![]() ![]() As Bassist’s mother says, about everything from medicine to the fit of a seatbelt, “It’s a man’s world.”īassist compares misogyny to an iceberg, whose visible peak represents the more obvious forms of violence like murder and rape. It’s no surprise that women are more likely than men to be misdiagnosed or not diagnosed at all. “Being socialized is almost like being gaslit into mental illness,” she writes. When she complains to two gynecologists that her “vagina is broken,” one prescribes “more sex, a 19th-century recommendation based on curing hysteria,” and the other tells her “it’s psychological.” A third finally determines she has a ruptured cervix. In HYSTERICAL: A Memoir (244 pp., Hachette, $29), the author recounts the two years she spent going from one doctor’s office to another, only to receive one diagnosis again and again: “Nothing Is Wrong With You.” Three months after the 2016 presidential election, Elissa Bassist suffered from blurred vision and debilitating headaches, neither the first nor the last symptoms of a mysterious, chronic illness. ![]() Speaking up doesn’t come so easily to most. By contrast, a single domination client pays her “$1,200 for four hours of cathartic suffering,” and then a few more hours sleeping in a cage. Juggling her careers in sex work and academia, the author lays bare the soul-crushing difference in pay: “My adjunct professorship at a state college paid me $800 per month,” for hours upon hours of lecturing, reading and grading. I had made my way back to him, his pretty baby.” “I had fashioned my femininity as an appeal to other women’s fathers,” she reflects, but “it also appealed to my own. “Domination is one of the only professions in which femininity is worth more than masculinity,” she writes, “and I was building my femininity to sell.” When Belcher brings Catherine home to meet her parents, her father expresses a new approval of her appearance: She’s slimmed down and grown out her long hair. After developing her nascent homosexuality in high school and college, when she presumed that queerness required her to be “butch,” she now finds herself reveling in the performance of über-femininity. ![]() It is the only thing preventing her from having to return to her small town, with its small-town mentality.īut the drag, too, is essential to her survival. “Needing the money is always more present than anything we might have to bury inside,” Belcher writes. program in English, Belcher finds herself in her mid-20s “at the end of my financial rope,” collecting food stamps and considering selling her eggs when a new girlfriend, Catherine, suggests she join her in working at a “B.D.S.M. Chris Belcher’s entertaining debut, PRETTY BABY: A Memoir (260 pp., Avid Reader, $27), recounts how a West Virginia adolescent who read Foucault and Derrida went on to become “L.A.’s renowned lesbian dominatrix.” Her work is as much about money and financial precarity as it is about sex and sexuality, if not more so. ![]()
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