Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America


Lily Burana - 2001
    We start innocently enough: reading a journal about finding oneself -- a journey across America to recapture and understand a young woman's history as she prepares for a new life.Along the way, we are alternately voyeurs and witnesses, learning the details and daily grinds of a worker in the sex trade -- an exotic dancer, on her last cross-country tour of the clubs that have been such an important part of her life. Well written and powerful, Strip City becomes, about midway through, the journal of a soul. It asks why we do what we do, what it means to say one is a feminist, and how to understand (with eyes wide open) an industry that is both liberating and degrading -- a job in some ways like many others, yet one ultimately corruptive of our very dreams, nightmares, fears, and desires. Strip City is not a tell-all, although it tells much. It is one woman's attempt to come to terms with her past: to glorify the dance and not to victimize, preach, or pass judgment on the dancers or to mystify the work, the audience drawn to it, and (most of all) the toll on the women themselves. It is both painful and funny and cathartic for both writer and reader. Most of all, it is a very moral tale, honestly told, deftly written, and exhibiting neither shame nor undue pride: an American tale, filled with pop culture images that remind us, over and over again, of the roles a prosperous, bountiful nation has allowed to (or forced on) women. Strip City provides us a dazzling, glitzy, and devastating meditation. ( Fall 2001 Selection)

Callgirl: Confessions of an Ivy League Lady of Pleasure


Jeannette Angell - 2004
    Deeply personal and moving, Callgirl challenges the commonly-held notions of the world's oldest profession as a pernicious industry peopled by amoral sex addicts.

Belle de Jour: Diary of an Unlikely Call Girl


Belle de Jour - 2005
    Her impressive degree was not paying her rent or buying her food. But after a fantastic threesome with a very rich couple that gave her a ton of money, Belle realized that she could earn more than anyone she knew--by becoming a call girl. The rest is history. Belle became a twenty-something London working girl--and had the audacity to write about it--anonymously. The shockingly candid and explicit diary she put on the Internet became a London sensation. Now, in BELLE DE JOUR, she shares her entire journey inside the world of high-priced escorts, including fascinating and explicit insights about her job and her clients, her various boyfriends, and a taboo lifestyle that has to be read to be believed. The witty observations, shocking revelations, and hilarious scenarios deliver like the very best fiction and makes for a titillating reading experience unlike any other.

The Price: My Rise and Fall As Natalia, New York's #1 Escort


Natalie McLennan - 2008
    A cautionary tale about a bright, confident young woman who sells her future for easy money and glamour, "The Price" takes readers inside the world of the twenty-five-year-old-girl "New York" magazine labeled "The $2,000-An-Hour Hooker."

Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper


Diablo Cody - 2005
    At the age of twenty-four, Diablo Cody decided there had to be more to life than typing copy at an ad agency. She soon managed to find inspiration from a most unlikely source— amateur night at the seedy Skyway Lounge. While she doesn’t take home the prize that night, Diablo discovers to her surprise the act of stripping is an absolute thrill. This is Diablo’s captivating fish-out-of-water story of her yearlong walk on the wild side, from quiet gentlemen’s clubs to multilevel sex palaces and glassed-in peep shows. In witty prose she gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at this industry through a writer’s keen eye, chronicling her descent into the skin trade and the effect it had on her self-image and her relationship with her now husband.

Whip Smart: A Memoir


Melissa Febos - 2010
    In poetic, nuanced prose she charts how unchecked risk-taking eventually gave way to a course of self-destruction. But as she recounts crossing over the very boundaries that she set for her own safety, she never plays the victim. In fact, the glory of this memoir is Melissa’s ability to illuminate the strange and powerful truths that she learned as she found her way out of a hell of her own making. Rest assured; the reader will emerge from the journey more or less unscathed.

Spent


Antonia Crane - 2014
    She gets drugged, does enema shows, and unionizes the club. When she tries to quit and go to graduate school, her mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Broke and broken, she returns to sex work, which leads to her arrest and a new resilience. Spent is a memoir about a woman’s journey through the sex industry, but it’s also a story of family, community, and our constant struggle against loneliness.

Bare: The Naked Truth About Stripping


Elisabeth Eaves - 2002
    It continued with the realization that women’s bodies often gave them a strange power over men. As an adult, it became a fascination with professional sex workers, leading to a plunge into their world. Bare follows the author and her fellow dancers through Seattle strip clubs and bachelor parties, exploring in riveting detail Eaves’s own motivations and behavior, as well as those of her coworkers, as they make their way through the sometimes exhilarating, often disturbing world of stripping. This compelling, revealing memoir exposes the reader to that world behind the flashing lights and offers illuminating insights into the reasons women take up this work—and how it affects their identities and lives off the job.In its unstinting honesty, Bare demands that we take a closer look at the way sexuality is viewed in our culture; what, if anything, constitutes "normal" desire; the ethics of swapping money—or anything else—for sex; and how women and men navigate the perilous contradictions and double standards that make up today’s socio-sexual conversation.

