The world's of sexuality, lapdancing and nightlife - the Holy Trinity of Hedonism - have inspired many books, plotlines and characters.
From the Belle de Jour of Luis Brunel's masterpiece to the Belle de Jour behind Dr. Brooke Magnanti.
From Gypsy Rose Lee to Diablo Cody.
The heavies in Scarface to the Mitchell Brothers in Eastender's.
I'm constantly reading and reviewing books on prostitution, lapdancing memoirs, tales on fallen women, tips for strippers - the list is endless. But I haven't found a comprehensive review site dedicated to these sexuality books, so I have decided to review as many as I can and share my thoughts on these books.
Because I'm a good little girl, I've also provided Amazon links for each novel, so if you would like to read a book or two on what stripping life is like, or how it feels to be a call girl, please feel free to clink on the links and buy a copy. You gotta support my fellow sisters and I!!!
You can click on the links below or continue scrolling down to read all the reviews one after the other.
'The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl' by Belle de Jour aka Dr. Brooke Magnanti.
Without a doubt Belle is a fantastic diarist, and one of my blogging hero's. In many ways she inspired me to start this blog as "Sassy Lapdancer", but not as a carrion call to 'look at me'! I'm inspired by her emotional honesty, and it really comes across in , which was her first book, evolving from her popular and award-winning blog that became the book; The Intimate Adventures Of A London Call Girl
As well as delving into explicit and intimate detail about her client's sexual peccadilloes, and the processes involved in getting ready for and meeting clients as a call girl in London, she writes about her love and home life. You feel sympathy for this woman, who often feels alone and alienated in the bustling strangeness of big city London. That she commits such intimate acts - perversions, blowjobs, girlfriend experiences, plus a whole host of sexual tricks, played out in various hotel rooms - but cannot find peace and love in her normal life - is a fantastic tale.
It's chock-full of very funny writing, done in a tongue-in-cheek way. It's a gripping series of anecdotes, which can make the narrative jump about a bit, but doesn't take from it's charm. She is extremely frank when describing sex and fantasies, but you are just as likely to laugh as to blush.
It's a great starter book for any erotic confessional collection.
The second book in the series The Further Adventures Of A London Call Girl (TV Tie in)
continues in the same 'year in the life of...' vein, and see's a few of her boyfriends from the first book pop back into her life. I must admit that for a girl who deals with sex everyday, she also has a pretty raunchy stable of boyfriends, but then I guess I do too, if you condensed a whole years worth of sex into a novel.
There was also a FANTASTIC and highly addictive TV series and you can grab the DVD's here; Secret Diary of a Call Girl - Series 1-4 Complete [DVD]
If you want a great box set to while away a rainy weekend (happens a lot in London), I'd get one sent over straightaway. It's like all the sexy bits of Sex & the City set in London, and has fabulous fashion to boot!
'Stripped; A Life of Strip and Tease in Clubland' by Samantha Bailey.
A memoir that runs the full life cycle of lapdancing. Samantha Bailey began as a champagne hostess and lapdancer in Denmark when she was only a sweetfaced 17 year old from Essex, then returned to the UK and worked in a succession of lapdancing clubs, first as a stripper, then as a house mum. Unfortunately for the gossip mongerers she doesn't explicitly name any clubs other than Stringfellows, but I reckon I can recognise a few of the places - and people - she mentions. Keeping my lips sealed for now tho!
Seeing as we both write about the same territory, I was suprised to see that the experiences which stick out in my mind are completely different. She talks about money and gangsters on almost every page, which could make some readers lose sympathy for the protagonist. You see her naievity in the industry gradually dissapate, and replaced by a steely determination to get on top of her game. However, over the ten year period, the game is changing - more clubs are opening up, stealing business, and a new breed of stripper, who will do anything for money, from dirty dancing to prostitution, emerge. At first Sam combats this ill tide by switching clubs, but she feels that she cannot cope as the guareenteed money begins to dry up. And Jesus, did this girl earn some money!!! She had a flotilla of regulars, guareenteeing several grand a week, and commission was so low in the beginning that it was practically non-existent. Eventually though, the commission and house fees begin to increase, as the clubs realised that they can make money off the dancers as well as the customers. She thinks she has a fresh start when she becomes a housemother, but the club, codenamed 'Liberty Steel', is taken over by a bunch of Americans who sound like a mealy-mouthed, hard-nosed contingent who make her life difficult. She eventually quits in glorious fashion, presumably to go off and write this tell-all memoir - Stripped: A Life of Strip and Tease in Clubland
My favourite chapter explored the different types of customers; 'The Virgin', 'Mr Trapped', and hilariously 'The Homosocials'. All in all, she divided the guys into six different personality and spending types, (see my stripclub stereotypes series for more in a similar vein), and I felt that she summed up the men really well. The Homosocials are described as men who come into impress other men ie: their clients. Or as she brilliantly puts it "It's a bizarre variation of the 'see how big my dick is' contest that men play all the time."
