#Charlotte Shane | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

thoughtportal · 25 days ago

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JAMIE HOOD: Hello!

CHARLOTTE SHANE: Hi! You look gorgeous—make sure to put that in.

HOOD: Oh, I will. An Honest Woman (Simon & Schuster, $26) is a sort of origin story, about the boys you grew up with and the cultural milieu of your youth, as well as an erotic Bildungsroman that eventually traces your history in sex work. I’m curious where you began.

SHANE: I went back to earlier writing and found a lot that surprised me. You learn how unreliable you are as a narrator, even to yourself. The more I looked, the more I realized one story—of how I was this homely teenager with few romantic options—was wrong. I had several boys who confessed their love to me, and this really good-looking boyfriend, but the facts of your life are not always the most important. I was so invested in this idea of being unattractive, I had to live my life that way, to be like, “Any guy who’s interested in me is weird, there’s something really wrong with him.” That feels so feminine: considering yourself from an ambiguous male vantage point. You’re trying to satisfy an ideal, but because it’s not the ideal of a real person, it’s impossible to meet the requirements. You exist in an aspirational state of failure.

HOOD: One of the radical things about your description of the call to sex work is that you went into it, in part, to be legitimated; you wanted your beauty quantified. We’re resistant to discussing how we long for desirability, but actually, everyone likes being desired and expressing that is a deeply beautiful, vulnerable thing. One of the other topics you’re so smart on is the capaciousness of male desire.

SHANE: Men, as individual people, seem so much more forgiving of aesthetic shortcomings, ones I and a lot of women would be less generous about. There’s that cliché: “Would you talk about your friend the way you talk about yourself?” And like, no, I would never talk to anyone the way I talk to myself. People get at this when they discuss how oblivious men are when women wear makeup or have surgery, but men are often culturally coded as stupid in these arenas. I wonder how much it’s that they play stupid to preserve their girlfriends’ egos. I think men are bad at looking at women the way women are taught to look at each other and ourselves. They don’t have the education. Men’s enthusiasm for boobs—like, even if they’re wack implants, most men genuinely aren’t going, “Whoa, you looked jacked up!”

HOOD: They’re like, “The tits are there. Period!”

SHANE: They’re like, “This is the best moment of my life.” And there’s something so pure about that.

HOOD: One reason your work was so exciting to me was that it affirmed my desire for men, even as I was dissatisfied with and wounded by them for many years. You and I share that abiding ache. You approach men, in love and in work, from a place of deep care and openness without it ever seeming like you’ve compromised your integrity.

SHANE: Well, when I think of the times I was most misandrist, the urge came from sincere feelings of disappointment and betrayal. I want to love men, I want to be with men, I want to sleep with men. Like, “Why are you making it so hard? Why does us sleeping together have to take something from me, why must it degrade me? Why can’t you just be considerate?”

HOOD: Yes! My thinking on loving men has evolved so much in the past five years. Before, I wrote about it from this very devotional place that was also self-abnegating and abject, a frame that’s lost its use value for me, partly because I was in a relationship that was great until it wasn’t, but also because of our friendship and your writing, which helped me reimagine desire as something not purely in service of men—desire and pleasure that also serve me, that are mutual.

You write in An Honest Woman of the reactionary sex panics that dominated the 1980s and ’90s, which were in part a response to second-wave feminism. We’re in a deeply conservative sexual moment now, too: I’m thinking of panics around grooming and trafficking, the fall of Roe, anti-trans legislation, and the backlash against #MeToo. Do you feel yourself writing into these ideological enclaves?

SHANE: The ’90s feel really far away, but then Americans—myself included—are so ahistorical. The Monica Lewinsky stuff was crazy fucked up. And Britney being grilled about her virginity! It was a demented time, but that’s the plight of women, always. You have to be this way and the entirely opposite way, too—and both at the same time—or you will face punishment. You need to be a virgin but need to be having sex. You need to look a certain way to have that sex, which should be straight sex. There was the Pamela Anderson tape, and Paris Hilton’s, so you need to be sucking a guy’s dick on camera.

