What I’m Reading
This week I started Chris Belcher’s sex work memoir Pretty Baby. Belcher is currently an academic based in Los Angeles, but she put herself through grad school as a professional dominatrix in part to escape small-town life in West Virginia, where she grew up.
On a personal note, this book is deeply interesting to me because, on the surface, her life seems to be the inverse of mine.
I grew up in Southern California and went into academia only to drop out after 7 years of graduate school and many years of teaching (I lost count, maybe 12 at various universities, community colleges, and high schools). I became a sex worker after I left my PhD program. I was in my late 30s. My only regret is that I didn’t leave academia for sex work earlier.
Moreover, while I grew up in Southern CA, I have spent most of my adult life in Pittsburgh, PA. While Pittsburgh is certainly not the small Appalachian town that Belcher describes—one that I must admit is quite foreign to me, even though my grandmother was the daughter of a coal miner and also grew up in a mining town in West Virginia—it is closer to that than it is to San Diego, where I grew up.
I haven’t finished the book yet, so I don’t yet have wrap up thoughts (expect me to write more about this book in next Friday’s Musing), save to say that I’m reading it with an eye toward how having inverse life experiences has shaped both of our feelings about academia and sex work.
What I’m Thinking About
What I can say at this point is that Pretty Baby has made me do a lot of thinking about how our cultural upbringing shapes our experiences of sex, and most notably of sexual shame.
Prior to working as an escort, I spent many years working as a full-time phone sex operator. While many people outside of the profession imagine that the job is simply moaning into the phone to get callers off, it is a much more psychological job than this.
Much of my time as a phone sex operator was spent talking to people about the sexual desires that they were afraid to admit to those they loved, as well as the insecurities and fears they had about their own sexuality and that of their partners.
When I first started doing the work, I had a very hard time understanding why my clients felt shame about the sexual things they wanted. There were times, especially in the beginning, when I was offended by their shame because I felt like they were harshly judging things that seemed normal or even hot to me.
Over time, however, I came to understand that the shame that they were experiencing was coming from somewhere, and it was my job to hold space for them to talk about it, with the hope that doing so would allow them to shed some of it. Sometimes this meant simply talking through it, and sometimes it meant roleplaying the things that they were afraid of or felt shameful about.
Pretty Baby brought into sharp focus where this somewhere is and made me realize that perhaps I struggled to connect with my clients’ shame precisely because I don’t come from a small town or from a conservative background. There were a lot of problems with how I grew up, but this wasn’t one of them.
In the book, Belcher described being a queer teenager who had adults—the parents of people she was dating—spit in her face when they discovered she was gay. She had teachers publicly shame her for her identity, and she had lovers who refused to admit that they had feelings for her. While I was certainly aware that queer teenagers experience things like this (one of my most vivid memories from college was having Matthew Shepard’s mom come and talk to our school about his brutal murder), it wasn’t my experience.
When I was coming of age, my mom told me that if my sisters or I were gay that she would be accepting, and my dad told us that he would prefer us to watch sex over violence on television. Sex wasn’t taboo and identities weren’t policed in the way that they were for Belcher. Beyond feeling grateful for this (which I undoubtedly am), I also am also thinking about how tragic it is that my experience is the exception rather than the norm.
What I’m Excited About
While I hardly ever take time off from work, I am going away this weekend with family. Interestingly, I am going to West Virginia (just a coincidence) to do some white water rafting and glamping. I can’t wait for an outdoor adventure and a little time to unplug and connect with my people. I’ll take some pictures of the beautiful West Virginia mountains and the river and share them next week.
I’m also excited for a lot of work travel that I have coming up. So much of it, actually! Next week I’m going to St. Louis and Buffalo, and then in September I’m headed to Boston and New York City. I’m most excited that for two of those trips I’m bringing my friend Lucy Bloom along with me! She will be in Buffalo and New York City with me. Keep this in mind if you’d like to see us together!
Availability & Booking
I’m Available in Pittsburgh until August 16th. After that my schedule is full of travel and adventure. Let’s have some adventures our own. Reach out to book!
Aug 15-16: Pittsburgh
Aug 18: St Louis
Aug 19-21: Buffalo
Aug 22-31: Pittsburgh
Sept 2-5: Boston
Sept 6-22: Pittsburgh
Sept 23-26: NYC
My travel calendar is kept up to date on my website. 