Stripped: A Life of Strip and Tease in Clubland has only just come out last week, and it's doing really well in the charts, so I encourage you to click on the link and grab a copy before they all sell out. Perfect holiday reading for when summer arrives!
'Glass Geishas' by Susanna Quinn
Glass Geishas - what a fantastic title.
Geisha are of course the traditional Japanese entertainers, all thick black laquered hair, ivory skin and brightly coloured kimono's, that are a symbol of Japan - and Japanese beauty. But the Glass Geisha in the title are not the precise and careful beauties with many years of training pouring cups of tea. The Glass Geisha are the wild and crazy hostesses who pour the whisky and keep the salarymen 'genki' (happy) whilst downing glasses full of spirits and mixers that they earn £3.50 comms each on.
How do I know?
Because I was a Roppongi girl once.
I went on dohans, got kickbacks from champagne bars, survived on a diet of booze, strong charcoal cigarettes, sushi and drugs supplied by the club's shadiest customers for a few months in Roppongi, Tokyo's infamous entertainment district. Like so many other Western girls, we bought a one way ticket and worked through our tourist visa, six days a week, living in cramped accommodation that the locals dubbed 'Pussy Plaza'.
It was awful yet fantastic, but I wouldn't do it again, so I pushed the experience to the back of my mind, not wanting to relive memories which are at times painful and leave me disgusted by the life my naive young self fell into.
Forgotten - until Glass Geishas came along.
I loved reading this book. The pages flowed like the drinks in the book - page after page just turning through my fingers. I got it from the book launch, where I was lucky enough to meet the lovely author Susanna Quinn herself, and that was on a Thursday before I went to work at my club nearby. I started Glass Geishas on my journey home at 5am, and was still reading it in bed as the sun came up. The images of rain soaked narrow streets and neon lights were too much for me, so I poured myself a gin. And then another. And I laughed and cried and drank more gin until I passed out.
(I'm not recommending that you attempt to read it in this fashion, but it is fun. Especially if you drink every time they say 'champagne', 'knocked back', 'little glasses of vodka tonic' etc.)
Now for the average reader - girls, you are going to love this book. It's got a cracking storyline and fantastically detailed description of the strange happenings and secretive world of Tokyo. Everyone is half-crazy, the industry has turned them into complete alcoholics, and no-one tells the whole story, if they get past lying through their teeth in the first place.
It's written from three points of view - a new girl called Stephanie who is desperate for what she has been told is 'quick and easy' money by her old schoolfriends who are living it up there already - but Julia is distant and weird whilst the other, Annabel, has plum disappeared off the face of the earth, leaving only a diary behind.
The second narrative is based on a cranky Japanese House Mum 'Mama San' who is telling her life story to a Western journo. She comes out with some real filth on Japanese perversions (actually, the book opens with a shady Rophynol scene, and that's tame compared to what happen's later.)
The third is a string of emails from a hostess who has been there for some time. I must admit I didn't get this - I thought it clunky and unnecessary, as it was mainly some girl being insecure and moaning about how it was all going downhill. I suppose that it was included to serve as a reminder of how the hostess industry could really mess with some girls psyches, but then I was half a bottle of gin down at the time and certainly didn't need any reminder of how within a few months I was a shaking alcoholic letting myself get felt up for fifty bucks a song.
Cleverly, this book is not a memoir. It's a novel. It has a proper story , with an intriguing beginning, an exciting middle, and a slightly rushed and very neat ending where everything falls into place - hurrah! In short, the perfect summertime read. Out of all the books on the entertainment and sex industries that I have read and reviewed, this is one of the freshest and original, and I hope it marks a turn in the tide of the neverending stream of memoirs and now-I've-left-the-industry biographies which is the normal publishing format.
Go buy it. Glass Geishas ; 356 pages with a gin chaser. Lovely.
From the Belle de Jour of Luis Brunel's masterpiece to the Belle de Jour behind Dr. Brooke Magnanti.
From Gypsy Rose Lee to Diablo Cody.
The heavies in Scarface to the Mitchell Brothers in Eastender's.
