Book Reviews

Book Review: Brothel’s Kitchen

Kate Sloan

Sex work is such a normalized field in my sex-positive, feminist communities that sometimes I sort of forget just how stigmatized it is in the world at large – even among people who claim to be “liberal” and “progressive.”

Narratives persist about how all sex work is nonconsensual and exploitative, despite sex workers screaming on social media for years that they’ve chosen their career path and don’t want or need to be “rescued.” Many people still use phrases like “selling your body” to talk about what is actually just the sale of your time and your body-based services, just like what happens in many other fields like massage, modeling, and professional sports. Far too many well-intentioned people try to argue that sex work is bad because it’s “disempowering,” as if the slog of earning a living is held to the same standard of “empowerment” in any other field. It’s perplexing and enraging – especially since so many of these folks think they’re being helpful by parroting their bullshit opinions that are (you guessed it) actively disempowering to sex workers.

I think a lot of this misinformation has to do with sex work’s representation (or lack thereof) in mainstream media, from the evening news to procedural dramas to blockbuster movies. For decades, if not longer, it’s been framed over and over as something one would only do under the direst of financial circumstances, or to get access to drugs, or to quench a psychological craving based in “daddy issues” or other trauma. While obviously there is poverty, addiction, and trauma in the sex work community (just as those things exist in pretty much every other community too), these narratives usually leave out the ways in which sex work can be incredibly positive and enriching for workers and their clients. And hey, newsflash: a job doesn’t have to be 100% peachy all the time to be a valid job worthy of respect and protections. We live under capitalism! Work sucks! Let people choose work that they like to do and feel able to do, since we all have to work anyway!

All this to say, I think positive portrayals of sex work are invaluable in shifting public perception of this misunderstood field. So I was pleased to be asked to review Phillipa Zosime’s new memoir, Brothel’s Kitchen: Flavours of Women.

The book follows Phillipa’s induction into the sex work industry in Austria. It opens with a series of scenes set at a massive orgy held by one of the brothels she works for, at which she’s expected to fuck and fellate clients for 7 hours (with breaks to shower, hydrate, eat, and rest). After she enjoys herself and gets paid, there’s a classic “You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation…” flashback and we turn back time to when she first entered the sex work world. Once an archaeology student and political intern, she decided instead to follow her fascination with sex and start having it professionally.

One very interesting aspect of this book to me is the details about Austria’s legal and regulated sex work industry. Regular STI tests are required, workers are considered self-employed contractors for the brothels they frequent, and meticulous paperwork is kept to make sure everything is legit. Many sex workers I know in Canada and the U.S. advocate for decriminalization rather than legalization/regulation, since (among other reasons) legislative bodies don’t tend to know very much about what sex workers and their clients actually need and want – but nonetheless, it was intriguing to hear about how brothels are apparently run over in Austria. The book goes into detail about how profits are split up between workers, madams, and house owners, as well as how much they pay in taxes and what kind of legal due diligence they’re expected to keep up with on a regular basis. These procedural minutiae ought to captivate anyone who’s curious about sex work law around the world.

Another fascinating detail from Philippa’s story is that she had only had one sexual partner before becoming a sex worker. It hadn’t been the most satisfying relationship, and she ended up having her first-ever orgasm with a client at the brothel (which became a point of pride for him and a running joke between them!). This was the point in the book when I started to get excited: it’s a really uncommonly positive depiction of what a career in sex work can be like. If there were more stories like this out there – stories that showcase the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful parts of sex work – I think far fewer people would hold shitty misconceptions about the industry.

Yes, there are scary and sad parts of Phillipa’s story. Her friend dies; clients blow up in anger on occasion; women get into snippy arguments; someone’s money gets stolen from her safety deposit box at the brothel. But all of these details just felt really real to me. Writing a fully rosy sex work memoir would, I imagine, be just as absurd as making any other career sound 100% fun 100% of the time. Life has its ups and downs, and so do our jobs, no matter what field we work in.

In addition to heartwarming sex-work friendships and heart-pounding sex-work problems, this book also contains quite a few funny stories that had me literally LOLing. There’s one in particular about one girl accidentally spitting cum onto another girl’s face that I don’t think I will ever be able to forget…

I gotta say, I liked Brothel’s Kitchen even more than I was expecting to. It’s charming, and cute, and fast-paced, and full of strange and illuminating details. There’s a disclaimer at the beginning that explains that “the events and conversations in this book have been set down to the best of the author’s ability,” and that “the author’s recollection of the past occurrences may deviate from those of others,” but there are so many parts of this book that seem like you couldn’t possibly have made them up. That realness is the heart and soul of Phillipa’s writing, and it makes this one hell of a page-turner.

