Indecent: How I Make It and Fake It as a Girl for Hire - Softcover

Lewis, Sarah Katherine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1580051693 ISBN 13: 9781580051699

Publisher: Seal Press, 2006

Synopsis

A true story of a woman with a "head for business and a body for sin," Indecent chronicles the real work and emotion behind the carnal adult sex industry

Indecent is not your average I-stripped-my-way-through-college memoir. Sarah Katherine Lewis is a veteran of the sex industry who started small--doing lingerie modeling and striptease shows--but for reasons including the desire to earn more money and curiosity about other types of sex work moved into porn, and ultimately into illegal work.

Lewis is smart, self-aware, and bitingly funny. Where other writers in this genre have generally shielded themselves from letting things get too bad or go too far, Lewis comes face-to-face with the unimaginable. Her experiences with customers, whose fetishes and behaviors range from obscene to bizarre to twisted, are often recounted with outrageous and caustic humor. Lewis is a brilliant observer of human nature and has a read on her employers and coworkers that lends unique insight into the seedy underground of the more hardcore sex industry. Lewis is a sex worker by choice. She neither condemns nor condones the work, though she depicts her experiences with a gallows humor that reveals the complexity of professional adult sex work. Indecent offers readers an insider's account of hard-earned lessons and acute insight gained from over a decade in the trenches of one of America's most insidious and lucrative industries.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

A 10-year veteran of the sex industry takes readers on a seedy tour of low-rent massage parlors and peep shows where she vamps in high heels and corsets, guides creepy men to ejaculate on her breasts and offers views of her privates to embarrassed gawkers. Lewis admires her co-workers and is bitingly negative about her clients. "It occurred to me that sex work was much like toilet training," she writes. "We were paid to manage, direct, and tolerate their waste, ignoring the stench and cooing over their various evacuations, like erotic bathroom attendants." She also claims to be baffled by porn's appeal, which seems disingenuous considering her often astute analysis of the mechanics of the trade. Although crudely frank about sexual positions and bodily fluids, Lewis, a 34-year-old bisexual, is slippery about her own background and motivations. Her protests that her self-esteem isn't low ring false, and its doubtful readers will believe that a National Merit scholar and self-described feminist is actually happy peeing herself for the camera. This sad exercise in denial misses the mark as either titillating erotica or bold affirmation of personal autonomy. (Oct.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Seal Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1580051693
• ISBN 13: 9781580051699
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256