Customer Reviews

Callgirl: Confessions of an Ivy League Lady of Pleasure

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

The question posed on the dust cover of Jeanette Angell's memoir is "If you were offered the same choice, are you sure you'd make a different decision?" Provided that you're strapped for cash, the question is whether you would choose to work at a Borders bookstore or a Starbucks coffeehouse for a tad over minimum wage or would you become a call girl earning approximately $140 per hour?

Well, my response before and after reading this intriguing bio was "Hand me a Starbucks apron, please." Personal options aside, Ms. Angell has cogently and thoroughly described the time she spent in juggling her day teaching job and her night work as a paid escort, which she describes as being "a skilled professional possessing an area of knowledge for which there is a demand, and for which the client is willing to pay......"

After earning a Masters in Divinity from Yale and a 1995 doctoral degree in social anthropology, Ms. Angell anticipated joining the faculty of a prestigious university and beginning her climb to tenure. That was not to be the case. Instead she found herself teaching classes at a small Boston area college where she received a semester by semester paycheck. She also found herself co-habiting with Peter, a lowlife who absconded with the contents of their joint checking account.

Determined not to ask her family or the State of Massachusetts for assistance, she began to scan the want ads. Available openings paid the above mentioned minimum wage, which would not begin to cover her bills. Looking further, she found that girls were needed by an escort service run by a woman identified only as Peach. She picked up the phone. Mystified by the fact that Peach didn't want a face to face interview, Ms. Angell nonetheless agreed to begin immediately by seeing her first client that evening.

It worked for her. Of that encounter Ms. Angell writes, "This wasn't anything esoteric or bizarre or dangerous: this was something I had done before, something I did well, and - best of all - something I enjoyed doing." Thus, for Ms. Angell, known by night as "Tia," a second career was born, a career she would follow for three years.

During her initial days or more accurately nights as an escort Ms. Angell was teaching a course titled "Life in the Asylum," which was in part an examination of the cruel ways in which institutions then and now deal with the mentally ill. Ms. Angell, obviously, feels passionately about this injustice as she does about the ways in which women are oppressed. Writing from a sociologist's point of view, she takes time throughout her narrative to eloquently discuss these issues, as well as making a heartfelt plea not to stereotype prostitutes.

The author of several previous books, she is an accomplished writer who laces Callgirl with deftly painted portraits of her clients. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, at other times a bit frightening, these men are all different from the 400 pound fellow who seeks to control the personal lives of "his girls" to a wealthy gentleman who sent her home with a giant size bottle of Chanel No. 5.

Assuming she was only being social she began using the all too available cocaine, which she eventually needed to start each day. It was not long before she realized that this abuse was jeopardizing her teaching. Then a scary brush with the law that would have ended her academic career forever pushed her into a determination to quit working for Peach. Of this decision she writes, "It wasn't cerebral. It was emotional. More than anything, I was feeling the job, with all of its uncertainties and stresses, slowly slipping off my shoulders like an old, worn-out coat that has served its purpose well."

Ms. Angell was lucky. At the close of "Callgirl," which was written 10 years after her retirement she is happily married, teaching, and is a mother. When she looks back at what she calls the "glamour of those days," she smiles.

As I said, Ms. Angell was lucky.

- Gail Cooke

I'm an undergrad from a NON-Ivy League school who works in the sex industry, and I was shocked at the stupid decisions she made! Doing coke with customers, smoking crack, telling a male friend about her work and was shocked he tried to buy a service, unprotected oral, kissing all of her clients on the mouth, working for a pimp... It just goes to show a degree doesn't help in this business unless you plan on writing a self absorbed memoir. Her writing is so-so as well. A lot of it goes like this, "I did this... and then I did that." You get the feeling that she thinks she's very elegant and sharp, but really, she was only charged $200 and hour. For a classic book on sex work, read Xaviera Hollander's "The Happy Hooker." It's a little dated, but she actually has an interesting story to tell.

The "whore with a heart of gold" is a literary staple; such beings may be rare in real life, but undoubtedly much more rare is the callgirl with a Ph.D. and college teaching assignments. A woman with that combination would be worth reading about, and in _Callgirl_ (The Permanent Press) Jeannette Angell introduces us to one: herself. Her book is a chatty, extremely readable account of her three years in prostitution. She is careful to make sure that readers know that this is a memoir, and her story, and not generalizable to the story or the plight of anyone else. Angell made an informed choice to enter the profession, and an informed choice to leave it, and had the luxury of choice in both situations, as many women do not have. She has plenty of stories to tell, and is unsparingly critical of herself at times, so her book is funny, raunchy, and sad page by page, but engrossing throughout.

