There’s no Shane in her game.
Charlotte Shane, a former sex worker who catered to the wealthy 1%, is speaking out about bedding businessmen in a naughty new memoir.
The author’s saucy tome “An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work” hit shelves on Aug. 13, and details the raunchy lifestyle she lived for over a decade, sleeping with elite men in hotels.
Before entering the escort industry, Shane was in a women’s studies graduate program — but the amorous academic eventually decided to devote herself to men and her insatiable desires.
“I became a sex worker because I suspected, and hoped, it would be this way: a private, minor form of celebrity. An alternate version of myself,” an excerpt of her memoir, published in The Wall Street Journal, reads.
In the book, she unveils how affluent men worked their way around the taboo business, schmoozing with women in luxurious hotels and exchanging secret code words.
“It helped that illegality-induced euphemisms tipped the dialogue into affectation,’ she wrote in the tell-all tome. ‘”Intrigued” meant horny, “visit” or “spend time with” meant have sex with, “friend” meant repeat customer.”
Shane recalled the moment she interacted with a client named Roger, a 54-year-old litigator in Washington, D.C. Although the pair were set to meet at a downtown Marriott at 9 p.m., Shane accidentally arrived 12 hours earlier at 9 a.m. dressed in “conventional business attire,” wearing a blue tailored shift dress.
While she didn’t intentionally plan to arrive so early, she purposely dressed in attire that would allow her admittance into the hotel and make her feel like she “deserved to be there.”
Roger agreed Shane was more than deserving to be there and “invited” her to meet up again and again. After the third encounter, he began begging for her presence.
“I have to say that each time I visit with you, I am left wanting to see you more,” Roger wrote after their third date.
Whenever a meet-up went well, Shane made sure to send a thank you note to clients for the “wonderful evening,” especially to those who she would like to see again.
Quite frequently, Shane would receive admiring messages back from “married men, single men, men who were divorced, men a few years or a few decades older than me, men who were wealthy and men who were rich, and men living under secret, crushing debt.”
After years in the sex work industry, Shane decided it was time for her to step down due to the changes she wasn’t comfortable with.
“These days sex workers, even in-person workers without OnlyFans accounts, have to operate like influencers to advertise and, for me, that extracts too much regardless of the compensation,” she wrote in a “Meant For You” blog entry posted on Jul. 10.
Shane admitted that marketing had evolved since the early 2010s when profiles included stock images, champagnes, and an about me section listing educational degrees and languages.
With other escorts adding accolades to their profile, it made Shane feel insecure about the skills she had to offer, questioning if she would be able to charge as much as other sex workers.
Shane wrote how she was “too afraid of being caught in a lie to pretend otherwise.”
Shane says she believes her memoir “inspire its readers to love more thoughtfully, to love better,” she wrote in the “Meant For You” blog post.
