Working Sex

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. (Nov.)