The Sex-Workplace Novel Has Arrived

The Atlantic

a day ago

Twenty years ago, a reader looking for taboo sex in print had to slink to the back of the bookstore and make whispered inquiries. Today, kinky books make up an established genre, one that shares front-table space with other major releases and possesses its own classics and conventions. This robust menagerie encompasses pulpy household names, including E. L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey, which in 2011 vaulted BDSM onto the New York Times fiction best-seller list. It has a literary canon— Marquis de Sade 's Justine, Pauline Réage's Story of O —and elevated LGBTQ smut standards such as Patrick Califia's Macho Sluts. Over in the nonfiction aisle are more practical selections, a hefty cascade of volumes that explore kink from all angles: how-to, history, philosophy, psychology, memoir.
The expansion of the genre tracks the broadening acceptability of erotic inclinations that were previously pathologized (and, at times, criminalized). The 2013 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) hastened this shift by redefining certain practices, including ' BDSM, fetishism, and transvestic fetishism (a variant of cross-dressing),' as behaviors rather than illnesses, according to an Atlantic article: 'Consenting adults were no longer deemed mentally ill for choosing sexual behavior outside the mainstream.'
As stigma recedes, the subculture meets the marketplace. While fiction continues to revel in fantasy and the forbidden, nonfiction is bending toward demystifying and normalizing BDSM. The latter form tends to emphasize the community credo of being 'safe, sane, and consensual.' It also participates in a broader project: staking out a claim to legitimacy by assuring the public that deviance is, paradoxically, normal. Redefining the transgressive as conventional might feel self-contradictory, but the pursuit of acceptance is as strong a human impulse as the appetite for risk. Call it a respectability kink.
Fiction still offers more freedom to roam outside the bounds of propriety, and the most ambitious kink novels venture beyond titillation. The author Brittany Newell sails over the guardrail between fantasy and reality with her second novel, Soft Core, by centering it on a protagonist, Ruth, and a setting, San Francisco's sex industry, that are both lively and deeply believable. Ruth is known as 'Baby' at the strip club where she works, an ever-chugging factory of arousal in which wigs and fake names and alternative personas are accessed on the fly to suit customer caprice. All this quick-change artistry offers her a welcome distraction from her existential fears, including the anxiety that her master's thesis, on surveillance, ghosts, and reality TV, was a waste of time. Having started out as something of an accidental sugar baby at 24, she is now 27. 'Youth made my general aimlessness cute,' she thinks. 'Without it, I was just a bad investment.'
As someone with professional knowledge of Bay Area strip clubs and dungeons—having worked in them during that same phase of my own life—I understood that although Ruth is haunted by many things, chief among them is the ticking of the clock. Slipping from Ruth to 'Baby' at the club gives her both an escape hatch from her Saturn-return blues and a whole new set of problems.
Strip clubs aren't really on the kink continuum, but I'd argue that the customer-dancer dynamic is its own form of advanced, high-stakes role-playing. BDSM is definitely an element, for instance, in Baby's relationship with her client Simon, a lonely cipher who PayPals her $800 a month for outré sexual indulgences, then later beseeches her to delete him from her phone.
Newell's gifts for sensory details (a dancer 'smelled like crème brûlée'; a woman's mouth is 'like a Slurpee: endless, red and wet') and for tracing the wavy contours of human connection make her work feel like that of a glitter-bomb David Lynch. Things get wavier still when she wakes one morning to find that her ex-boyfriend Dino, a dashing, fastidious ketamine dealer who loves his dogs and lounges around in elegant women's lingerie, has vanished from the Victorian flat they share.
Within a week of Dino's disappearance, the gamine and eerily familiar Emeline starts dancing at Ruth's club. Like a pampered duckling, Emeline imprints on Ruth, even hunting down her signature perfume—the titular Soft Core, which, as a besotted customer once gushed, makes Ruth 'smell like a library in ancient Egypt.' Newell's story begins to simmer with noirish detail: mysterious notes appearing in Ruth's belongings; bizarre anonymous emails materializing in her inbox; fast drives on twisty streets; fog rolling in and out, an enigmatic character unto itself. Ruth keeps thinking that she spies Dino everywhere. But does she?
