Sex Industry Book Club Ep 2: Prostitute Laundry by Charlotte Shane

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

On this second episode of the Sex Industry Book Club, co-hosts Jessie Sage and PJ Patella-Rey talk to Charlotte Shane about her book, Prostitute Laundry.

You can listen to the episode here.

Jessie: Welcome Charlotte! We are happy to have  you on the second episode of the Sex Industry Book Club.

Charlotte: Thank you for inviting me!

Jessie: Do you want to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about the memior that you put out, Prostitute Laundry.

Charlotte: Sure. So I am a writer who started working in the sex industry and when I was 20 and kind of never really left it, so I started Prostitute Laundry as a newsletter. My friend Melissa Gira Grant had a tiny letter, that was how I found out about it. I thought, “Oh, maybe this is a good way for me to basically write like I used to write when I had a blog without having to maintain a blog”.

So I started writing these letters, these confessional letters about whatever was going on in my life at the time, and definitely the first letter had less than 100 subscribers—maybe like 70 or something, I just mentioned it on my Twitter. I didn't have intentions for it really beyond it being an outlet. It became  extremely important to me as a way for me to process my own life and just a creative kind of well. Whenever I'm writing about my life—like in real time—it gives me a very heightened experience in my own life. I'm extra aware of things and I'm thinking more deeply and more carefully. I feel more present in my life when I'm writing about it.

Jessie: I totally understand that.  

Charlotte: Yeah, and it starts to feel like the writing is manifesting certain things. When I've been regularly writing about my life, crazy things start happening to me. My friend Susan Shepherd (a journalist and an out sex worker) and I were talking about the idea of writing a book, and I was saying, “Writing a book doesn't feel important to me, I can't really imagine when I would never write a book about.” And she's like, “You already have written a book, your letters!” And I was kind of like, “Oh, haha, you know, that's nice. You're being a nice friend.”

I thought about it a little more and I'm like, “No, this should be a book.” And again, I am a profoundly unambitious person, I’ve never had aspirations for this book beyond it getting to whoever wants it.

Jessie: That's so interesting to hear you talk about because I feel like there is a lot in the book that kinda gets woven in about your relationship with writing. I really appreciated that. Like talking about story­telling and writing, and how it becomes so integrated into both what you do and how you understand your relationship to yourself and your life.

Charlotte: It really is such a big part of who I am, I can't imagine what I would be like if I didn't  write. And I think because of that relationship, I think that's part of why, to me, it's not like a field of achievement. You know what I mean? It’s just a way of being in the world.

Jessie: It's interesting in my life because I also write a lot about sex work, and people have said to me like, “Oh, I think it's very brave that you talk about these things.” I think that’s odd. It doesn't feel brave to me, it just feels like a thing that I do. It's not more brave than doing the work itself.

You write in the book, “I hate that dramatic cliche of an artist insisting that they’d die if they don't create, I understand what it's getting at, but the expression is all wrong.” Then you go on to say “I would write anyways, I believe I could choose not to write, that's what makes it awful to do anyways, it's voluntary and therefore reckless, selfish and stupid”.

I was wondering if you still resonate with that. Do you still feel that way about writing? Or has that changed?

Charlotte: After the book came, I did send a few more newsletters. I started a different mailing list and I still send maybe a few dozen. But honestly it didn't have the same intensity. I have not really returned to that sort of writing, even though I think I might eventually. It's been sort of cyclical for me. I don't feel compelled to write now the way I did then.

I was lucky enough pretty early in my career, and also in my adult life, to connect with other sex workers who were very politically engaged and very aware of sex worker as an identity, sex workers as a community. A lot of those people were writing online, or they were publishing books, or they were writing a blog. That was a very regular thing to find another sex worker who was writing, whether or not they had ever wanted to or they imagined that as part of their life path. So the issue of disclosure came up a lot, and I did talk with people who said, “I regret not being more thoughtful about who I was writing about.” Which is still such a big debate in personal writing, that's always the debate. Like, you deserve to tell your story, but you can't tell your story without telling some other people's stories and is that acceptable? Is there a good way to do that? What if somebody says, “I don't wanna be in your book,” and you say, “But I need you to be?” It's a very complicated question.

PJ: And I imagine it's intensified by the subject matter too, when you're writing about sex and writing about criminalized activity, and just intimate relationships, it seems like there's heightened stakes.

Charlotte: Yeah, I definitely think that somebody could very legitimately critique me for what I  share about certain other people in Prostitute Laundry. But by the time I was sending out those  newsletters, I had had a pretty popular blog before that, and at that point it was actually much more anonymous too. So I kind of experimented with some of this before, and like I said, talked to other people about it. I feel like I see a lot of moments in Prostitute Laundry where I'm very  conscientiously drawing a boundary on behalf of somebody else. I feel like I'm really good about  doing it with clients, I don't think anybody would be able to read that book and say like, “I know  exactly who was hiring you.” I think I was really good about doing it with my partner at the time, I tried to be incredibly careful about giving away anything about his identity. There's probably still room for critique and intention is not really a defense, but I absolutely have never put my writing into the world thinking, I hope this hurts somebody I know.

