Book Review: An Honest Woman by Charlotte Shane
An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work by Charlotte Shane contains some juicy insights into what it’s like to be a sex worker but lacks a certain emotional honesty and vulnerability to the telling.
Rating: 🌟🌟
Genre: Memoir, Non-fiction, Feminism, Sexuality
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review in one word: Juicy
An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work by Charlotte Shane is an electrifying insight into the hidden world of being a sex worker. Shane is an exceptional writer who manages to paint some incredible paintings with her words.
The book traces Charlotte’s origin story being a young woman who preferred the company of boys rather than girls. I get that this is a counter to a lot of the man-bashing, man-hating varieties of feminism out there.
“Many men gravitate toward the security and domesticity of long-term relationships. Lots of clients will re-create their primary relationship in the field that’s supposed to be their escape from the same. They orchestrate it, because when it’s not there, they ache for it. They may need to feel and act as if they’re relationally unencumbered. They may make a show of how horribly the collar chafes or how brazenly they yank it off, but they still want the tether of home. Carousing and womanizing aren’t the same without it. A leashed dog feels the frenzy for a squirrel just out of reach, then returns to a full bowl and a fleece bed that smells of himself. An unleashed dog follows a scent into new woods, wanders exhausted into an empty field, lies down in the friendless dark.”
There’s quite a lot of internalised misogyny in her descriptions of other women. Women are depicted as dumpy old women and whiney pains who deserve their husbands and boyfriends to cheat on them or they are younger, winsome and bitchy competition for male attention. It’s a misconception and a deep stereotype that seeks to divide women – as old as the hills.
There are other women too, the ones who are neither and who are just relaxed, easygoing and just want the best for everyone?
There seemed to be no camraderie with other women at all, rather just a cold competitiveness and this shone through quite clearly in the book. Shane’s way of seeing sex as a teenager as firstly puppy-like and “innocent” exploration with her male friends translates very quickly into being about transactional value once she reaches college age. At this point she quits her Women’s Studies major and becomes a sex worker full time, raking in a lot of money. Something happens in between there for such a dramatic shift, but we don’t hear about it.
“The boys extended to me what the artist Hannah Black calls “the collegiate, unpretentious sexual warmth” characteristic of gay men that’s usually withheld between straight men and women. And in doing so, they invited me inside a sort of hedonistic Eden, a space of inclusion and innocence that existed alongside feral vulgarity. How miraculous that I’d been a part of that. Their generosity gave me something far more precious than sexual pleasure, and I would yearn to feel it again for the rest of my life.”
I don’t quite know what I was expecting from this book but it felt like there were large parts of Shane’s life that were omitted. She doesn’t quite get as vulnerable and personal as I would have hoped. Instead, there’s a lot of descriptions of all the men she’s shagged – these parts are vividly beautiful and we see the men in all of their vulnerability, loneliness and humanness in how they long to connect with her. We also get to see the ugly side of men too, the way they try all kinds of possessiveness, control, threats and stalking.
I just wished she would have extended that level of vulnerability to her reflections on own evolving self in her writing. Her relationship with ‘Roger’ a wealthy senior man who treats her exceedingly well in terms of manners, polite requests for sex and giving her financial freedom. These parts of the memoir started off compelling, but became repetitive and tiring after a while.
It is clear that despite all of the talk about only caring about money, Shane deeply desires connection, intimacy and long-lasting love. Towards the end of the book in a rather rushed conclusion, she finds her soulmate and she knows right away that he’s the one. This is a pleasing conclusion to the book, and you feel very happy for her but this felt like a sudden event tacked onto the end rather than a gradual evolution of inner life. As a result this is a patchy, inconsistent memoir.
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