Working Stiff by Grant Stoddard

Smirk.

In some ways, I should just leave it at that. But I won’t. I can’t.

Just when you think you’re a mature individual and gotten over any possible embarrassment over buying a book about a guy’s sexual exploits, you get comments from an over friendly sales associate. The ever so kind cashier gave me a little smirk while he was placing it in a bag and then had to comment on my choice of purchase. I make some offhand comment about it looking too funny to pass up but on the inside, I’m feeling like I’ve just bought porn and my mother is the one taking my money. And after reading this fun little book, that seems rather fitting.

Basically, Working Stiff is the autobiography of one man’s experience as a columnist for the webzine, Nerve. His assignment was to go out and perform sexual experiments and report back in the form of a high school lab report. He did this for two and some years. And he did everything. Nothing was too weird, deviant, or gross. And you get some of that is this retelling of his life but not really. He didn’t grow up wanting to be a sex reporter, he just wanted to live in America and jumped at a chance that would pay his rent and keep him in the country. He is the everyman thrown into situations that he stumbles his way through. (My favourite would have to be his time at Leather Camp.) What you didn’t get through his old column is his parent’s reaction to his line of work. Or how assignments affected his dating life.

There were a few very explicit scenes and this is definitely not a book I’d recommend for just anyone. The writing style reminded me more of the stuff I’ve read off of the internet than anything I’d read in book form. If you are not used to that, you might find it a little graphic. And the fact that it was non-fiction added a certain sense of surrealism to the text that you wouldn’t accept from a fictionalized story. But it was undeniably funny and I can’t think of a single thing more amusing than sex.

Smirk.