PJ: And I hope you didn't read the question as a critique.

Charlotte: Oh, no! It’s totally a fair question.

PJ: To say that the stakes are high isn't to say that you didn't handle the situation with finesse. Just as you do a lot of reflecting on the process of writing, you also do a lot of reflecting on boundaries, and make it clear to the reader that you're drawing lines in different places. Not using certain names, not mentioning certain cities, and so whether some of the reader agrees or not, I think it’s pretty clear that you're making a conscious effort throughout to try to maintain boundaries.

Charlotte: People who perform sex work are an incredibly diverse range of people, but one might argue that the people who are most comfortable seizing it as an identity and most comfortable talking about it publicly, are also people who gravitate towards a certain degree of openness. Sometimes I just forget. It doesn't occur to me that somebody might be like, “Hey, please don't tell everyone that I like getting fucked up the butt.” Sometimes it genuinely doesn't occur to me to be like, “Oh no, I shouldn't say that they like wearing pantyhose or something.”

Jessie: Yeah, it was funny, we had this conversation last week because I'm in the middle of writing my book. We went to a SWOP event for International Whores’ Day, and I was gonna read a section from my forthcoming book. I gave PJ the passage because in the passage, I'm talking about having sex with one of my clients, and PJ was gonna be in the audience along with a lot of our friends. I was like, “I want you to listen to this before we get there, so you're not shocked and it's not a weird situation.” I give it to them and then they're like, “I think the logic that you use to move this piece to this piece isn't quite like fleshed out yet,” and I was like, “Okay, but what about the sex?” And they were like, “Oh, I don't know, I think I signed up for that. Am I supposed to be weird about that?”

I think that when you live with this degree of openness, you're so inoculated to it, it's hard to remember that other people might not feel that way, because somebody wearing panty hose does not seem like a big deal.

Charlotte: Yeah, there's a part in the book, kind of near the end, where I talk about meeting a friend, my friend Emma and her main client and this other woman, and the three of us are dominating him, and he has on this very silly French maid outfit and is crawling around on the floor. In that chapter, I write about talking to my boyfriend and trying to say, “I wish people could comprehend how completely mundane this is.”

Jessie: Yeah, absolutely.

Charlotte: I understand why there are certain little bullet points that make it very salacious, but in the moment, I wish people understood how you can be completely bored by it.

Jessie: Yeah, even the people that you work with, like your duo partners. I once had a client who was like, “Is this gonna be weird for you because she's friends with you outside of this?” I was like, “What?” I found that question to be odd. Why would that be weird? We're just working together. I think that there is something about that—it becomes very mundane in a way that it's hard to explain to people who don't do this kind of work all the time.

Charlotte: Yeah, and one of the things I think is so can be so beautiful about the connections you form with other sex workers is this blend of tremendous intimacy and being kind of blase about it at the same time. I was thinking recently I did a web cam show while I was on my period. I was with my friend who I was visiting and staying with, and at the end of the  show, I was like, I cannot get this make­up sponge out, and she's like, “Well, look, I have these calibers I'm gonna use these to get it out.” Nothing about that to me feels embarrassing or weird, but I do recognize that there was such a beautiful intimacy to it, you know, that I could take for granted, this person was going to fish around in my vagina to pull out my bloody make­up sponge.

Jessie: And not at all be weirded out by it.

Charlotte: Right, right. And I was like, “We did just spend two full hours having sex with each  other on camera, but the fact of that happening off camera is what makes it special.” I do think that at the end of the day, I appreciate sex work for many things, I definitely would not have the life I've had without it, but the friendships, really, are so precious.

PJ: I wanna jump into talking about the content. There's so many themes I would love to cover. But I did have one more question just about the writing of the book. You talked about how you blog, and then you did the mailing list, and that a lot of the content from the book is derived from the letters that you wrote for the mailing list. How did you go about bundling those, curating them and turning them into a book? The way it reads, it really is coherent and has a narrative arc, so I assume there were some revision along the way, but I was just curious about what that process is like.

Charlotte: Well, the very first edition of Prostitute Laundry, which was released to Kickstarter  supporters, was pretty directly a bound copy of all the newsletters. There were a few I left out because they had been published elsewhere online, but otherwise it was pretty much like A to B. The third edition, which is what's available now, I took one or two of the earlier letters out because they didn't feel that narrative­ly relevant. It's been copy­ edited and there are a few stylistic edits I've made, but for the most part, it's pretty true to what was sent out at the time.

I started the newsletter, I generally didn’t know what it was going to be. It was like, “Oh, I'm just writing. This is like a form of therapy. I'm having a lot of emotions, I'm processing them through the newsletter.”

