How Charlotte Shane’s Memoir of Sex Work Became an Unlikely Love Story

“What was so funny was the idea of a really off-putting 40-year-old man teaching me how to be a woman,” said Charlotte Shane, the author of An Honest Woman: a Memoir of Sex Work and Love, when we spoke last month. By now, I’ve followed Shane on social media for years, and what continues to draw me to her writing has always been the way she does, in fact, seem to know how to be a woman. Specifically, Shane seems to be an honest woman, bringing a sense of principled curiosity to the page regardless of her subject matter. Her memoir, out with Simon & Schuster today, is in many ways a love letter to men. It is an inquiry into desirability and an earnest examination of heterosexuality, without the self-deprecating why me that I frequently encounter when talking to straight women about their romantic predicaments. Before the book’s release, I called Shane to ask her what it means to be successful at being a woman. Over the course of our conversation, we ended up touching on Britney Spears, conventional beauty standards, the heyday of feminist memoirs, and, of course, sex.

ARIÉL MARTINEZ: I’m really excited for this book to be out in the world. I’ve admired your writing for so long.

CHARLOTTE SHANE: Thank you. I’m excited to talk with you.

MARTINEZ: To start, can you tell me how the book came about?

SHANE: I sold the book in 2018 because it seemed the natural next step for me as a writer. Most nonfiction books are sold on proposal, and virtually the moment it was sold, I felt like, “Oh, I don’t actually want to write this book.” I stopped trying to write it for a while, and then the pandemic started. It was a very dark time, but I felt like the volatility of the moment might lend itself to something really wonderful happening. Of course it didn’t, but I felt like I was going to be living in a new world, and it was impossible to think about my book. But eventually I was like, “Okay, I actually do have to write this.” The breakthrough was probably in 2021, when I realized that the frame for the book should be this relationship with my client, Roger. That facilitated the actual completion of it. The previous idea I would not have been able to do.

MARTINEZ: What was the previous idea compared to the final result?

SHANE: It was more of a feminist cultural commentary, which already feels a bit dated. There was a time where a lot of feminist memoirs came out with that approach, like Laurie Penny or Jessica Valent, but these were feminists who had basically grown out of the blogosphere. I don’t mean to name names in a cruel way, but these books don’t have much traction. They come out and immediately drop away because they’re either so tied to current events or don’t have anything original to say. 

MARTINEZ: Totally. Did it surprise you to have Roger be the structure of the book?

SHANE: Yeah. Once I hit upon it, the book suddenly had a story. It helped me feel like I could fall back on that cultural criticism or pull in these references. And it felt like a way to recognize his importance in my life. It is, in some ways, a tribute to him. 

MARTINEZ: Something that’s so interesting about your book is the way you write about the draw to sex work as this proof of desirability. So I’m wondering how your relationship to desirability has evolved since writing it? 

SHANE: The sheer fact of getting older has changed my relationship to it, you know? Sex work helped me realize that conventional femininity and conventional beauty is and can be very much a costume. There’s something reassuring in that, to feel like, “Okay, if I really want to take a stab at appealing to the most amount of people, it’s actually pretty predictable,” like in the makeover scene from Wizard of Oz or Clueless or any rom-comedy movie where the girl takes off her glasses and buys the right dress. I’m not someone who finds a lot of self-expression in makeup, and I have very poor style, so almost all ways of relating to myself aesthetically are about the effect I’m hoping to have on other people. I don’t know how to put makeup on, honestly, and it’s so freeing.

MARTINEZ: Totally. You’ve touched on this but, what is your relationship to femininity?

SHANE: I don’t know. I was never athletic enough to be a tomboy. I didn’t like being outside, but I was also not a girly girl at all. I know many children have this experience of watching their mom put on makeup and feeling a certain way. It’s a very cliche coming-of-age moment, and tons of memoirs include it. But I don’t recall feeling that way. A lot of feminine interventions that are an unquestioned part of a lot of women’s lives were not part of mine, like getting your nails done, getting your eyelashes done, waxing different things. It didn’t really occur to me that people could do that. 