I'm constantly reading and reviewing books on prostitution, lapdancing memoirs, tales on fallen women, tips for strippers - the list is endless. But I haven't found a comprehensive review site dedicated to these sexuality books, so I have decided to review as many as I can and share my thoughts on these books.
Because I'm a good little girl, I've also provided Amazon links for each novel, so if you would like to read a book or two on what stripping life is like, or how it feels to be a call girl, please feel free to clink on the links and buy a copy. You gotta support my fellow sisters and I!!!
You can click on the links below or continue scrolling down to read all the reviews one after the other.
- 'The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl' by Belle de Jour aka Dr. Brooke Magnanti. Reviewed here
- 'The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl' by Belle de Jour aka Dr. Brooke Magnanti. Reviewed here
- Stripped: A Life of Strip and Tease in Clubland
- Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper
by Diablo Cody.
- Stripping Down
by Sheila Hageman (she wrote an inspirational guest post here)
- Girl in High Heels: Intimate Confessions of a London Stripper
by Ellouise Moore.
- Girl with a One-Track Mind: Confessions of the Seductress Next Door
by Abby Lee.
- Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl
by Tracy Quan.
- Glass Geishas
'The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl' by Belle de Jour aka Dr. Brooke Magnanti.
by Sheila HagemanWithout a doubt Belle is a fantastic diarist, and one of my blogging hero's. In many ways she inspired me to start this blog as "Sassy Lapdancer", but not as a carrion call to 'look at me'! I'm inspired by her emotional honesty, and it really comes across in , which was her first book, evolving from her popular and award-winning blog that became the book; The Intimate Adventures Of A London Call Girl
As well as delving into explicit and intimate detail about her client's sexual peccadilloes, and the processes involved in getting ready for and meeting clients as a call girl in London, she writes about her love and home life. You feel sympathy for this woman, who often feels alone and alienated in the bustling strangeness of big city London. That she commits such intimate acts - perversions, blowjobs, girlfriend experiences, plus a whole host of sexual tricks, played out in various hotel rooms - but cannot find peace and love in her normal life - is a fantastic tale.
It's chock-full of very funny writing, done in a tongue-in-cheek way. It's a gripping series of anecdotes, which can make the narrative jump about a bit, but doesn't take from it's charm. She is extremely frank when describing sex and fantasies, but you are just as likely to laugh as to blush.
It's a great starter book for any erotic confessional collection.
The second book in the series The Further Adventures Of A London Call Girl (TV Tie in)
continues in the same 'year in the life of...' vein, and see's a few of her boyfriends from the first book pop back into her life. I must admit that for a girl who deals with sex everyday, she also has a pretty raunchy stable of boyfriends, but then I guess I do too, if you condensed a whole years worth of sex into a novel.There was also a FANTASTIC and highly addictive TV series and you can grab the DVD's here; Secret Diary of a Call Girl - Series 1-4 Complete [DVD]
If you want a great box set to while away a rainy weekend (happens a lot in London), I'd get one sent over straightaway. It's like all the sexy bits of Sex & the City set in London, and has fabulous fashion to boot!'Stripped; A Life of Strip and Tease in Clubland' by Samantha Bailey.
A memoir that runs the full life cycle of lapdancing. Samantha Bailey began as a champagne hostess and lapdancer in Denmark when she was only a sweetfaced 17 year old from Essex, then returned to the UK and worked in a succession of lapdancing clubs, first as a stripper, then as a house mum. Unfortunately for the gossip mongerers she doesn't explicitly name any clubs other than Stringfellows, but I reckon I can recognise a few of the places - and people - she mentions. Keeping my lips sealed for now tho!
Seeing as we both write about the same territory, I was suprised to see that the experiences which stick out in my mind are completely different. She talks about money and gangsters on almost every page, which could make some readers lose sympathy for the protagonist. You see her naievity in the industry gradually dissapate, and replaced by a steely determination to get on top of her game. However, over the ten year period, the game is changing - more clubs are opening up, stealing business, and a new breed of stripper, who will do anything for money, from dirty dancing to prostitution, emerge. At first Sam combats this ill tide by switching clubs, but she feels that she cannot cope as the guareenteed money begins to dry up. And Jesus, did this girl earn some money!!! She had a flotilla of regulars, guareenteeing several grand a week, and commission was so low in the beginning that it was practically non-existent. Eventually though, the commission and house fees begin to increase, as the clubs realised that they can make money off the dancers as well as the customers. She thinks she has a fresh start when she becomes a housemother, but the club, codenamed 'Liberty Steel', is taken over by a bunch of Americans who sound like a mealy-mouthed, hard-nosed contingent who make her life difficult. She eventually quits in glorious fashion, presumably to go off and write this tell-all memoir - Stripped: A Life of Strip and Tease in Clubland
My favourite chapter explored the different types of customers; 'The Virgin', 'Mr Trapped', and hilariously 'The Homosocials'. All in all, she divided the guys into six different personality and spending types, (see my stripclub stereotypes series for more in a similar vein), and I felt that she summed up the men really well. The Homosocials are described as men who come into impress other men ie: their clients. Or as she brilliantly puts it "It's a bizarre variation of the 'see how big my dick is' contest that men play all the time."
