“I decided that if I was going to be identified with my sordid professional past, I would be compensated accordingly. And so in the fall of 2014, after years of hiding my forays into the adult industry, I nonchalantly mentioned my stripping job in an essay. It would be the first of many stories in which I would insert a moderately titillating but wholly unnecessary fact about my time doing sex work because, as it turns out, the perceived humiliation of a woman combined with the erotically charged emotions of men is where profitability reaches its disappointing apex for young female writers. In any case, the first essay fortunately attracted the attention of a literary agent with no predilections for the vulgar. Her initial email included the line, ‘I’m very interested in books that examine the modern female experience, and the female perspective of fresh, exciting, subversive moments of culture, history, or craft.’ I replied that I had interest in 'a number of topics pertaining to lived female experience’ that I would like to discuss. I did not mention that the particular lived female experience I wanted to write about was being afraid I was going to die at the hands of a man.”
- alanamassey on documenting the aggressions of men