REVIEW: Lovers XXX by Allie Rowbottom

One of my favorite reading experiences of my life was Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. I read it in the months between graduating college and starting grad school, an amorphous time when I had no immediate plans or responsibility, in my childhood bedroom, compulsively, pulled along by the taut thread that is McNeil and McCain’s magical ability to construct narrative out of interviews. Later, I decided to read The Other Hollywood, their book about the history of the porn industry. I grew up in the era of third-wave feminism, and figured The Other Hollywood would reiterate all the things I’d been told: sex work is a way to be in charge of one’s body, a way of subverting the system, and that participating in it didn’t mean you were emotionally damaged but instead indicated sexual liberation.