Stripped: A Life of Strip and Tease in Clubland
has only just come out last week, and it's doing really well in the charts, so I encourage you to click on the link and grab a copy before they all sell out. Perfect holiday reading for when summer arrives!'Glass Geishas' by Susanna Quinn
Glass Geishas
- what a fantastic title.Geisha are of course the traditional Japanese entertainers, all thick black laquered hair, ivory skin and brightly coloured kimono's, that are a symbol of Japan - and Japanese beauty. But the Glass Geisha in the title are not the precise and careful beauties with many years of training pouring cups of tea. The Glass Geisha are the wild and crazy hostesses who pour the whisky and keep the salarymen 'genki' (happy) whilst downing glasses full of spirits and mixers that they earn £3.50 comms each on.
How do I know?
Because I was a Roppongi girl once.
I went on dohans, got kickbacks from champagne bars, survived on a diet of booze, strong charcoal cigarettes, sushi and drugs supplied by the club's shadiest customers for a few months in Roppongi, Tokyo's infamous entertainment district. Like so many other Western girls, we bought a one way ticket and worked through our tourist visa, six days a week, living in cramped accommodation that the locals dubbed 'Pussy Plaza'.
It was awful yet fantastic, but I wouldn't do it again, so I pushed the experience to the back of my mind, not wanting to relive memories which are at times painful and leave me disgusted by the life my naive young self fell into.
Forgotten - until Glass Geishas
came along.I loved reading this book. The pages flowed like the drinks in the book - page after page just turning through my fingers. I got it from the book launch, where I was lucky enough to meet the lovely author Susanna Quinn herself, and that was on a Thursday before I went to work at my club nearby. I started Glass Geishas
on my journey home at 5am, and was still reading it in bed as the sun came up. The images of rain soaked narrow streets and neon lights were too much for me, so I poured myself a gin. And then another. And I laughed and cried and drank more gin until I passed out.(I'm not recommending that you attempt to read it in this fashion, but it is fun. Especially if you drink every time they say 'champagne', 'knocked back', 'little glasses of vodka tonic' etc.)
Now for the average reader - girls, you are going to love this book. It's got a cracking storyline and fantastically detailed description of the strange happenings and secretive world of Tokyo. Everyone is half-crazy, the industry has turned them into complete alcoholics, and no-one tells the whole story, if they get past lying through their teeth in the first place.
It's written from three points of view - a new girl called Stephanie who is desperate for what she has been told is 'quick and easy' money by her old schoolfriends who are living it up there already - but Julia is distant and weird whilst the other, Annabel, has plum disappeared off the face of the earth, leaving only a diary behind.
The second narrative is based on a cranky Japanese House Mum 'Mama San' who is telling her life story to a Western journo. She comes out with some real filth on Japanese perversions (actually, the book opens with a shady Rophynol scene, and that's tame compared to what happen's later.)
The third is a string of emails from a hostess who has been there for some time. I must admit I didn't get this - I thought it clunky and unnecessary, as it was mainly some girl being insecure and moaning about how it was all going downhill. I suppose that it was included to serve as a reminder of how the hostess industry could really mess with some girls psyches, but then I was half a bottle of gin down at the time and certainly didn't need any reminder of how within a few months I was a shaking alcoholic letting myself get felt up for fifty bucks a song.
Cleverly, this book is not a memoir. It's a novel. It has a proper story , with an intriguing beginning, an exciting middle, and a slightly rushed and very neat ending where everything falls into place - hurrah! In short, the perfect summertime read. Out of all the books on the entertainment and sex industries that I have read and reviewed, this is one of the freshest and original, and I hope it marks a turn in the tide of the neverending stream of memoirs and now-I've-left-the-industry biographies which is the normal publishing format.
Go buy it. Glass Geishas
; 356 pages with a gin chaser. Lovely.