When things sort of started taking off with George, there was this weird momentum where you're writing about your life, and it becomes this question of “Which is the chicken, which is the egg?” Is this stuff happening in my life because I'm writing about it? Am I making this stuff happen? Or is it that I need to be writing because all of this stuff is happening in my life. It's really hard to find a cause and effect. Once the newsletters started getting kind of like a clearer trajectory where there were reoccurring characters and it wasn't quite so aimless­ness, the readership started to grow. I was very much writing it as a product to be read by other people, and I would make conscientious choices about where to end a letter.

PJ: Yeah, I noticed that a lot. We actually talked about a number of the letters and how you would foreshadow what was going to happen in the letter early on in a way that there was  suspense operating.

Charlotte: There was so much happening in my life at that time. I was working so much, I was traveling so much for work. All I had in my life was work, which took up a lot of time, and then recreational relationships (for lack of a better word), and this writing. So much happened that it  was easy to write, I think sometimes even two letters a week and still feel like I have a huge backlog of material to get through. It's building up faster than I can get it out there, which is a good thing.

Jessie: You were saying that there are certain characters that are emerging over and are showing up over and over again. Did the readers have investments in certain people in your life?

Charlotte: The audience was always incredibly kind and supportive and very judicious about when they responded. I would get maybe a number of responses after each letter, but they'd be really brief and incredibly positive. It would just say something saying like, “Oh my God, I love this,” or, “Oh, I can't wait for the next one.” Just a lot of positive feedback that didn't seem like it came with any expectation or request beyond write another one, which is kind of a dream feedback.

Jessie: Right, it doesn't get better than that! I thought what you did really well, and I think maybe I'm so attuned to this because I'm writing right now as somebody who has been divorced and has very complicated feelings about my ex-­husband. We were together 19 years, so it's this interesting thing where I would like to leave him out for his own privacy, but also how do I write a book about myself without mentioning a 20­-year marriage that I had two kids within. I think there was something pretty beautiful about the way that you spoke about your boyfriend at the time. The way that you talked about the way things kind of devolve at the end of a relationship, and how that's a very complex thing. I've been thinking a lot about how to do that in my own writing, but also just in general how writers deal with complicated relationships when they're writing their own personal narratives.

Charlotte: My ex has read it, and so I don't think he felt hurt by the depiction, I hope he didn't, and I don't think he holds it against me. What I sort of tried to do was just kind of like the therapy advice of “I statements”. I really am gonna protect his privacy as best I can, I'm gonna try and make him completely unrecognizable even to people who know him. But then also when I write about our relationship, just really write about how I'm feeling about it and leave space for all that I don't know. I feel like it's really early on in the book, I think I'm writing about how he'll shut himself in the bathroom for a long time, and I assume he's like not using the toilet for that long, but... I don't know. So it just kind of is like, this is one way our relationship is weird to me. What's  convenient is that we can never really know another person, so there's always a lot of uncertainty that you can kinda just lean into. So much of how we feel anyway is what we've  made up or the kind of threads we've woven between certain things that didn't exist before we put them there.

Jessie: That's hard for a lot of people to do though, and I think that that's something that you  did well, was to not only do that, but to recognize it and then to also be explicit about it about the  fact that this is your perspective and that though you're going to say something that is true to you, maybe that's not everything that there is.

PJ: Yeah, it definitely made you read as a more reliable narrator because it's not being presented as the objective truth, but as your experience of a situation.

Charlotte: Yeah, and I also think I'm just, I'm incredibly lucky person and very blessed. I don’t really use that word often, but it doesn't feel like lucky is strong enough. I believe this person cares about me, even if we're hurting each other or mistreating each other, I do believe we care about each other. That definitely makes it easier. Honestly, if I were writing about someone I'd been with for a long time and I felt like I don't care if I burn this bridge, like, “fuck this person, everyone should know how awful they are,” it would have been a very different book, I'm sure.

PJ: I've definitely been familiar with your writing from from Tits and Sass, where you have that wonderful piece on an enthusiastic consent that I've taught for years. There's a piece I remember maybe the first time I came across your writing was in The New Inquiry.. Actually, you wrote that piece in Real Life. Here's a funny admission. You wrote about Chrono Trigger. I bought it and played the entire game after reading that because I remembered it from being a kid and having played it for a few hours at a friend's house and how magical was to me. I wanted to go back and actually re live that, so I spent like 40 hours playing a video game after reading something you wrote.

Charlotte: I know exactly what you’re talking about, I'm so happy and that's so nice to hear. I think that's one of my favorite pieces of writing, just in terms of accomplishing what I wanted it to.

