Rusty McMann (stage name) discusses his happy life as a Las Vegas call bear. (via The Awl)

“The early messages in my family were that women are the source of power. They made the household decisions, held the purse strings, and if the woman of the house was not happy, no one was happy. “

In High school, Marzanna hung out with the geeky new wave crowd who smoked cloves, cut class and drank vodka. I was a blonde cheerleader who dated sexually ambiguous Mormon surfers. She was a year older so our social circles clashed, but I remember Marzanna’s black eyeliner, vintage coats and her hearty laugh. Marzanna and I’ve known each other our whole lives. We went to ballet together when we were five. Our Dads, both staunch Republicans, attend Rotary meetings in our small town. Hungry to escape the insulation of Humboldt County, Marzanna and I were both foreign exchange students. I found her twenty years later on Facebook and she agreed to do this interview about her career as a sadist, her personal relationships and her life as an ex-pat.

The Rumpus: You’ve always been a bright, theatrical person. Did you always know you would live a subversive lifestyle? How does a nice girl from Eureka, CA become a Pro Domme in Berlin?

Mme Marzanna Katorga: I didn’t know I would be a subversive person at all.  I was raised to be such a good girl. I had no real desires to be a particular thing when I grew up but I was instilled with a feeling that I was special and therefore something special would happen for me.  So, talk about a shattered illusion when I got out into the real world. I really feel like I was raised to be some sort of exiled aristocrat in a world where formality and aristocracy are mostly dead. I mostly wanted to be elegant and artistic and lauded for my creativity and loved. Either that or a veterinarian.  So I guess in a way I have become what I wanted. Without the animal doctor part, although I do use vet wrap and needles and I do enjoy treating men like dogs or pigs so maybe I got the best of both worlds. I knew the world was far larger than the few miles radius a small town offers.  Mostly I just kept pushing beyond those boundaries I felt in my household growing up.  I find fulfillment at the border or near the edge of society.

Rumpus: What were some messages you received about sex in your family and in our small town?

Katorga: The early messages in my family were that women are the source of power. They made the household decisions, held the purse strings, and if the woman of the house was not happy, no one was happy.  Things were done to assure the woman of the house was happy, comfortably situated, and she had the things around her just so.  Being raised that way and on ballet, opera, theater, and art as well as performing these things in the family living room for guests so that I could be praised for these skills raised me to understand a sense of power and control and femininity.  Feminine cruelty and fetishism came later. The messages I received early on were so deeply coded and hidden it was like trying to unravel the human genome.  Every hint of sexuality took on a spark for me, and those things that aren’t considered “sex” by most became my codex.  High heels that caught the eye of someone and made them double take, lipstick, the barest touch of one hand to another’s arm – these felt like “sex” because I was hyper-alert to human connection and like all young people I was seeking information I filled the gap in my knowledge with fantasy. I believe this has something to do with fetishism and fetishism has everything to do with my personal and professional life. Intimacy was a secret message to be decoded. Touch was electric.

Rumpus: What messages did you receive about beauty and desire? When did you discover you were sexually different than other people?

Katorga: Beauty was when my mother and my grandmother got dressed up to go out or had a dinner party with the table perfectly set and everything had a quality of elegance that masked any hostility or imperfections. There were conversations that were not about what was being said. True desire was hidden and finery replaced deeper urges. Beauty was a certain public appearance of being put together, of being comely.  Beauty was something classic and never garish.  Beauty was in control; out of control was bad. I spent hours and hours looking at records and photos of ladies in heels and hats and gloves and lipstick, at the heightened femininity of the 1950s. I took every kind of “lady” class imaginable. I was also playing baseball, mowed the lawn and was left to my own devices with mostly male playmates. I hated dolls; I loved army men. I was different from my friends.  I spoke using proper English for a start, I wore vintage clothing and I really didn’t know how to fit in very well so I often directed “we are going there” and “we are doing that”.  I discovered the power of fishnet stockings and high heels very young. When I was barely a teenager, my first experience with the reality of sexual intercourse was through an act of violence. This is where the strongest message about sex I have carried into my work came right through me, an undeniable message that sex was better as subtlety and under my control and that the act of being fucked lacked grace or complexity.

Rumpus: When and why did you begin doing sex work? What do you do now?

