Charlotte Shane was twenty-one and a graduate student when she started selling private sex shows on a Web site called Flirt4Free, in the early two-thousands. But the fact that she might be bad at camming was also partly the point: it was a wager with herself, a way of figuring out once and for all whether she really was desirable. The attention and adoration was far more sincere than it was lascivious or disturbing, as sex buyers are often made out to be. It felt like being good at being a woman.
Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction. Instead, Shane uses her experience as the basis for a sustained meditation on the misunderstandings that shadow male-female relations, whether paid for or not. These blog entries and e-mails have since been anthologized as books , and to read them is to be reminded of the frank, first-person essays by women which mushroomed on Web sites like Jezebel around the twenty-tens. But what makes Shane a more adept interpreter of gendered suffering and sexual autonomy than many of her contemporaries is her attunement to both the mechanics of the body and the ruses of the psyche.
She catches glimpses of what is otherwise obscured, deferred, and distorted, and this gives her work a watchful and self-reliant quality that glides against the current of much millennial-feminist thought.
Shane is compelled by the numinous attraction that pulls her toward sexual partners, and the unguarded tenderness that certain clients feel toward her. The task of her writing is to take these appetites seriously. From romance novels, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and sex-ed class, she got the impression that intercourse was especially dangerous for girls, always leading to some kind of disaster: blood, pregnancy, rape, mental breakdown, or an S. Sex, it turned out, could do something other than shore up the couple form.
There were the hobbyists who collected encounters with sex workers like rare vinyl; the fetishists who came with hyperspecific role-play requests too rarely indulged; and the romantics who wanted an attractive conversationalist to take to the Boston Symphony.