PJ: It was really magical and it inspired me! So anyways, it's just an aside, but I say that as a set up because I wasn't entirely sure what the book was gonna be about. I assumed it would primarily be about sex work, and what I came to discover in reading it was that it really was more about your sex life outside of sex work, but also kind of vis-a-vis sex work. That was really interesting and maybe particularly in the current moment, it felt a bit refreshing because so much of the discourse around sex work today is emphasizing the work part of sex work, and this  is about sex and pleasure and sex in sex work, but also sex outside of sex work. It just felt like a really different angle than what a lot of what we've been talking about. Certainly, what we talked about last time when we were on the last book we read for the podcast was Porn Work by Dr. Heather Burg, so I was very focused on the work. And of course, sex work provides a backdrop to all of the experiences you're having and all the things you're thinking about, but you're really sharing your life outside of sex work, I think even more than the inside of it.

Charlotte: I think it was a surprise for me to really. I think I thought the newsletter would  basically be a version of blogs I had kept in the past, which were very much about sex work and  almost nothing else. I really thought that like, “Okay, this is where I'll talk about my sessions and my clients.” Now in retrospect, I do think I was looking for a love affair when I was having sex outside of work. I did want a love affair even if I wasn't really aware of it at the time, or I wouldn't have said I was looking for that. The George thing was a huge surprise, and honestly, getting implants was a surprise. I didn't know I was gonna do all this stuff.

I think that we don't like talking about it around the anti’s, nor should we, but I think it's really hard to do sex work and not have it change your relationship to sex. It's work first and foremost, but I don't know any type of  work that you could do for hours and hours and hours and hours and not have it impact non-work portions of your life. Maybe I'm unusual just in how long I stuck with escorting. I'm not fully anomalous, but probably unusual. A lot of people don't do it for all that long. Most people probably have concrete financial goals or maybe they want to start a relationship that would necessitate them quitting or whatever it is. But being in it long enough was like, I got to see all these phases. The phases where the work is actually very sexually fulfilling and interesting to me, and then phases where I'm just like, “I hate all sex. I don't wanna have sex.” Just bouncing around hitting every little ball machine that you can hit in terms of your relationship to sex.

Jessie: Yeah, there was passages in the book where you talked about the fact that early in your sex work career, you felt like there was something interesting or subversive or exciting about doing sex work. Then later where you're at the point where you're writing the book, you kinda turn that upside down and say it's the sex that I'm having outside of work that's serving that function at that point in you  life.

Charlotte: Yeah, definitely, because I did start sex work when I was young, I didn't own a sex  toy until I bought one to use on webcam. My sexual history is very weird, but also I maintain  kind of typical for late in life virgins, I think when people lose their virginity a little later in life, (however they wanna define their virginity) they spent a longer period of time being overtly sex ­crazed as adult. My quintessential example of that used to view PJ Harvey, which people I think don't know that much about anymore. I think that she lost her virginity at 21 and then it's like, she's gonna go have a 20­-year music career where all she writes about are like bizarre is sexually twisted women.

I have so many fond memories of my earlier time and sex work memories that exist alongside bad experiences, some experiences that were so bad I don't think they were ever replicated on the page. But I also just think back on certain scenes and I’m just like, “Oh my god, these guys got the bargain of their life to spend an hour with a 23­ year­ old who was this insanely horny.” They had no idea, they got so much of their money's worth.

Jessie: I don’t want to cut this off because I like this conversation, but I do wanna make sure that we get to the audience question, so this one is actually about how you navigate your sex work, your personal and your writing persona.

It is from Fluffy White Cat, who says, “Charlotte, your pen name, writing candidly about your personal life, politics and sex work, your escort­ name persona, that your clients know you under, your legal name, that your family and close friends know you under, but may not know your other two identities,” She's just laying that out. “Do you ever feel  frustrated or torn about having to hide Charlotte Shane and your talents as an accomplished writer from your family or anyone who may not know you as Charlotte? Have you had to fabricate stories about what you do for your work under your legal name for those who don't know Charlotte, the writer? And the second question, which is related, when you started showing your face as Charlotte, a few years ago, after the first edition of Prostitute Laundry came out, were you concerned your clients would recognize you, possibly blurring boundaries or getting upset reading stories about the real you when you weren't ready or didn't come out to them as a writer, or a family, learning  about your sex work through your writing?” Those are all complicated, but related questions.

Charlotte: Yeah, there's a lot there, but I think I can answer it all. I have written about sex work under my legal name, and my personality type, I think I've written or said before, I'm  somebody who was immune to shame. I’ve felt shame once or twice in my life, but it’s absolutely related to things I did where I'm like, “That was not like I did an unkind thing, I am a better person than that.” It's not shame like, “Oh no, people know I had sex for money.” Luckily, I guess, I'm unrestricted by an upbringing that was especially shaming or judgmental or punishing. Not that I think my upbringing was especially free or open either, it just wasn't like, I don't know, I wasn't raised Catholic.

Jessie: I noticed that in your book, it seemed to me like you had a very open relationship with your mom, she came up a couple of times as kind of a confidant.

