What Charlotte Shane Learned from Sex Work

Shane knows that her descriptions of sex work might be used as proof of the job’s perceived harms—the way it is said to subordinate women to their sexuality or commodify what should only ever be given for free—but she has little interest in sharpening the facts of her life to form a straightforward defense. Instead, Shane uses her experience as the basis for a sustained meditation on the misunderstandings that shadow male-female relations, whether paid for or not. Passages flit between her girlhood and significant events in her professional past: she recounts listening to her father loudly appraise the appearance of passing women, apparently oblivious of his capacity for hurt, and she writes about working a bachelor party where sex was a benign bonding agent and she felt “welcomed into a zone of masculine joy and fellowship.” Along with worldliness and financial security, what Shane gained from sex work was a familiarity with the male mind freed from the persistent sense that men are brutes, compelled by an “uncontrollable will to ejaculate.” Hers is a vantage on love and intimacy at once more dispassionate and more optimistic than the gloomy diagnosis of heterosexual relationships she inherited.