Brendan Francis Newnam: Well, to support your compulsion to sketch, you’ve done many things. You briefly went to college before dropping out to focus on simply being an artist. But to support yourself, you did what you call, “the naked girl business.”
You were a nude model for artists, for people you call “GWCs” — which are guys with cameras that would place ads on craigslist. At one point you say it was money that drove you into the naked girl business, but you also wanted to test yourself. What did you want to test?
Molly Crabapple: I think I wanted to burn off the innocence of childhood. I wanted to get rid of that limiting idea that a lot of girls have that the most important thing about us is our unscathedness by the world.
Because it’s very limiting. It’s like, if you constantly live expecting for the world to be this big, scary rape trap, you can’t go out, or travel, or have adventures or do all sorts of things. You can’t live as a free and equal person. While we should all work for a world where no one is in fear of violence, by the same token, sometimes the fear of violence itself is used as a chain against women.
Brendan Francis Newnam: You talk a lot about this. Not only were you on a very popular website posing nude, but you also did burlesque shows and other things. And throughout this part of the book, though, aside from a few creepy guys, it doesn’t really come off as super-tawdry or super-frightening.
Do you think you’re lucky, or is the world of sex work, as you describe it, not as exploitative and crippling to the ego as maybe people think?
Molly Crabapple: I mean, everyone has a very, very different experience, and I can only speak for my own experience. I had, definitely, photographers that got off on telling me horrible things about my body. I definitely had photographers where I was scared at shoots, though I certainly was lucky enough that nothing happened to me.
But listen, we live in a country where one out of five American women experiences sexual assault. It’s just a dangerous country for women. Most of those assaults come from women’s friends, acquaintances, loved ones, partners, and men that they’re dating. So, I think all sorts of worlds can be good and bad. All sorts of jobs in capitalism can be exploitative sometimes and things that you enjoy other times. Sometimes both at the same moment. My God!
But for me, no, it was not the worst thing on earth. It’s actually something I’m always very glad I did because I met the women who would always be my muses. These tough, smart, sharp, independent women.