Charlotte: Yeah, and so I guess my approach in general to a lot of things in life maybe is like, “I'm not gonna hide it, I'll try not to shove it in your face, but I'm not gonna hide it.” If you feel like it's something we need to talk about we can. That was basically what happened with my family, where I would take certain opportunities to involve my mom and things that involved sex work in more mainstream acceptable ways. I guess when Prostitute Laundry came out; I think maybe I told my mom about Tiger Bee Press, it was like, “Okay, I'm going to try to share some parts of my life with my mom, but not make her deal with anything she doesn't want to deal with.” Maybe like 5 years ago, I think I was saying something to my mom like “I don't really know how much of my life you're comfortable with me sharing with you,” and she stopped me and she said something like, (I won't do what she said justice, it was very precise) “I don't own you, and you came through me, but you're not mine, and there's nothing you could ever do that would make me love you less.”

Jessie: Oh, that's so nice. That's like a perfect mom thing to say. It's beautiful.

Charlotte: I think what made it so moving was that it was so unexpected, and the way she said it, within what she told me at the time, she definitely made it clear she knows. And I think she did it in a way that was really smart for her too, where I feel like she was letting me know, like “I am not comfortable talking about it with you, but not because I don't love you.” That’s okay, for anybody. One of my friends who I really like and respect a lot, who's a writer, I remember hanging out with him once and it was before Prostitute Laundry was out as a book and I remember he was like, “I had to unsubscribe, there’s too much sex in it.” My feelings were never hurt, I understand. If you're not up for the sex, you probably are finding a lot in there that I was speaking to you. Again when I say I've been lucky, it's absurd how kindly I've been treated throughout my life. Almost everybody in my life, I think now, whether  they know my legal name or not, they know that I write as Charlotte. So once again that's out there. Some of them maybe only know about the more mainstream stuff, or they know I contributed to the New York Times Magazine or whatever, but I'm not hiding anything. So it's kind of simultaneously on the surface, and I never was with a partner who didn't know about sex work.

So for me, the hardest type of privacy to maintain has been protecting myself from clients. It hasn't always worked, I did have a very scary stalker for a while, and I had a lawyer and it was really bad. But when I think when I decided to put my face to the name, to me, I felt actually a type of protection. It was like, I want people to know that you're not going to hurt me with this. This doesn’t really happen anymore, but there was a time on Twitter, I think when I would get more men trying to insult me or whatever, and they would just be like “You're a slut.” I'm like, “Alright? What gave away? Was it me writing obsessively about all the people I’ve slept with?” When I did put my face to Charlotte, I got an email, an angry email, from a client I had only seen one, and it was such a funny email. He was basically like, I don't know if you really are this other person, but if you are, you shouldn't be upsetting your clients by telling them that. It's a ridiculous email like this is very embarrassing for you to have written this.

Jessie: That's so funny. I had an opposite thing happen where somebody booked me, but didn't know that I was Jesse Sage, and I showed up and he was like, “Oh my God! You wrote all those articles, I've read all ofyour articles!” and then spent half the session asking me about specific things that I've written, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, I didn't see this coming.”

Charlotte: That's kind of sweet. Maybe not, if you're not prepared for it, but it's sweet that he was such a fan.

Jessie: No, it was. It was very cute. But yeah, when those personas cross I think people can have strong feelings about it.

Charlotte: Yeah, absolutely. I definitely know a lot of former clients have made the connection, they know me by my escort name, some of them even know me by my legal name, my escort name and Charlotte. Most of them, I think, like it. I think it feels like it comes with a certain level of cache. I also think most people like the idea of someone writing about them, I know that some don't, but it's flattering to think like you're going to be interesting or memorable enough for someone to write stories about you.

Jessie: There is another question from Twitter, from somebody named Brian. He said, “Hi,  Jessie and PJ. I enjoyed Episode One and would like to submit a question to Charlotte, if possible. So I just finished reading Charlotte Shane’s book in the current third edition. As a client, an ally of sex workers, I appreciate learning about Charlotte's private and professional relationships, she maintained. Something that I wonder about is the concept of casual or recreational sex, and whether this gets classified as hypersexuality.

Charlotte: For myself, the number of times I've been hurt by sex, in all the different ways, but mainly emotionally, honestly, they're so outnumbered by the times I got something positive out of sex. Which doesn't mean I had an orgasm, it doesn't even mean it was turned on. When I get horny, I'm not just horny for sex, I'm horny for adventure.

Jessie: And that totally came across in the book.

PJ: Yeah, totally. I mean a number of times, you say in particular, your favorite thing is meeting up with strangers. It seemed very much to focus on the adventure of it.