Some Girls: My Life in a Harem


Jillian Lauren - 2010
    The casting director told her that a rich businessman in Singapore would pay pretty American girls $20,000 if they stayed for two weeks to spice up his parties. Soon, Jillian was on a plane to Borneo, where she would spend the next eighteen months in the harem of Prince Jefri Bolkiah, youngest brother of the Sultan of Brunei, leaving behind her gritty East Village apartment for a palace with rugs laced with gold and trading her band of artist friends for a coterie of backstabbing beauties.More than just a sexy read set in an exotic land, Some Girls is also the story of how a rebellious teen found herself-and the courage to meet her birth mother and eventually adopt a baby boy.

Camgirl


Isa Mazzei - 2019
    She was also a compulsive seductress with a reputation as a slut and heartbreaker. One day, while working a low-paying retail job, she had a revelation: why not embrace her salacious image and make some money off of it?She began stripping, dancing, masturbating, playing games, making art––and broadcasting it all online for money as a camgirl. In her first month, she racked up hundreds of nightly viewers, and within a year she ranked in the top fifty girls on a site featuring tens of thousands of performers. Over the course of her career, Isa built her own business, explored BDSM, attended a porn convention, slept with a fan, and pushed herself further than she thought possible. And yet, despite her success, she struggled to fit into the community she so desperately wanted to belong to.Camgirl is a relatable look at confronting our past traumas and accepting ourselves for who we are. It masterfully explores the complexities of digital life, sexuality and the tensions between our private and public selves. Mazzei’s biting humor and raw vulnerability ensure you’ll never think about sex work―or sex―the same way again.

How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale


Jenna Jameson - 2004
    With never-before-seen photographs from Jenna's private collection, exclusive photos taken for this book, and original cartoon strips, this memoir is an unparalleled exploration of sexual freedom.

Rent Girl


Michelle Tea - 2004
    A graphic and uncompromising autobiographical bender, the story of Tea's years as a prostitute, with provocative illustrations by Laurenn McCubbin.

Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny


Holly Madison - 2015
    A former girlfriend of Hugh Hefner describes how her years inside the Playboy Mansion went from a fairytale of A-list celebrity parties to an oppressive regime of strict rules, scheduled sex, and a total loss of identity, so much so that she even contemplated suicide.

Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin...Every Inch of It


Brittany Gibbons - 2015
    I hope you buy it—and not just because each purchase gets me one step closer to buying the leather pants of my dreams.I hope you buy Fat Girl Walking because I want to start a conversation. Or continue a conversation, one I inadvertently started a while ago when I took my clothes off on a stage in front of 700 people. A lot of people thought I was awesome for doing that. A lot of others thought a size 18 woman had absolutely no business showing off her body. Unfortunately for them, I've made it my personal mission on my blog, in social media, on television, and now in this amazing book you're holding, to destroy the ridiculous myth that every woman who is overweight hates her body and herself. I, Brittany Gibbons, and the Curvy Girls I speak to every day on the internet, beg to differ. We love our bodies. We love fashion. We are in loving relationships, having lots of sex. We aren't just a fetish, we're normal women. Sure, sometimes we doubt ourselves, we're not robots, but not anymore than EVERY OTHER WOMAN ON THE PLANET. See, Fat Girls aren't freaks of nature. We're just like you. Maybe we are you.Fat Girl Walking is a collection of stories from my life, my thoughts about the issues that I have faced as a woman, wife, mom, daughter, daughter-in-law, and internet personality in regards to my weight. I have tried to be as honest as I possibly could—apologies in advance to my husband and parents, but hopefully any discomfort you feel is quickly replaced by laughter. The insecure texts to my husband and summer camp hijinks are hilarious if I do say so myself. And I also ask some tough questions, things like "What if my husband weighs less than I do?" and "Is my body hate ruining my daughter's life?" Read Fat Girl Walking and let's start having these conversations. No pressure, but we may just save all of womankind.Love,Brittany

A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy Who Joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She is Today


Kate Bornstein - 2012
    A few years later, she stopped calling herself a woman and became famous as a gender outlaw.Kate Bornstein—gender theorist, performance artist, author—is set to change lives with her compelling memoir. Wickedly funny and disarmingly honest, this is Bornstein's most intimate book yet, encompassing her early childhood and adolescence, college at Brown, a life in the theater, three marriages and fatherhood, the Scientology hierarchy, transsexual life, LGBTQ politics, and life on the road as a sought-after speaker.