 

Thanks so much to Phillipa Zosime for providing this book for me to review! This post was sponsored, which means that I was paid to write a fair and honest review of the book I was provided with. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Book Review: The End of Policing

Kate Sloan

Here’s one of the whitest things I could possibly say: I’ve never had a memorable encounter with a police officer.

Unlike countless people of color and especially Black folks, I have never been harassed, victimized, pursued, or discriminated against by a cop. My opinion on the police for most of my life has been neutral-to-positive, a fact that makes painfully clear the effectiveness of “copaganda”: media created to sugarcoat and valorize the role of police in our society. From SVU to Brooklyn Nine-Nine to The Silence of the Lambs, much of our media serves to numb white people’s understanding of the havoc cops wreak on Black folks’ lives every day, and have since the birth of their institution.

It was for this reason that I felt compelled to read The End of Policing. Friends of mine more entrenched in the social justice movement than I am have been shouting (and tweeting) anti-cop slogans for years now, and – seeing the violence regularly inflicted on marginalized people by police officers – I agreed with them that something needed to change. But I didn’t know much about the nuts and bolts of the issue: law enforcement’s rampant history of racist profiling and unwarranted violence, and the alternatives being proposed to replace this frustratingly venerated institution. My privilege had enabled me to go a long time without investigating this issue beyond a few cursory Google searches and news articles, but I wanted to fix that, because information is power and can effect change. So when I saw that Verso Books was offering a free ebook of The End of Policing for a while, as per the author’s wishes to get this information out there, I snapped it up and started reading.

It’s worth noting that the author, a sociology professor named Alex S. Vitale, is (so far as I can tell) white. Some books written by authors of color on similar issues include How to Abolish Prisons by Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché and Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis, both of which I’d like to explore next because they focus more on the imprisonment part of the unjust law enforcement system, while the book I’m reviewing today is all about cops: what they do, where they go, how they operate, and why they’re ill-suited for the roles we’ve slotted them into.

Vitale’s central argument is that the entire way our culture understands crime, and its causes, is wrong. There’s a hugely prevalent “bootstraps” theory of crime that paints it as the behavior of the depraved and morally flawed. Why would someone steal a loaf of bread, this theory goes, unless they were an ethical degenerate? What is there to do for them but throw them in the slammer, give them a shot at self-rehabilitation, and then toss them back out onto the streets when their sentence is done?

This perspective completely ignores the existence of structural inequality – which, newsflash, is a pretty big component of any capitalist society. When you make a law that says “stealing is wrong” (for example) but you put one group of people in a situation where they regularly have to choose between stealing and dying, while another group of people rarely or never even gets close to the maw of that terrifying decision, of course the first group is going to get in legal trouble constantly. And because our culture works how it does, that group – poor folks, and especially poor Black and Brown folks – will be treated as if their thievery was an independent decision based on a moral failing, rather than something they were pigeonholed into doing by the way the world treats them.

I’d heard it said many times in social justice circles that the police’s purpose and function is essentially to keep Black people down, and I always thought that was a claim about the police’s current atrocities rather than an indictment of the institution’s entire foundation and original purpose. But Vitale’s book set me straight on this issue. Police – which haven’t existed in their current form for as long as you might think – were always assembled and deployed with the mission of protecting people who had money, power, and privilege. They would chase down slaves who escaped, for example, and squash workers’ rights movements on behalf of the upper-class whites who didn’t want to have to give their poor employees better working conditions or higher pay. Police, both historically and presently, put a higher premium on protecting white people’s “property” and “wealth” (which, let’s not forget, was stolen from Indigenous folks and built by BIPOC’s slave labor) than on protecting Black people’s lives.

Seeing as their entire institution was literally created for this purpose, it’s no surprise at all that they continue to be one of the most racist forces in a world some people still misguidedly insist is “post-racial.” This is especially true since, as Vitale explains, police are trained (whether explicitly or implicitly) to view perpetrators of crime as their enemy in a war of sorts, so they come to view themselves as heroes when in fact they are usually targeting society’s most vulnerable at the behest of society’s most powerful.