Charlotte: And I think some people would say—like some therapists—maybe not very good therapists would be like, “Oh that's because you love the danger or something.” But I just don't feel afraid. I wouldn't have done it as much as I did it if I felt afraid. I don't feel afraid even work­wise. Shame and I don't go well together. I'm just not a very fearful person, I'm not prone to anxiety at all, and I don't think it's scary to meet someone for the first time, even when the context is you're going to have sex with each other. To me, it's not scary, it's interesting. I guess it's like I am the dog at the dog park who's invasively sniffing everyone butt. To me I am promiscuous, I'm really promiscuous as a personality type. I just like the idea of getting right into someone's life, getting right in there and not having to waste time with all the other stuff.

Jessie: That's kind of the beauty of sex work, is it truncates everything because you only have so much time that you have to kinda just dive into something in a way that you wouldn't necessarily outside of that context, and I kind of love that about it. I was actually wondering if you've ever read Nausea by Sartre?

Charlotte: Oh, I don't think I have.

Jessie: So it's a novel by a French philosopher, and I loved it. It totally influenced me when I was young. One of the characters in there is obsessed with this idea of creating special moments, and whether that can be real. Then another character was obsessed with adventure, and whether there is any such thing as adventure. It's a lot about storytelling, the stories that we tell ourselves and also how we try to create those stories in life, or make our lives like a story. One of the things that you said that totally reminded me of that novel was, and this is your boyfriend talking to you, “‘You want moments to be special.’ my boyfriend said to me, ‘You want your life to be full of meaning and deep connections, and I wouldn't be with you if I didn't admire that about you.’” I was just thinking about that as you were talking about both the book and this passage, because it did feel like not just about sex or pleasure or orgasms, but also about moments of connection and adventure and creating something spectacular, extraordinary or…I'm not sure what words you would use there.

Charlotte: I think that's exactly right. I've definitely had periods of my life where I felt very misanthropic. Particularly when I was younger, growing up, I think it was very hard for me to kind of come to terms with how much ugliness there is in the world, and senselessness and injustice, but ultimately, I think other people are very interesting. Even if I don't respect a person or like them I probably still think they're interesting. I'm not a thrill seeker in any other capacity, not very athletic, I'm not really interested in skydiving or anything like that. So to me, that's what's most  interesting. Intersecting with another person in a way where maybe we leave a mark on each other, a positive one or a small one. Absolutely, you're right, that sex work can facilitate that. So I think it's maybe not clinically addictive, but it definitely generates momentum when you're sex working a lot, if you are able to not get burned out. Just feeling like at the end of the day when I worked at this incall and saw maybe six people a day or something, and at the  end of the day, I have a lot of stories. It's hard to give that up, I think, because it feels so sustaining or it did it for me anyway.

Jessie: I thought it was interesting because there's often times where you're thinking about leaving work and you're like, but I can't pass up the money, but I like how you back that up often with, well, it's actually about more than that. It's not just the money, and it's somewhat disingenuous to frame it as just that.

Charlotte: Yeah, yeah, it is hard to pass up the money. There are times where I turn down things and then I'm like, that was stupid, why did I do that? Because it feels like that's not justifiable because it's a lot of money. That's really what it is. But yeah, for most of my life, I was doing it because I wanted to do it, because I was getting something out of it that was much more meaningful to me than money.

PJ: On page 2­11 you say, “This wistful feeling came over me, for sex with a total stranger, which is probably my favorite thing in the world, I realized how much I missed walking into an unfamiliar home, seeing an unfamiliar man, how much I missed the anticipation, curiosity and the defined unknown in the moments before. I hadn't met anyone new that way in a long time because he had been all I wanted. Now I was free.” So you were talking about ending a relationship there, and this desire for meeting with strangers, but then to build off that, there are these other couple of spaces where you're talking about how even sex work was no longer satisfying that need. At one point, on 187, you say, “Now I believe the antidote to work sex isn't no sex, the antidote is at least as much sex as I can have at work, but on my own terms with people I choose.” Then there's one more other piece that I think is kind of really on this theme, which is on 217, “Once freedom felt like earning money for sexual labor that would otherwise go unacknowledged and unappreciated, but now doing it for free feels like freedom. Now freedom is in not experiencing sex as work.” Those are all kind of quotes that stood out to me.

Charlotte: The first part you read, it's like, how much I missed having sex with a stranger, and to me, it's just like somebody describing food where I'm like “God... Yeah, isn't that the best? You should do that after this, when we're done here.”

Jessie: You actually say that in another part of the book, you say something like, “I crave that sex, like some people crave food.”

Charlotte: Yeah. Maybe it's the storyteller in me, where I'm like, this is the set up for the start of a story. Like you get in a car, you're driving to a place you've never been before, and you get out, and the person who opens the door is a person you've never seen before, and then you go inside and you start taking off your clothes.

Jessie: Oh, that's a set up for something to happen.