Katorga: People seem to think that if women spank someone or tie some boy up then, voila!  We became a Dominatrix!!  But that’s not true for me everything around me slowly alchemized to make me who I am.

I’m what I call a Lifestyle Professional Dominatrix.  This is what I consider my life’s work – this is my personal sexuality and also my trade.  In 1989, when I was 19, my dance instructor and I spoke about how we needed some extra money.  The conversation turned to stripping. This was in Portland, Oregon after all which was the strip club capital. Mostly, it was a bonding experience with this woman that I really thought was just the coolest person I’d ever met.  We practiced in her living room, drinking wine. This was the first time I had encountered a woman who was independent and empowered in her body.

She was about 15 years older than me.  This woman blew me away because she could say and do what she decided she wanted without worrying what others thought. We talked about sexuality and what men wanted and how to move our bodies. We went into “EJ’s” for an audition. I made the mistake of putting the 15 minute long dance mix of “Fascination Street” by the Cure on for my audition and had the longest and most wretched striptease of my life.  I really had no desire to get naked, let alone hustle, let alone dance that long to little praise or acclaim. There were about 6 guys in the bar and one of them maybe glanced my way.  She did a lot better, but the bartender told her she was too old.  Rather than it being a crushing experience, we had a great laugh. It was terrible; we weren’t strippers.  I’ve had respect for strippers ever since, it’s an artful skill. I discovered phone sex work in the back of a newspaper. In 1989 you could make some good money on the telephone.  I had a line at home and a switchboard sent calls to me.  I learned I was in control of their orgasm. I had an excellent memory for voices so I started making cards with details about each client that called me.  I learned how to keep them on the phone, how to get them confessing their secret lusts, to build the sexual tension to get to the release.  I paid for my apartment and bills this way while going to college. It was more than a little empowering.

Rumpus: How did you learn about BDSM?

Katorga: About this time, I began to think about power, control, sex, and it keyed into some of my interests in leather and I began seeking information about domination.  Thanks to some glorious leather men – the real Tom of Finland types – and an era where if you were into leather, it didn’t matter if you were queer or a heterosexual femme. I was just another person into leather and these men took me in. I was so fortunate.  I learned a great deal about bondage, sado-masochism, and the details that a skilled top needs to know. Leathermen became my family. I was able to fulfill my tomboyish side once again learning about whip throwing and leather bondage, hanging out with daddies and their boys.

Rumpus: How does Pro Domme work differ from other types of sex work? What do you hope to accomplish during a session?

This is what I mean, he says in a Czech accent. I must airbrush this now! You must start jogging more.

Right, I say, and I tilt my head down so that he won’t see the spot on my chin, inexpertly concealed with powder. He takes a few more shots, asking me to straddle a chair then look dreamily into the rafters then smile as if I’ve just heard a good joke.

The studio is the size of a school classroom and smells of dust. Even the floor reminds me of school – scuffed beige lino, the same as the gym room.

Later, I have to lie flat on my back while the photographer uses the macro lens on my pubic hair, nipples, jaw-line, and eyes. I pass the time by revising words for my English exam. Acquiesce, I think. Viscera. Obsequious.

Afterwards I step out into another rainy Glasgow night, the spotlights burning my eyes. That was the last, I think.

***

It begins with SuicideGirls, a website of nude girls with tattoos, piercings, and dyed hair. Like most teenagers I have low self-esteem and body image issues – but also a tattoo, several piercings, and dyed black hair. SuicideGirls claims to get a million hits per week.

I gather my two best friends and a bottle of vodka. Sophie the tomboy styles, Alexander the in-the-closet homosexual photographs. We drink until it all seems like a great adventure, then I climb into the empty bath while Alexander watches me on the tiny screen of my digital camera. I peel off my black bra and pink mesh hot-pants and Halloween cat ears. I press my feet against the taps, arching my back and blurring my eyes like the girls in the magazines.

We like these, says SuicideGirls, send the rest. I hadn’t thought that I would need more. Capturing my nakedness has already pushed the limits of my friendships. I take the photos and list myself on several modeling portfolio websites. Photographers email, offering an hourly rate for me to take my clothes off.

