Provocative Non-fiction

The following collection of provocative non-fiction books explore the sensual side of humanity—from the frivolous to the profound. Listed is an eclectic collection of books that deal with biographies, exotic places and people, sexual histories, trivia, philosophies and more.

Looking for provocative online pleasures? We recommend:

• Adult DVD Empire - The one-stop-shop for all your movie and sex toy needs
• Good Vibrations - Making the world a sexier place

Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today's Sexual Culture by Rachel Kramer Bussel (Editor)
Cleis Press, January 2012; ISBN-10: 1573447595

In Best Sex Writing 2012, editor Rachel Kramer Bussel and judge Susie Bright collected the year’s most challenging and provocative nonfiction articles on this endlessly evocative subject. The essays here comprise a detailed, direct survey of the contemporary American sexual landscape, a landscape Major commentators examine the many roles sex plays in our lives in these literate and lively essays.
Available at:  Amazon | Amazon UK

The Last of the Live Nude Girls: A Memoir by Sheila McClear
Soft Skull Press, August 2011; ISBN-10: 1593764006

Review by Rob Hardy:   Times Square in New York City is not what it used to be just a few years ago. Even under the strictness of Mayor Giuliani's anti-porn drive starting in 1999, though, there were still peep shows, places where a guy could pay some money and watch a naked woman behind a window. Peeps shows are still there. To them in 2006 came Sheila McClear, a college graduate who fled a punk collective in Detroit and just wanted to see New York. Her experiences in the booths, the guys on the other side of the window, the women she worked with, and the men she worked for are all subjects in The Last of the Live Nude Girls: A Memoir (Soft Skull Press). McClear thus joins the memoirists of the sex trade like Lily Burana and Diablo Cody, but her experiences in New York are unique, and she recalls them with clarity and even sweetness, a becoming objectivity (perhaps borne of that glass shield between herself and the outside world), and good humor, and also without a shred of judgmentality. This is hardly an uplifting account, but is superb as readable memories of a time, place, and shared activity that are worth preserving. .

McClear had majored in costume design, and set out from Detroit’s decay to work on costumes for the Classical Theatre of Harlem.  The job was temporary and so were her lodgings; when her father learned what sort of flophouse she was living in, he advised her (the one example of paternal advice in the book), “Shove your wallet down the front of your pants.  That’s what we used to do in the army.”  She looked to be a barista or waitress, but those jobs didn’t pan out, and then she was a telemarketer for less than a day.  With zero money and zero prospects, she answered a Craigslist ad for dancers.  “Being a stripper was pretty much the last thing I could imagine myself capable of doing.  I was terribly shy and awkward.  I still felt hopelessly behind when it came to sex, or dating, or even socializing.  I was a wallflower and a late bloomer... I watched and waited.”  She was hired to do lap dances, and could not manage it.  “I couldn’t perform the socializing required for this job, the endless conversations that the club’s well-off but socially inept clientele required you to entertain them with” before the actual sale of a dance.  “They needed their egos to be puffed up and stroked first, and I couldn’t do it.  My own nervousness made other people nervous.”

It was easier, then, to get in the box at the peep shows.  The deal is, there is the woman in a closet-sized booth with a big glass window.  There are curtains or other devices to obscure the view from the customer until he pays.  Send money through the slot and the curtain gets raised for a few minutes.  “My survival was based on hustling, convincing the neon-overdosed tourists and curious college boys and ghetto kids from the Bronx and Mexican laborers and guilt-ridden street preachers – plus the natives, the sundry damaged goods of Times Square – to pay $35 to watch me take my clothes off, with the bare minimum of enthusiasm, behind glass.”  On the other side, the guy does whatever he wants, which is usually to masturbate.  There are microphones and speakers for two way communication, so that the guy can request particular activities, but the dreaded “socializing” was not something she ever had to put up with again.

There are other girls, quirky, silly, and sad, all of whom are doing their best to get by in this extraordinarily strange career.  Many of them invest in artificially enhanced bodies, and they get paid better that way.  McClear learns for herself that wearing a blonde wig increases profits.  The girls develop tough emotional barriers to keep others away; there were some friendships, but by the time her peepland adventure was over, there was only one other fellow worker that McClear kept up with.  When they moved on, they simply disappeared, and they were unlikely to have left any way for those remaining to find out what happened.  McClear did her share of drinking to get through her shifts, and others did drugs which seem to have been easily available.  “Real life in the peep show consisted of waiting, sitting around for customers while slowly losing your mind.”  Not only that, but it was never erotic.  “I never felt sexual.  I felt like I was working at a hospital or a nursing home or a factory where they have those big slabs of meat.”

