Paying for it : : a Comic-Strip Memoir About Being a John

Locations
Call Number: Adult Graphic Novel / Brown, Chester
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 1st Floor 4-week checkout	Adult Graphic Novel / Brown, Chester	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 1st Floor 4-week checkout	Adult Graphic Novel / Brown, Chester	4-week checkout	Due 05-02-2024

"Brown calmly lays out the facts of how he became not only a willing participant in but also a vocal proponent of one of the world's most hot-button topics--prostitution. Paying For It offers an entirely contemporary exploration of sex work--from the timid john who rides his bike to meet his escorts, wonders how to tip so as not to offend, and reads Dan Savage for advice, to the modern-day transactions complete with online reviews, seemingly willing participants, and clean apartments devoid of cliches street corners, drugs, or primps" -- from publisher's web site.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Bland submitted by jaegerla on June 29, 2011, 8:29am This book has three strikes against it:

Strike #1: The drawings barely rank above stick figures.
Strike #2: It could have been about 150 pages shorter than it was. There was no need for 250 pages of a bland guy and his blandly drawn sex acts .
Strike #3: The "appendix" at the end of the book is an exaggeratedly rosy view of prostitution. Brown attempts to dismantle feminist arguments against prostitution with nothing more than his personal opinions. He has no statistics or studies to back up any of his defenses. He also envisions a world where all women prostitute themselves for extra income and all men are comfortable with this. But what the hey. If the women of the future are all expected to prostitute themselves then all men should be expected to prostitute themselves, too. Let's be fair about this.

The one thing I can say that was a positive about this pile of crud was his argument about decriminalization vs. legalisation of prostitution.

good submitted by Navox360 on August 8, 2011, 6:46pm good

Ugh, skip it submitted by bfields on June 26, 2020, 12:01pm I wanted to throw this book across the room multiple times while reading it.

I'm inclined to be sympathetic to the idea of prostitution legalization. But he's just throwing in every bad argument he can think of and hoping something will stick. There's no acknowledgement that there might be tradeoffs, and almost no real world data of any kind.

In the main story he makes a decision to give no details about the women, supposedly to protect them. Maybe that's necessary, I don't know. But it's just another thing making the whole thing feel like some sort of boring philosophical exercise with no grounding in reality.