***

A middle-class girl with a job in a bookshop, good exam results and a place at university, I don’t need the money. I need a spotlight trained only on me. I am so pretty, so classy, that people pay to immortalize me as a work of art. I am no porn star, no topless model; I am Bettie Page. I fill myself up with other people’s desire for me. I feel the same emptiness as all teenagers, a black pit to be filled by experiences, opinions, original thoughts. In time, I know I will become a well-rounded person. But I have never been good at patience.

***

I bring my boyfriend to the first shoot at a man’s house in a Glasgow suburb. In preparation, I paint my toenails purple and borrow my mother’s Clinique eyeliner. My bra is printed with rainbow-coloured skulls. The man’s bedroom has bare walls and a view of someone else’s window.

Open your legs, he says, and though it’s not what I think Bettie Page would do, I do it. I think about my boyfriend on the man’s couch, fiddling with the TV remote and listening to the clicking of the camera.

On the train home I can’t decide whether I’m a third-wave feminist or just a victim.

***

On one shoot, a man brings along a pair of knickers he wants me to wear. He asks in a nice way, apologetic. I refuse. I don’t think it’s hygienic, I say.

All the photographers are men. Most are twice my age, though one looks barely legal. He says he is an art student. He spends a lot of time arranging the lights.

Each photographer has an odd request that they state as if it is common sense. One does not want me to have any body hair whatsoever. One wants me to show all my teeth when I smile. One does not want me to smile at all. One will only use special lenses that have to be put into the camera under a black cloth. I smile, and wait, and think of Bettie Page. In Art class I make a heart-shaped papier-mâché box to store my earnings. I am saving up for a laptop so I can sit in coffee-shops and write a novel about these experiences.

I imagine myself on the cover of pulp fiction novels, twisted around snakes, holding a whip. I imagine myself in Bizarre magazine and late-night MTV videos and photography journals. I imagine myself on the front page of SuicideGirls, but I never email them back.

***

Six months after those first photos, in a studio that smells like dust, a Czech photographer tells me I have cellulite. I am 18 years old, weigh 112 pounds, and have a 26-inch waist. I am tired of spreading my legs. I go home and open the papier-mâché box.

***

See also:

The Rumpus Sex Blog.

Antonia Crane’s Recessions Sex Workers series.

And thank god for that. My back had been killing me since I boarded the plane for Las Vegas and I was not looking forward to lugging my bags around without an anti-inflammatory. I was heading to Sin City for the Adult Entertainment Expo and my bags only faintly resembled the luggage Hunter S. Thompson and Oscar Zeta Acosta felt necessary to take with them in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. My tame bag of drugs­ included 48 Ibuprofen, 16 chewable Pepto-Bismol tablets, half a bottle of Tums, and eight caps of Dayquil all stuffed into a Ziploc emblazoned with Spider-Man’s mug.

[Some images slightly NSFW]

"My tame bag of drugs..."

Still, I felt prepared. The Vegas of today isn’t Thompson’s Vegas of 1971. Hell, it’s not even the Vegas of a decade ago. The family-friendly Vegas pushed on us a few years back ended in a broken marriage and sure enough the Harley-riding stepfather, “What happens in Vegas…” showed up. Now frat boys and families who never got the memo wander the over-priced Strip, neither group comfortable with the other’s presence. However, the one aspect of Vegas that has never, nor will never, change is the gratuitous sex – and I was headed into the cleavage of the beast.

The Adult Entertainment Expo is the largest adult entertainment trade convention in the world pulling in just over 22,000 attendees this year. Walking through the Sands Expo towards the large double doors that lead into the convention is like strolling a twisted red carpet. Suits playing hooky from the nearby Consumer Electronics Show line the entryway, snapping pictures of any actresses coming or going from work. It’s all in preparation for the thousands of flashes that are about to greet you.

If it wasn’t for the breasts, you could almost convince yourself that you had wandered into any other convention in the world. Booths create rows in a large hall, bigger companies take up more space, and you can always tell where the free goodies are by the size of the crowd. Endless handouts and PR reps bog you down for hours while you muscle your way through the crowds. Then you turn the corner, only to run face first into a seven-foot bucking penis. Straddled by girls in bikinis, the penis acted as a phallic mechanical bull, thrusting wildly about slamming woman after woman into the ground while the crowd cheered.

