Bringing the Body into the Room: A Conversation with Chris Belcher
Chris Belcher | Pretty Baby: A Memoir | Avid Reader Press | 2022 | 272 Pages
In her new memoir, Pretty Baby, Chris Belcher recounts moving from a small town in West Virginia—where her parents worked “in hard hats and steel-toed boots, returning dirty and smelling of chemicals”—to earn her Ph.D. in Los Angeles. She runs up against an obstacle when the university teaching stipend doesn’t cover L.A. rent. Under the tutelage of a self-assured girlfriend, who worked out of a dungeon on “a stretch of Venice Boulevard that had never been in a movie,” Belcher rebrands herself as “L.A.’s Renowned Lesbian Dominatrix.” At night, she learns how to throw a whip, and meets male clients who pay handsomely to be taunted and humiliated by women in latex and heels. Each morning, she washes off her mascara, puts on her blazer, and returns to campus to teach undergrads and mingle with professors who have no knowledge of how she supplements her income.
Pretty Baby is less about the erotic underworld of Los Angeles than it is about academia’s dirty little secret: that higher education is no longer a route to a safe middle-class life. It doesn’t protect you from financial precarity, or the accompanying compromises many urban Americans make to get by. I spoke to Belcher about power, class drag, performing lesbianism for profit, and queer nostalgia.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Sascha Cohen: The media usually treats sex work as either entirely empowering or entirely abject. But as you demonstrate in Pretty Baby, the actual experience of selling a sexual fantasy is a combination of moments that can be positive or negative depending on the encounter and client. Why do you think it’s so hard for people to see the nuance here, to understand that sex workers often feel ambivalent about their labor?
Chris Belcher: I think that ambivalence is part of all forms of work, and all forms of sex. Talking about sex in that way can be difficult, especially if we think about the mainstream, modern iterations of feminism—we want to think about sex as something that's good if it's consensual, and bad if it's not, and let that be the standard bearer. We might think similarly about labor in some senses, although, of course, we're all compelled to do it. But sitting in that ambiguity is difficult. Especially when your work is politicized the way that sex work is, having an easy narrative about it being either positive or abject can be useful for both sides: people who are trying to work toward decriminalization, and people who want to create a situation in which this kind of labor doesn't exist. If you have a clear narrative without the ambiguity, you get a lot further in your demands.
SC: There’s a tendency to assume that sex workers who pursue higher education must be middle-class and don’t actually need the money—the idea that they’re “slumming it” for thrills. But this ignores so many students who come from the working-class. You write that your alternative to college would have been working in a meat-packing facility, and your other options to supplement your grad school stipend were collecting food stamps, doing minimum wage service work, or selling your eggs, because teaching doesn’t actually provide a living wage.
To what extent do you see sex work as a response to a crisis in academic labor? To the reality that, by design, a career in the humanities remains a luxury?
CB: A lot of those stereotypes that say academics who are doing sex work must be slumming it—that itself comes from another stereotype, that anybody pursuing academia, especially in the humanities, must be middle-class. There are people who went to graduate school with me and who were middle or upper middle-class, but I also went to school with many people who were struggling financially. And I didn't have literacy around finances and loans and what it would mean to graduate college and then defer my student loan debt for ten years to pursue graduate school—all of that comes from growing up working-class and being a first-generation student.
There was a time when I was doing sex work where I wasn't actually making more money than I would have made doing a minimum wage job—but the difference was, I was working for a few hours and could dedicate the rest of my time to my academic work. I got myself to a place where I had less to worry about because I could pay my rent. I was never making a killing and rolling in cash, but I was able to pay my phone bill. It came to a point, after being on the job market and adjuncting for a long time, where sex work began to feel like my best option for upward mobility. It surpassed academia as the way I was going to pay off my student loans or ever save any money.
SC: As Mistress Snow wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education, sex work and the “life of the mind” have been understood as inherently opposed and in tension, even though there’s a documented history of writers, intellectuals, and artists working in the sex industry. There’s a sense that women can use either our bodies or our brains to get ahead, but never both. In my experience, this leads to a fragmented identity. I saw Pretty Baby as a way of integrating your experiences.
CB: Snow’s piece is lovely in the way that it brings the body into the room when talking about academia. I remember a time when I was on my way to a study session with a group of other graduate students, and I overdrew my bank account to sit in that room. The idea that you can just be in this space of pure intellectual pursuit, without a body to feed or provide shelter for, that just by pursuing these kinds of degrees, you leave your body behind, is a fiction. And it's a fiction that’s also upheld by this idea that everybody is middle-class or that everybody has a safety net. That's just not the case.
SC: There’s a parallel in the book between your gender drag while Domming (dressing more feminine than you otherwise would) and your class drag in academia (hiding your socioeconomic background). Do you think this is an imperative many working people have, to disguise aspects of ourselves, to put on a performance, so we can meet our material needs? Is there something universal about it? All of us, in some way, putting on a show and having to repress some of our multitudes?
CB: I've realized that, even in the kinds of gender performance that I was doing in the dungeon—and this has shifted a lot as I've gotten more comfortable with my work as a Dominatrix—I didn't have to suppress every bit of myself with every client all the time. But on the other hand, in academia, I really did have to suppress much more. Putting on a performance of class mobility and cultural capital, and suppressing the parts of myself that were informed or changed by sex work.
