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A review by lpm100
Whore of New York: A Confession by Liara Roux
2.0
Book Review
"Whore of New York"
2/5 stars
A well-off Sparkling White Girl monetizes her "oppression" and "trauma"
∆∆∆∆∆∆∆
This book is interesting to read because of the novelty of an autobiography of an autistic sex worker-- although it has lots of resonances to a similar book I've read--Karley Sciortino's "Slutever, " (For for the record, it's also about a well-off white lady from upstate New York who grows up in a stable upper middle class home and starts hooking out of some sense of acedia.)
On the one hand, there is so much here that just doesn't go together-- in the factual sense.
1. The author is learning C++ in second grade and knows all about Quantum Mechanics (and that's a word that a lot of people like Deepak Chopra like to use because it sounds so cool--even if they don't have the faintest idea what it means) but then, her mother asks her to make a doctor's appointment for a neurologist and she didn't know how. (p.42).
2. The author claims to have Ehlers Danlos syndrome (p.110). But that is a disease where one might wake up with several joints dislocated in the morning. (Lots of YouTube videos about this.)
So, with the author and her line of work..... Could she really survive being pumped so vigorously /so many times a day without multiple dislocations?
Also, there is not one single sentence that describes how that disease effects her day-to-day life.
3. Roux talks about any number of men that she met who were stupid. But then......her own WIFE pimped her out for three to four bookings a day (the author says she would sometimes have to put ice on her *beep* by the end of the day) so that her wife could get money to pay for a house that was not in Roux's own name.
And by the end of this marriage, her Wife Pimp had spent every single penny that she had made.
So, if these guys were stupid......what does/did that make her?
4. The author talks about sex with her wife being painful all the way through the book. But, for somebody who gets pumped by three or four people per day, what could another lady possibly do that could top that?
*******
On the other hand, a great deal doesn't go together in the conceptual sense.
1. The author also seems to be from a very wealthy family, and she has the emotional anguish the only Wealthy White People With No Challenges have. (Her father tickled her too much once and it caused her childhood trauma. Umm, Okay.)
2. There's also a lot of whining about rules (p.52, "puritanical").
But then, if this author had had a life organized by rules....... would things have been easier because she didn't have to waste the time to figure them out? (Hoffer: "The Orthodox Jew is less frustrated than the emancipated Jew. The segregated Negro in the South is less frustrated than the nonsegregated Negro in the North.")
And if things like homeowners associations and professional standards are such stifling rules, why not just pick up and move to Haiti?
As it happens, people find themselves all the time and in large numbers without going through LSD trips (p. 80) and an "abusive" wife.
3. There is hinted sexual abuse (p.108), but with the author's melodramatic tone..... that could be something as simple as being swatted on the butt by her father.
4. Lots of masochistic personal tendencies (that seems to be a common thing with sex workers that have pimps), but then she only plays the role of dominant?
But in this case, her pimp was her wife?
And only became her wife as the relationship started to go downhill? (p. 142)
5. Could she ever get laid enough? (It has been said that "You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.")
-Painful sex with her wife.
-Any number of girlfriends/orgies on the side (most of whom were also sex workers).
-Then getting fingered on a dance floor in a club? (p.171).
ALL THIS after three or four bookings some days, where she needed to ice down her *beep* afterward.
I would say that the only thing that makes sense in this book both conceptually and empirically is that the author envisions herself a therapist for her clients--and it is well known that people who can't solve their own problems set about the business of solving the problems of others. (She was at the therapist's office almost every 10th page of this book.)
*******
Take away messages:
1. Even if you do everything right and provide your kids every advantage, sometimes they just turn out wrong.
2. Everything in proportion, and nothing in excess.
If you are too strict with your kids, they might end up as sex workers.
Too domineering OR too lax, and they might go on an extended journey to "find themselves"--often as fodder for someone else's mass movement.
3. It's not always the worst idea to have a plan for life.
Asian Indians and Orthodox Jews (among many others) have been getting married in the same clockwork like way for thousands of years and I'd be willing to bet that the amount of relationship sturm und drung in this book is more than all of theirs combined.
4. When people can't get their act together, it seems like *everybody else* in the world has to be wrong. (Capitalism. The patriarchy. The white male power structure. Parents. Christianity.)
5. Religious people don't stop being religious. They just take on ideas with the same mental architecture, but different specific symbols. (p.208).
How else to explain the author's interest in the occult?
