Book: Indecent
Jul. 12th, 2009 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Sarah Katherine Lewis (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
markedformetal)
Details: (c) 2006 Sarah Katherine Lewis; pub 2006 Seal Press; ISBN 1-58005-169-3
Verdict: Indecent is well written but thoroughly depressing.
Reasons for reading it: I dipped intomarkedformetal's journal while she was in the process of writing this, and she had interesting things to say about sex work. What caught my eye in contrast to most other internet pontification about sex work was that she clearly places the industry as part of the broader issue of semi-skilled, semi-legal labour, as well as talking about sexism and misogyny and so on.
How it came into my hands:rysmiel knew I'd taken an interest in the blog so lent me the book.
Part of the reason why I found Indecent depressing is that the material is depressing. Large swathes of the sex industry thrive because of men who have really misogynist views of women and sexuality, but this is not exactly a new concept to me. The thing is that Indecent is also depressing because it's treading a very fine rhetorical line: it is trying, and I think mostly succeeding, to be emotive without being titillating, harsh without being so depressing that people would stop reading. And Lewis tells the reader that she's doing this! She talks about how when working in stripping or erotic massage or whatever, she would tailor her spiel to what the client wanted to hear, what would produce the appropriate reactions while at the same time making him more likely to hand over cash. And she's clearly doing exactly the same thing with this book, picking words carefully to have exactly the desired effect on her readership. So the book didn't make me hate men; I already knew that a small proportion of men are sexist and exploitative, but instead it very nearly made me hate people. It seems to treat all communication, not just between a sex worker and a client, but all communication, as more or less conscious manipulation. And it gave me self doubt over every time I'd ever agreed to do something as a favour for a friend, knowing it was more for their sake than mine.
Perhaps surprisingly, the depth of analysis in the book seems less than the best of what Lewis was coming out with in her blog posts. But she's definitely making some interesting points about the effects of being in the legal grey area that is sex work. Since the work is either actually illegal or at least very much outside the social mainstream, in some ways the workers have a lot more independence than people working in fully legal jobs of the kind that don't really require qualifications. She points out, subtly, but the message is clearly there, that "the system" isn't really on the side of lower-class women anyway, so being outside the system has some advantages. At the same time, the fact of engaging in illegal or nearly illegal acts makes the women involved incredibly vulnerable; if they are robbed, assaulted, exploited by their employers or worse, they have no real redress because to get any help they'd have to admit to criminal activity.
The theory that a lot of the point of prostitution and the sex industry is to give men sexual contact with other men in a way that they can delude themselves isn't "gay" seems a little over-stated to me. But I wouldn't be surprised if paying for sexual services had quite a lot to do with relationships between men.
Just as Lewis is discussing sexual acts in quite a lot of detail, while being careful to avoid providing masturbation material, she's trying to talk about some very marginalized people, without providing any warm glow of satisfaction that a reader might derive from vicariously experiencing other people's misery. I think both of these are admirable goals, and many many books about sex work get this wrong in one direction or the other. But the problem is that in trying to avoid provoking strong emotions, I think Lewis somewhat weakens the force of her book. It's very subtle, and I wouldn't be surprised if she was hoping that people will pick it up expecting the usual stripper memoirs genre and get a political message when they weren't looking for one. In the end, though, I think it's almost too subtle, it sometimes seems waffly, or you'll get half a sentence indicating that she had some traumatic experiences, but the idea is never developed. I totally respect that she's maintaining her privacy and not putting any bad situations she may have gone through out there in public for everyone to be pleasurably horrified by, but in the end it was hard to see exactly where the book was going. And if I hadn't read the blog and a lot of other discussions around this topic, I would have come away confused rather than enlightened.
Still, I think there is some benefit to the world in having a book with a clear-eyed picture of what the sex trade is like. It's not a happy hooker story with a flimsy educational excuse to provide lots of lurid descriptions of sex acts, and it's not a Victorian (or second-wave feminist) style catalogue of horror and depravity designed to evoke pity for the poor exploited prostitutes. It may not be the best book ever but it's one of very few that are even attempting this, and for that I think it's worthwhile.
markedformetal)Details: (c) 2006 Sarah Katherine Lewis; pub 2006 Seal Press; ISBN 1-58005-169-3
Verdict: Indecent is well written but thoroughly depressing.
