Working Sex: An Odyssey into Our Cultural Underworld [Hardcover]

Marianne Macy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1996

A candid exploration into the sex industry, Working Sex includes profiles of transsexuals, prostitutes, exotic dancers, porn producers and actors, a masturbation teacher, and sexual surrogates, who open up their lives to frank and probing questions and offer their thoughts and life views. Illustrations.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This book grew out of a 1990 New York magazine cover story Macy wrote in which she posed as a woman who wanted to become an escort. Because the experience made her reexamine her ideas about people involved in sex work, she decided to report on others in the business, from exotic dancers to a professional dominatrix. Perhaps because these topics have since seeped into the press, Macy's subject is less outrageous than she professes. Moreover, her narrative style?detailing not only her reactions to the people she meets but even her negotiations with editors?sometimes gets gratingly self-involved. Yet for some readers, this might be a handy introduction to an unfamiliar world. Macy attends a masturbation workshop taught by author Betty Dodson and concludes that Dodson teaches an important message about caring for yourself. She meets Candida Royalle, who creates adult films aimed at women and couples, and glimpses another shift in attitudes toward women's sexuality. Her accounts of her visits to a transsexual club and to a domination session lead to a hardly comprehensive, anticlimactic final chapter on escorts, male and female, in New York City. Macy notes, reasonably enough, that "we have a sex industry because we need and want one." However, the difference between Dodson and a dominatrix is deep enough to demand more analysis.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Macy got the inspiration for this book while working on a New York magazine story for which she posed as an "escort" to find out what was involved in the escort business. In it, she revisits escorting and explores the related fields of pornography, stripping, teaching (mostly women) the ins and outs of masturbation, domination-and-submission for hire, and transsexualism. For a book about the sex industry, it doesn't have much actual sex in its pages. Mostly, Macy interviews those engaged in each niche industry examined. Occasionally, she resorts to subterfuge to get a truer inside picture of various activities, but throughout, she keeps professional distance. She writes efficiently without becoming shallow and manages to probe her subject matter without bogging down in moralism. In short, she's an excellent reporter, and this is an excellent report. Of particular interest to porn enthusiasts will be Macy's encounter with former hard-core star--nay, immortal--Amber Lynn, member (with sister Ginger) of the first family of American smut theater. Hot stuff. Mike Tribby

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub; 1st edition (September 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786702494
• ISBN-13: 978-0786702497
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,079,937 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An excellent read, well-written and interesting, August 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Working Sex: An Odyssey into Our Cultural Underworld (Hardcover)

If you are looking for a hard core, easy come sex book, this isn't it. If you want to read a story that has some intelligence, some heart, some fun and will make you think, then give this book a try.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Observations of a Voyeur, July 29, 2005

By 

Erika Mitchell (E. Calais, VT USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Working Sex: An Odyssey into Our Cultural Underworld (Hardcover)

This book contains notes, observations, and anecdotes that Macy collected in her research pushing the limits of accepted sexual behavior in America. Topics include escort services, masturbation, pornographic film stars, strippers, dominatrixes, and transsexualism. The book includes a short section of black-and-white plates, mostly professionally-produced PR photographs of people interviewed in the text. End material includes a short list of sources and suggested readings and an index.

Reading the book jacket, I expected the book to be about the sex industry. I figured that Macy would describe the lives of prostitutes, how they got started, the risks they take, and their attitudes toward their work, as well as the customers. I'm just guessing, but I would think that a demographic division of the sex industry might show prostitutes comprising the majority, with strippers and others as smaller sub-groups. But Macy doesn't go near any admitted prostitutes. Instead, she confines her exploration into prostitution to the relatively safe areas of escort services and the sideline work of strippers. She does this because her main method of research is to enter the world of the sex industry as an undercover reporter. She doesn't want to actually engage in any sex work herself, so she has to satisfy herself with the information she can glean from being interviewed to work at an escort service, or from interviewing interviewers from the escort services. To get material about strippers and transsexuals (a topic that isn't exactly relevant for a book on the sex industry), she befriends stars or neighbors, attending many strip clubs and even a support group meeting for transsexuals.

Macy pushes the limits of acceptability in more ways than one. In social science research, credible researchers follow the doctrine of informed consent. Before collecting any material, no matter no how innocuous, they first ask permission from subjects and inform them how the information will be used. As a reporter, Macy seems never to have been exposed to such practices. Instead, she takes the undercover approach, which may be appropriate for exposing unknown or hidden social issues, but is very questionable when dealing with people's private (or so they thought) behavior. She describes collecting material for her "research" while hiding under a dominatrix's bed during a D&S session, terrified that the customer might discover her presence, and how irate a customer became when he had told his fantasy to her under the guise of her being a dominatrix's apprentice when she was later introduced to him as a writer. Although Macy attempts to make her observations more credible by citing a few academic writers, her general research method is entirely beyond the pale.

Macy's style of writing is, on the whole, incoherent. Instead of sticking to a story or pushing an argument to its conclusion, she jumps around from anecdote to topic, sometimes hinting at what happened rather than telling the facts. Her first chapter, about escort services, never actually reports her findings, but rather presents a disjointed tale of doing the research and publishing it in a magazine. Perhaps her intent was not to actually report research on the sex industry, but to titillate and turn readers on. If so, the text also fails in this respect.

2.0 out of 5 stars Very Tame, November 20, 2008

By 

K.A.Goldberg (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Working Sex: An Odyssey into Our Cultural Underworld (Hardcover)

Author Marianne Macy investigates various aspect of the sex industry, including escort services, strippers, female coaches for masturbation, dominatixes, transexuals, etc. Macy began this as a magazine story idea, and spends a certain amount of time interviewing various sex workers and employers looking for workers - but not prostitutes. This result is a surprisingly tame read, with very little sex, and not all that much insight. Some will dislike the author's acceptance of such activities, while realists understand the futility of letting moralists enforce puritanicalism on a society where consenting adults are supposedly free. Those looking for a voyeristic read will be disappointed and are advised to look elsewhere.