I am Paying, So What? On Chester Brown’s Paying for It
I have read some of Chester Brown’s books but had never seen such enthusiastic reviews about his work as the ones on his Paying for it (Drawn and Quarterly, 2011). “So personal that it hurts” — to sum up what most critics were saying. None other than Robert Crumb, the main precursor to Brown and company, wrote a foreword praising the book and Brown’s ability to expose himself, among other things. (Of course, and that is the only reserve he had about it, Crumb found the sexual life and desires of his successor a bit tame in comparison to his own.) Anyway, this is like the pope praising a priest from a small village up in Canada.
But what is Paying for it about? Well, it is about the life of a John.
John is the pejorative name given to someone who hires a prostitute — and I hope to be using the right word for it. Maybe the right word is “escort,” or something fancy like that. Rephrasing: leaving the one being paid outside of the equation, John is someone who pays for sex. In real life, Brown is a John, hence the so-called self-exposure. The whole tragedy of his life — at least the part of his life capture by his narrative — is that being a John is currently socially unaccepted. It is as hard, I think, as being a vegetarian: you always have to justify yourself in front of people who eat meat. Following my own weak metaphor, it is possible to say that this is exactly what Brown does throughout the book: he defends himself, and, as most vegetarians, in the process condemns everyone else.
The part of the book in comic form, which is the main part of it, recounts his misadventures as a John. Of course, he is not a regular John: he is special. He is a client sensible enough to sympathize and also relate to his workforce. But he starts the book by telling us how he came up with the idea of being a John. At the end of a long-time relationship, he concluded that all you have in the world is, on the one hand, romantic love, the type that he had just left behind; and, on the other hand, paid love, the type he will embrace from that point onward.
his arguments are all constructed on the hypothesis that romantic love is bad, and, more than that, that relationships in general are based on this type of love; the exception being paid relations.
Now, I have nothing in favour of romantic love per se, especially if it is defined on sacrifice, and pain, and hurt, and all that nineteenth-century mal de siècle shit. My problem with his argument is just that he offers one solution to the romantic problem, and one solution only: he foresees a day in which all sex will be paid for. To solve all the problems that stream out of romanticism, let’s commercialize our relationships. In his mind, a business transaction is fairer than anything else. That is, custumers right would be the new etiquette for Brown’s utopia.
But he only states that at the end of the book, a compendium of useful information about prostitution and the whole business around it.
In the first part of the book, he narrates his relations with various prostitutes during his life as a John, one by one, with all his doubts and worries, from the start to the end, when he finally meets his dream prostitute, the one with whom he still has a relationship. By the end of the book, she gives up being a prostitute, although he still pays for his weekly hour or two with her. That is a happy and non-romantic ending there, folks: she gives up, but still charges him. She is not a prostitute. That is Brown’s new love utopia: a commercial transaction between two people, not between johns and prostitutes.
Throughout the book, Brown also discusses his ideas on commercial love with prejudicial and narrow-minded people — usually his friend Seth (another worthwhile comic writer of his own generation) — that probably represent us all, the people who look at him with eyes distorted by years and years of a romantic mindset. And he screams with Seth, us. Seth, like most of us, never gave two thoughts about it, and probably never will. Brown struggles. Just like a vegetarian.
My answer to his arguments would be, “do what you want, you know?” Most of us, probably like Seth, do not care if people pay for it or not; and are not judgemental on vegetarians, even though we choose to eat meat.
Ps.: The best criticism on Paying for it I have read came up on The Believer. In it, the reviewer (sorry, I don’t remember her name!) states something like, “apparently, there are no one-night stands in Canada!”
