66 of 69 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
SURPRISING AND INTRIGUING, August 19, 2004
This review is from: Callgirl (Hardcover)
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
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30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Was it wrong for me to think she'd be smarter?, November 9, 2006
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.
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35 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Insider's Examination of A Real Profession, March 8, 2005
This review is from: Callgirl (Hardcover)
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.
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