*******
There are some number of Academic/Kooky White People ideas in here that are not unknown to this reviewer--but unexpected in the book on sex work.
1. Rehashed Marxism. (p. 83) "exploitation"/ "extracted value."
2. Lots of references to "the patriarchy."
3. By page 163, Roux is off into Lilith/Ishtar, an ancient Sumerian goddess of war and pleasure. (It seems that a lot of sex workers worship this deity.) There is even mixing of Lilith with Zodiac signs and Greek mythology.
Of course, she only found this out when somebody who was studying to be an astrologer told her during a reading.
On p.203, she has asked her tarot cards to tell her what she needed to write about in this book. (People who are bright enough to learn C++ before 10 years old would be expected to be bright enough to never give money to an astrologer, nor spend a single penny on tarot cards.)
4. The back cover of the book describes "critiquing capitalism's mechanisms of exploitation, the conservatism of Western medicine, and the politics surrounding sex work." (Roux is able to have freedom of choice because people are willing to pay for her services, and yet this book has an issue with that. Such profound irony.)
I can't remember exactly how many times I read the phrase "White privilege" in this book.
But, a cute Sparkling White Girl with a nice face/magnificent bush (like Roux) can make an entire living capitalizing on that/self victimization and be taken very seriously--in spite of not really having that much to say.
And then complain about it.
Meanwhile, I have never met a single black woman who was able to do anything even remotely close to what this author did. (And nice looking though she may be: Roux ain't got *nothin'* on Heather Hunter, let me tell you.)
5. On the very last page, the label says that it wants to offer people an escape from Capitalist Realism by selling them books.
*******
Of the book:
1. No references
And that would have been helpful for us to look up her shaky claims that "whenever States passed no fault divorce laws the homicide rate against women dropped dramatically"(p.194)
I looked up several studies and found that female suicide rates dropped back 20%, but there was no quantified effect on the homicide rate.
2. Quoted Neill Strauss' "The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists" ("neg," p.73).
3. 210 pages. It is written in the style of Blaise Pascal's "Pensees"
4. An easy read of a couple of afternoons.
5. I have read three books like this, and this is the least good of the three.
"Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl">"Slutever">"Whore of New York"
Verdict: Not recommended.
New words:
Grimoire
Succubus
"Whore of New York"
2/5 stars
A well-off Sparkling White Girl monetizes her "oppression" and "trauma"
∆∆∆∆∆∆∆
This book is interesting to read because of the novelty of an autobiography of an autistic sex worker-- although it has lots of resonances to a similar book I've read--Karley Sciortino's "Slutever, " (For for the record, it's also about a well-off white lady from upstate New York who grows up in a stable upper middle class home and starts hooking out of some sense of acedia.)
On the one hand, there is so much here that just doesn't go together-- in the factual sense.
1. The author is learning C++ in second grade and knows all about Quantum Mechanics (and that's a word that a lot of people like Deepak Chopra like to use because it sounds so cool--even if they don't have the faintest idea what it means) but then, her mother asks her to make a doctor's appointment for a neurologist and she didn't know how. (p.42).
2. The author claims to have Ehlers Danlos syndrome (p.110). But that is a disease where one might wake up with several joints dislocated in the morning. (Lots of YouTube videos about this.)
So, with the author and her line of work..... Could she really survive being pumped so vigorously /so many times a day without multiple dislocations?
Also, there is not one single sentence that describes how that disease effects her day-to-day life.
3. Roux talks about any number of men that she met who were stupid. But then......her own WIFE pimped her out for three to four bookings a day (the author says she would sometimes have to put ice on her *beep* by the end of the day) so that her wife could get money to pay for a house that was not in Roux's own name.
And by the end of this marriage, her Wife Pimp had spent every single penny that she had made.
So, if these guys were stupid......what does/did that make her?
4. The author talks about sex with her wife being painful all the way through the book. But, for somebody who gets pumped by three or four people per day, what could another lady possibly do that could top that?
*******
On the other hand, a great deal doesn't go together in the conceptual sense.
1. The author also seems to be from a very wealthy family, and she has the emotional anguish the only Wealthy White People With No Challenges have. (Her father tickled her too much once and it caused her childhood trauma. Umm, Okay.)
2. There's also a lot of whining about rules (p.52, "puritanical").
But then, if this author had had a life organized by rules....... would things have been easier because she didn't have to waste the time to figure them out? (Hoffer: "The Orthodox Jew is less frustrated than the emancipated Jew. The segregated Negro in the South is less frustrated than the nonsegregated Negro in the North.")