Row after row of vibrators, strap-ons, $6000 life-size realistic sex dolls, Obama condoms, bondage gear, and pillows with indentations in them so women with implants can sleep comfortably on their stomachs. It’s enough to make Aphrodite and Adephagia throw up their hands in surrender – and those are just the marital aids. Everywhere breasts accost you. Stars signing autographs, video monitors running through porn, and 40-foot posters proclaiming the release of the latest XXX parody, within five minutes your brain shuts down and tits become almost boring. Granted you don’t want to blink for fear of missing a pair, but even the sight of a gaggle of female porn stars snacking on hot dogs in the cafeteria does nothing for you.

It’s with this blasé attitude that I found myself staring down a wall filled with prosthetic vaginas. I thought back on the Expos of years past. Even as late as 2008, I could recall an Expo that took up two floors and was overflowing with exhibitors, porn stars, fans, and all the free DVDs you could handle. Now, reduced in size, the con felt more like a frivolous celebration of the products than a business convention. The suits that used to pop up throughout the aisles were largely gone and those that remained stuck out like the cheerleader’s father at a college party.

“These will get you rock hard. Last for hours,” a bald salesman for Stiff 4 Hours yelled out at me when I came within ten feet of his booth. “Best there…” He continued before trailing off at the sight of my credentials. “Oh, press.” At the sight of two women walking his way, this time clearly sporting credentials signaling they owned an adult bookstore, his overzealous chrome dome ran after them promising incredible deals if they stocked his product. While some tried to earn a living, most people came for the t ‘n’ a. In addition to the seven-foot mechanical member, AEE also delivered Slick Chix female oil wrestling, a series of naughty stage games for fans, and professional and amateur pole dancing contests. Even with waning attendance over the years, AEE still filled the halls thanks to the overwhelming power of sex.

Casinos have tapped this vein as their latest effort to counter the difficult economic client. On a previous trip to AEE, I stumbled upon an isolated portion of the Mandalay Bay casino called “The Party Pit.” Comprised of a series of gaming tables surrounding a small stage complete with flashing lights, a stripper pole, and, of course, a scantily clad woman dancing to the current Top 40, it mixed the two staples of Nevada: Sex and gambling. Two years later, on a Thursday night I found myself aimlessly wandering Luxor’s empty food court looking for signs of life. At 11 p.m. on a Thursday night, the shops stood closed, most restaurants were locked down, and only a few members of the cleanup crew remained. The casino downstairs, while not barren, was patchy at best. Once-filled seats at Blackjack, now abandoned to stay at home and clip coupons. With one exception: The Luxor’s very own Party Pit surrounded by gamblers and tourists snapping photos. In only a few short years, seemingly every casino on the strip had emulated Mandalay Bay’s mash-up of women and cards. It was easy to see why sex had infiltrated the casinos. Las Vegas, as a gambling town, was stagnant. Just one block off The Strip, rundown motels punctuated For Sale signs sitting atop empty lots that amounted to nothing more than fenced in sections of the desert. Everything about Las Vegas, gambling, big shows, and weddings, had become a cliché in of itself. Losing a fortune on craps because you don’t understand the rules, Wayne Newton, and getting married by Elvis haven’t changed in 50 years. Vegas had to sex them up. The Party Pit, Cirque du Soleil’s naughty Zoomanity, and a wedding reception for two porn stars – even if it was by invite only.

Some salacious version of Lady Luck scored me an invite to Eric John and Vicki Chase wedding reception at the Palazzo’s Sushi Samba. After receiving the approval of a large gentleman named Vinnie the Snakemannn, my friends and I entered to music pounding through the air and a crowd seething around the bride and groom. In the booths, bottles of Grey Goose appeared as if the servers were stocking BevMo’s empty shelves. A few quick searches on our iPhones identified which women in the room we did indeed recognize from our computer screens at home.

“You just touched a Goonie,” my friend yelled. I turned in time to see Corey Feldman disappear behind two bodyguards that put our good friend Vinnie to shame. The presence of Edgar Frog invigorated the party even more and as women started to flash the crowd, the bar began to mirror the same scene I continually came across in Vegas. Wherever there were women acting provocatively, the crowds would appear.

Around 4 a.m. Feldman left the club and, as everyone knows, it’s not a party without a Goonie. Shuffling out of the hotel, we hailed a cab and zoned out in euphoria and exhaustion. Our cab driver tried to overcharge us and I had to threaten to call the cops to get our money back. As he peeled out of the Luxor driveway sending a valet running to the curb, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. If he had had a nice pair of tits, I might have let him keep the money.

