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

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.”

Charlotte Shane, author of "An Honest Woman." (Sam Miller)

Of her hundreds of patrons, she remembers “just one man who was saturated with disregard for me in the way anti-sex work activists imagine all clients are, and his attitude was so foreign that trying to recall it now feels like summoning an obscure academic fact as opposed to a personal experience.” The rest of the men who annoyed her were misogynist in a more garden-variety fashion. Their disregard was perhaps no less pernicious, but it was at least more familiar. By the time Shane found herself listening to tedious male laments on the clock, she had already observed men in all walks of life conscripting women to serve as “emotional-support animals.” Some of these women were sex workers; others were “dutiful wives and girlfriends and subordinates.”

Men could be tiresome and entitled, but they could also be a riot. After one particularly exhilarating night at a bachelor party, Shane felt she had been “welcomed into a zone of masculine joy and fellowship, embraced by the occupants, and made delirious by their exuberance.” For the most part, she reflects, “clients treated us better — exponentially better — than most of the men we [had sex with] for free.”

One man in particular treated her with care and consideration, and much of “An Honest Woman” is an homage to him.

Shane’s memoir begins with recollections of her adolescence, when she was an avid student of desire, and it ends with a moving account of her marriage to a man she loves. In less than 200 pages, the book manages to be part autobiography, part anthropological investigation and part feminist tract — but centrally, it is a eulogy for Roger (not, of course, his real name), who was Shane’s client for nearly a decade.

Roger was not the sort of man who hires sex workers in the movies: He was neither a seedy lecher nor a would-be white knight. Instead, he was an avuncular type trapped in a loveless marriage. Shane describes him as “a nice guy: a prominent lawyer who’d worked pro bono on a significant environmental case.” He wore unassuming jeans and sneakers, and “he was kind, and not snobbish, and unfailingly polite to service staff.”

For nine years, he met Shane regularly while he was on business trips (some of them real, some of them fictitious). She was not in love with him, nor was she physically attracted to him, but she grew to admire his decency and his sense of humor. He sought not sex but companionship, and he and Shane developed a sweet and steady attachment.

Then, he was diagnosed with incurable brain cancer — and all at once, “An Honest Woman” transforms into a strange and poignant love story. For what was Shane to Roger? Where was she inscribed in the ledger of his life? “I knew him well — maybe I knew more of him than his kids or his wife, or at least I knew him differently, because the version of him I knew was obscured from them and from everyone else,” Shane writes. “But I didn’t have his health history. … I couldn’t even visit him in the hospital. We’d played prominent roles in each other’s lives for almost a decade, but I couldn’t talk to anyone in his family.”

As a result, “we didn’t get to say goodbye. It’s a wound that will last forever.” Shane only learned that he had passed away when his emails stopped coming; she later found an obituary online. Every week, she walks past a condo where he stayed and peers up at the balcony. “I don’t know what I expect to see, but it would feel wrong not to do it,” she writes.

The biggest tragedy of Shane’s career is not the clichéd one envisioned by squeamish critics of sex work. It is not that she has been devalued or debauched, or that she has become too jaded to love, or that she was routinely exploited. It is only the ordinary yet unbearable calamity of death.

August 7, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com