Sex, stripper heels, lipgloss and cash: the life of a sex worker
Rita Therese’s account of a career in sex work is unapologetic, wry and entertaining — but it’s not without horror.
The cover of the book is scarlet red, the title hot pink. Inside, hot pink. The title is Come. It is written in a fat, fluid 1970s font, something that evokes highway motels and neon lights, girls in denim cut-offs winking over a bar.
On the first page Rita Therese offers a portrait of herself at work, on a jobbing trip to Port Hedland, Western Australia, 2015: make-up arrayed on a shelf, eight-inch stripper heels resting on a case of Diet Coke, ‘‘a hooker still life”.
Her bag, she explains, contains condoms, lube, chewing gum, lighters, a broken cigarette, sticky pink lip-gloss and a thick wad of hundred-dollar notes. She is a sex worker and, we are assured, she will tell us all about it.
We will share the contents of her handbag, survey her kit from pedicure to pout. And then, like Therese’s glamorous work incarnation who goes home tired to pull on the trackpants, that simple story begins to smear and sag as real life emerges and honest skin shows through. Come begins as a saucy beckoning, and finishes as a humble, hushed request, an invitation to lie quietly beside a sensitive woman exhausted by her demons and hoping to share herself with company, not clientele.
The first part of the book, Sex, is exactly what it says on the tin; an unapologetic, bright, wry and entertaining explanation of a profession that involves fornication and a great deal of personal grooming.
Therese works her way through the customary sequence of anecdotes, the array of customers — sympathetic, grotesque, affecting, forgettable — and a haphazard chronology of her progression from topless barmaid, through stripping, porn acting and routine sex work, to high-class escort.
Beginning in the industry at the age of 17, the astute, curious Therese soon grew in confidence, her body’s capacity for charm, her personality’s gift for effort. She tells the story in jumbles: here, at a lunch break on a porn set in a sheep field, eyeing her co-star for an off-camera frolic, undeterred by the afternoon’s toil; there, being tortured by a sadist in a fine hotel as the Dom Perignon chills nearby; pulling herself and her colleague together after a sleepless party night with Bacardi, vodka and espresso before a 10am double booking, making hundreds of dollars then snuggling into bed with some Xanax at lunchtime.
She gives us an hilarious instructive chapter called Whore Beauty: practical, appalling tips on the progressive smudging of makeup over a 10-hour brothel shift (“ … you go back downstairs with your hair sticking out, an eyelash stuck to your cheek and your work wife gives you a look in the mirror as she’s doing her lip liner. ‘Good booking?’ ”), prepping for anal sex, or how to wash expensive lingerie in a rice cooker.
It is unapologetic, amusing, blunt, Therese at her best, confiding and outrageous at the same time. Then it ends with a section that is titled: When a client rapes you.
For of course there is trauma. We say “of course” not because it’s inevitable that a sex worker is abused but because any intimate account of badly regulated physical work is likely to include injury, upset, abuse.
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Therese, an out and proud worker, carefully mediates the political exposure of a sex work memoir that includes distress and rape by deliberately broadening, in the middle section of her account, into her personal life, which holds its own horrors.
She is in her early 20s at this point and she is not untypical of any young woman when she tells of an adoring partner who slowly gaslights her into terrified submission; of family suicides, isolation, drug frazzle, self-starving, nervous collapse.
At work things are more reassuringly controlled and affirming, especially the camaraderie of her colleagues, a second family (“Well, perhaps one of those cult families where nobody’s related and they all have sex with each other,” she deadpans). There is also fright, exhaustion and the simply disgusting.
But it is her boyfriend Todd, not her clientele, who calls her a “f..king whore”. Steadily Therese leads us from the chambers of sexy lamplight to the fluorescent glare of modern young womanhood and its confusions, contusions and courage.
“It’s not my ‘bad’ side, it’s me,” she realises, “a woman with duality but forced to live in the shadows, afraid of what life and my income would be like if I allowed her out.”
Composing and experimenting are a way of life: when not escorting, Melbourne-based Therese is a university student of philosophy, a writer and a collage artist, cutting and reassembling elements.
“I didn’t realise,” she admits, “that this book would become so inward facing.” She is healthy and wise by 25.
“Still a hooker but a good hooker, right?” she writes sardonically towards the end. “It’s ok now, because I’m not a f..k up anymore — and it all ends happily. This is what you wanted, right?”
Sex work is understood to be about wish fulfilment, about pouts and porn and release. But it is really about admission: to the surface of a stranger’s skin, to the inside of their body, to a room where you might take on a new self.
It is about the admission of instinct and desire, and of truths. Rita Therese wears two pairs of false eyelashes, fake tan and elaborate costumes to work: she knows artifice, is not interested in confirming prejudices. Her book is smart, interesting, true and touching: worth the price of admission to her company.
Kate Holden’s books include In My Skin: A Memoir.
Come: A Memoir
By Rita Therese
Allen & Unwin, 246pp, $29.99