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Everyone I’ve Had Sex With by Megan Boyle.

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While the issue is certainly complicated, this is incredible news.

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– Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain

Two weeks before Christmas of last year, my father was diagnosed with cancer. The months that followed involved a succession of treatments and a major surgery. Throughout the experience, there was much discussion of clinical, medicalized pain: a necessary series of infusions, needles, stitches and the painful sensations that go along with every step of that process. My father’s pain had to be managed, organized, orally dissected, in order for it to be dealt with and understood. The shared experience of living with my father’s cancer forced me as an individual to examine what pain really meant to me: not just because I am my father’s daughter, but also because I am a professional Dominant.

I’ve been a professional Dominatrix for four years now. My father has had cancer for a fourth of that time. My favorite activities as a professional Dominatrix all involve pain, in some form or another: psychological, psychosocial, or just purely physical. The body in pain: something I thought I knew a thing or two about. It’s been something important to me, valuable to me as an artist and a performer. It’s been something that kept me full of life, infused my work with meaning, and brought me to a heightened awareness of myself: something I had always thought of as expansive and mind-blowing. Not something I saw as soul-crushing and hurtful. Yet to imagine my father in pain has hurt me more than I can even understand, more than I even want to understand. And to think, in the past, how often I’d taken pleasure in the pain of others…

Of course, in theory, it is easy to see that the pain my father goes through is very different from the pain my clients pay for. To quote the S&M writer Dossie Easton, “For those exploring pain as a gateway to sexual wholeness, a stubbed toe (for instance) is still painful.” I know intellectually that the pain of cancer isn’t the same as S&M pain. S&M pain is about having fun with pain, making a theatrical event of its presence. And when I explain my job to others, on the most reductive of levels, I tell people that I put my clients in pain in a way that is pleasurable for them as well as for me. From the first moment of my explanation, the pain is a positive force and the difference between that and “normal” human pains seems therefore more clear.

Still, the boundaries that exist between these two forms of sensation, linguistically held within in the same word, became increasingly undefined to me in the months that followed my father’s diagnosis. I looked at my father in pain and felt inconsolable with grief at my inability to end it. Until then, I hadn’t imagined the physical pain of another person could be so palpable to me, yet in no way pleasant. For as visceral and incisive as the pain I’d inflicted on others was, both affecting my clients’ states of mind and my own mental being, it was nothing in comparison to the pain I felt knowing my father was, potentially, dying. That, it seemed was just… too real.

Perhaps this was where the distinction lies: perhaps I saw masochistic pain as a fantastic mental endeavor, a purposeful mind game, existing within a different psychic plain than the chronic, overbearing state I knew my father endured. Perhaps that’s why I had such an easy time talking about S&M with others, while so few people in my life knew my father was sick. Indeed, I could always talk about the pain of my clients, because it was purposeful. It had a reason behind it: it brought me satisfaction, as both a sexual sadist and as a fiscal opportunist. There was a person, namely me, that was orchestrating everything. Making the fantasy real.

And wasn’t that why I did what I did as a profession, so that I could take that kind of power away from nature? So that the universe that be couldn’t tell me when the pain started and stopped? So that I, and I alone, could be in control of its happenings? Of course it was. I saw it as my liberation from a world filled with chaos, from that confinement of the natural (dis)order of things. No wonder it was now crippling to me to know that those same forces could show me just how small and powerless I was in the world.

I felt the way I felt about my father’s pain because I couldn’t control it. And what a horror it was, indeed: to find a pain in my life that I couldn’t control. I had convinced myself that pain was what flowed through me, disseminated from my fingers, was my tool and my artifice. Beautiful and impressive, making me beautiful and impressive as a result. I could feel so powerful, so in command of my self and my world. I could say when it stopped and started. I made the rules.

In cancer, there are no rules. The doctors explain what they can, but they don’t make the rules either. I can study what I can know about my father’s cancer, prepare myself for what might be coming, but it wasn’t like training myself for a scene. It wasn’t like prepping for some intense edge play. It wasn’t going to follow my set plan. The cancer would be playing its own game all along, having nothing to do with the supposed reality I had created for myself and for others around me. For my part, I was merely an ensnared observer, helpless and wounded.

