Sunday, April 17, 2005
Rent Girl by Michelle Tea, illustrated by Laurenn McCubbin
Rent Girl is a graphic novel and I do mean graphic.
Rent Girl has an autobiographical feeling to it which is bolstered by the publishers comment "A graphic and uncompromising autobiographical bender, the story of Tea's years as a prostitute...". The book itself doesn't actually say it is autobiographical but the details are so real, so sadly funny, that they ring true.
A young lesbian needs money and when her worldy, older girlfriend reveals that she is a prostitute it looks like a chance. After all, this girlfriend is emotionally healthy. Isn't she? The life of an in-call or out-call prostitute has its benefits (money) but so many more things that speak against it. Reading it, I wondered if I was living this how I could even think while feeling all that tiredness and despair and lack of nourishing brain food. In and out of the business life goes on and across the country prostitution leads to drug dealing (though she is terrible at it).
If she is a victim, it is a victim of lassitude, of not knowing how to break out or of lacking the energy to get into the new way. And when she leaves sex work for "legitimate" jobs the constant beating down and humiliation for such small amounts of wages leer at her more than the johns. She wonders what is worse verbally abused of silently judged and concludes that is is silently judged but that judgement touches copy store minimum wage workers as much as it does tarty women at bars.
I laughed quite often while reading this book. One of my favorite (non-laughable) bits came at the beginning of the book: "she was of course revealing herself to be a liar, something neither of us understood at the time...it lodged a suspicion, a bit of doom, in my heart. A magnetized sliver of grimness that drew to it every lie Steph would tell, getting chunkier and heavier as time went on." This is exactly how it feels to realize someone you trust is a liar; even if you understand the lies and aren't on the recieving end of the ones you see/hear, the sliver grows.
A solid feeling look at sex work seen without the filter of victim or superhero.
Rent Girl has an autobiographical feeling to it which is bolstered by the publishers comment "A graphic and uncompromising autobiographical bender, the story of Tea's years as a prostitute...". The book itself doesn't actually say it is autobiographical but the details are so real, so sadly funny, that they ring true.
A young lesbian needs money and when her worldy, older girlfriend reveals that she is a prostitute it looks like a chance. After all, this girlfriend is emotionally healthy. Isn't she? The life of an in-call or out-call prostitute has its benefits (money) but so many more things that speak against it. Reading it, I wondered if I was living this how I could even think while feeling all that tiredness and despair and lack of nourishing brain food. In and out of the business life goes on and across the country prostitution leads to drug dealing (though she is terrible at it).
If she is a victim, it is a victim of lassitude, of not knowing how to break out or of lacking the energy to get into the new way. And when she leaves sex work for "legitimate" jobs the constant beating down and humiliation for such small amounts of wages leer at her more than the johns. She wonders what is worse verbally abused of silently judged and concludes that is is silently judged but that judgement touches copy store minimum wage workers as much as it does tarty women at bars.
I laughed quite often while reading this book. One of my favorite (non-laughable) bits came at the beginning of the book: "she was of course revealing herself to be a liar, something neither of us understood at the time...it lodged a suspicion, a bit of doom, in my heart. A magnetized sliver of grimness that drew to it every lie Steph would tell, getting chunkier and heavier as time went on." This is exactly how it feels to realize someone you trust is a liar; even if you understand the lies and aren't on the recieving end of the ones you see/hear, the sliver grows.
A solid feeling look at sex work seen without the filter of victim or superhero.
# posted by JJ @ 5:12 PM 