Angell finished her Ph.D. in social anthropology in 1995, and while waiting for a position of tenure, she took a series of positions as lecturer. She was just barely getting by, and then suffered an emotional and financial disaster: her boyfriend not only dumped her but emptied her checking account before doing so. She needed money just to get by from month to month, more than her limited lecturing could get her. She signed on for a good one, paying $140 an hour, with $60 going to management. Angell liked sex, she liked being around people, and she really needed the money. Any ethical dilemmas over the job lessened when she thought that in her sphere, having casual sex with a man from a singles bar was acceptable but sex as a business proposition wasn't. Which is really less ethical? She forces the reader to examine plenty of ethical issues. She was expecting a lot of kink initially, but "What I got instead was the sort of unmemorable sex that invariably characterizes first encounters." Clumsy and awkward. As she reflects, "It happens in real life all the time." There was a scary encounter with a cop, and although "Most of the fetishes and unusual activities that I encountered were fairly benign, essentially harmless..." a couple of them described here are chilling, though; an argument could be made that prostitutes are providing a larger social function in keeping such activities within the pay-for-play realm.

She left the business for reasons she can't be sure of, but it had given her financial security, and a chance to have her desirability confirmed "just at the point in my life when Madison Avenue was telling me that I was over the hill." She admits that she was lucky; Peach cared about her workers. Even when Angell dipped into cocaine, she was lucky enough not to have whatever it is that makes people addicted. She writes full time now and has a husband and children. Her husband had some difficulty initially accepting her past. Angell has written to dispel misconceptions regarding prostitution, but she knows that her satisfactory and relatively benign experiences are hers, and she is a case study of one, not a cross section. She admonishes the reader that most women in the business are not doctors who need to pay off loans, that there are women (and children) forced into the sort of work she was able to choose. She winds up with a small polemic to say that legalization and regulation are the only way to keep women from being used abusively in the trade. It is a convincing end to a unique memoir, written in a conversational and engaging tone, which will provide the curious reader with lots of answers about a hidden world.

I collect and voraciously read books about, and by, prostitutes/prostitution, strippers/exotic/nude dancers. Dominitrixes, phone sex, etc; or, what has become collectively known as Sex Work. Not all have been stellar, most have not provided me with anything I didn't already know and/or experienced, and some have been down right disappointing.

Callgirl, when I first started it, fell within the middle range; not exactly profound, but with enough amusing anecdotes and inner reflection to keep me interested. The argument that Sex Work is no different than any other profession is not a new one, nor is the revelation that most men seek out the Sex Worker more for companionship and acceptance than the actual sex. As such, this book is not what I would consider a fascinating read, as in something I just can't put down until I reach the back cover, so I have been reading it in spurts, and was about half way through when I saw the author on Oprah's After the Show.

Oprah did her standard preface to the interview, outlining Ms. Angell's education, background, and the tragic circumstances behind her decision to pursue a side career as an 'escort', finishing up, of course, with a plug for her (Ms. Angell's) book. Then the interview started. Ms. Angell, I felt, did not carry herself well. Perhaps she was nervous, but her incessant and overblown laughter really grated on me, giving more the impression of a silly schoolgirl at her first slumber party than a confidant professional. About halfway through the interview Oprah dropped a bomb, that Ms. Angell's educational and (straight) employment claims did not pan out with her (Oprah's) researchers. Then Ms. Angell stopped laughing. An unsmiling Oprah asked why she lied. It took several minutes to get the answer, as Ms. Angell hems and haws and blathers in unfinished sentences about who knows what before finally admitting that in reality she was a high school french teacher, not a college professor as noted in the book.

This is what the book jacket claims about Jeanette Angell:

--She lectured and gave courses and workshops in sociology, history, religion, and anthropology at some of the most prestigious universities in America and England, including Harvard, MIT, and the London School of Economics.--

Ms. Angell went on to explain that when she initially wrote the book it was a novel, a fictionalized version of her experiences working as an escort, hence, she was not really writing about herself, just retelling her story through a fictionalized character, but her publishers suggested that the book would do better if she presented it as a true life story, so she changed it accordingly, but left in her altered biography. She also claimed that she retained the altered version to protect the identities and reputations of innocent parties. Upon further questioning by Oprah--actually, it was Oprah repeating the same statement of "You did this to make yourself look better." Over and over--Ms. Angell finally admitted that, yes, she kept the fictionalized elements in the book to make her look better.