This main idea – that the solution to crime isn’t stricter law enforcement, but instead, the end of structural inequality – echoes through every chapter of Vitale’s book. He looks at topics like sex work, border violations, homelessness, drug use, and street gangs, and systematically explains why police are not a good or even passable solution to most problems. Structural inequality, the likes of which we see between white folks and people of color in North America and elsewhere, leads to economic precarity and, in many cases, mental illness and addiction issues for those who get the short end of the stick. These factors are the roots of almost all the crime police crack down on, and yet the crimes themselves are treated as isolated incidents, related to nothing structural except the supposed moral decrepitude of the “criminal” class. Why are we surprised that we built a dam and now the water is overflowing?

Each chapter of Vitale’s book gives an overview of the area of policing it covers, including numerous horrifying statistics and stories, and then offers some alternatives to the police-based status quo. You’ve probably seen people talking about some of these alternatives on social media a lot lately. Because the law enforcement institution is deeply discriminatory and was built to be that way, reforms aimed at getting the police to behave better will never work. It’s like training a bloodthirsty animal not to eat meat: the best you can hope for is that they’ll successfully suppress their natural desires for a while, not that those desires will actually change. For this reason, police abolitionists – a group that, wonderfully, seems to be growing by the day now – want, instead, for the police to be defunded and for those funds to be reallocated to services and causes that will actually reduce crime, like affordable housing, mental health counselling, addiction treatment, employment programs, social work, and sex work decriminalization. The law enforcement system thinks the best way to reduce crime is to make life harder for those in vulnerable populations; Vitale’s perspective, and that of other police abolitionists, is that making life a great deal easier for those people is the true ticket to crime reduction and a more harmonious society.

One thing that astonished me to learn from this book is that these alternatives are usually much cheaper to run than the current law enforcement system. Vitale produces stats that back this up for a staggering number of issues. It turns out, for example, that it costs the state dramatically less to just give a homeless person a safe and stable place to live for free than it would to continually cycle them through jails and courts for the “crime” of sleeping in a park or urinating on the street. (Where else are they supposed to sleep and pee, when you’ve banned them from so many safer locations?) It would also reportedly be cheaper to supply addicts with treatment and harm-reduction services than it is to send them to drug courts or prison. The tired Republican argument of “Where will the money come from?!?” seems pretty weak when you realize that police budgets are often the highest line item in any city budget and can be billions per year. Do you actually care about “the taxpayers,” or do you just hate the marginalized people you see as intractable criminals?

While this post is ostensibly a review of The End of Policing – which I loved, and would heartily recommend – mostly I wanted to use my platform here to tell you what you can do if you believe enough is enough and the police should be defunded. You can call or write to your local political leaders to demand they take action on this issue. You can donate to, and signal-boost the work of, abolitionist activists and organizations like Critical Resistance. You can loudly question the dogmatic beliefs of your police-abiding friends and family, perhaps backed up by stats and facts you read in this book. You can educate yourself more and more on this issue until you flush the harmful “copaganda” out of your psychological system. I’ve been doing all of these things after a lifetime of relative ignorance on this issue, and I invite you to join me – because contrary to popular belief, if we truly want a safer world, we need to get rid of cops and replace them with actual solutions to the problems we face.

Self-Isolating and Bored? Here’s 15 Pieces of Media to Entertain You…

Kate Sloan

Dear friends: This is a hard time. I’m proud of you for wherever you’re at, whether you can’t stop crying in bed or you’re doing pretty okay actually (or something else entirely). Whatever reaction you’re having is valid – as long as you’re not one of those “This virus is cleansing the planet!!” ecofascists or a “But people should still pay their rent somehow!!” capitalist.

My friend JoEllen recently published a list of “comfort media” to consume in These Trying Times. I wanted to do something similar, although I will say that not all of these works are necessarily comforting. Some of them are just cathartic, or absorbing, or all of the above. When I’m sad or anxious, sometimes I don’t want to turn away from those feelings – sometimes I want to walk right into them, revel in them, exorcize them from my body.

In that spirit, here are 15 pieces of media, across various genres and formats, that I think you might find helpful right now in one way or another. (A note: all the links to books in this post go to the Powell’s website. Powell’s is a great indie bookstore that you should absolutely support in these tough times if you can, instead of lining Bezos’s already-overstuffed pockets.)

Stephen King, it must be said, is a problematic fave. However, he has written some of the best apocalyptic fiction in the biz. I often find it useful to focus on his terrifying stories in times that are, themselves, also terrifying – because, I reason, I may be having a tough time but at least I’m not handcuffed to a dead man’s bed (Gerald’s Game) or running away from my axe-wielding husband (The Shining).