The “pornification” of culture wasn’t about porn stars establishing certain standards; it was that everyone was then expected to engineer themselves for visual and sexual consumption. I had a pretty real-deal eating disorder—I stopped getting my period and everything. The culture paid a lot of lip service to the idea that “We want girls to be healthy, we don’t want you to have an eating disorder,” but just look around! Yes, you do!

HOOD: Anytime low-rise jeans come back, anorexia’s on the menu.

SHANE: Exactly. Look at the clothes, the models, the celebrities. The eating disorder was nonnegotiable. I remember having this conversation with a friend who was hospitalized, and being like, “I’m not going to feel guilty for making myself throw up when this is what I’m told to look like. I’m not going to take shit from adults who tell me this is wrong, because if they have a problem with it, they should be trying to change my environment, not trying to change me.”

HOOD: I’d like to think about narrative conventions in sex work writing. In 3 Conversations, you express reservations about the ending of your earlier book, Prostitute Laundry, because you didn’t want to have written an escort memoir that’s like, “And then I met The Guy, and he saved me, and I left prostitution, and everything was wonderful!” But An Honest Woman also ends with your marriage. Like you, I hold deep distrust for the authorized narrative: I don’t want to let myself do the usual thing. But that’s how my first book ends, too! It’s this narrative of abjection and then I fall in love. What is the fear there?

SHANE: Well, the minute you publicly say, “I’m in love with this person,” you’re thumbing your nose at the gods. You’ve seen it—people we know dedicate a book to somebody and then have a venomous breakup with that person. These are cautionary tales about when you’re too eager for your resolution. But infidelity is also a big part of An Honest Woman: Is sexual monogamy possible? Is it even desirable? That type of sexual humiliation is female, not to say men won’t be hurt if their female partners cheat on them, but for a woman to not be able to keep a man is the ultimate indignity. It’s treated as a fate worse than death: a referendum on you as a woman.

HOOD: We’ve talked a lot about loving men, but I’ve also had our recent conversations on the “heteropessimistic” literary moment in mind, particularly after that takedown in the New Yorker of Sarah Manguso’s divorce novel Liars.

SHANE: The New Inquiry published a good essay about heteropessimism, right?

HOOD: By Asa Seresin, which was where the term was coined, as far as I’m aware.

SHANE: I don’t want to include that essay in my critique, but there’s a posture now that’s like, “I discovered what emotional labor is—it’s cleaning up after my husband!” Or: “I hate men, it’s disgusting that I’m straight. I wish I could go to conversion therapy for straight girls.” By its exaggerated nature, this stance feels insincere, which defangs it. It avoids serious political engagement. The complaints women have about men are usually so valid, but they require a different type of attention.

What feels radical to practitioners of heteropessimism is this freedom to say, “Fuck men—yes, all men!” If you feel a group has treated you as their enemy, there’s something energizing in saying, “No, you’re my enemy, I’m the one who’s done with you, you disgust me.” The appeal is intelligible, but you have to go somewhere with it. Like, OK, now what? Are we resigned to this? Do we have power? If you can’t look at your own participation in a scenario, that’s no critique.

HOOD: Right, there’s a distinction between posting about a shitty date on Twitter and writing a book about divorce, but we use the same critical framework to diagnose these very different objects of inquiry. It’s flattened. Not to say that such books are above critique, but there’s a knee-jerk repudiation of these narratives that dismisses the possibility of a woman’s writing, for example, a vengeance novel. Why can’t Manguso write a bitter, one-sided story? Often, in the end of a relationship, you are only seeing one side. That imbalance is part of the field of curiosity. We aren’t disinterested gods hovering above our relationships—why should our books be?