Reasons for reading it: I dipped into
markedformetal's journal while she was in the process of writing this, and she had interesting things to say about sex work. What caught my eye in contrast to most other internet pontification about sex work was that she clearly places the industry as part of the broader issue of semi-skilled, semi-legal labour, as well as talking about sexism and misogyny and so on. How it came into my hands:
rysmiel knew I'd taken an interest in the blog so lent me the book.Part of the reason why I found Indecent depressing is that the material is depressing. Large swathes of the sex industry thrive because of men who have really misogynist views of women and sexuality, but this is not exactly a new concept to me. The thing is that Indecent is also depressing because it's treading a very fine rhetorical line: it is trying, and I think mostly succeeding, to be emotive without being titillating, harsh without being so depressing that people would stop reading. And Lewis tells the reader that she's doing this! She talks about how when working in stripping or erotic massage or whatever, she would tailor her spiel to what the client wanted to hear, what would produce the appropriate reactions while at the same time making him more likely to hand over cash. And she's clearly doing exactly the same thing with this book, picking words carefully to have exactly the desired effect on her readership. So the book didn't make me hate men; I already knew that a small proportion of men are sexist and exploitative, but instead it very nearly made me hate people. It seems to treat all communication, not just between a sex worker and a client, but all communication, as more or less conscious manipulation. And it gave me self doubt over every time I'd ever agreed to do something as a favour for a friend, knowing it was more for their sake than mine.
Perhaps surprisingly, the depth of analysis in the book seems less than the best of what Lewis was coming out with in her blog posts. But she's definitely making some interesting points about the effects of being in the legal grey area that is sex work. Since the work is either actually illegal or at least very much outside the social mainstream, in some ways the workers have a lot more independence than people working in fully legal jobs of the kind that don't really require qualifications. She points out, subtly, but the message is clearly there, that "the system" isn't really on the side of lower-class women anyway, so being outside the system has some advantages. At the same time, the fact of engaging in illegal or nearly illegal acts makes the women involved incredibly vulnerable; if they are robbed, assaulted, exploited by their employers or worse, they have no real redress because to get any help they'd have to admit to criminal activity.
The theory that a lot of the point of prostitution and the sex industry is to give men sexual contact with other men in a way that they can delude themselves isn't "gay" seems a little over-stated to me. But I wouldn't be surprised if paying for sexual services had quite a lot to do with relationships between men.
Just as Lewis is discussing sexual acts in quite a lot of detail, while being careful to avoid providing masturbation material, she's trying to talk about some very marginalized people, without providing any warm glow of satisfaction that a reader might derive from vicariously experiencing other people's misery. I think both of these are admirable goals, and many many books about sex work get this wrong in one direction or the other. But the problem is that in trying to avoid provoking strong emotions, I think Lewis somewhat weakens the force of her book. It's very subtle, and I wouldn't be surprised if she was hoping that people will pick it up expecting the usual stripper memoirs genre and get a political message when they weren't looking for one. In the end, though, I think it's almost too subtle, it sometimes seems waffly, or you'll get half a sentence indicating that she had some traumatic experiences, but the idea is never developed. I totally respect that she's maintaining her privacy and not putting any bad situations she may have gone through out there in public for everyone to be pleasurably horrified by, but in the end it was hard to see exactly where the book was going. And if I hadn't read the blog and a lot of other discussions around this topic, I would have come away confused rather than enlightened.
Still, I think there is some benefit to the world in having a book with a clear-eyed picture of what the sex trade is like. It's not a happy hooker story with a flimsy educational excuse to provide lots of lurid descriptions of sex acts, and it's not a Victorian (or second-wave feminist) style catalogue of horror and depravity designed to evoke pity for the poor exploited prostitutes. It may not be the best book ever but it's one of very few that are even attempting this, and for that I think it's worthwhile.