This admission has seriously changed not only my opinion of Ms. Angell, but my opinion of the book. While the author maintains that aside from her fudging on her day job, everything else (in the book) is absolutely true. Sorry, in my opinion she sacrificed her credibility in claiming an employment upgrade. And if her motives were truly about protecting the innocent then she should have been up front about her distortion of the facts; disclaimers are common in cases of biographers who don't wish to or are unable to reveal the identities of innocent parties. In not providing a few sentences in the preface, informing readers that some details, people, places, things have been altered for whatever (supposedly) protective reasons, she has sacrificed the integrity of the entire work. Maybe she is telling the truth, but if she is less than truthful about the small stuff--and, in actuality, lying about your education and job is small potatoes in comparison to the main subject of life as an escort--then how can I trust her providing the truth about the big issues? In addition, in the book she goes into heavy detail about the subject(s) of her lectures, her students and the staff at the prestigious university she was, again, supposedly, working at, when in actuality she was working as a high school french teacher, so there is seriously more 'fictionalizing' going on than just a resume. I now seriously question everything; everything is suspect.

So, I feel decidedly cheated; like a victim of the old Bait and Switch Game. The main selling point of this book is that it is supposed to be autobiographical, take that away and all you have is a so so, run of the mill novel about being an escort.

On the whole, Angell is thoughtful and introspective, accurately dismantling many of the myths surrounding elite prostitution. She clearly explains how sex is *work*, not intimacy, for the working girl.

However, despite her academic credentials, her writing is often superficial and relies too heavily on cliches and cute turns-of-phrase that fail to communicate much of significance, like an earnest undergraduate who clearly has potential but will never earn more than a B until his/her writing matures.

The book's editing leaves much to be desired as well, as the book contains spelling and syntax errors, unintentionally incomplete sentences, and the like, that distract the reader from the narrative.

If you're new to sex-worker memoirs, this one might have value for you. However, if you've already read some of the classic first-person accounts of sex work - such as French's book, Working: My Life as a Prostitute; Delacoste & Alexander's anthology Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry; Queen's book, Real Live Nude Girl; Nagle's anthology, Whores and Other Feminists; or Bernstein's anthology Tricks and Treats - you will find little that is new or interesting in Callgirl.

This book was strange for me. I was fully engrossed while reading it. I liked it when I finished it, but a week later... I could not remember it at all. Only two things stand out:

The narration, written in an offhand voice, can be wearing.

There is a pervasive feeling of things not adding up. I didn't see any clear clues of lying/fiction. Then again, I didn't go back and look.

I can't recommend this book, either to read or run away from.
It is bland and forgettable, but does offer insight to a world most of us know little about. I read this before I had found out about the author's forced admission of "doctoring the facts". Had I know I may have read it differently.

Callgirl has, in my opinion, several flaws, that are hard to ignore when you are reading this thinking that it is, indeed, a very faithful account of an escort, and in general, flaws on form.

The first is, I would say, in the department of believability. This has been already brought up by several other reviews, but there are too many incongruences on its writing. It is hard to believe that an Ivy League educated Ph.D holder would be so naive in several issues, and that, teaching classes about prostitution, she would not care to check issues of the legal ramifications of her profession, among other clear issues there.

Second: the style of narrative is inconsistent, and often rambles a lot. The first few chapters indeed correspond to her first few weeks in the business, and the last few chapters correspond to her last few weeks on it. But in the middle, she goes back and forth in time, without giving you a clear timeline. Many of the "relevant" incidents on the book cannot be clearly put in chronological order. Most chapters try to focus on one thread of a complex story, taking it from start to finish. For example, the chapter about Mario, one of her favorite clients. She tells you about what she heard from him before she met him, her first call with him, the client/service provider relationship they developed, and how this relationship came to an end at some point. Not a bad chapter, but not all of them are like that. Others, she starts several threads of thought at once and didn't finish either of them. For example, chapter thirteenth! She starts telling you that her night job was starting to take its toll on her teaching, and half way through her explaining why she thought this was happening she starts telling you that there were worse professors than she ever was, and suddenly, the topic changes to her ongoing romance with a guy she met through Peach (her madam), then some rambling about why men prefer having sex with prostitutes, and how it was not "fun" for the prostitute, but exclusively hard work. Then she changes to how (even when her teaching was deteriorating) she started getting invitations for a lecture somewhere else, and as her classes were "cutting edge" she was being invited to the right parties to be to raise on the academia, and somehow it turns to how she made a bunch of doubles (the client paying for a threesome with two girls), how it was a "collaboration" between the two girls, how one of them once help her in the situation where she had suddenly gotten her period just a few minutes before walking on the guy's place, and then some ramblings about why threesomes between friendly acquaintances generally would not work. All that in thirteen pages. Messy, isn't it?

