This Bestseller Turns Prostitution Into ‘Female Empowerment’

In 1999 there was a popular song that I learned all the words to when I was way too young to know what I was actually saying. The chorus to “What Would You Do?” by the band City High included a line that said, “What would you do if your son was at home, crying all alone on the bedroom floor ‘cause he’s hungry / and the only way to feed him is to sleep with a man for a little bit of money?” 

At the time I didn’t think much about the message behind the pop song. But I can’t say the same holds true after slogging through 656 pages of Kathryn Stockett’s latest historical fiction release, “The Calamity Club.” This was the author’s highly anticipated follow-up to her runaway hit in 2009, “The Help.”

Stockett used way more words to say essentially the same thing as the brilliant lyricists behind “What Would You Do?” The entire book is a defense, and an unrealistic portrayal, of “ethical” prostitution that’s as predictable as it is exhausting. The author tries to convince the reader that having sex for money is fine if it’s for a good cause. 

The extra-long book, which is currently holding strong at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list in the fiction category, was most certainly a calamity. It was also sorely lacking an editor — not to mention a reality check.

It’s interesting how the book’s description doesn’t explicitly mention the gist of the novel, which paints prostitution in a sympathetic light. I can’t say I’m privy to the marketing agenda of publisher Spiegel & Grau, but my guess is that the team was intentionally vague to attract a larger audience. Even in the age of OnlyFans, explicitly glorifying sex work is a hard sell for most readers.

“In 1933 Oxford, Mississippi, Prohibition is on the wane, and the Great Depression is tightening its grip. Poor and rich folks alike have fallen on hard times, even as the old social order remains. For women on the margins, the options are few and the price of dignity and self-determination is unbearably high,” the book’s synopsis says. 

The wokest among us will call it female empowerment, of course. But what’s even more baffling is how Stockett tried to convince the reader that the female characters would line up to sell sex for quick cash and, even worse, that this was all inevitable. 

The action takes place in 1933 as the Great Depression wreaks havoc on the nation. Stockett repeatedly mentions well-to-do families who lose everything, including the millionaires down the road and the main characters themselves, who are hoodwinked by a lying husband/son who is both terrible at investing and secretly gay. 

Women have the right to vote but lack the ability to purchase mass quantities of condoms without being shamed or outright denied. The implication is clear: These women are oppressed, and their only recourse is to sell their bodies for money. What would you do if your son was at home, crying all alone on the bedroom floor? What would you do if you were about to lose your childhood home? Your daughter? Your sanity?

There is pushback from the main character, the wise spinster sister Birdie, who is painted as being more clever and level-headed than anyone else in the book. But eventually she caves to the pressures of Charlie, who was previously arrested and thrown in prison for solicitation, or possibly just for speaking to a black man, it’s not exactly clear which. Charlie thinks a short-term brothel is the answer to all their problems. And she has enough life experience to put it all together.

Spoilers ahead. The main conflict in the book is financial, but it’s also about sex-based discrimination. The women are painted as being resourceful, but they are also products of their time and therefore unable to earn living wages on their own. Given that the men in their lives are useless, they are forced to take matters into their own hands. Which, in this case, means resorting to the world’s oldest profession.

Charlie becomes the madam of the temporary brothel, and Birdie is her skeptical accomplice. They are always one step ahead of getting caught: by the police, by the homeowner whose mansion they are using to entertain customers, and by the overtly religious busybody in town, Garnett Pittman, the hypocritical chairlady of the local orphan asylum who becomes president of the Anti-Vice League for the state of Mississippi.

It’s worth spending some time on the novel’s primary antagonist. Garnett is cartoonishly evil and is the one who pulled strings to have Charlie sterilized and institutionalized to protect Garnett’s husband’s secret — that he fathered the now 11-year-old Meg during a one-night stand when Charlie was 17. Garnett punishes Meg at the orphanage for her parentage and conspires to keep her mother locked away forever.

Modern fiction is chock-full of hypocritical Christian characters just like Garnett. It’s almost a given that once devout Christianity is mentioned, that person will be one of the bad guys. Meanwhile, the true virtuous people are always the ones questioning religion, questioning authority, and generally ditching traditional moral virtues for a “do what I want” existence.

It sounds a lot like the modern day progressive party, come to think of it.

Stockett says during the “Author’s Note” section at the end of the book that she was inspired to write the story because of a law passed in 1928 that allowed the sterilization of women deemed to be “imbeciles,” including “promiscuous women.” She felt compelled to speak out against these atrocities, but instead of arguing against eugenics, she wrote a book that essentially says short-term prostitution is a great way to solve financial hardship.

One of the downfalls of the book is that the brothel never gets busted. The homeowner, a well-to-do older woman who would ostensibly not agree to her family home being turned into a house of ill-repute, goes along with the plan after she figures out what’s going on. So do the maids and Birdie’s bank manager boyfriend. This kind of behavior from all the main characters would be far-fetched in 2026 and feels even more so in the mid-1930s.

As a reader, it feels like the whole 600-plus page story is barreling toward disaster. But then in the end there’s just nothing. The women make a lot of money. The homeowner pays off the mortgage and keeps her home. Charlie gets her daughter back. The cops bust a different, more corrupt brothel instead. The women involved get in, get out, and then move on to live the rest of their lives completely unscathed by their actions. 

As popular as it was, “The Help” became controversial because it centered on a white savior narrative, marginalizing the voices of black domestic workers, as the critics said. “The Calamity Club” has so far been embraced by mainstream critics because it does none of that. Instead, it presents a problem and provides a solution that’s free from legal or moral consequences, despite how ludicrous that is in the real world. 

But why would the critics take issue? They’re a lot more scandalized by racial narratives than they are by prostitution for a good cause.

Last year, OnlyFans creator Sophie Rain went viral for chastising Bonnie Blue, a pornographic film actress, for “the trauma she’s causing herself and so many women.” Rain was upset that Blue’s stunts of sleeping with thousands of men in a single day were turning her profession into a laughingstock and said her antics meant it was “no longer about female empowerment.”

Rain’s issue is not realizing that being a little bit of a porn star is not possible, just like Stockett’s version of prostitution doesn’t make it morally acceptable. It doesn’t matter if the women only slept with men for money for a short time. It doesn’t matter that they paid off their debts. In this book, the ends do not in fact justify the means. 

Blue’s antics do the world a favor because they are honest. Her line of “work” is gross and seedy and should be seen as such. Stockett is never able to make a case for “ethical prostitution” any better than a vegetarian can justify ordering Big Macs from a McDonald’s drive-thru. 

“The Calamity Club” is moral relativism at its finest, which is probably why the leftists are fawning over it. 

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