MARTINEZ: Yeah. You write about the Clinique makeup woman showing you these other tools that you could use to alter your appearance, which seemed like a surprise.

SHANE: Yeah. And my webcam boss was basically like, “Get a tan and wear a wig.” And I’m going, “What?!”

MARTINEZ: You’re like, “You can do that?”

SHANE: That’s what was so funny, the idea of a really off-putting 40-year-old man teaching me how to be a woman, essentially.

MARTINEZ: Do you think that having these really intense moments of connection or being present with people has made you more aware of that absence now with other relationships? 

SHANE: Well, I am very happily married now, and I’m really lucky to have incredible friends who I love talking to in this group chat which we call the “24-hour phone call.” It’s a very pre-cell phone type of girlhood. But since I started in-person sex work, I have been really concerned about how many people don’t have that in their lives, and it would make me feel sad and almost stressed out because it is so unnecessary. This disconnect is so fixable, and it’s causing a tremendous amount of sadness and loneliness.

MARTINEZ: What is your solution to it?

SHANE: People just have to tell each other that they need the other person’s attention. They have to say, “It makes me feel badly when you’re looking at your phone all the time” or “It makes me feel neglected if I ask you a question and you don’t answer.” The easiest example for me was when I was working with a lot of men who felt like their partners weren’t willing to have sex with them, or a certain type of sex with them. They were too afraid or ashamed to really articulate what they wanted. The fear of their wives rejecting them felt too great to take the risk. My sense was that they hadn’t made it clear to their wives that this is something important to them. And obviously, women grow up in a heteronormative society that tells them that men want sex more than they do, and that sex is less fun for women. That it’s not only more potentially impactful in terms of pregnancy, but also that it’s emotionally fraught. And then it’s very easy to understand why a man comes to a woman and says, “This type of sex feels important to me.” What you’re hearing is not like, “I really want to connect with you in this way and share something with you that’s meaningful to me.” You’re hearing, “I want to make this demand on your body.” 

MARTINEZ: Yeah. I was really struck by how you wrote about men’s desire and its expansiveness as being something that you seemed almost in awe of. I’m currently writing a book about Britney Spears and femininity, and I was so happy to see her come up a few times in your book as being this platonic ideal of sex appeal. I’m curious what you think about Britney now, and if you were surprised to find her recurring as a character in An Honest Woman?

SHANE: I knew I wanted to write about when I saw Britney live in Las Vegas, because it was such an emotional experience. But to put it in a really silly way, she’s such a rich text, right?

MARTINEZ: She really is.

SHANE: To write a book on her must be so daunting because there’s so much material. There’s her cultural output alone, and then her personal life is so wild and complex. When I saw her in Vegas, I felt really overwhelmed by the weight of her influence in my adolescence and also seeing her seeming not well, seeming really unhappy. She was really inescapable in the nineties. Maybe the Kardashians sort of supplanted her as the feminine ideal. But her being so young and everyone knowing that and those public conversations about her virginity—what a sick time.

MARTINEZ: It’s so fucked up.

SHANE: Yeah. And just thinking, “Well, the entire country has decided this is what a teenage girl is supposed to be like.” She’s supposed to be a virgin who looks impeccable, looks super sexy, is really fit and blonde and tan and moves like she is very experienced sexually, but again, virgin, virgin—

MARTINEZ: Virgin, yeah.

SHANE: Everything about it is so absurd and very much engineered in the lab to maximally torture every other woman alive. I don’t believe they were contemporaneous, but she came right after Monica Lewinsky, right? Where it’s like, “Here’s an actual adult woman who did something a little bit sexual and the entire world is like, ‘What a disgusting slut. We hate her.’”

MARTINEZ: Yeah, “…Baby One More Time” came out the same year. It was such a bizarre time for public discourse around young women’s sexuality. I’m also curious to hear you talk about writing about sex, which you do so eloquently. I heard the writer Garth Greenwell talk about this axis with sex writing, the physical and the emotional on a grid, and I’m curious if that resonates.

