Review by Candi Forrest April 2006

I couldn’t wait to get a copy when I first heard about this book. An Ivy League (meaning: very prestigious Boston university) anthropology/sociology lecturer who worked as an escort for 3 years had written a memoir about her "double life". I thought, well that’s the book I won’t have to write now. Finally we’ll have a book written by an author who can lay claim to both of the two relevant identities in the field of sex work literature. - the social researcher and the sex worker. This will be knowledge that will combine those two, sometimes incompatible, perspectives. It will include some incisive and critical sociological analysis of the hypocritical stance that society holds towards prostitutes from someone qualified to argue from all points of reference. She will use her anthropological insight combined with her sex work experience to make some bold new comments about the "real" nature of male-female sexual relationships, and sexuality in general, in the contemporary West. I suppose I expected too much. The book is what it sets out to be and not much more – a standard sex-work memoir written by an upper middle class woman. The main focus is on her experience of the "double life" – the tension created by hiding her sex work, the problematic nature of "overlaps". Talking about prostitution with students who call her "professor" in class by day; having to deal with the mundane fantasy that her slip about "teaching school" creates in the mind of a working class client by night.

My expectations first began to be diminished when I saw the cover design that Angell had allowed the Australian publishers to use. Hmm, huge hot pink letters over black fishnet stockings. Well that’s one stereotype she’s not going to question. I was less inclined to spend the money and I didn’t buy it then. I finally got a copy as a gift and read it in a day – it’s a "can’t put it down" type of read. She is a pretty good writer and gets better as she goes. Although it starts off a bit patchy and impersonal, you do get to like her more as the book progresses and more of her humour and naturally witty personality comes through. She is also very honest emotionally and many of the stories about her working experiences are "real" – in the sense that they were situations I recognised and could relate to.

In a broad sense the author and the tales she tells are sex work positive. Nonetheless I expected something smarter, more critical and edgier from a former sex worker and anthropologist.

It was disconcerting for me to realize that despite being 35 when she started sex work, despite being an anthropologist and university teacher, despite having a 10 year window since she stopped working to think about the issues, Jeanette Angell maintains a rather narrow perspective. Her sex work experience is not broad; she worked for an escort agency which employed only women with some university education, and her standard work-load was one client a night. This naiveté is reflected in her attitude about types of sex work. An honest but disappointing comment about street workers is given on the first page:

...to be honest, those girls scare the shit out of me. I was out one night with Peach [the escort operator] and we locked the car doors when we drove past them, and we're supposedly in the same business. The truth is, we have nothing in common.

Nothing in common? This sort of unreflective statement is hard to take from someone who on the very next page is pleading for understanding from her readers:

Please hear this. Callgirls have ethics. We make decisions like everybody else does, based on our own religious and/or moral convictions. We are Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Socialists, and Libertarians. Some of us are kind to small animals. We are neither sex-obsessed or nymphomaniacal. We have relationships, we build trust, and we keep secrets. We are daughters, sisters and mothers; we are wives.

Yes!! Great!! Why can’t you apply this same analysis to street workers? It was not a good start. And it didn’t stop there. Unqualified statements about men generally and about clients specifically were sprinkled throughout the book.

Jeannette Angell is an intellectual and material snob. Her opinion about what distinguishes callgirls (what she is) from hookers (what she is NOT) seems to be a class-based one. That is, call-girls are a cut above, definitely not "hookers", because they don't work on the street and their clients might take them out for dinner and even opera occasionally. This first becomes apparent in what is otherwise a very profound description of her difficult conversation with an old friend, Seth, when she comes clean about her work. She relates the ego-lift sex work has given her:

Well, news flash: there are a lot of men in this city willing to pay two hundred dollars just to be with me for an hour. They think I’m worth that kind of money.

...only to have Seth diminish it by saying

Yeah, but look at who they are.

The lack of understanding and judgement he displays is well known to sex workers who’ve had similar encounters but her responses reveal that she is coming from a very defensive place herself:

You want to talk about who they are? Let’s see. Last night it was one of the string section of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. And after him, a guy in a townhouse on Beacon Hill; there was a Renoir on the wall. And I’m on my way over to MIT right now. Real losers, Seth”

Soon after, he makes the mistake of calling her a "hooker".

Hooker? …What do you think, I’m cruising down Kneeland Street in shorts and boots, walking up to cars and offering a good time in the back seat?

Granted, a lot of sex workers use class-based distinctions like this, and invest a lot of softening power in euphemisms like "service provider" and "callgirl", particularly when they first start out and are trying to figure out where they stand in their now altered moral universe. But Angell never backs away from these early attitudes – street workers remain, in this way, the "other" to her. (There is a rant about stereotypes and injustice quite late in the book, when Angell finds herself in a sticky situation with the police, but it is too little too late.)

In this, and in other ways depicted in the book, she seems incredibly naive to me. Despite her age and the fact that she had actually written and was teaching a university class on the history and sociology of prostitution, the only legal preparation she had made for a police confrontation was to take the old chestnut of advice that her boss, Peach, had given her. This was ask them straight up "are you a police officer?" and they have to answer honestly. I couldn't believe she hadn't investigated the legalities further, given that she says she would have lost her teaching career, the thing she felt "born to do", if charged. This is a classic example of what is a common phenomenon in the sex industry in Australia as well – sex workers on the whole do not educate themselves very well about the legalities of their profession until they decide to work for themselves. Peach, the escort operator, despite being a first-class manipulator and self-evidently out for herself, is held in very high esteem by Angell and many of the stories surround their relationship and the select group of escorts and drivers who were permitted entry into the inner sanctum of Peach’s company.

The Boston escort scene described would be familiar to Australian escorts, particularly those who’ve worked for agencies. Angell conveys a realistic range of client experiences – from the horrific to the mundane. Then there are the dream jobs that test your boundaries – one in particular proves devastating. Her relationships with other escorts are compelling – both the competitiveness and the camaraderie are conveyed. We are taken on a very emotional journey with the author but the end seemed a bit tacked on to me leaving some important areas unresolved. Jeanette Angell is now married and no longer at the university. When did she finally stop? Why? What happened with her academic career? Despite a chapter on the subject of whether she should tell potential Mr.Rights about her sex work we don’t really get a very good account of what happened with her husband. Maybe some of this will be revealed in the "sequel", Madam (a further ode to Peach no doubt).

This review was published on the Scarlet Alliance website, July 2006