Pretty Baby

April 11, 2022
In this penetrating debut, professor and former dominatrix Belcher dissects the tensions between sexuality and shame. She traces her relationship with sex, beginning with her adolescence in 1990s Appalachia, where, she writes, “I was masturbating to the alcoholic coach” in A League of Their Own. To Belcher, losing one’s virginity (a mission she completed at age 16) was just another way to vie for power. While lies laid the foundation for her high school days, it wasn’t until she discovered she was hiding behind them—the cheerleading uniform, the sex with boys—that she encountered her true self: a queer young woman who yearned for closeness. As she took ownership of her identity, Belcher formed relationships that would prove pivotal, including a romance with Catherine, a professional dominatrix she met as a broke PhD student in L.A. As she recounts her own foray into pro domme work, she balances the raw and shocking—“I fed dog food... to a man who pouted and begged for more”—with incisive takes on the economics of sex work (“Everyone wants whores to stop whoring, but when they do, they can’t get hired at Starbucks”) and the freedom she found in it. The result is an illuminating personal look at the power and politics of sex.

Starred review from June 1, 2022
A professor of writing and gender studies reflects on the life path that led her into part-time sex work as a professional dominatrix. Belcher grew up in a working-class West Virginia town where secrets--like her queerness--"burn through [the community]...like a match dropped in a dry October cornfield." Aware from age 10 that she was gay, Belcher plunged into adolescence determined to lose her virginity to a boy because she believed "there was some kind of power girls got from fucking." Her social persona as a high school cheerleader seemed to conform to stereotypes of femininity, but Belcher quickly realized that heterosexual sex empowered men rather than women. A college relationship with a bisexual woman inadvertently introduced Belcher to sex work. In the guise of a gay male, the author later enticed a queer man she met online to visit her for a tryst in a campus bathroom, reveling in the pleasure that control over men gave her. Belcher felt the same "rush" several years later in graduate school. A financially strapped humanities doctoral student in Los Angeles, she followed her lesbian lover's lead and became a professional dominatrix. Suddenly, the queerness that had made her feel like an outsider became a source of personal power. "My clientele wanted a woman who would never want them in return," she writes, "and at that, I excelled." But while sex work paid the bills her university work did not, it also left the author vulnerable, not only to expulsion from the "safe" middle-class world of academia, but also to the vagaries of male violence. As it explores issues of class, gender, and sexuality, this refreshingly bold, boundary-breaking book reveals that no matter how formidable a woman is, she is still subject to the ever present threat of patriarchal brutality. "I knew that female supremacy was manufactured in the dungeon," writes Belcher. "Still, when I was in there, it did sometimes feel good to say no." A provocatively lucid, impressively rendered memoir.

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