Charlotte: Yeah, exactly. It's like you've done your part, you've facilitated possibility. As probably any full ­service sex worker knows sex can be incredibly monotonous, there's a way in which it's very boring actually. I have felt that way before. I've felt like I'm on autopilot. I really am not interested in any part of the experience. But when you're not burned out, for me at least, doing it voluntarily, it's because I think other people are interesting. I think it's interesting to see other people in a different position than they are in day-to-day life. It doesn't mean they're not guarded. A lot of guys I met for the first time to have sex with they're either incredibly guarded and I'm like, that's interesting information, or they're trying to act confident and they're so nervous. They're visibly shaking. I like getting all that information, I think I'm kind of an Anthropologist, maybe at heart.

PJ: We're starting to get low on time, but I wanted to change subjects real quick because there is at least one more piece I want to get to that really spoke to me or I thought was powerful. It's later in the book when you're talking about glamour, class and the relationship between class and escorting.

There's so many powerful paragraphs in here on that. I wanted to read a couple. You say. “I think there's some tension around this point in the ‘high class’ stratum. Lots of women make it out like their clients are eternally splurging on gifts. Maybe that's true for the blonds, but for me, it's usually a decent dinner followed by sex. I think we all sometimes feel that we're not as elite as everyone else, even other escorts can be misled by escort marketing.”

And that just feels so familiar in this world because I guess we have, on many occasions, felt like “Is that real?” That really stood out to me, but then you also give far more context to all of this, and you talk about your experiences with an early client who took you shopping and really helped you to perform this part of the high end escort. You say, “All I do is manage other people's impressions of me, what does it mean to be a young woman with a messy blow­out and to cram a small roller bag with just purchased designer goods. Why would she do that in a hotel lobby, it speaks to wealth but not class and not too truly shocking wealth, but a lower tacky level.” And to me, that just gets at some of the tensions or the contradictions I think anybody in the industry has experienced at times, and I just felt that it was really powerful.

And then elsewhere, you also describe glamour as a sort of mirage. “Even when you know better when it comes to being routine, unremarkable, like any other job that's what the word glamor means, that's how it operates. It's the casting of the spell and spells don't wear out, it's reaching one oasis, to discover it’s a mirage and as you sit in the hot sand of reality, becoming all the more entranced by another shimmery faux oasis in the distance.” There's something about all this discussion of class and glamor that seemed like really powerful for me. Particularly for sex workers and the tension between being surrounded by real money and having access to what at least to us feels like real money. Life transforming amounts of money, but at the same time, an amount of money that pales in comparison. Often to the wealth of clients who have inconceivably large amounts of money, and the kind of contradiction and tension that's in all of that.

Jessie: Well, there was even one part where you talked about how your one client facilitated  you playing class drag by buying all of the Louboutin’s and whatever.

Charlotte: I've spoken with so many other smart women about this recently, semi recently, for the Only Fans article. For instance, one of the people I spoke with who had transitioned from escorting to only fans in the pandemic was saying they used to be a traveling escort. They were making a lot of money then, but it was a really expensive brand to maintain. It's like, yeah,

this shit's expensive. If you're buying it for yourself and you're expected to wear something different every time you see a particular regular. Even the lingerie, if you're really going to lean into it and you're not going to try to pass off bargain brand,  you're going to be spending a lot. If you are traveling and putting yourself up in really nice hotels, the travel is expensive. I don't think I mentioned it in the book, but I had this client who definitely saw tons of other women, and I don't remember why, but he was really gossipy.

Jessie: Yeah, yes. There's a brand of clients who loved to gossip about everybody that they've seen.

Charlotte: Yeah, yeah. And he was talking about different escorts he's seen. He was saying something like, “Oh, they start making $150,000 a year or whatever, and they hire themselves an assistant and then they're back to making a $100,000 year.” And I think about that a lot because I'm like, yeah, there is this way in which I feel like I've seen people use this type of aspirational living and spending is absolutely not confined to sex workers. To me influencers now probably go through this a lot, where it’s the classic keeping up with the Joneses. You're going broke trying to convince everyone that you have enough money to be vacationing in the nicest spots without thinking about it, without blinking an eye. That you only drink the most expensive champagne. There's a way which I'm kind of gullible too, so I might see an escorts client ­facing Twitter feed and so you're posting about Cartier or something, and I'll just be like, “Oh wow” and then I’ll be thinking about it later, and I'm like, “Oh, this is a stolen picture or whatever.” It's hard not to become kind of infected by that mindset. I do to still sometimes, where I'll be like, why aren't people buying me Chanel bags. Then I'm like, well I don't care about Chanel bags, also I’m vegan. Obviously, social media facilitates that a lot, but my friend Juno  Mac, who co wrote Revolting Prostitutes, has had a lot of smart things to say to me about this.

This doesn't just exist for the gratification of the person  performing. It exists to convince clients that I don't need your money. “I'm not desperate. I'm very elite, I'm very selective. I’m a luxury good and you can tell because I am covered in luxury  goods.” It is so performative, and I think that's something I have always been aware of.

