A Review of A Review: NYT’s Book Review’s “Meet, Play, Love”
In the August 23rd issue of the New York Times Book Review, writer Toni Bentley wrote a front page review of the new anthology Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys.
While I was more than thrilled to see a sex work anthology given such forward press coverage (especially in an article that promotes such sex work-positive people as Audacia Ray, Annie Sprinkle, and Carol Queen) the coverage itself left me a bit cold. I was happy to see that making the topic "sexy" wasn't Bentley's goal, as most mainstream press seems to promote sex workers with an obnoxious level of "Sex! Drugs! Rock and Roll!"-like decadence, I'm unsure if she succeeds in having much of a topic at all in the end.
Her basic assertion in the review is the following: that everyone pays for sex, in some way or another. Sex workers simply put a specific price on a specific activity, whereas "the rest of the world" pays for sex with dinners, dancing and other "normal" activities. This assertion is neither new nor particularly interesting.
Really, the notion that in a capitalist society, any and all emotions, sensations and experiences are available for purchase, is not exciting to ponder for very long. Bentley quotes writer (and online dominatrix) Sadie Lune as saying "money is the boss's boss," in reference to the fact that capital is the overriding "Dominant" in any sex worker/client situation. Yes, everyone is a slave to something. She follows this quote with her own add-on: "So which is more powerful, money or sex? I forgot." Sounds to me like she's lost her own thread, mid-story.
And while she doesn't play the "sexing it up" card, she does continuously promote the "Us/Them" dichotomy between "normal" people and sex workers, in both the way she approaches the topic and what she talks about as "a parallel universe" of sex workers. She references Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience (starring porn star Sasha Grey) and the HBO series Hung as ways in which sex work stories have penetrated (pun intended, to be sure) the average American's experience, but I see this as another mistep by mainstream media to (yet again) forget what's right in front of them: there is no Us/Them. There is only Us. Sex workers are not abnormal people, living outside the norm. They are what sets the norm, so that the norm can exist. And yes, from a legal standpoint, there is a focused discrimination against sex workers and their rights, but nevertheless: every day, in every city in this entire country, someone is engaging in paying for something sexual. It's not abnormal. And if it is abnormal by decree, it's only to reinforce that there has to be an object to have a subject, a freak to have an average.
The most insulting part for me, though, is that Bentley criticizes the editor David Henry Sterry for condescending to the writers by having verbose and (what she deems) overly sentimental introductions to their stories, while she simultaneously condescends to the sex worker community at large in the whole article. This is most pointedly obvious in her ending, in which she declares that "this collection is a wonderful reminder that good writing is not about knowing words, grammar or Faulkner, but having that rare ability to tell the truth, an ability that education and sophistication often serve to conceal." Not only do I not agree with that assertion, but I think the fact that the formally educated and socially informed writers of this anthology deserve a bit better.
The only positive point to this article, for me, is that it puts sex workers on the front page and they aren't getting arrested while being there. The fact that there is even a dialogue occuring about sex workers and their stories and that the New York Times would not only cover that, but push it front page forward, is an exciting step towards generating further conversations about identity that are meaningful and progressive.