There are three King novels that feel particularly salient to me in These Times, and they are as follows. Under the Dome is one of my all-time favorite books – it’s a hefty 1,000 pages but the pace is snappy enough to make that seem reasonable, as is often the case with King. In this story, an invisible but impenetrable “dome” descends on a small town in Maine called Chester’s Mill, cutting off its residents from the outside world and plunging the population into a panic. You’ll see familiar moments in this story – grocery store riots, lying politicians – but also moments of hope, triumph, and the goodness of humanity. (P.S. If you like audio formats, you honestly owe it to yourself to read Under the Dome as an audiobook – it’s read by the ever-wonderful Raúl Esparza and is beyond compare in its genre, IMO.)

The King novel most prescient of our current situation is, of course, The Stand, his epic novel about a flu strain engineered by the army as a biological weapon which then gets leaked into the world by accident. It quickly infects and kills over 99% of Earth’s population, and the survivors are left to cobble together some semblance of a new society in the wreckage. There’s lots of good stuff in here about friendship, grit, and goodness – all balanced with plenty of that signature King darkness and evil. This book shows a version of pandemic response that’s far more drastic than anything our world will likely face due to COVID-19, so it’s escapist in the sense that it allows you to think, “Well, things are bad, but at least they’re not this bad.”

I also gotta shout out my favorite lesser-known King novel, the relatively recent Sleeping Beauties, which he co-wrote with his son Owen. This one’s also about an apocalyptic scenario of sorts: all the women on Earth start contracting a mysterious illness where, when they fall asleep, they essentially go into a coma and cannot be awakened. Hilariously, we then get to see what happens when the men of the world are left to fend for themselves. Chaos ensues, obviously. This one isn’t as well-reviewed as some other King novels, but I wonder how much of that is due to its vaguely feminist themes!

If you like podcasts and/or roleplaying games and haven’t yet dove into the amazingness that is The Adventure Zone, you’re in for a treat. It’s my favorite podcast of all time – maybe even my favorite piece of narrative media ever? It has made me laugh and cry more than any other podcast, certainly.

TAZ is the three McElroy brothers (of My Brother, My Brother and Me and Polygon fame) playing tabletop RPGs with their dad. The first campaign, Balance, follows a flamboyant wizard named Taako, a wholesome carpenter named Magnus, and a goofy cleric named Merle as they work to collect 7 dangerous relics from all over their magical world. Start with episode 1; after that, there’s still SEVENTY-SIX more episodes for you to listen to in the first campaign alone. (Yeah, it’s a hugely epic story.) One of the later campaigns, Amnesty, is also a gorgeous blend of comedy, camaraderie, and magical realism.

While we’re talking about immersive fantasy podcasts: have you heard of Hello from the Magic Tavern? It’s an almost entirely improvised narrative fiction podcast about a guy named Arnie who accidentally falls through a magic portal into a faraway fantasy land called Foon. Looking to understand the planet he’s landed on, Arnie sets up his podcast recording equipment at a nearby tavern and begins weekly interviews with various guests from around Foon – swordsmen, shopkeeps, goblins, and royalty – all while backed up by his two faithful cohosts, a self-aggrandizing wizard named Usidore and a horny shapeshifter called Chunt. Start with episode 1 and get lost in Foon – it definitely seems better than Earth right now!

Brilliant comedian and musician Lane Moore wrote a book called How to Be Alone which feels particularly needed at this time. It’s full of thoughts about anxiety, attachment, and the longing for intimacy, but its tone is ultimately hopeful – by the time I finished this book, I felt much better about the idea that I might not always have a partner, or tons of close friends, and that might be okay. If you’re struggling with feelings of loneliness and isolation, pick this one up; reading it is like having a profound chat with a good, smart pal.

Lane is also doing a nightly Twitch show (last I checked, anyway) at 8 p.m. Eastern time, also called How to Be Alone, that you can watch right here. She describes it as being like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse for lonely adults – and don’t we all need that right now?!

Looking for something uplifting to read? You really can’t do much better than Alexandra Franzen’s You’re Going to Survive, for which she interviewed professionals across multiple fields (cuisine! music! fashion! non-profits!) about the hardest moments of their careers and how they got to the other side. I’ve never seen a more striking illustration of the notion that “this too shall pass,” always.

