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Sex sells, always has, always will. But who profits and who loses from the billions spent in the adult sex and porn business is also the subject of contentious debate, usually between parties who have no direct experience in the flesh trade.
That is certainly not the case with Sarah Katherine Lewis of Seattle, who provides a powerful account of her decade as a sex worker in "Indecent: How I Make It and Fake It as a Girl for Hire" (Seal Press, 324 pages, $14.95). Lewis' new memoir is a brutally frank and graphic recounting of what it's like to work in massage parlors, porn films, strip clubs and other seedy way stations in this shadow economy.
But what truly distinguishes "Indecent" is Lewis' cutting and sarcastic sense of humor. No matter what she does, Lewis never seems to lose her finely honed sense of the ludicrous and ridiculous, two quantities never in short supply when sex is being provided for sizable bucks.
"Indecent" follows the familiar format for such sex memoirs -- the innocent pilgrim's progress into a strange and forbidding world. But Lewis is a pilgrim with a decided edge, a feisty, independent feminist with a high school degree who enters the sex business at age 24 after eight years of poverty-level employment in food service, including a stint as a barista at an unnamed franchise coffee place where she was fired for "insubordination."
"Sex work -- whatever that was -- had to be better than food service," she writes. "I was sure of that."
Lewis begins her sex worker odyssey in a place that she calls Butterscotch's Live Lingerie Adult Tanning, the first of several skin emporiums that sport deliberately confusing names. She is not sure what employment there will involve, although certainly not just tanning, but she is far more worried that her height and "statuesque" shape (size 12/14 attire) may disqualify her from employment.
That was no such problem in a place that looked like "a junkie's apartment" and Lewis soon found herself in a private room striking various poses in lingerie while a male customer masturbated. No touching was allowed, no total nudity either, and the unemployed former barista was thrilled to pocket amounts that ranged from $90 to $200 for a single night's work.
"For the first time in my life, I had begun to feel more desirable than not," she writes. "It was like winning the lottery, or losing my mind -- my approach to everything became different. ... I realized I had a real facility for this kind of work -- 'adult' work. It agreed with me."
Lewis moves on to solo roles in porn films, then performing behind glass for male customers in peep shows that grow increasingly creepy with strangulation scenarios. Then she moves to a South End massage parlor (Temple of Shakti) that supposedly is offering some version of Eastern healing, although her real job was administering a desultory massage that closed with using her hand to help a customer to "achieve release."
That was crossing the sex Rubicon for Lewis, the first time that she veered into an act of actual prostitution that could lead to arrest, yet with a payoff of $120 for 40 minutes of work. She is repulsed by what she is doing, aware of the consequences, but continues until she is fired, weirdly, for not buying into the "temple's" healing scam.
One of the considerable strengths of "Indecent" is how Lewis dispels many of the reigning myths of the sex trade, including that sex workers are turned on by the acts they perform or that workers and customers are capable of genuine human communication. Lewis, in fact, admits to hating her clients and even fantasizes about killing them, which she says is a common among sex workers.
"Indecent" is not without flaws. It runs too long, it leaves the reader in the dark about what impact her sex work has on her personal life with family, friends or lovers. And Lewis' step-by-step descent into ever-more outrageous and illegal activities seems to elude much critical analysis by someone who seems remarkably self-aware.
She appears to stop short of sleeping with customers ("I had standards. Not high ones -- but they were intensely considered, and I was committed to them."), but she does steal a customer's wallet in New Orleans.
Still, Lewis' unflinching candor, honesty and humor still deserve praise. They turn "Indecent" into an illuminating first-person report from the trenches of the sex trade.
Sarah Katherine Lewis discusses "Indecent" at 7:30 Friday night at The Elliott Bay Book Co.; 206-624-6600.
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