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If you’ve only encountered Charlotte Shane’s new memoir, An Honest Woman, through the tabloids, you’re probably expecting something salacious and full of vivid disclosure about what it’s really like to work in the sex industry. What you’ll get instead is something deeper, more carefully woven, and altogether stronger as a narrative: Shane is never coy or withholding about her work, but her centering of female pleasure (and its absence) in a world normally associated with male wish fulfillment is nothing short of revolutionary. The book works valiantly to tell a story about sex without a patina of faux glamour or obligatory trauma porn; to reduce An Honest Woman to online clickbait is to miss what’s really there and to be worse off for it.
Vogue recently spoke to Shane about seeing sex work depicted in art, the changing meanings of exposure and anonymity when you’re writing for an audience, and the lack of honesty that so often accompanies the way we teach young people about sex. This conversation has been edited and condensed.
Vogue: What are your favorite written depictions of sex work—in fiction, nonfiction, film/TV, whatever?
Charlotte Shane: Virginie Despentes’s King Kong Theory was hugely influential for me, and I cite it pretty early in An Honest Woman. Carol Leigh’s writing was also formative. For more politically oriented or, dare I say, educational work, Melissa Gira Grant’s Playing the Whore, Heather Berg’s Porn Work, and Juno Mac and Molly Smith’s Revolting Prostitutes are all wonderful. Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne’s The Other Hollywood is incredible. Suzy Favor Hamilton’s memoir, Fast Girl, really captures the high of escorting, especially when you’re new to it, and Katherine Faw’s Ultraluminous feels a little like what The Girlfriend Experience movie wished it were. I loved Hustlers, and Klute and Working Girls are classics. But if I had to tell someone to consume just one piece of media about sex work, it might be The Prostitutes of Lyon Speak, a documentary from 1975.
What do you wish more people understood or believed about sex work?
That criminalization kills. That it endangers sex workers, even when they’re ostensibly not the targeted party—as with the so-called Nordic model. People do this work because it is work, meaning it pays: It is a way to earn a living. It’s fine for you to not like it or be uncomfortable with it or feel confused about it. But none of those personal reactions is a justification to harm sex workers, and making their work illegal, along with the stigma that entails, is what makes them so vulnerable to exploitation and injury.
What does the maybe-anachronistic notion of privacy look like to you, both as a writer in general and the author of this specific memoir? How do you figure out what needs to be told urgently versus what needs more time?
Ooh, good question. I’ve never really understood the way people talk about my writing, including this book, as if I were almost freakishly candid. “So open” and “so honest” are pretty common, delivered in a tone of voice that sounds a little wary. Isn’t personal writing supposed to be personal? Isn’t the whole point to be rigorous about your thoughts and motivations and responses? I guess the sexual aspect throws them off, but to me, to state what I suppose is obvious, sex is not that private. Or, rather, sex is idiosyncratic and intimate, but most people have done it, so we don’t need to clutch our pearls like it’s such an outrageous topic. We’re supposed to be adults!
I gravitate toward deconstructing and then reconstructing the process of comprehension versus just reciting an intellectual argument because, as a reader, having a felt, emotional experience is more convincing than just reading an explanation. So I need to provide context and details about the circumstance that inspired a particular insight in order to convey it effectively. But of course there are many things I didn’t include in An Honest Woman or in any of my books, many things I don’t want to talk about with strangers, parts of my life I don’t want idly and carelessly debated like they’re little desk toys to fiddle with.
I think true privacy has never felt more precious or rare; we’re under incessant surveillance, and it seems as if all aspects of society conspire toward making us create more content, forfeit more of ourselves for the benefit of corporations and the state. Lately I’ve been yearning for greater anonymity, not because I’m ashamed of anything, but just because I don’t like feeling exposed in an involuntary way—for instance, how I have to advertise my words with my face. Privacy only has meaning if we can choose when to share ourselves, how to share, and—I think this is very important—why we share. The minute someone demands information from me is the minute I don’t want to give it up, even if it’s something innocuous like what I had for breakfast.
I’m thinking about your book’s title in the context of sex as both a general fact of life and an industry. What do you think a more honest view of sex in our society would look like?
Oh, gosh, where to begin! A more mature attitude would be a good start. We’re a really sexually self-destructive population, I think, because we refuse to just be normal about it. It’s so rare for any American to get accurate information about sex delivered in a nonchalant, mature, supportive, nonjudgmental way at any age, but especially as young people, which is when it would do the most good. It’s not honest to tell girls and young women, especially, that sex is synonymous only with vaginal penetration or that that should be the main act—that it’s the only act that matters. It’s also not honest to lead them to believe that their first time should hurt or will hurt or that it won’t hurt at all; they have the right to be assured that it’s different for everyone and different for the same person at different times. There’s so much panic and hysteria and fear and, simultaneously, puerility and frivolity baked into how Americans think and talk about sex, from the political level to the cultural. We deserve much better.
What do you hope never to be asked again while promoting this book?
I’ve written a lot of book criticism but not really interviewed writers about a particular book, and I do not envy the folks—including you!—who’ve had to interview me. It’s really hard to come up with relevant but original questions. A lot of questions are best answered by just reading it. It’s short, so it won’t take that long!
