Sun, 21 March 2010
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Xaviera Hollander, author of bestseller The Happy Hooker, speaks to Susan Tracy about her experiences in New York as a high class prostitute and madam in the sixties and gives her opinion on the state of relations between the sexes today.
Summer is here and so is the film version of Sex and the City. Women all over the globe are eagerly awaiting their turn to slip into the darkness and revel in the juicy details of the intimate lives of four lovable femme fatales of pop culture. But, even before Sex and the City’s creators were talking, there was another kind of sex in the city, something much more adult and taboo; nothing short of a one-woman show.
Fans of sexuality-themed books should consider it required reading to pick up a copy of the candid, groundbreaking book, The Happy Hooker. It is, simply, a breathtakingly frank, unabashed account of one free-thinking Dutch woman who took New York City by storm in the 1970s, becoming its most infamous madam.
The book is engrossing and - pardon the pun - hooks you from the very first sentence, and I was thrilled when fate gave me the opportunity of interviewing The Happy Hooker herself about that time in her life.
Susan Tracy: The stark rawness of the beginning paragraphs of The Happy Hooker vividly and immediately describe one aspect of prostitution, that of being arrested and jailed. What is your opinion on why prostitution is considered a crime in America?
Xaviera Hollander: Because of all the side elements involved in prostitution: pimping, providing clients, hustling clients, drug abuse, drug dealing, blackmailing of clients, robbing clients.
There is a so-called hooker hierarchy: In Holland and Germany you have the Red-Light districts, women behind windows. There are the women on the street, the junkies who work out of cars or in parks. There are clubs like bordellos and bars, and so-called ‘massage parlours’ where a lot of Asian women work and give great massages with a little something extra. Then you have the official call or escort girls who work for agencies. Finally, you have women who find their clients via the internet.
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