A new book from Aussie sex worker Rita Therese might not be the book you’re expecting, but it’s the one you should probably read. Come: A Memoir isn’t the glamorous tale of rich clients, jetting off overseas, and being paid $1,000s to just listen to a man talk (although it includes that, too); it’s dark, brutally honest, and a book you won’t be able to put down.
Rita doesn’t leave anything out. In parts, Come is like a big sister guide to the sex industry, explaining the difference between “toppies” and strippers, how to control a boozed out Buck’s Party, why having sex on camera is different to fucking a client in a hotel room (which may or may not be haunted), and the unique social rules in a strip club.
In others, it’s a deeply personal account of a woman who has experienced trauma, addiction, and violence – and come out the other side.
“I wanted to do right by my peers,” Rita told PEDESTRIAN.TV, when asked why it was important not to glamorise or gloss over the murkier parts of the sex industry.
“I really wanted the reader to decide how they felt and try to not lead them in a direction. I just wanted it to be relatable for workers – I hope it is! It has made me feel much less alone having other SWs [sex workers] read my book, and say, “I’ve felt that.” I don’t think the book is unbiased but I tried my best to give it balance, and show the spectrum of experience.”
Rita, 25, entered the sex industry at age 18 on a whim, answering an ad for topless waitresses. It wasn’t long before she happy to go a step further and do fully nude waitressing at bookings – for more money, of course.
“It was the snowball effect,” Rita writes in Come. “Academics and anti-sex work feminists like to attribute these kinds of things to sex workers becoming desensitised to the horrors of the industry, but all that’s happening is you’ve realised it just isn’t a big deal to get your coochie out for money.”
From there, Rita worked as an escort (both privately and in brothels), a stripper, and for a time, in porn.
In her professional life she was (is) Gia, the glamorous, heterosexual babe of every man’s fantasy, who doesn’t have a worry in the world and exists to give men the hour of their lives.
In private, she’s Rita, a bisexual woman who’s survived abusive relationships, tackled substance abuse, navigated mental illness and yet still manages to make you laugh with her no-holds-barred sense of humour. Come is about grief as much as it is about sex work; Rita lost two of her older brothers to suicide within eight months of each other. Her pain seeps through every page.
“It wasn’t until I finished my book, and during the process as I shifted through my grief and into myself, I realised how much I had buried,” Rita told PTV.
“It’s an ongoing process, and one I would like to write about. But at that time, last June, I wasn’t there yet. I don’t even think I realised what else was going on after I was done speaking about sex work, what else existed.”
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Come is a kind of “masochistic act”, a test to see if she could turn her writing skill – she’s produced zines and freelance pieces over the years – into a full-blown book. “I wanted to know: do I have any skill?” Rita said. “Am I any good at this? [At first] I tried to write as somebody else – how I imagined a writer sounded – and I hated it. I binned two-thirds of the book and started over again.”
The result is an expertly balanced tale of the depraved and the existential, the salacious and the sorrowful. No chapter better demonstrates this than ‘Whore Beauty’, which offers advice for the aspiring sex worker in a progressively darker series of tips.
It starts with the practical, women’s mags sort of stuff (why you should shave with men’s razors; how to deal with ass pimples from stripping), moves on to the explicit (where to aim your face when a guy wants to ejaculate all over it), and finally arrives at the gut-punch finale: what to do when a client rapes you.
“I really did struggle with the idea of whether to put a trigger warning in for the story about when I was raped by a client,” Rita said. (Note: there isn’t one, but by the time you arrive at the story, you know you’re not reading a light and fluffy novel.)
“That was one of the hardest stories to write, even though I’d previously published it before in a zine,” Rita continued.
“I don’t know why I didn’t [include the trigger warning] in the end – perhaps it was a fear of frightening away people from that chapter. I was so phobic of death for such a long time as well, that I think after experiencing so much of it and staring into the void – especially when I myself became suicidal when my PTSD became almost unmanageable – the void looked back at me? And I decided to write about the darkness so I could bring the light back in. I’m really interested in the concepts of the Jungian shadow self, about balance and how the psyche has the positive balanced with its shadow, the dark, the negative, the ugly.”
Rita was studying philosophy, but she’s since transferred to law, balancing tutorials with bookings and hoping her classmates don’t recognise her from porn or “a photo of my asshole on the internet”. She wants to use her law degree to fight for the marginalised communities within her community.
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“The people in the trans community, the queer community and the sex worker community, we are people who often experience sexual violence, who’ve experienced domestic violence and it is really hard,” she said.
“Often when you’re coming up against, you know, a QC barrister and a rich client, and you’re pressing charges for an assault or rape… I want to be that barrister for people. I want to come in swinging and be able to defend the people that I’ve seen countless times be bought out by just wealth and not having the same opportunity.”
Come: A Memoir is available now from heaps of good bookstores.
To get help around issues raised in this article, please speak to your GP or give one of the following organisations a call: Lifeline on 13 11 14; 1800 RESPECT on 1800 737 732; Alcohol Drug Information Service (ADIS) on 1800 250 0151.