It was not all so bleak.  McClear’s book is shot through with funny writing, and funny stories.  A man came in, for instance, and asked to see both her and her friend Ruby, together, specifying, “And will you, um, fight?  You know, call each other a bitch and stuff?”  The customer is always right; Ruby asks McClear, “Your booth or mine?” and then in mock anger yells at her from coming into her booth.  They call each other names, but both of them were trying not to laugh.  McClear was delighted when the window went dark and the “exhausting awkward improvising” was finally over.  And yes, it might have been awkward, but the customer got off on it.  There was the time when they were watching the video monitors that showed the customers browsing in the sex shop below “so we could get on the mike and entice them to climb three flights to see some live, nude, tired girls.”  They were astonished to see a man pushing a stroller through the aisles as he looked through the porn videos.  The man eventually took off his jacket and covered the baby’s head, “So it couldn’t see the pornographic video covers or the wall of dildos and vibrators?” wonders McClear.  Eventually the girls called the attention of the supervisors to the attentive father, and even the supervisors were outraged, but he wandered out before he could be ejected in shame.  Another funny theme is that of the European tourists who wander in.  “‘I am disappointed in New York,’ one said.  Every European tourist said this in regard to our flesh trade when they learned that prostitution wasn’t legal.  ‘People told us it was supposed to be so wild!  I don’t see that.’”

There are stories here about the management, and about the guys with their mops, Lysol, and bleach that are in charge of cleaning up all the lost bodily fluids.  McClear is bemused one Christmas: “The guys who worked in the store had thoughtfully hung sparkly candy-cane ornaments from the top of each of our booths.  I wasn’t sure whether to be touched or deeply disturbed.”  There are stories about trying to maintain some sort of real social life.  In a club she nearly trips over something like a duffel bag.  “I looked down; it was Kevin Carpet.  Kevin was either a man with a serious fetish, or some sort of performance artist, or both.  He could be found at any number of downtown bars and clubs, his entire body rolled up into a carpet underneath the bar, where people – girls, mostly – stood on him while getting a drink.  He liked it when they jumped up and down on him in their high heels.”

She left the peeps and went into journalism, and this is her first book.  Toward the end of her stay, she says, “I realized that things never changed in this world.  I could hop from city to city and from club to club, but there was no geographic cure, and no upward trajectory or arc or hope for the future.  There was simply the grind, and the money.  There would be $500 nights and $50 nights.”  By the time her spell in the booths ends, McClear has survived and come out stronger and more curious about her fellow creatures.  She makes clear she still has awkwardness and reserve: “Stripping hadn’t cured that.”  Her unique experiences are written with amusement and melancholy, and as with any good memoir, the reader is likely to feel grateful at her generosity in sharing it all with us.
Available at:  Amazon | Amazon UK

Paying For It: A Comic-Strip Memoir about Being a John by Chester Brown
Drawn and Quarterly, May 2011; ISBN-10: 1770460489

Review by Rob Hardy:  Canadian Chester Brown is a well known artist of comic strips, most famous for his comic-style biography of Canadian resistance leader Louis Riel, and some autobiographical work.  When his relationship with his last girlfriend foundered in 1996, he realized he was no longer interested in romantic love or monogamy.  He still wanted sex, and he still wanted the love of his friends, but he didn’t mind if the two wants stayed separate.  Skinny, not handsome, and ill-at-ease around new people, he came upon the solution.  He’d start going to prostitutes.  That’s what he has unapologetically done ever since, because the arrangement has worked out well for him, and he’d like people to know about it.  Nothing to be done, then, but to draw an autobiographical comic about his adventures in the world of commercial sex.  He includes the interactions this brings him with prostitutes and with his friends and former girlfriends who don’t know anyone else who has done this sort of thing, and some of whom think he is more nuts than they previously realized.  The book is Paying For It: A Comic-Strip Memoir about Being a John (Drawn and Quarterly), and shows once again, if anyone needed further evidence, that comic strips aren’t just the Sunday funnies and they aren’t just the playground for muscle-bound guys in tights and capes.  Funny, self-deprecating, iconoclastic, and thought-provoking, Brown’s chronicle will allow those who have never visited a prostitute to learn a little bit about what it is like, and how it is that commercial sex might turn out to be satisfactory for both parties involved.  (It should be noted that Brown lives in Toronto, and Canadian laws about prostitution are relatively liberal compared to our own.)

Paying For It is an elegantly produced book.  The bulk of its 280 pages is comics, of course, but before those is an admiring introduction from R. Crumb, and afterwards are appendices and copious notes on what has been illustrated.  Brown explains, for instance, that he has taken pains to keep the identities of the prostitutes secret, and although his little drawings would not do for visual identification, the speech bubbles of the prostitutes often cover their faces or they are turned away from the viewer.  He explains that he submitted the work to the friends who are shown in it, to make sure that they didn’t object to how they had been drawn or quoted (in this and in plenty of other episodes, Brown just seems a really nice guy).  He gives annotations that explain some of the action or dialogue in the comics.  In his first encounter, he and the prostitute are sitting, clothed, on a bed, and she says, “Okay, what would you like to do?” and he says, “Uh, I’d... like to have vaginal intercourse with you.”  The note at the back of the book explains: “Yes, that’s what I really said.”  There are eight tiny, minimalist, black-and-white panels on each of the comics pages.  Some of them show Brown and his hire in action in bed, but they are far too small and undetailed to be even close to lurid.  Most of the panels, on the other hand, show him talking with the prostitute, or talking with his buddies or former girlfriends about his new way of life.  Through it all is a bald, bespectacled, cadaverous figure whose facial expression does not change.  That’s Brown, and I was not at all surprised that a photograph of him at the back of the book shows that he really does look like that (although he doesn’t have glasses, now that he uses contacts). 