If you’re less about distraction and more the type of person who likes to dive directly into your feelings and face them head-on, I highly recommend the movie Contagion (2011), a fast-paced thriller about a high-mortality virus that originates in bats and pigs and quickly spreads around the world. It’s topping the charts right now on streaming sites and whatnot; evidently a lot of people are turning to it, for one reason or another.

The main thing I found comforting about this film is that the scientific and medical professionals in it are incredibly competent and smart (and are, notably, mostly women). The science presented in the movie was thoroughly researched and the moviemakers consulted professionals in the relevant fields, so one could even say Contagion is educational. On an emotional level, watching the brilliantly-acted suffering of mb Damon’s character – who (mild spoilers here) loses his wife and son within the first few minutes of the movie – is cathartic in the most ineffable of ways. He is us and we are him. Hang in there, mb Damon.

If you like fanfiction – and even if you don’t – the novel-length Sherlock stories written by Katie Forsythe (a.k.a. Wordstrings) are worth looking into. She’s a brilliant writer who explores themes of mental illness through the familiar characters of the Holmes universe. I find it’s very hard to worry about my own problems (or even my own planet’s problems) when I’m tracking Sherlock and John’s journeys through crime scenes, drug hazes, and sexual tension.

All the Best and Brightest Creatures might be my fave. An asexual (but not sex-repulsed) Sherlock gets together with a bewildered-yet-horny John, all while they try to solve mysteries set in place by one Jim Moriarty. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a fanfic story so gripping. And conveniently, Archive of Our Own lets you export fanfic in formats that’ll work on your e-reader, so you can lounge in bed or in the tub with Sherlock and John to keep you company.

It’s all too easy to fall into a YouTube rabbit hole these days, consuming news videos and conspiracy videos galore about the current situation. But why not make your YouTube gallivanting into a more pleasant, educational, and uplifting endeavor? I can’t recommend Philosophy Tube highly enough – it’s a campy-yet-esoteric video series in which the dazzling Olly Thorn presents his ideas on topics as wide-ranging as sex work, witchcraft, and Jordan Peterson. He takes an honest look at the world as it is, and theorizes on ways it could be better, kinder, stronger. His videos are also plenty theatrical and silly at times – this isn’t some dry philosophy lecture!

While I’m talking about YouTube, I would be remiss not to mention the Bon Appetit channel, which is basically porn if you enjoy food, competence, and kindness. Our mess of a planet kind of fades into the background while you’re watching, for example, Claire Saffitz trying to make KitKat bars from scratch, or Amiel Stanek sampling every way to cook an egg. I wish the channel would start putting out videos of the BA chefs making quarantine-appropriate dishes from their own separate homes!

If you are a video game person, you’ve probably already been turning to your games of choice for entertainment and comfort. But if you’re looking for recommendations specific to this moment, I’ve gotta say that the immersive, competitive, and plot-driven nature of the Pokémon games has made them invaluable to me through all of this. You add “pocket monsters” to your team, train them, and battle with them, all while traversing strange lands and meeting interesting people. I would suggest starting with HeartGold or SoulSilver if you’re new to the series – they’re both fairly accessible and they also take longer to get through than most (if not all) of the other main-series games. If visuals are important to you, the X/Y and Sun/Moon versions look much nicer, though they are definitely less challenging than previous iterations.

There’s also the game everyone is talking about right now, Animal Crossing. A new version is out for the Switch but I’m also quite partial to the 3DS version, New Leaf. Animal Crossing is essentially the Seinfeld of games, in that it’s a game about nothing: you have a house in a small idyllic town, and you can make friends with your neighbors, decorate your home, go fishing, buy cute clothes, and just generally lead a low-stakes fantasy existence. If you need a whole other life to distract you from your real life, Animal Crossing is definitely a good option.

Along similar lines, it’s very easy to get absorbed in any Harvest Moon game. The focus of these is farming, which doesn’t seem like it would be that interesting – and indeed, sometimes isn’t – but it has clear goals, and sometimes you need that. You can also befriend (and even marry) other villagers, mine for valuable ores, upgrade your home, take care of livestock, and cook from recipes. My favorite in the series is the very simple and straightforward Friends of Mineral Town.

What media are you turning to these days?

12 Days of Girly Juice 2019: 8 Brilliant Books

Kate Sloan

This instalment of 12 Days of Girly Juice used to highlight my favorite things I tweeted all year, but you know what? I’d rather talk about books. (However, if you were wondering, my favorite tweets of the year were definitely this one and this one.)