When a Dominatrix loses her control of her own sadism, when a scene goes bad or wrong, too far for either of the players, the dominatrix is at fault. She has to bear the burden of that mistake. For my own part, I can blame myself, for not being more safe or sane or consensual. I can take that responsibility on. But here, what was there to take upon myself? Something had gone wrong, and whose fault was it? Who is there to blame, when your father’s body fills with cancer? Who is there for me to blame, when I can’t stop it?

In the months during my father’s recovery, when he reacted negatively to surgery and had to return to the hospital, I wanted nothing more than to march into a dungeon and obtain that pound of flesh for his release from this sickness. I hoped over and over again that someone would present themselves to me as a replacement for him; somewhere in my mind, I wished that I could present the world with a pain large enough to release my father from his own.

Because of course, the thing I wanted to disregard the most in this whole process was my own suffering. I was the one psychologically bound to my father’s physical bondage. Even now, as my father lives happily in remission, free from the confines of cancer and its physical workings, I still keep my pain locked away from discussion or regard. Only now can I admit how much it has crippled my heart beyond my own conception. But maybe I am wrong about the pain of s&m and the pain of life being so distant from one another. Maybe, just maybe, I will return to my work with the knowledge that my own pain can flow away from me, out my fingertips, the same way it drained out from my father’s face. Maybe then, I too can be free of this pain, as real as any imaginary world I have ever created.

***

The Rumpus Sex Blog.

The Rumpus Recessions Sex Workers series.

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I’ve even written columns about writing ads. I’ve written for magazines and websites, and I’ve written for pay and for free. I’ve walked the dating ad walk, talked the dating ad talk, and I’ve occasionally done both while chewing gum.

I know of what I speak, if what I speak of is dating adverts, and thus when I say that I’ve never read anything quite like Sexually, I’m More of a Switzerland: More Personal Ads from the London Review of Books, you can trust me. For one thing, I’ve never thought I’d come across a compendium of dating ads that quote or reference Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen. There are many poems I might have deployed in an effort to get me loved/laid. The Faerie Queene is not one of them. And yet this book has two:

Are you the man of my dreams? Green, 9’10”, three eyes, six tentacled arms and reciting the third canto of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene whilst crushing football-sized grapes with hoofed feet? Either stop it now or kiss me you monstrous wine-making fool. Woman, 41, Exeter.

That darksome cave they enter, where they find/That cursed man, low sitting on the ground,/Musing full sadly in his sullen mind. So, next time you want to turn the TV on, ask first. Finchley troll (35).

It is the London Review of Books, after all, a journal whose erudition makes the New York Review of Books look like a fluffy bunny. And England, after all, cherishes its authors, hugs them to its collective breast; it also treats them like celebrities, castigating them for their poor choices of mate, frock or alliteration. England, after all, is a land where people place bets on The Booker Prize, the national prize for a work in fiction, and even if the prize was set up by a sugar company in a desire to shine itself up with some sparkly learning, and even if the betting began because of said company’s desperate finagling to get public attention, there’s no denying that Great Britain has a very different relationship with writers than us, these United States. The personal ads in the LRB prove it.

This book is edited by David Rose, as was its predecessor, They Call me Naughty Lola. Separated into seventeen brief chapters whose names themselves are lines in the adverts (“Scrimshawed from the tusk of a walrus,” “Look sideways with schadenfreude,” “The Skoromokh of Gender Confusion,” “Hubris made me pen this ad”), the chapters provide a more-or-less whimsical grouping based on theme: one that would fit the literary devotion of my X Bert, another fitting the psychosis of my X Taaaaahd, another speaking to the science-fiction geekery of no one I’ve ever fucked, and one for you, you know who you are, among others.

Rose’s fingers are all over the text because not merely was it he who chose which ads to include in the volume (one of my favorites: “Man, 46. Animal in bed. Probably a gnu.”), but also because he wrote the notes to the volume. Being a person who cannot help herself from leapfrogging to the end, I went immediately to the appendix, where I found an annotated chronology of Miss World title holders, for no apparent reason. I am a huge fan of randomness, so I read it and was delighted to discover that I share with Norma Cappagli of Argentina (Miss World 1960) a defensive enjoyment of an anodyne glass of Scotch. I was also shocked to find out that Miss World is a political battleground wherein the relationships between Spain and Gibraltar, Israel and Lebanon, and those of other countries have played out among the tiaras and hairspray.