By the end of the book Brown knows something about how best to arrange hires to his liking (though he might disagree with R. Crumb’s description of his belonging to a group of men who are connoisseurs in the world of paid sex), but in the beginning it was anxiety all around.  He worried that he would look like a loser to other people, and then he worried that he is worrying about what other people think.  He is such a newbie that his initial worries seem especially ridiculous once one has gotten to the end of the book: “How would it even work?  Most guys who pick up streetwalkers have a car.  Since I don’t have a car, how would I go about it?”  But he takes heart from a book of advice from the ever-useful Dan Savage: phone an escort, make an appointment to meet in a safe location, be respectful, use condoms, and tip the lady.  The first nervous encounter (on March 26th 1999, to be exact – Brown kept a journal) ends with satisfaction on both sides, and Brown thinks on his bike ride home, “It was so honest... upfront.  It felt... natural.” 

It has felt natural to him ever since.  Many of the encounters are funny.  “Wendy” doesn’t meet him at the donut shop on time, so he phones, and she says, “Chester, I’m sorry.  Something came up.  I’ll be there soon.  Give me ten minutes.”  (It turns out she was having problems with her landlord.)  And then she is disorganized about getting a room, and when they are settling in, it turns out she forgot condoms and invites him to come with her to buy them.  He loses interest, but she gets her pay.  With “Gwendolyn” as with many of the women, the conversation turns to how she got into the business.  She explains, “I was working at a massage parlour, but I hate giving massages, so I figured I’d give this type of work a try.”  Brown asks, “A legit massage parlour or a rub-and-tug?” and she replies, “A rub-and-tug, but even at rub-and-tugs you’re expected to give massages, and it was hard on my hands and fingers.  It’s less work to just have sex with the guys instead of massaging them.  And you make more money, too.”  Gwendolyn also replies to his question that no, she’s never taken a client who turned out to be someone she knew, but there was a close call.  “A guy phoned and I recognized his voice – he was an ex-boyfriend of mine.”  The solution: she disguised her voice and said she charged 600 for a half hour.  “Beatrice” has the television on the whole time at her place and watches a soap opera throughout.  Afterwards, in the penultimate panel, she asks “Why are you giving me a tip?” and in the final panel, Brown is walking home and thinks, “Why did I give her a tip?”  Once Brown gets his own apartment, he is ready to invite prostitutes in, but runs into the classic bachelor’s problem: his rooms are a mess.  “If I’m going to have a prostitute come up here,” he thinks, “I’d better clean up this place.”  One woman, having found out that Brown is a cartoonist, remarks, “I used to like Archie comics.”  Brown replies, “My stuff’s quite different from Archie.”  (Bingo!)  And there are decisions, decisions: “Should I see Millie or Denise next?” he thinks.  “Millie’s younger and more beautiful.  On the other hand, Denise is better in bed and she is pretty.  But she’s not as stunning as Millie.  And Millie doesn’t charge as much as Denise does.  And Millie’s very bubbly and friendly.”  Eventually (surprise!) a decision gets made.

The encounters seem friendly.  (Not all; the shortest chapter here is three panels which show Brown in missionary position and thinking, “Unfriendly, not very pretty, no blow-job – no tip for this one.”)  Many of the women have agreeable personalities and intelligence.  One woman asks, after seeing Brown bring in a book on American history, “Does Johnson think the Civil War was started by tariffs or slavery?”  Mutual satisfaction is the general rule.  Of course, part of the reason for this is that Brown is a thoughtful gentleman; it is not at all surprising that the women like him and would be glad for return visits.  In one of the book’s many appendices, Brown’s friend Seth writes, “The funny thing about Chester is that out of all the men I know he’s quite possibly the one I think would make the most considerate boyfriend or husband for a woman… and yet he is the one who picked the whoring. It’s a funny world.”  Many of the panels here show Brown and his friends in Socratic dialogues about marriage and dating and the place of prostitution.  Brown’s friends are relentlessly interested.  “This is disgusting,” says one, “but it’s also good gossip.”

Page: 1 | 2 | 3

  E-mail this page

Copyright © 1996 and on, Erotica Readers Association, Inc.
All Rights Reserved World Wide. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or
medium without express written permission is prohibited.