SHANE: I haven’t read him saying that, but I like that idea. Have you read the book Notice by Heather Lewis?

MARTINEZ: No, I haven’t.

SHANE: She’s someone who writes about sex in an incredibly unusual and effective way that utterly fascinates me. She does something really incredible with her writing, and notices something interesting about an escort who is not getting picked up by truckers but by men commuting to and from their day jobs. But for me, particularly when I was younger, one of the reasons sex was really fascinating was because it happened with another individual. It was different every time. So maybe there’s a way of thinking and writing about sex where sex is the product of what these two people are doing as opposed to an arena in which these two or more people are expressing themselves, and not always intentionally, right? She’s a little bit polarizing, but Miranda July is very much interested in all types of physicality, which is less true for me. She gets that sex is this arena where people show parts of themselves that don’t otherwise have a medium. And the bodily pleasure is very much secondary to trying to have this quick hack into another person, which was what really appealed to me. 

MARTINEZ: Well, you talked earlier about what intimacy means to you, how it’s this form of presence. And in a world where we’re increasingly on our phones, sex is one of the few areas where the expectation is to not be anywhere else. It’s one of the few areas of intimacy that’s not tainted by technology, unless you’re filming or watching something. 

SHANE: Yeah, I agree. My clientele were not by and large the type of clients who would want to watch porn with me, but obviously it would come up every now and then and I would always feel like, “Oh, this is weird.” It’s very distracting and not at all what appeals to me. If anything, it can be a before activity, but it doesn’t need to be during.

MARTINEZ: Right. Let’s turn the phone off.

SHANE: But I imagine this is still true for a lot of sex workers, because clients are paying a lot for it they’re more willing to put down their phones. And all of those things intensify the emotions because then you also get to relax a little bit and take a breath. The actual sex does not usually take that long, and even if a guy shows up for an hour appointment and has in his head, “I’m going to come three times, or else I’m not getting my money’s worth,” there’s still going to be downtime.

MARTINEZ: Right.

SHANE: You inadvertently give yourself the downtime like, “I’m just going to be lying in the bed. I’m not going to have to be checking my phone. I’m just going to be talking with someone, or not talking.” And also, the skin to skin contact. 

MARTINEZ: Absolutely. It’s another form of being present and experiencing your body and someone else’s, which we’re being trained not to do, what with the algorithm and the endless scroll. It’s very scary.

SHANE: Definitely.

MARTINEZ: One of the other things that I was really interested in is how you write about all of the ways a woman can fail. But what does a successful woman look like to you?

SHANE: Well, like I say in the book, when I was making a lot of money escorting, I felt like I was successful at being a woman. Now, I don’t know. From a pretty early age, it seemed to me that womanhood was largely synonymous with beauty, and it’s been hard for me to replace that concept. I found that I could work around it basically without necessarily having to say, “I’m going to redefine this.” When I was 18 or 19, I wrote a poem, and it was something like, “Oh, I’m a failed being because I’ll never contain all the beauty in the world.” And that’s something I’ve thought about ever since because it was one of those moments where your subconscious tells you something that you hadn’t quite understood before. I was like, “Oh, right. It isn’t enough to be a beautiful woman.” It’s really not even about being beautiful, full stop. It’s about being the most beautiful.

MARTINEZ: Yeah.

SHANE: Because womanhood conceptualizes this war where you’re fighting to be the beautiful one, or beautiful in every single way. But I don’t really think about womanhood anymore. Through sex work, I proved whatever I felt I needed to prove to myself. And then the whole project was revealed for what it was, which was absurd. Just an empty, hollow endeavor. It’s funny that I think so much about men and not so much about women, and I take it for granted as a category that has meaning, even though I couldn’t explain why. Just to be clear, it’s not like a gender essentialism thing.

MARTINEZ: That’s so funny, because I think so much about women and I never think about men. Anyway, I feel like we’ve channeled the energy of being in the corner at the party having an intense conversation.

SHANE: Thanks for inviting me. I can’t wait to read your Britney book.