The Tricking Hour
by Irene Silt
Deluge Books £14.99

FITTINGLY, this book escapes easy categorisation. It is written by US sex worker, poet and activist, Irene Silt. It comes from a series of essays originally published by New Orleans ANTIGRAVITY magazine as a perspective from life lived on the margins.
 
The Tricking Hour can be read as memoir, poetics of hardship, anti-work manifesto, and as a social case-study of American malaise: the sex worker as social clinician diagnosing the symptoms of a screwed labour force. Also, the sex worker as ultimate entrepreneur deftly working materialism to the last cent.

Here the violence of capitalism is felt literally in the body; Silt offers a view of the body as workplace, the body as a factory as well as the product sold and bought.

In this sense the distance between the experience of the sex worker from that of many other forms of emotional labouring, overwhelmingly performed by women, is cigarette-paper thin.

From hairdresser to care worker, masseuse to manicurist — the interactions between bodies within the exchange relationship, and the intimacies associated, carry similar recognitions.

Silt writes: “When I grab a stranger by their insides, I find an unorganised chaos of forces: bits of experience, fragments of meaning, flashes of guilt, moments of jest, deep hatred, whatever is left when they lose control in a way they did not expect — whether from exhaustion or from trust, maybe just alcohol. I see myself all along the perimeter of the club, in the mirrors reflecting our fragmented world.”

The view from the perimeter reveals brutalities at the centre of mainstay hustles — gig workers to HR managers to hack writers, extractive capitalism ensures alienation is only a question of extent: we all put out.

From this conception Silt advocates her manifesto for sex worker organisation within the “economies of desire.” She warns against ceding power to a class of experts — politicians, “when we place our horizons on candidates to create options for us, we relinquish control of our communities.”

The demand for freedom results in a cri de coeur against decriminalisation, against legitimisation, above all, against paying taxes, for self-made communities of outsiders who nevertheless seek protections.

And against all of this Silt acknowledges the toll of personal concessions the hooker (her term) makes in favour of the mighty dollar. “I visit men I hate after men I hate,” she writes in a testimony searing in honesty but ultimately exposed in its incoherence.

The relentless confrontation of the sex work relation, the age old proximity of sex and death, from which “there is no turning away,” creates an ouroboros-like argument where the serpent eats its own tail.

This is a fascinating fusion of engagements with the oldest profession and the working self.