And if things like homeowners associations and professional standards are such stifling rules, why not just pick up and move to Haiti?
As it happens, people find themselves all the time and in large numbers without going through LSD trips (p. 80) and an "abusive" wife.
3. There is hinted sexual abuse (p.108), but with the author's melodramatic tone..... that could be something as simple as being swatted on the butt by her father.
4. Lots of masochistic personal tendencies (that seems to be a common thing with sex workers that have pimps), but then she only plays the role of dominant?
But in this case, her pimp was her wife?
And only became her wife as the relationship started to go downhill? (p. 142)
5. Could she ever get laid enough? (It has been said that "You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.")
-Painful sex with her wife.
-Any number of girlfriends/orgies on the side (most of whom were also sex workers).
-Then getting fingered on a dance floor in a club? (p.171).
ALL THIS after three or four bookings some days, where she needed to ice down her *beep* afterward.
I would say that the only thing that makes sense in this book both conceptually and empirically is that the author envisions herself a therapist for her clients--and it is well known that people who can't solve their own problems set about the business of solving the problems of others. (She was at the therapist's office almost every 10th page of this book.)
*******
Take away messages:
1. Even if you do everything right and provide your kids every advantage, sometimes they just turn out wrong.
2. Everything in proportion, and nothing in excess.
If you are too strict with your kids, they might end up as sex workers.
Too domineering OR too lax, and they might go on an extended journey to "find themselves"--often as fodder for someone else's mass movement.
3. It's not always the worst idea to have a plan for life.
Asian Indians and Orthodox Jews (among many others) have been getting married in the same clockwork like way for thousands of years and I'd be willing to bet that the amount of relationship sturm und drung in this book is more than all of theirs combined.
4. When people can't get their act together, it seems like *everybody else* in the world has to be wrong. (Capitalism. The patriarchy. The white male power structure. Parents. Christianity.)
5. Religious people don't stop being religious. They just take on ideas with the same mental architecture, but different specific symbols. (p.208).
How else to explain the author's interest in the occult?
*******
There are some number of Academic/Kooky White People ideas in here that are not unknown to this reviewer--but unexpected in the book on sex work.
1. Rehashed Marxism. (p. 83) "exploitation"/ "extracted value."
2. Lots of references to "the patriarchy."
3. By page 163, Roux is off into Lilith/Ishtar, an ancient Sumerian goddess of war and pleasure. (It seems that a lot of sex workers worship this deity.) There is even mixing of Lilith with Zodiac signs and Greek mythology.
Of course, she only found this out when somebody who was studying to be an astrologer told her during a reading.
On p.203, she has asked her tarot cards to tell her what she needed to write about in this book. (People who are bright enough to learn C++ before 10 years old would be expected to be bright enough to never give money to an astrologer, nor spend a single penny on tarot cards.)
4. The back cover of the book describes "critiquing capitalism's mechanisms of exploitation, the conservatism of Western medicine, and the politics surrounding sex work." (Roux is able to have freedom of choice because people are willing to pay for her services, and yet this book has an issue with that. Such profound irony.)
I can't remember exactly how many times I read the phrase "White privilege" in this book.
But, a cute Sparkling White Girl with a nice face/magnificent bush (like Roux) can make an entire living capitalizing on that/self victimization and be taken very seriously--in spite of not really having that much to say.
And then complain about it.
Meanwhile, I have never met a single black woman who was able to do anything even remotely close to what this author did. (And nice looking though she may be: Roux ain't got *nothin'* on Heather Hunter, let me tell you.)
5. On the very last page, the label says that it wants to offer people an escape from Capitalist Realism by selling them books.
*******
Of the book:
1. No references
And that would have been helpful for us to look up her shaky claims that "whenever States passed no fault divorce laws the homicide rate against women dropped dramatically"(p.194)
I looked up several studies and found that female suicide rates dropped back 20%, but there was no quantified effect on the homicide rate.
2. Quoted Neill Strauss' "The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists" ("neg," p.73).
3. 210 pages. It is written in the style of Blaise Pascal's "Pensees"
4. An easy read of a couple of afternoons.
5. I have read three books like this, and this is the least good of the three.
"Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl">"Slutever">"Whore of New York"
Verdict: Not recommended.
New words:
Grimoire
Succubus