I read 40+ books this year and loved lots of them, so this is hard – but here are my 8 top picks!

You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian

From the author of the viral story “Cat Person” came this tour de force, a collection of short stories about the complexity of consent. Within these pages are several tricky fictional situations centering around sexual sadism, relational autonomy, erotic humiliation, and more. Several times while reading this book, I had to put it down and ponder: What do I think this character should have done, ethically? What decision would I have made in this situation? This book is so timely, what with the concept of consent being debated and dissected all over the place due to the #MeToo movement, and I think these stories are useful thought exercises for those of us concerned with parsing what consent and non-consent really mean, and what their limitations might be.

The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang

When I first read Esmé’s essay “Perdition Days” years ago, I thought it was one of the most striking things I’d ever read. It chronicles her time living with Cotard’s delusion, a belief that (in her case) one is dead, and that the people in one’s life are merely purgatory’s facsimiles of their living counterparts. Esmé painted an incredibly affecting picture of what this delusion felt like from the inside, and how it impacted those around her. She went on to write The Collected Schizophrenias, a collection of essays (including “Perdition Days”) which discuss her life with chronic mental and physical illness, and the various dilemmas and struggles therewith. I found myself crying on the subway while reading Esmé weigh the decision to have kids or stay childless; I marveled at her reporting on chronic lime disease and the way its sufferers are frequently dismissed and disbelieved; I revelled in the bravery it must have taken for her to write about these things, and the artfulness with which she has done so. This book has stuck with me in ways I can’t even articulate, and I’m so glad it exists.

High Heel by Summer Brennan

You won’t read a more thorough history of the high heel than this – but this book is so much more than that. It discusses the iconic shoe in relation to politics, gender, sexuality, pain, music, film, fashion, and more. I notice people’s shoes a lot more now than I did before reading this book – and I’m more intentional about my own choices in that regard, too. I like Summer’s nuanced conclusion that high heels aren’t necessarily oppressive and evil like many feminists argue – they can instead be a freely chosen expression of identity that many people find affirming and uplifting.

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell

I saw this book retweeted onto my Twitter timeline and my interest was immediately piqued. A gorgeously illustrated story about queer high-school heartbreak? Yes please! I cried multiple times while reading this immensely beautiful graphic novel, because the feelings of rejection, insecurity, unworthiness, and ultimately resilience were so familiar to me, from both my queer relationships and my “straight” ones. The pleasure of reading this book was equal parts emotional, intellectual, aesthetic, and tactile – a rare thing!

Building Open Relationships by Dr. Liz Powell

If you read only one book on non-monogamy, make it this one. Dr. Liz lays out all the common pitfalls of this relationship style and how to deal with them. Their book is written with compassion and vulnerability, and is full of useful stories from Liz’s own dating life that illustrate the principles they teach. I feel much more equipped to handle non-monogamy after reading this book, and I’ve recommended it to countless people. It’s just that good.

Night Film by Marisha Pessl

I love a good murder-mystery, and that’s exactly what this novel is. An investigative journalist sets his sights on figuring out why and how the daughter of a prominent horror movie director died. In the process, he picks up a couple of sidekicks, wanders through revered movie sets, chats with a drug-addled movie star, breaks into abandoned buildings, swans around Manhattan penthouses, sneaks onto an estate in a canoe, and basically just gets up to some good old-fashioned hijinks. Marisha Pessl is a gifted (and often hilarious) writer, and I was captivated by this story from beginning to end.

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

This book got a lot of attention around its launch, and for good reason. Tolentino’s painstakingly constructed essays dive into precarious topics like the wedding industrial complex, the absurdity of reality TV, activewear as capitalist fetishwear, and more. Every piece in this book is incisive, witty, evocative, and meticulously researched. Reading it probably made me smarter, and definitely made me feel smarter.

The Wagers by Sean Michaels

I’m biased because Sean is my cousin, but this novel is really extraordinary. It’s primarily about luck – what does it mean to be lucky, and how can one become moreso? – but is also about love, and family, and fame, and privilege, and the grocery business. I love a twisty plot, and this one frequently made me shout “OH SHIT” while reading in cafés or on the subway (whoops). I fell in love with the characters of this strange novel, and couldn’t wait to find out what would happen to them next.

What were your favorite books you read this year?