To fill the empty hours without Dino, Ruth takes on an additional hustle as 'Sunday,' a dominatrix for hire at the Dream House, which is not so much a dungeon as 'a pea-green four-bedroom house in a quiet cul-de-sac.' There, she broadens her client base as a compassionate consort to men who prefer to indulge darker fantasies. These include Albert. In front of Ruth, he takes on an alternative persona, named 'Allie,' who claims that Albert is her sugar daddy. Ruth doesn't remark on the irony of tending to an affluent sex-work client who is cosplaying as a sex worker.
Ruth assumes—incorrectly—that she can take Dino's disappearance in stride by overworking, given, as she puts it, her 'native ability to absorb any trauma like it was just one more step in my skin-care routine. Wake up at five, wash face, stare into void, moisturize.' (I snort-laughed in recognition.) She learns, as the days pass, that dissociative endurance is not necessarily a positive attribute, and that sadness can seep into any space—VIP room, dungeon chamber—as if rising through the floorboards.
Although her rootlessness and sorrow originate from experiences that predate her lover's departure, Ruth wonders if these haunting feelings are exacerbated by her profession. 'Maybe my work was partly to blame,' she thinks. 'I'd been method-acting as a dream girl, and now I couldn't touch back down to earth.' Newell skillfully renders the exhaustion of sex work, especially the weird repetitiveness of trying to keep things exciting and new for clients. Years ago in Los Angeles, one friend of mine, a kink impresario who was winding down from a draining day of video shoots by sorting through a rucksack full of black and red leather floggers, sighed to me: 'It's not the sex; it's the work.'
In interviews, Newell has shared that the scenes set at the Dream House are modeled on her own experience. As a Stanford graduate who published her first novel, Oola, an obsessive love story, when she was 21, Newell might strike the reader as a hyper-literate Persephone: equally adept at chronicling the velvety, narcotic appeal of the 'libidinal underworld' and the bell-clang wake-up calls that chase off the escapist high. Her admixture of emotion, intellect, and erotic perceptivity achieves what nonfiction writers—sincere sex positivists and edgy academics alike—often fail at: an explication of the psychology of kink that maintains the heat of intrigue.
Soft Core is more a study in feeling-tones than a tightly plotted thriller. It's a trippy excursion down the rabbit hole into a particular substratum of culture, maintaining a tether to the 'real' world while burrowing out to the misty shoreline where it's hard to tell horizon from sky. Each subplot sounds a distant foghorn of loneliness.
As Ruth turns 28, she begins to see that she can't be sustained by a hail of compliments and cash and evanescent male companions. That's not a life; that's a never-ending ghost hunt. This book's growth arc doesn't depend on Ruth/Baby/Sunday finding someone or something she's looking for; it lands on her figuring out what she herself lacks. Transactional fascination pales next to devotion—but you need the eyes to see it.
Soft Core is also a novel about a city. San Francisco has always been a frontier town—a place to pursue an outlier dream. Before it became, as Ruth observes, a 'seasick city of data and drugs' that drew hordes of gentrifying tech evangelists, people came seeking queer liberation and a vibrant leather community. And before that: punks, hippies, Beats, and on back to prospectors panning for gold. Many San Francisco seekers find themselves contending with the sour note of the utopian quest. As a canny cartographer of want, Newell takes her place among the city's storied sexual intelligentsia. Though at times her eye for the awkwardness of interrelation points to Mary Gaitskill, she's more a descendent of Danielle Willis, the latex-clad poet whose Zeitgeist Press book, Dogs in Lingerie, gave voice to San Francisco's spooky, kink-conversant stripper narrators 30-plus years ago.
Outsiders often deride kink for both its earnestness and its deviance. The same can be said of sex work. In the words of the San Francisco–based sexologist Carol Queen, 'Trashing other people's sexual vision is so common. It's the highbrow's lowest road.' But the elusiveness of something (respect, satiety, understanding) often only makes you crave it more, and Soft Core shows us the magnetizing, if at times humbling, pull of raw need. 'Nothing lasts forever,' Ruth muses. 'Except, of course, longing.' That is a frontier that some of us will always be chasing. I guess some girls are just kinky that way.