Third: her ramblings (yeah, I know, I am rambling a bit too with this review). She rambles too much at some points. She is in the middle of an interesting point of the story, something noteworthy happening with one of her client, and she would start this several pages long philosophical ranting about some opinion she has, or preconception she thinks everybody else have. With respect to the inclusions of her life as a professors, unlike other reviewers, I indeed appreciated it, maybe because as her, I am a PhD holder and a college professor, and a few of her insights may be interesting, but in the place they are, take the interest way from where it should be: THE STORY!

Fourth: Her idea pushing. It is natural that someone who writes a book wants to make a point out of the narrative. But when the writer aggressively assume that the reader agrees with her, it is a bit antagonizing. I remember one of the points that actually upset, when she is talking about another of Peach's girls who is also a school teacher, and asks the reader "Would you want your eleven-year old daughter to be taught English by a woman who is, in addition to a teacher, a prostitute? Tell the truth. Gotcha. I rest my case." I remember even cursing at the author at that point, how does she dare to presume to know what my opinion is. Truth is, I (and I bet, a lot of people to) would have no problem with my children's teacher's activities out of the school, as long as they do not affect her performance and ethics as a teacher. I would be concern if this Beth she describes, is abusing drugs in the way she admittedly was, as generally people who abuse drugs are addicts, and addicts tend to do things they shouldn't, and that may affect my children. But if she has sex with strangers on her free time, that is not my business, even if she is getting paid for it.

Fifth: Abuse of fancy vocabulary and dull phrases. I consider myself to have a broad vocabulary in English, but this lady had me going to the dictionary a few times per chapter, with few exceptions. It's not that I don't appreciate the opportunity to learn a new word, but she abuses of obscure and arcane language, what ends up being somewhat distracting. Also, there are plenty of dull phrases that may be cute the first time she tells them, but when they are told twenty or fifty times during a 220+ pages book, it ends up being terribly annoying. Like the "rat bastard boyfriend" Peter, or the fact that she and some of her clients knew, thought or felt things on their "heart of hearts". Once is cute, twice is still funny, three times is pushing it, but more times than chapters in the book, that's plain irritating.

In closing: It's not precisely a book that would inspire me to read more from the same author, and I think it is by far much closer to fiction than to a memoir, but if you are not too picky with your reading choices, it is still entertaining.

I can't exactly pin down what was wrong with this book. Perhaps, it was too many things to pick just one. The story overall had a serious lacking in the believability department. It read in large part like Penthouse Stories. Since the Author is a Professor I was expecting her to be able to incorporate her experiences as a sex worker and contextualize them historically and within the context of modern society.

I loved (sarcasm) the added myth that you just have to ask a cop if he/she is a cop and they must tell you the truth or you cannot be arrested. The wise Madame Peach with Lawyers on her client list is not aware of this and our Professor was also in the dark.

(Snopes "Are you a Cop?)

Also she had no grasp as an Anthropology Major of the basics of Chinese Society and had to ask her friend Henry for insight for her dear friend?

I guess in the end it read to me not as the authors personal experience but her imagination of what it would be like to work in the sex industry. She proclaims to be bisexual but details heterosexual sex in some detail in the book but nary a word on her bisexual encounters.

*Spoiler* The ending seemed rather tidy as well. Her and her madame happily married and living the suburban lifestyle.

On Saturday I promised myself that if I finished a chore, I would get to start reading CALLGIRL, sitting brand new on my shelf. Chore done, I opened the book...and couldn't put it down. A cliché come true. I finished that night before bed.

The author's first-hand, frank account of the escort trade, of the business aspects and the intriguing characters and the risks and rewards, would by itself be riveting reading, but what adds unique depth is the interweaving of a second world, the one in which the author is a respected college professor who teaches, among other things, a course on prostitution. The author, who is now a writer and wife, makes it clear she has no regrets for her past "other" life, and presents cogent arguments to legalize prostitution.

The following day, I gave the book to my wife. She couldn't put it down either.

After thinking about this book more I have decided to add a star to my rating and forgive the horrible writing/editing of the book since it appears English is not her first language and it was edited by an independant publisher. The main things I hated about this book is that the author continuously reminded you that 1.) she was incredibley smart, and 2.) she was damn good at having sex. I understand this is what the book is about, but I purchased this book already knowing the general premise. She had a rare, nearly luxurious (comparatively, at least) experience in the prostitution industry and it would have been nice if she would have given a peek into the darker side of prostitution. The book also seemed quite aimless. I couldn't figure out what the thesis of the book was. Even after discussing it with my fellow book club members, I still have not determined what this book's purpose was. It is an easy read and only takes a few hours to complete, but if you are a stickler for grammer this book will probably piss you off.