Review: Paying For It, by Chester Brown

[ed_rex]

You're a dirty whore-monger, Chester Brown

Autobiography is a risky endeavour at the best of times; not only will the memoirist's craft be scrutinized and judged, but so too will his or her character. So it is probably a good thing for Chester Brown that he is one of the best cartoonists of his generation, because he really does have sex with prostitutes.

In fact, his latest book, Paying For It, is all about his decision to give up on romantic love in favour of sex for money.

It has become almost trendy to dabble in the sex-trade. Bookshelves groan beneath mounds of tell-all memoirs and fictions, and even relatively mainstream television has gotten into act, with no less than one-time Doctor Who companion Billie Piper disrobing on a regular business as Belle du Jour. But memoirs and fictions glamorizing the life of johns?

Maybe not so much

It is one thing to admit to taking money for sex; to confess paying for sex, on the other hand, remains quite outside the bounds of polite society.

If Brown doesn't make an explicit analogy between his "coming-out" as a john and the struggles of gay men and lesbians who braved arrest and assault when they refused to any longer closet their sexual natures, Paying For It certainly implicitly invites the comparison, if only by Brown's refusal to be ashamed.

As Brown's friend (and ex-girlfriend) Kris tells him, to most people, johns are "... creeps. Who knows what they're capable of? If I had a daughter I'd be worried about what would happen if she was in the same elevator as one of those guys."

So would you want to read a comic book by and about one?

Click here for my full review, with inevitable spoilers — not safe for work.

Comments

[evilawyer]

Which strikes me as a double-standard which presumes that all women involved in the sex-trade are victims — full-stop again.

You're probably going to catch all kinds of flack for that sentence, but it makes me ask: Why do we assume that every single sex industry worker out there, regardless of where s/he is located and what her/his background and intelligence level are, could not and did not exercise some level of autonomy and brain power in deciding to enter the profession. It seems to me that, at least in industrial/more affluent nations, this viewpoint automatically assumes a complete and total lack of reasoning power on the part of all of the workers and relegates them the mentally deficient status. Is it a career to be aspired to? Not from my viewpoint. Are those who engage in it "clearly victimized"? I don't know.

Never heard of Brown (I don't follow comics anymore), but you've written a very interesting article.

Probably

[ed_rex]

Why do we assume that every single sex industry worker out there, regardless of where s/he is located and what her/his background and intelligence level are, could not and did not exercise some level of autonomy and brain power in deciding to enter the profession.

Very much so. I've known a few women who've dabbled — or more than dabbled — in the sex trade, but none of them had a pimp and none of them thought of themselves as anything but people who were making (quite lucrative) choices.

As the same time, I am one of those who finds something repugnant about the industry; I am one of those who gets kind of squicked-out by johns. I think I understand the negative reaction to them. And god knows I wouldn't be happy for, say, my niece, if I found out she had entered the industry.

Brown basically makes the claim that, at least for some women, prostitution is no more or less a job than any other, that some like the work, some are indifferent and some hate it. Both reason and experience tell me that is almost certainly true, given the wide range of human character I know exists.