In the dungeon, I was selling a particular iteration of lesbianism that wasn't necessarily my own authentic sexuality. Rather, it’s a sexuality that is produced by and for the male gaze, which can then be taken up by sex workers as a as a form of power in order to extract money from men. That’s what I was doing. And it did feel to me like, okay, I'm performing lesbianism like in pornography. That's not necessarily something that is ever going to be unmediated. It's a representation that you can repeat for yourself, for your own means.
SC: The perennial question about both BDSM and sex work—which feminists have been wrestling with since the 1980s—is “who really has the power?” The bottom or the top, the worker or the client? You suggest, and I agree, that the person who pays has power over the person who needs the money. But at the same time, there’s a psychological power you touch on, of eliciting and manipulating a man’s deepest desires, which is real too. And there’s a dark flip side to that—the idea that women who “play with fire,” by teasing or arousing men too much, deserve whatever violence those men inflict on us.
CB: In the book, I talk about finding power in the ability to say no. It’s a performance of no, a performance I was being paid for, and it put me in proximity to danger.
The book recounts instances of blackmail, of sexual assault, and of acutely experiencing the danger of proximity to men in sexual scenarios, but those aren't necessarily exclusive to people who do sex work—lots of women who interact with men sexually, they experience things like blackmail, revenge porn, and sexual assault. I think the pleasure I was taking from the performance of saying no was a response to all of those things that piled up, the violence and exploitation. Nobody deserves to experience that kind of danger. But I do think I created some pleasure for myself, and maybe that is a kind of making do. I don't know that these things are actually resolved—in the book, or even in me now.
It’s complicated, in a lot of ways, by sex work being a service. To what extent are feelings of power or pursuit or desire… how can we see them as anything pure, on either the client side or the provider side?
SC: We’re both elder millennials, and one of the joys of the book is the nostalgia for certain queer-girl cultural touchstones, which I think the younger generation who grew up with abundant gay representation in the media may not fully grasp—things like reading feminist magazines at the bookstore, getting an undercut, watching MTV for the sole lesbian on The Real World, and listening to riot grrrl and Ani DiFranco. How has queer culture changed in the past decade? I’m grateful that I no longer have to feel shame about my queer desires, but I also think when a subculture goes mainstream, something is lost.
CB: When I was growing up, it really did feel like any kind of building that I was doing around sexuality and gender, I had to do for myself, and I think that a lot of queer people do, because we don't have a blueprint. We have this opportunity to build our own identities in lots of different ways. During the time that I grew up, that was kind of scattershot—you got a little bit here and there and you could kind of put it together. And now, everything is in the palm of your hand.
I formed a lot of my ideas about sex and gender in a proto-internet time, pre social media. Now, kids have access to their culture all around them, and they're shaped by it, especially in online spaces. One big difference that younger folks who are reading the book would probably notice is that a lot of my queer subject formation was happening in places they might consider dangerous—queer bars, or meeting people online from gay.com. Now I think there is so much emphasis on safety in queer life, in creating safe spaces, whereas folks who are late millennials might have formed who they are in ways that seem dangerous.
SC: Sometimes I think it was more exciting back then.
CB: I mean, that's what danger is, right? It can create a real sort of sexy anxiety. Knowing that people are going to protect your space and your identity can have a sanitizing function. Obviously, I don't want people to have to experience the homophobia that I experienced, and I'm hopeful that kids who are growing up today have less of that, but there are trade-offs that probably make Gen Z queer kids a bit different than we were.
SC: The title of the book, Pretty Baby, refers to an infant beauty contest you won in West Virginia. I wonder if you were also thinking about the 1978 Brooke Shields movie of the same name, which takes place in a New Orleans brothel.
CB: When we settled on the book title, I was aware of the movie, but I hadn't watched it yet. And then I watched it and thought, “yeah, I'm okay with this!” Here is this young girl who is being thrown into danger in all different kinds of situations, right? And the danger doesn't come with sex work in the film or in my book. The danger just comes with being a girl child in America.
SC: You close the book with an anecdote about a student who confesses to you, in a paper, that she does sex work to afford school, and at that moment you felt like you couldn’t be totally honest with her about your own experience. What are your thoughts, now, on lingering stigma towards sex work? It’s become much more visible because there are so many downwardly mobile young people and no social safety net in America. But there’s also a clear backlash to this, between laws like FOSTA/SESTA and what some have called the “end of sex positivity.” Where do you think the culture is headed in this area?
CB: For younger people who have grown up with porn as sex education, who are having unsatisfying or even coercive heterosexual sex, there has been some backlash against the "sex positivity" that was part of my generation's feminism. Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex has a fantastic essay about talking to students about porn, and realizing that many of them find porn to be a source of violence, or at very least a roadblock to their own sexual comings of age. But at the same time, I think younger people today have a real sense of material circumstance and downward mobility, and an understanding of porn and sex work as work. I think, even without having written the book, I would be more willing to talk with students about my experiences in sex work today than I was in 2016, which is when that particular student was in my classroom. The stigma lingers, but the realities of late capitalism are more pressing, and young people see that.
Chris Belcher is a writer, professor, and former sex worker. She completed a PhD in English at the University of Southern California, where she is now assistant professor of writing and gender studies. Under her working name, Natalie West, she edited the acclaimed anthology We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival. Born and raised in West Virginia, she now lives in Los Angeles.