Lindy West meets Emily Witt meets Diablo Cody in this incisive and infectious essay collection about the nightlife and sex industries, bodies and desire, and sexuality and performance by celebrated burlesque performer, sex educator, and social worker Fancy Feast.
When Fancy Feast (yes, you got her name right) was in her high school production of "Cabaret," she convinced the director to cast her as a sexy Kit Kat Club Girl, not the old landlady part that always always goes to the fat girl. In a black slip and fingerless gloves, Fancy made her debut appearance in a fluorescent-lit high school auditorium—and has never looked back. In college, she spent school holidays in New York City, watching striptease after striptease, transformed by watching the beautiful yet gritty art form. "God help me, I was going to become one of them," she decided. "Nuns are called to serve Christ and I was called to serve burlesque."
And serve she does. Fancy Feast has now been working for over a decade as an entertainer and sex educator and has won top awards for her work. In Naked, Fancy draws back the curtain to reveal a world that most denizens of the daytime never see. Part exclusive backstage pass, part long-form literary striptease, these essays confront our culture's tightly held beliefs—like so many clutched pearls—about sex, communication, power, and the messiness of life on the margins of respectability. In "Dildo Lady," Fancy recounts her time cleaning Fleshlights at a sex store, attributing vile customer behavior not to individual flaws but to the failure of our sex education system. And she makes a group of cancer survivors feel sexy again, which may be the only essay about dildos you'll ever read that will make you weep. In "Doing Yourself," Fancy tackles fatphobia and dating, self-love and fantasies. In "Yes/No/Maybe," Fancy brings the reader from sex parties to polyamorous relationships as she contrasts the undeniable sexiness of enthusiastic consent and clear boundaries with the devastating effects of non-consent. As someone who has been paid to let partygoers eat cake off of her nude body, or as someone who conjures workplace fantasies for phone sex clients, and as a human who sometimes falls for her clients, Fancy Feast has the wisdom of experiences that not everyone might get, and in Naked, she gives readers a front-row seat to many of them.
Fancy Feast does this all as a fat woman who makes a living taking her clothes off—a triumphant punch back at a culture that wants fat people to be self-hating or sexless or miserable. Narrated with wry humor and a fierce determination to find something sexy and meaningful in a world that is darkening around us, these essays are splashy, sometimes hilarious, and always powerful in their vulnerability.
