Paying For It: The Hidden Costs of Chester Brown

There's some R-rated content in this post. Please stop reading if you're underage, squeamish, or my Mom.

I bought Chester Brown's Paying for It when it came out a few months ago, read it in a night, felt dirty, showered, tried writing about it, showered again and then palmed it off a friend so he could read it as well.

So, I've had a pretty good excuse for not writing about it (no source text to refer back to), and it's not like I really need to anyway- reviews appeared everywhere, from the expected likes of The Comics Journal, to the more pedigreed pages of the New York Times Review of Books. Thirty years ago, the NYT would have never run a review of a graphic narrative, much less one about a john waxing autobiographical, and particularly not one that would move the reviewer to describe the author as looking like "a praying mantis with testicles." That reads like progress to me. Comics: Not just for kids! ... SERIOUSLY, the children will be traumatized.

Mostly, I found that the reviews spoke more to Paying for It's merits as a polemic, and any conclusions to the reviewer's own position on prostitution. Compare this negative review by Matt Seneca to the positive one in the Times, "But I would hope that righteous, human indignation at Brown's exploitation of a pre-existing problem will flare up and remain as long as it can..." versus "Mr. Brown’s illustrated memoir is exactly what it sounds like, a frank and guileless account of his predilection for paying women to have sex with him."

Likewise, my ambivalence about Paying for It could be a reflection of my own ambivalence about prostitution. As a good quasi-Third Waver, the kind who has picked up at least one copy of Bust, I know I'm supposed to be pro-sex work, but practically I remain suspicious of the actual power dynamics in many sex-for-cash transactions.

Sidenote: This is an ambiguity that was strengthened by my year spent toiling in one of the dustier reaches of the smut world. Not as a sex worker (or, as Brown so charmingly calls them, a whore), but as a porn reviewer. I would go from reading some porn star's bio, where she would claim how liberating her career was, to seeing videos of her getting brutally DPed. Now, those guys, like most male pornstars, would have been paid significantly less than our busty babe for that scene. But all that- the salaries, the personal manifestos, the hopes, the anti-itch creams, form a context that is likely uninteresting to the average viewer. Because, if you ponied up 40$ a month for a site called DoubleStuffedSluts.com (or whatever), you know what you want. And that's not a fully actualized woman- it's what's in the sitename.

Even if I could suppress my personal shudder factor though, I doubt I would like Paying for It any better. The 40$ cover price in effect buys you two books- the graphic memoir portion, and the hand-written essay on why prostitution should be decriminalized in the back, but neither justifies forty bones. Or even twenty.

Let's start with the Appendix. It's a frustrating read, showing that Brown has done his research, and documented it in full. However, that documentation is also a map of a certain kind of logical thinking, the kind that blazes a path straight through any uncomfortable conclusions to a self-serving destination. For example, Brown works through every experience he had with foreign-seeming prostitutes, just to see if he was somehow involved with trafficked women. And of course, he decides that he never was. The most irritating piece of evidence was that one of the brothels had an ugly prostitute, which in Brown's mind meant they were necessarily all voluntary employees, because why would sex traffickers pick up an uggo? That's not his exact wording- Brown often strikes a tone of stilted chivalry- but is his general point.

I would say it's perfectly likely that, while sex traffickers would prefer conventionally attractive women, they would still find a use for a "monster in a miniskirt." Some guys need a cheaper lady. Some genuinely like women who look like that (please see above for how I would know this.) Either way, they're going to be able to exploit someone. I have no evidence that was the case when Brown paid them a visit, but at least I will admit that I don't know, unlike Brown, who knows he is right all of the time, and would like you to know that too.

Few policies are wrong, or misguided in this appendix-they're all EVIL. It seems to be one of Brown's favourite words after "whore." And even when he's found some individual cases of evil outcomes- like the abuses in Nevada's system of legalized prostitution- he extrapolates from these incidents to write off more general ideas. Just because it's done one way in Nevada, does it follow it would have to be the same way in Ontario? Brown says yes- next point please.

Even if you skipped the last half of the book and focused on the part with pictures, Paying for It disappoints. In Louis Riel Chester Brown's simplified faces and frozen forms seemed epic, allowing the reader to impose and explore their own interpretations of the Métis hero in their blankness. Here, they just feel small and unfinished. The decision to obscure the prostitute's faces is more problematic, even if it is understandable. Few of the women could probably be found at this point to give their consent to be drawn, and it seems like those Brown actually asked, didn't. But it's hard not to see the parade of prostitutes as anything but tits and ass when that's all you see of them.

Oh, Chester Brown, I love The Playboy and Louis Riel so much, that maybe I'm seeing too many flaws with Paying for It in comparison. Or maybe I just resent making a contribution to the Chester Brown Gets Laid Fund. Either way, I'll be shelving this one in the back, covered by better books, but at least not by a brown paper bag.