Has anyone been listening to this series? I generally like SP and think she's a thoughtful, honest, open person. I really enjoyed her first book Animal. I haven't read the new book and not sure I will based on listening to this.
I don't know whether it's that she's super woke or is just bending so far over to accommodate and validate women in the sex industry as having choices (the happy hooker trope seems to be pushed quite heavily and (so far; I don't know how many other episodes there may be that touch on it) there is not much talk of trafficking, addiction, poverty, mental illness or the further reaching social effects of women in sex work.
I understand and applaud her making the point about speaking to women in the industry who are so often spoken about rather than engaged with, but it still comes across as quite sanitised, and in the current episode (talking to Joana Nastari) she laughs at the decision to drop Grid girls from Formula 1 because "(the idea is) ...well if some women are in Lycra then other women are going to get touched up on the bus, like as if those two things are cause and effect..."
I was really shocked by the slightly flippant attitude that there is no causal link between women being paraded as interchangeable sexy props at super Macho events like F1 and Men's belief that women ARE there as arm candy. A persistent theme seems to be that women strip/do Sugar Baby work/Escort so they can put themselves through college. Men, in the main don't turn to prostitution to put themselves through college as far as I know but this disparity isn't even touched on.
I find the whole area of Sex Work difficult to navigate because I can't help but feel the proportion of women who enter it willingly and who enjoy it is probably vanishingly small, yet these are the ones who are seized upon in any discussion in order to validate 'women's choices.'
I don't really know what I want from this thread, just that listening to SP has left me disheartened at the idea that this is current young women thinking.