Book Review: The Offline Dating Method

Kate Sloan

I receive many press releases per week, and most of them hold zero interest for me. Weird new porn movies. Shitty new vibrators. Swanky events I can’t go to because they’re in New York or Los Angeles.

But recently I got a press release that did pique my interest. It was about a new book that had just been released, The Offline Dating Method: How to Attract a Great Guy in the Real World, by dating coach Camille Virginia.

The concept caught my eye because the realm of “offline dating” advice is usually presided over by male pickup artists. They call it different things – “day game,” “night game,” and so on – but it’s essentially the same idea, just twisted into a different form. PUAs are misogynist manipulators, but this female writer, I gathered, was not advocating the shitty kind of manipulation – maybe just the kind that can get you a date with someone who finds you attractive but who you otherwise never would’ve talked to.

Indeed, while Neil Strauss’s books are guides for men on picking women up, Camille Virginia’s book is a guide for women on getting picked up by men. (Yes, it is painfully heteronormative, so I’m sorry for any accordingly heteronormative statements that follow. Virginia does acknowledge in her introduction that a lot of the tips she offers will work on a broad range of people, not just straight men – and she’s right – but the book is written explicitly through the lens of “You are a woman and you want men to ask you out.”)

Virginia’s central thesis is that meeting potential romantic partners in “the real world” is superior to online dating, for a plethora of reasons: you can make better connections more quickly, and you’ll know much sooner whether you’re actually attracted to and compatible with the person you’re flirting with. In three meaty chapters full of headings and subheadings, she explains how to seem magnetic and approachable, how to start and sustain a conversation with a man you don’t know, and how to transition that conversation into getting asked on a date.

At first, the most striking thing to me about this book was how anathema it seemed to how people my age actually seem to date, and to want to date. I’d recently read an Atlantic article about the so-called “sex recession.” The millennial interviewees spoke about meeting “offline” as an impossibility, an archaic relic, in the wake of Tinder and its cohorts. Take, for example, this sentence where the author, Kate Julian, is chatting with a young female source about Sex and the City: “’Miranda meets Steve at a bar,’ she said, in a tone suggesting that the scenario might as well be out of a Jane Austen novel, for all the relevance it had to her life.” But for all their romanticization of meeting a partner in a bar or a bookstore, these millennials also acknowledge that this type of meet-cute wouldn’t really be welcome in their lives. Julian, who met her husband in an elevator in 2001, writes, “I was fascinated by the extent to which this prompted other women to sigh and say that they’d just love to meet someone that way. And yet quite a few of them suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out. ‘Creeper! Get away from me,’ one woman imagined thinking.”

This is in line with my own experience of dating in a world filled with smartphones and social anxiety. Once, during an extended dry spell in which it felt like I’d never have sex with someone who desired me ever again, I was approached by a random flirty man at a food court while I was reading. After a tense conversation in which I basically politely told him to leave me the hell alone, I tweeted, “Dear men who try to pick me up in food courts: can u not? I’m just tryna eat my General Tao chicken & read my book, bro.” A male friend replied, “Complains about lack of male attention by night, complains about male attention by day” – which enraged me at the time (and still to this day, honestly – hi, Brent), because it implies that all romantic/sexual attention is the same and should be received with the same warmth, whether it’s wanted or not, and that if I ever push back against negative attention, I don’t deserve the positive attention I want.

But as misguided as that feedback was, it also, in some ways, captured the same millennial dating contradiction Julian’s interviewees talked about in her article: we romanticize offline “meet-cutes,” but, at the same time, we find them scary, annoying, or just plain weird.

This is the somewhat hostile context in which Virginia’s writing her book on how to get picked up in public. There’s very little acknowledgment in the book that people might think you’re odd or creepy for trying to talk to them on the subway or at the grocery store – she just says that women are rarely perceived as creepy, and that if someone gives you a weird look for talking to them, they’re not a good match for you anyway and you should just shrug it off and move onto the next person. She does acknowledge that there are certain places and cultures where it might actually be unsafe for a woman to initiate a conversation in public with a man she doesn’t know, but for most women, she seems to think it’s a perfectly normal and acceptable thing to do. I had to suspend my disbelief a little to accept this premise that underlies her entire book, but I’m a socially anxious introvert, so of course I did.

