Working Girl

June 5, 2023
Performance artist Giovannitti’s incisive debut memoir explores the intersection of art and sex work, and builds a case for destigmatizing the latter. “In the beginning of my working life, I felt that I wanted to find a patron, not a client, and I wanted to sell a performance, not sex,” Giovannitti writes. Those ideals became complicated, though, as she started to observe the overlap between the two pursuits. After her first solo sex work negotiation, Giovannitti returned home and cried over “moving from girl to prostitute.” But what is prostitution, she asks, and considers whether selling creative works, with their own investment of time, authenticity, and intimacy, is also a form of prostitution. “Just as prostitution is the oldest profession, this is the oldest metaphor,” she writes of the links between sex and art. Giovannitti uses both her own art and the art of others, including digital artist Shawné Michaele Holloway, to bolster her analyses: “Enduring a man’s efforts to push my boundaries is commonplace and boring... but taking pains to find such violations interesting gives us a way to live with them more easily. The same is true of confessional writing,” she muses. Giovannitti’s plainspoken explorations of controversial topics are sharp and stirring, and her provocative observations will prompt debate. This deserves to be grappled with.