The Happy Hooker, an international bestseller about being a hip twentysomething Manhattan madam, made Xaviera Hollander an overnight celebrity thirty years back. Suddenly the toast of beautiful-people parties and talk shows all over the world, the silver-blonde Amsterdammer had become, with her frank talk about job satisfaction, a four-star general in the sexual revolution. HarperCollins’ reissue of the book this summer coincides with its release of Hollander’s newest, Child No More ($23.95), a warmly witty look at love and life.
The Happy Hooker, its author says now, owes its success to America’s sexual backwardness.
“I was honestly surprised,” Hollander tells the Express, “maybe because I was brought up in Europe, where the mentality is less hypocritical. So far, no books had actually called the animal by its name. Sex was, until then, discussed in Latin terms like vagina, coitus, fellatio — not cunt, fuck, blow jobs. So I seemed to have been a revolutionary liberator.”
A longtime advice columnist for Penthouse magazine, Hollander says the greatest lesson she’s learned is that the best sex is what goes on inside your brain.
“A man has the anatomical equipment to penetrate the body of a woman, or of another man if he is so inclined. But as a woman, I can do better: Penetration of the mind is a far more powerful weapon to gain possession of another human being,” says Hollander, who will be at Cody’s on June 13. “A woman can provoke and tantalize, entice and enslave. She will coax from the deepest recesses of his mind her partner’s innermost fantasies. But don’t get me wrong. I am not into one-sided exploitation and do not find pleasure in using a man’s fantasies against him. Rather, the insight I obtain enables me to grant him greater fulfillment than he could have imagined. So there you have it: interpenetration, bigger and better than any single orgasm, and it lasts longer.”
