Book Review: The Pleasure’s All Mine
January 2nd, 2009Next up in my closet-cleaning is The Pleasure’s All Mine: The Memoir of a Professional Submissive by Joan Kelly. (Original review on Sugarbutch; my comment is reposted here.)
What I wanted from it: an insightful, hot and/or eye-opening look into the business and experiences of a professional submissive.
What I got: a personal memoir of a girl drawn to sexual submission, who finds that commercial channels will provide her opportunity and motive (cash!) for the sexual thrills that she’s too timid and ignorant to seek recreationally.
And let’s not start on the business end. Joan Kelly has … interesting boundaries. She falls for and tries to date her first client at a commercial dungeon? One of her (more disturbing) clients just “decides” that ass-fucking is on her pro-subbing menu? It’s very Pretty Woman. But not all sex workers are Cinderellas waiting for our Prince Save-a-Ho. I would hesitate to give this book to a new or curious submissive or hopeful sex worker. What’s hot and ends well makes for a good story, but it’s a poor business model.
I really wanted the promised solution to the problems inherent in professional submission: as the book back reads, “the difficulty of remaining self-possessed, all the while surrendering to the sexual will of others”. Not so much.
If I sound too critical of Marnie/Joan, it’s because she scares me a little. I’m glad it worked for her. Things worked out for me, too, and God knows, I’ve never been a model sex worker. But if I can’t read about excellence, at least I want funny and well-examined failure. I wanted more self-possession, more introspection, more direction, more… ownership of her sexuality and desires and her work.
In a lot of little ways, the messages of this book frustrated me. Yes — I wish that women didn’t find it easier to fuck/play for cash than to assert their own desires as worthwhile. I wish that men didn’t find it easier to pay for sex/play than to make themselves interested in, and nonjudgmental to, the women who want it. And maybe if there wasn’t such stigma, women like Joan could let themselves think more about what they do, and go about their business in a safer, more intelligent, dare I say more defensible way.
If you’re going to promise subversiveness, try harder.
If you want my copy of The Pleasure’s All Mine, it’s free to the first taker to comment and claim it. Email me your address at misscalico (at) gmail (dot) com. Bonus points for telling me why you want it: I like to know!
January 2nd, 2009 at 7:43 pm
very nicely said. I was just going to write you a reply to that comment with something like “that comment was a pretty complete/articulate review” – and then I saw the pingback.
I’m a bit of an outsider to the world of sex work, so I was hesitant to write so critically of it, yet it was just so clearly simplifying a very complex situation. And it is actually the complexities that, I think, make it so fascinating! when she stripped all of that out, well, she lost most of her content, and praise from other critical folks interested in sex.
hm. I like the way your brain works. we should talk books more sometime.
January 3rd, 2009 at 2:53 pm
I want you to write the book you wanted this book to be. Because I want to read that book too. If you asked me who I knew that could write a book about sex work that was hot, and contained excellence, self-possesion, introspection, direction and ownership of her desires, sexuality, and her work, I’d say Calico.
January 19th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Well put. I too was critical of her pro-sub experiences and choices, but it is a memoir and her story. There seems to be a desire and need for a good pro-sub manual, but this is not it.