What is most interesting to me is what Rose chose to give footnotes to and what he didn’t. For example, in the chapter “The Skomorokh of Gender Confusion,” Rose opts to annotate a plethora of pop references: the Playboy mansion, Jennifer Lopez’s hit “Jenny from the Block,” porn star John Holmes, the acronym BBW, and Carly Simon’s hit “You’re So Vain. ” He does not, however, choose to tell his gentle readers what a “Skomorokh” is. If you’d like to know, Skomorokhs were medieval East Slavic harlequins and the word is the basis for the Scaramouch of “Bohemian Rhapsody” fame.

It’s hard not to see Rose’s deployment of notes as a sly joke on his part. Of course the people who would pick up a collection of LRB personal adverts would need to know that Oasis’ “Don’t Look Back in Anger” reached number one on the UK singles chart, and of course the same audience would hardly need to have Thomas Pynchon explained as if to yellow-helmeted toddlers. I get the joke, and it’s a good one.

I came to get my hot hands on a copy of this book from following LRBPersonals on Twitter. In publicizing the collection, Rose has whittled the great and heaving mass down to 140-character amuse-bouche, and it has been a pleasure reading the ads as he doles them out like salty caramels. It’s pleasurable too reading the book. These people make me feel like a slack-jawed yokel, and I usually strut with the cocksure confidence of being one witty bitch.

And yet.

The ads—funny, smart, witty, sardonic, biting and mordant as they are—are also steeped in real, vulnerable pathos. I know that my imagination is populated with too much post-war British fiction, Dr. Who and episodes of Spaced, but I see so many pallid people penning these missives over pots of tea and sending these quiet pleas out into the hopeful dark. It’s like space exploration but with less firepower and more debris. I feel for them, each and every one, because I’ve been one of them. I’ve taken a long look at myself and imagined how to sum up all that I am and all that I want and fit that summary into one small page. How could I do better than this:

Week 3—Day 2. Breakfast: small piece of fruit (for example an apple), tow crispbreads with one tablespoon low-fat soft cheese and one sliced tomato. Lunch: one wholemeal pita bread with a quarter small pot reduced-fat hummus and crudités, one small banana. Dinner: 47 chocolate cakes, anguish, despair, bile, hatred, a small pot of low-fat fruit yoghurt. Post-divorce comfort eater and sex therapist (F, 38).

Or this:

When Diana Rigg was in The Avengers I liked it. But when Dianna Rigg wasn’t in The Avengers I didn’t like it. I like Diana Rigg. Are you Diana Rigg? Please write.

Or this:

Myspace.com/mantellinghimselfheisnotyetoverthehillwhenreallyheis or box no. 8743.

I can’t.

And that’s why this book is ever so much more than a bathroom book, which is probably where it’ll end up in homes that have a place to keep books in the bathroom. On the other side of each of these ads there is a real human who thinks and feels and hopes and, oddly, researches public animal executions, taxidermy tigers and likens his personal ad to Schrödinger’s Cat.

May someone see him for the joyful paradox he undoubtedly is, alive, dead, or some state suspended in between.

You can buy Sexually, I’m More of a Switzerland anywhere that fine, slender volumes published by Scribner are sold. Buy enough of them and then maybe David Rose will send me a photo of his new tattoo of Evil Knievel and Elvis.

***

Art by Molly Crabapple. [Read the Rumpus interview with Crabapple here.]

Related posts:

1. How the NYTimes Book Review selects books to review
2. The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
3. Thurston Moore’s Audience: A Subjective Account of the Brooklyn Book Festival

“Several Australian government websites were slowly recovering Wednesday hours after the online prankster group, Anonymous, unleashed a massive distributed denial-of-service attack to protest the country’s evolution toward internet censorship.”

That’s right, “Operation Titstorm” was a success, with the Australian Parliament’s website being felled after receiving “7.5 million hits a second.” Learn more about the attack, and the reasons behind it, here. (via @elliottjustin)

OK Cupid went through statistics related to 7,000 profile pictures to find what kind of pictures were most effective. Surprising and interesting.