was cool and scientific: Each bout of awkward fumbling in the back of a car with a friend was a data point. (“The situation wasn’t volatile or risky because what would happen was made explicit in advance,” she writes. “I didn’t even take off my clothes.”) Shane’s priority during those exchanges was “information-gathering,” not pleasure, and the sex work she pursued after college was a natural continuation of her informal education.

But she admits that she was also drawn to escorting for less sanguine reasons. Like many young women in her cohort, she longed for male validation, and she set out to earn it by cultivating erotic discipline. As a teenager, she recounts, she “fell in love with boys, really fell in love with them — the fact of them, the phenomenon.” They enthralled her because they were raucous and wild; they “had permission in a way girls didn’t, and therefore access to a bigger, freer world.” Shane envied their power and their confidence; she couldn’t commandeer these qualities for herself, so she settled for trying to attract the boys who monopolized them.

At first, she suffered from the usual adolescent hang-ups: a fear that she was ugly or unlovable, a premonition that she was irredeemably maladroit. Britney Spears, then the reigning emblem of female desirability, was a daunting model for a gangly teen. The tanned and toned pop star “represented a degree of aesthetic perfection and sexual prowess that seemed compulsory yet permanently out of my reach,” Shane writes. In a world where “women’s value” was a function of sex appeal, but in which it was impossible to compete with the likes of Britney, what was a girl to do?

Shane decided to hone her skills, first as a “cam girl,” then as an employee at an unlicensed massage parlor and finally as a self-employed escort. “My sense that I wasn’t sexually appealing could have kept me from sex work, but instead, I think, it drove me to it,” she writes. “I wanted so badly to be proven wrong.”

Many women of Shane’s generation (which is also mine) endured similarly vexed girlhoods under the star of Britney — and many of us survived by adopting methods not dramatically unlike Shane’s. We, too, set out to master the art of heterosexual seduction. Sex work is work in that it is remunerated, but it is also work in that it is laborious. Not all heterosexual women are compensated for their efforts, but we have all toiled to perfect the feminine performance. That is to say, we have all worked at sex.

Like all jobs, escorting has its advantages and its drawbacks. Before Shane struck out on her own, she had some inconsiderate bosses, and every so often she was obliged to sit through dates with boring clients. Some men were worse than dull: One of them stalked her, claiming that he could tell she felt trapped in her trade and offering — then demanding — to liberate her, while others pressured her to disclose personal information that she preferred to keep confidential.

But what line of work is free of oafish bosses or selfish (and occasionally sexist) clients? Sex work was not perfect, but it was not appreciably worse than any of the other forms of employment on offer to Shane. Indeed, she reports that “women with straight jobs who started moonlighting as strippers or call girls often left the white-collar world to spend more time at their sex job because it paid more, offered more control over working conditions, and entailed less harassment.”