Letters from Johns, Letters from Working Girls: an update.

Author and blogger Susannah Breslin, whose work we've chronicled here before, says:

For a variety of reasons, I'm stepping up my efforts to solicit, if you will, Letters from Johns and Letters from Working Girls. These two projects tell the true stories of sex work from the perspective of the clients and the sex workers. If you're a John interested in writing a letter, consider the following questions. Have you ever been with a prostitute? Why? And what was your experience of the girl? If you're a Working Girl interested in writing a letter, consider the following questions. Have you ever been a working girl? Why? And, what was your experience of being a working girl? These are not collections of jerk-off stories, but letters from real-life johns and working girls.

Link.

[#1 posted by hypatia , April 21, 2008 1:28 PM]

/me smells a book deal?

all the best, it's a great project :)

[#2 posted by Jacquilynne , April 21, 2008 2:45 PM]

I've been reading it since it made the Time list recently, which means not that long, and I have to kind of wonder how much editing those letters are getting.

Now, maybe her outreach efforts have primarily reached the more literate johns and working girls out there -- that would certainly make sense -- or maybe everyone reads all the old letters before they write her and are emulating them -- also logical -- but those letters all have a certain sameness to their level of literacy that I find suspect.

[#3 posted by mkultra , April 21, 2008 3:20 PM]

I think it's probably fair to say that there's a certain amount of self-selection here, in that if someone wasn't comfortable expressing themselves in writing and interested in doing so, that person would be unlikely to write in.

[#4 posted by Belac , April 22, 2008 5:58 AM]

Yeah, I think the working girls are likely to be fairly unrepresentative of the overall population.

[#5 posted by Jacquilynne , April 22, 2008 2:02 PM]

She's followed up with information on the editing she is doing, and I'm not surprised it's happening. To be clear, I'm not horrified, either -- she's basically proofreading them -- but there was way too much perfect capitalization happening in those letters for them to be untouched.

Personally, I feel like we'd get a slightly truer sense if we could see what the people wrote as they wrote it. Perfecting the grammar tends to skew the perception even more in terms of education/literacy than it's already being skewed by the fact that the project involves self-selection for willingness to express this sort of idea in print.

But then, maybe the inherent casualness of the internet is already skewing those letters into worse grammar than they'd have if people were writing real letters, and her proofreading is just reversing that trend.