Not to be the Sarah Manguso Defender, but this happens with women writers all the time. Manguso has, what, ten books? And she writes this one book against this one man and one marriage, and suddenly everyone acts like it’s the only thing she’s ever written! It’s exhausting! How can women talk about disenfranchisement or victimization under patriarchy if anytime the topics surface, you’re dismissed as having wanted those experiences only in order to be able to cry about them. It’s misogyny all the way down.

SHANE: It’s undeniable in the post-#MeToo moment that a woman recounting a difficult experience she’s been through is taken as an aggression, an accusation, and something that merits a social response, as if, implicitly, she’s asking for something from the rest of us and we have to correct her, like, “You are not entitled to what you’re asking for.” There’s no allowance that she just wants to talk about something that happened.

You mentioned ethics before, and of course nobody lives their life alone. Does everyone have the right to talk about what they’ve been through? Or, by virtue of it implicating other people, are we supposed to stay quiet? The people disproportionately expected to bear this burden are women.

HOOD: Right. Our womanhood becomes contingent on us keeping people’s private lives safe. The ethical imperative is always on women, an expectation that isn’t often lobbed against male writers.

SHANE: Men can inflict grave harm, they can wound others in profound ways, without it becoming the unignorable part of their story. Who’s that Supreme Court guy, the drunk one?

JAMIE HOOD: Oh, Kavanaugh?

SHANE: Yes! That was such a stark illustration of something almost every woman—and many men—could recognize: someone can hurt you and instantly forget about it. It doesn’t even matter to men like Kavanaugh.

Women are punished for this imbalance in material ways, as in rape trials. Like, “Brock Turner raped a girl, but it didn’t matter to him, so why would we punish him for it?” My suspicion of these divorce stories, though, is that I want that energy to be directed into something creative rather than merely cathartic. Feminist consciousness-raising was about airing grievances, yes, but women came together to address the structures, systems, and policies architected to keep us in those griefs.

HOOD: I don’t disagree with that at all, and I also think if the ethical imperative is on women, often the political one is as well. Our memoirs have to do something to enact change. Reading Liars made me realize I needed to get out of my relationship. I saw if I married my boyfriend, this would be our marriage. I guess in that sense, the novel did change something.

I want to return to this notion of ethics because I think of you as a profoundly ethical thinker and as someone who—in writing of people who become entangled in your life—always labors to preserve the dignity of others. I’m thinking, too, of how your current newsletter affords you the liberty to write about the genocide of the Palestinian people. This seems an organic pivot in your writerly attentions and of a piece with what you see as the duty of the writer.

SHANE: My life feels like a tug-of-war lately between this bougie, literary existence and something more meaningful. I went to grad school for poetry, and afterward thought, “What the fuck am I doing with my life? This doesn’t matter.” Not to say I think poetry doesn’t matter, full stop. In that moment, it felt negligent to be doing something academic and aesthetic; the world needs concrete action.

The same thing happened with the newsletter: I wrote one or two about books and shifted to genocide. What is our obligation as people living in the world? More and more, I feel this is the type of writing I’m duty bound to produce and share, and it shouldn’t be paywalled. It should be as widely accessible as possible.

The writing that I feel is most important can’t be monetized in any practical way, and, honestly, shouldn’t be. Then I think: how can I make a living while writing, and the answer is sex work. That’s something I’m still trying to figure out. Does it matter if you change someone’s mind? Does it impel them to act? I’ll be wondering for the rest of my life: How do you help a person see something true? How do you get them to live their life as if that thing is true? This is the spiritual inquiry in its purest form—the “how should a person be” question.

We talked about this after Netanyahu addressed Congress—it’s a vital service to just say what’s happening right now, because the number of lies and manipulations taking place every day in language are atrocious. They’re a sin in and of themselves; they camouflage reality. It’s really evil work, but maybe I can play some small part in trying to correct it because it actually does change the world to help another person have some moment of real discovery. That’s no small thing.

Jamie Hood is a poet, critic, and memoirist. She is the author of how to be a good girl, which will be reissued by Vintage next year, and Trauma Plot: A Life, which is forthcoming from Pantheon in March 2025.

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