When I first moved to Toronto, I rented a room above a restaurant in a not yet gentrified neighborhood. Across from me was one of those seedy boarding house hotels and sex workers worked the corner. I would see them on my walk home. When things were slow, they read books. As a bookworm myself, I was intrigued. It took me a couple of months to work up the courage to ask them what they read when they weren’t busy. They were amused by me. I was a weird college kid in weird outfits with a weird ask, but from then on, we would chat about books sometimes. They were the first sex workers I ever met. They made me feel welcome in my new neighborhood.
A few years later, when I was a baby stripper, some of the girls would lend each other books in the changing room. Some were self-help, some business improvement, and some were books about sex workers, or sex worker memoirs. Eventually, we formed what we called “the ho bookclub.” Our book club went on for a year or two, before some of us left the club for good. I still read and collect books by or about sex workers, particularly books written by Canadian authors.
I’m hoping to review books written by sex workers later this year, but for now, I’m going to focus on established feminist writers whose books can be easily found at local libraries and bookstores.
Margaret Atwood and Heather O’Neill are Canadian, feminist, best-selling authors. Both have written about sex workers during their careers. There is not enough space in a monthly column for me to get into much detail about each author and their body of work. But there is space for me to tell you if sex workers feel seen in the books written by the above authors.
I might as well start with the grande dame of Canadian literature herself, Margaret Atwood. As we’ve seen with the reversal of Roe v. Wade in America, her book and the current TV adaptation the Handmaid’s Tale is becoming less speculative fiction by the day. I remember first reading the book in high school, and remember thinking to myself that I, too, would have chosen to work at the clandestine brothel called Jezebel’s instead of hard labour in a nuclear wasteland without any safety precautions if the powers that be determined me to be too slutty to be used as a handmaid. I didn’t have the vocabulary at the time to express that even in extreme situations such as being forced to choose between sex trafficking or a gulag, victims can and do express agency. And there is such a thing as a spectrum of consent.
Atwood’s Oryx and Crake trilogy, like the Handmaid’s Tale, is speculative fiction. Year of the Flood is my favorite of the three because the protagonist is a stripper. Ren is a graduate with a fine arts degree in dance whose only career prospects are working in fast food or to work as a stripper. She gets hired as a feature entertainer at a club called Scales and Tails. The book begins with Ren being stuck in a decontamination suite at the club just as the environmental apocalypse hits. She survives on champagne and bar nuts and reflects on her life thus far and wonders if she will ever find her friend Amanda again. In this dystopian strip club/brothel, the women who work there are categorized by the owners as either talent or disposable, and the clients treat them as such.
The girls who are talent are expected to perform. They are provided some, but never enough, safety measures such as skin suit costumes and a decontamination suite if the suit gets ripped to minimize their interactions with the clientele. By contrast, the workers deemed as disposable are brought in from impoverished countries and the men can do what they wish to them with impunity — their bodies are literally disposable.
In her fictional world, and in my real world, class, or the perception of class, determines a sex worker’s earning potential and working conditions. On one end, we have white, conventionally attractive, college educated women who can brand themselves as luxury and charge accordingly. On the other end of the spectrum, we have sex workers who work outdoors. They are more likely to be living in poverty, racialized, disabled, living with addictions or mental health issues, and/or without access to education or social capital.
Think about it: when the Stormy Daniels scandal broke, people were tripping all over themselves to say that they too would engage in sex work for 130 thousand U.S. dollars and that Daniels has great business acumen. Would these same people rush to express their approval when they see a sex worker working outdoors, doing the same thing just in far worse conditions for exponentially less money? Would they want to be a sex worker in that scenario?
With the exception of Lullabies for Little Criminals, Heather O’Neill sets her books in Victorian or Edwardian era Montreal. Her protagonists are, for the most part, teenage girls who engage in survival sex work. I’m sure, in part, writing about Montreal’s history is in itself O’Neill’s ongoing homage to her hometown. Montreal is glorious and deserves to be celebrated. But it’s also a hell of a lot less jarring to read about teenagers trading sex during a time where child labor was still legal and women weren’t allowed to vote or own property. I think for us as readers, it’s easier to stomach human tragedy when it’s at arm’s length — we can tell ourselves that things are much better nowadays for young people, and that our social nets never let anyone “slip through the cracks.” We fall asleep with our book still open, in our cozy beds, surrounded by modern amenities.
O’Neill’s latest book, When We Lost Our Heads, is about two best friends Marie and Sadie, who get up to all sorts of strange and wonderful performance art. Marie is the only (legitimate) child of a sugar baron. Sadie is the child of a social climbing third rate politician. In an ever escalating game of truth or dare, the girls accidentally kill a maid. Marie is shielded from consequence. Sadie is sent abroad to some sort of remedial school. Years later when she returns, she runs away from home because her family wants to minimize their reputational risk and send her to the asylum. Instead, she runs away and meets George, an androgynous woman who was raised communally in a brothel. George hasn’t left the brothel, she splits her time between doing sex work, being a trained midwife for the brothel, and a clandestine abortionist for the wider community. She takes in Sadie and they have a beautiful love story. Sadie eventually becomes the brothel’s resident dominatrix. This book is unapologetically queer; there are no heaving bosoms. Instead, we get a love scene with a strap on followed by cuddles. The sex is real.
Equally real is the camaraderie among the sex workers. They help each other with clients. They hustle together. The work is hard, but the girls have a shared sense that helps them push through it. On Sundays, they rest their bodies and smoke opium. Nowadays, it’s a facemask, foot bath and joint kind of hangout after work or on a Sunday afternoon, but the communal rest remains the same. The women at the brothel know each other’s bodies. They love each other. It made me want to work with these girls.
Sadie and George eventually part ways, but they put their time at the brothel to good use. They each become writers in their own right. Sadie becomes a famous erotica writer, and George writes political pamphlets that eventually empower young girls working in the factory to revolt, strike and demand better working conditions. There is no precautionary tale, they both move on from sex work relatively unscathed. If anything, their time at the brothel gave them inspiration and time to plan their next steps.
If reading more books was one of your New Year resolutions, you should add Year of the Flood and When We Lost our Heads to your list. The authors’ creation of a parallel world as a way to lessen the blow about the impossible choices young women are faced with is masterful.
Both books highlight and parallel key struggles that I, and other sex workers I know, face. They also reflect us as full humans: we are resilient and work hard. We love and are loved. We use our talents to uplift our communities in face of injustice.
I’m looking forward to reading books new book written by sex workers about sex work and sex workers. We have a lot to say! Consider reading along with me this year.
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