Anneli Rufus tours the hot genre of sex worker books and finds it compulsively sickening. Sarah Katherine Lewis’s memoir Indecent: How I Make It and Fake It as a Girl for Hire (Seal, 2006) “joins a string of new books about adult entertainers, along with Diablo Cody’s self-consciously comic Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper (Gotham, 2006) and gender studies professor Bernadette Barton’s polemical Stripped: Inside the Lives of Exotic Dancers (NYU, 2006).

The publishing industry is funny that way. Some honcho sniffs a trend in the air, word leaks out like blood at the beach, then boom: one year it’s all queer cowboys all the time. Or diets that let you eat lard. Right now it’s lap dancers.

“In this latter-day phase of stripper chic,” continues Rufus, “academics such as Barton churn out doctoral dissertations about peep shows and shimmering poles. Middle-class 20-something smarties write memoirs about ditching drone jobs in cafes and offices for ‘the penis gallery,’ to quote prep-school grad Cody, whose Pussy Ranch blog led to a six-figure advance for Candy Girl, and who is now a millionaire screenwriter working on a project with Steven Spielberg …”

“… Yeah, but the hate. These books are really less about sex than about loathing the customers. We see them depicted as groveling, foul-smelling, pathetic, perverted, laughable in their need and their loneliness. Cody mocks the ’standard model short, pink Minnesota dick,’ the glaze-eyed losers who ‘point dumbly’ and beg. Lewis, whose honesty makes hers the best in this trio, makes no bones about wanting to kill the men who ask her to help them ejaculate. “As I ran my hands over Steve’s spine, I imagined myself stabbing him in the back. For maximum damage I’d have to work the knife in between the bumps of his spinal column. … Fuck you is what I’m thinking. … Stabby stabby.”

Is this the new porn? asks Rufus. Or the death of feeling good about sex of any kind? Read her piece at Alternet here.

So Judith Regan got hers. The publisher of Regan Books has been gassed by Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins following the withdrawal of her O.J. Simpson book If I Did It. But a U.S. National Book Critics Circle blog contributor wonders if Regan is the victim of typecasting.
“Often seen as a right-winger, Regan in fact was something other: someone who tweaked the culture wars to her own ends,” writes Art Winslow. “Lost amid the notoriety of the O.J. flap and publishing chaff such as Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star is recognition of that: Regan’s imprint published Michael Moore and Ralph Nader as well as Dick Morris and Peggy Noonan; General Tommy Franks and Trent Lott but also Arianna Huffington and Xaviera Hollander. Are her hands bloodied? Sure. Is it unfair to tar her broad-brush? Yes. There’s a lot of joy in Mudville after this news, I’m sure, but is publishing really left any purer?”

National Post columnist Robert Fulford has weighed into the book reviewer conflict of interest fray with a resounding “Who gives a bookseller’s ass?” in “Meet the keystone kops of criticism.”
In response to the controversy at the Toronto Star, after a reviewer criticized a book by a publisher that had rejected his own book manuscript, Fulford recalled getting a conflict policy from the Los Angeles Times, and thinking: “How fair, how ethical, how pure — and how stupid!”

Fulford wonders what the “conflict police” would have thought of Edmund Wilson or H.L. Mencken, whose legendary criticism regularly crossed the ethical bounds being asserted today. Why no furore, Fulford wonders, about the issue of quality?

Of course, as The Tyee noted last week, some Canadian critics may be wearying of reviewing novels by people they’ve slept with.