Indecent: How I Make It and Fake It as a Girl for Hire Book

I wrote a little review of Indecent back when I first read it. It went something like this:

Work has been on my mind lately, which might be why I broke my rule about non-scholastic reading during the semester and picked up a copy of Indecent: How I Make it and Fake it as a Girl for Hire by Sarah Katherine Lewis. If I had more publishing industry savvy, I would talk about how trendy sex-industry memoir has become. Perhaps I'd go on to tie it all to the mainstreaming of the porn aesthetic and reality television. Fortunately, I am lazy. All that I know is that Indecent goes on my bookshelf next to Michelle Tea's Rent Girl and approximately a thousand miles away from anything ever written by Tracy Quan. No one will ever call Lewis' book a "funny, insightful romp."

Gentlemen and ladies, imagine that the next time you find yourself in the professional company of a lingerie model, stripper, or peep show girl, imagine that while she is gyrating in front of you that she is thinking about how much her feet hurt in those lucite heels. She is thinking about making her stage fee. Imagine that while she pantomimes desire, if she thinks of you at all, it is only because she is thinking about how much she would like to stab you repeatedly in the face. Yes you, especially if you're trying to relate by asking her if she's putting herself through school.

Tracy Quan's sex industry is half HBO special, half chick-lit novel, full of urbane, supernaturally slender women rushing from the gym, to their waxing appointments, to $300/hour in-calls. Lewis and Tea's sex industry is decidedly proletarian, full of women in itchy wigs peeling their clothes off for what adds up to minimum wage. While I'm finding a place for Indecent on my bookshelf, it ought to go next to Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed. In the manner that all service industry drones come to hate their customers, Lewis and Tea come to hate men, or at least whatever it is that drives men to pay women money to simulate desire. The Michelle Tea in Rent Girl hates everyone. She's a mean little sociopath who has stopped seeing interactions between people and can only imagine interactions between herself and the contents of your wallet. Lewis, on the other hand, genuinely loves her co-workers - the smartest, funniest, kindest, wisest, and most beautiful women in the world. That affection is what enables her to chronicle ten years of peep shows, whack shacks, and strip joints and still come out of it seeming rather...well...sweet.