Jessie: Totally. It's interesting though, I think that a lot of clients buy into it too, though. I was at dinner on Sunday night when I was in New York with some sex worker friends of mine, and one of them told a story about how she was chit chatting with a client. He was talking about how much money he had, and she was like, just kind of joking, and she's like, “Oh, are you old money or new money?” And he was like, “Oh, I'm new money. What about you? Are you old money or new money?” And she's like, “I'm a prostitute. I'm no money. What are you talking about?” But in the moment, it didn't occur to him that she wasn't in the same class as him.

Charlotte: I think that it's like a lot of people's target clientele, just like you say, they are new money and they also want to pretend in the same way. They want to make the same performance; they want to announce that, convince everyone of how much they make. Yeah, it's really, it's interesting. And as the years have gone by post­ pandemic, especially, my tolerance level for it is not great anymore. It very much feels like dancing while the world ends, but not even dancing 'cause that you could do with someone you care about. It almost feels like just drowning your sorrows. You’re living in this make­ believe world. Having those adventures is really fun, it is fun to be proximate to a lot of wealth. I think it's interesting. It's unusual. It’s an ego ­boost, but it's also totally empty, which is part of what I think it's pretty easy to fake.

Some of my most wealthy clients, I do think they see through a lot of that because they've been so rich for so long, I don't think they really care about it. It doesn't really turn them off necessarily. Honestly, if anything, it might give them a greater sense of power. Do you know what I mean? “She thinks she's fooled me into thinking she's so elegant or whatever, and I'm very aware that I'm never gonna run into her in Aspen.”

PJ: This is a really interesting contradiction that you're bringing up. You're just talking about how for those ultra elite men that can be a form of power, but also at the same time, often a form of power especially for women who have class transition. And looking at page 254, in your head, you had a recent conversation with a client during which he asked what your family thought you did, and you told him, “My parents thought I was a kept woman. For a long time, I've treaded on that, relying on that assumption is protection. I used men as camouflage. I want strangers to overlook what's rightfully mine because it makes me feel safer. We'll do that when approximate to a man, but probably even if I'm not. We're trained to be blind to a woman's power no matter how conventionally or blatantly it manifests.” I just wanted to add that in and see how that resonates with you today.

Charlotte: You mentioned the New Inquiry earlier, and I think the first piece I ever wrote for The New Inquiry was about making so much money through sex work and being kind of confused by that. Am I a bad person now that I made a lot of money? And my editor, he just very gently said something in the first round of editing said something like, “Well, what is it like to have this much money?” Well, you don't have to think about it, you don't have to worry about money. That's  what it does for you. Really, because I'm not someone I think who lives extravagantly or wants  to live extravagantly. It's like the reason I want to have money in a savings account, is so I don't  worry about money.  

Maybe this is too far a field, but with crypto crashing and everything, there's a lot of gleeful mockery of people who use crypto on Twitter. I'm sure part of my reaction is influenced by knowing how many sex workers seized upon it out of necessity. But also I understand why some of these people absolutely should be mocked. And maybe they just did something foolish but I also feel like a lot of these people just wanted what probably everyone in  this country wants. They didn't want to have to work their whole lives. They didn't want to have to worry about medical emergencies. It's so expensive to live, it's so difficult to live a life of dignity in this country. I don't think it's inherently greedy really. To be like I want x amount of dollars in my savings or calendar, I want x amount of money coming in per month, and maybe that person does explicitly desire a lot of frivolous things, but I just think it's really hard to have a sense of psychic security.

Jessie: Especially in a culture like ours that has virtually no safety net.

Charlotte: I have had a lot of conversations with people about my financial situation and what's right, what's wrong. Anyone at any age can do sex work and showed if they want, but it's not unreasonable for escorts to retire in our 40s. Everything with money is so complicated and the hedonistic treadmill is a real thing. The first year I worked as a sex worker, when I took Webcam, I was living in a city is living in Philadelphia, and I think I made $42,000 maybe that  year. And I felt so rich, like crazy rich. I was a young person, I didn't have a dependent. I didn’t have medical bills, I didn't have student debt either, I had gone a scholarship for grad school and my undergrad was very cheap. I think often of this conversation I had with my friend who was also working on a webcam, making a lot probably making more than me, and she was saying, I'm running out of stuff to buy, she's like, I have to update my Amazon wish list because these guys want to buy me stuff and I'm running out of stuff to buy. We were both making $40,000 when I look back, so not to disrespect our achievements or whatever, but you really do like to get used to a certain style of living or whatever. I just think of this one client I've known for a very long time, he’s a very wealthy man, and since the pandemic, I have sometimes tried to have a conversation about flying. I see him infrequently enough that this has happened on more than one occasion. I'm talking and saying something about flying, something about the airports, and he's looking at me not in a mean way, but in a slightly baffled way. Then finally he'll say to me, he'll be like, “I can't think of the last time I’ve flown commercial.” And I know it's true, he hasn't taken a commercial flight in 30 years or something. I’ve been living on another planet from him.