Even if you’re not a straight woman trying to get a straight man to ask for your number, there’s still lots of valuable stuff in this book about general social skills. It contains a lot of practical advice about sparking and maintaining conversations, building confidence, and developing a natural curiosity about your fellow (hu)man. When I read some sections aloud to my extremely extroverted partner, they said all the social tips were fairly obvious to them and almost go without saying, but I didn’t feel that way at all – I think a lot of people who are as socially awkward as me, or moreso, would find these tips illuminating. They give you a blueprint for developing your relational skillset and having meaningful (i.e. not small-talk-y) conversations with people you just met.

So, yes, this is a useful dating book. But I actually found it to be a fascinating read on an entirely different level as well, and here’s where this review gets really weird. As this book picks up steam in the middle, it starts to read like – there’s no other way I can say this – conversation fetish porn.

Hear me out. I’d never heard of a conversation fetish before that phrase popped into my head while reading The Offline Dating Method, but I’m sure it exists. My friend Bex often talks about having a “flirting fetish,” being turned on by witty repartée and double entendres – and that’s what I thought of as I read Camille Virginia’s rapturous magnum opus.

I’m not saying that Virginia necessarily has this fetish, but the way she writes about good conversations is genuinely erotic at times. “You’re going to become addicted to how fulfilling it feels to make other people feel good,” she warns in a section about committing “random acts of kindness” as icebreakers in public. She colorfully defines a “meaningful connection” as “a genuine conversation that feels natural, not forced in any way, and gives each person a feeling of deep fulfillment… being completely present in a conversation and co-creating a shared experience.” After an example conversation in which a man tells her that his cufflinks bear his English family’s coat of arms, Virginia writes, “Boom! You just went from the topic of cufflinks to talking about his family’s 300-year-old estate in Cornwall in less than ten seconds” – profound conversations are as compelling and exciting to her as “number closes” and “kiss closes” are for pick-up artists, and she writes about them with the same slick sensuality. “I’ll admit it: I have an addiction to connection,” she says; “I absolutely love it.”

Virginia talks with reverence about hallmarks of human kinship like sustaining eye contact, making relatable jokes, exchanging compliments, and creating intimacy through authenticity. “Conversations will become an experience that are ten times better than any movie, TV show, or book because you’re not just observing; you’re living the story with another human in real time,” she effuses. “This will not only feel incredibly fulfilling for you but everyone you create that connection with, which means people will naturally want more of you and the good feelings they now associate with you.” She could literally be talking about sex or kink here instead of conversation and the sentiment would still feel true. I’ve never seen someone describe the simple act of dialoguing with such carnal enthusiasm.

I’m not at all saying this to shame her, whether or not this is actually a kink for her, or for anyone else. I actually find it fascinating to observe how eroticizing a particular act, and/or fitting it into a kink framework, can help me look at that act with new eyes and feel invigorated to include it in my life more often. It’s like how thinking of comedians as reaction-soliciting tops has helped me enjoy comedy even more. Understanding that conversations unroll with electric and pleasurable interpersonal energy, just like sex or kink, has made me more jazzed than usual to engage people in conversation, even people I don’t know very well or at all. I enjoy the process more now that I’m specifically chasing the fulfilment and connection Virginia writes about so descriptively (and erotically). I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: kink is magic.

There are some problematic things about this book, as you might imagine. Safety concerns aren’t acknowledged enough. Every reader is assumed to be a woman who wants to date men but doesn’t want to be so forward as to initiate a date herself. (“Asking a man out myself has never turned out well for me,” Virginia mentions. “I’ve been told by many men that they prefer to ask the woman out and plan the date.”) Most vexingly – and pretty typically, for the dating self-help genre – the author uses herself and her own stories as examples of how easy it is to meet potential dates IRL, without particularly acknowledging that she’s conventionally attractive, thin, white, able-bodied, and socially capable in ways that many people are not. Advice that amounts to “Be yourself!” rings pretty hollow when your self isn’t as traditionally desirable as the advice-giver’s self. I will say that her conversational suggestions don’t necessarily rely on you being attractive, but their positive reception might.

Overall, though, while I went into The Offline Dating Method expecting a light and frothy dating guide that reads like cobbled-together Cosmo tips, it is actually so much more than that. It’s an ode to the beauty of human connection, and a road map to help you get there. It’s a brave stand in a world that has increasingly digitally anesthetized us to our fellow people. It’s also – most surprisingly of all – some of the most explicit and satisfying erotica available for a subculture I’m not sure even exists: conversation fetishists.

 

Thanks to Camille Virginia and co. for supplying me with this book to read!