Book Reviews
Issue #31
Dork Whore
By Sarah M Seltzer
Published: March 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
DORK WHORE: MY TRAVELS THROUGH ASIA AS A TWENTY-YEAR-OLD PSEUDO-VIRGIN
By Iris Bahr
(Bloomsbury, $15.95, 224 pages)
In an era of vagina-as-empowerment-tool, Iris Bahr’s hilarious memoir of her travels in Southeast Asia owes a serious debt to Eve Ensler. Without Ensler’s famous series of monologues (you know which ones), Bahr might never have dreamed there was a market for an unflinching female virginity-losing narrative — or as she puts it, the “penetrator plan.”
Bahr has the credentials to keep us laughing; she’s an actress and stand-up comedian who has written and acted in shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm. But beyond the one-liners that are clearly her forte, Dork Whore is a refreshing counterweight to the overplayed cliché of men sowing their wild oats on journeys abroad. With explicit descriptions, our narrator chronicles her travels in Thailand, Vietnam, and India (a rite of passage for young Israelis like Bahr, just out of the army).
First and foremost, there’s her quest to end her “frustrated flowerdom.” But in the process, there’s also a series of endless gastrointestinal illnesses and worms — yes, worms — and enlightening appearances from a cast of characters including a Vietnamese cab driver who is still scared to go into the North, Thai strippers who prefer chatting with Iris to entertaining clients, and an annoyingly optimistic, fashion-senseless backpacker who, to our narrator’s chagrin, is also named Iris.
Bahr’s brisk prose captures the hurriedness and thrill of being young with a backpack behind you, and endless possibilities before you — possibilities that could turn out to be more seedy than sultry. Although she chronicles the stuff that everyone’s on-a-budget overseas journeys are made of, Bahr’s refusal to turn her adventures into a glossy travel brochure or a sappy coming-of-age yarn makes the story her own. We see the trip for what it is: the undirected, often reckless, wanderings of an insecure, angsty, and wryly observant young woman.
There is catharsis beneath the humor. As 20-year-old Iris pushes onward, we discover that it’s taken her so long to “lose it” because she’s fixated on finding a cusp-of-womanhood experience that’s literally and figuratively pain-free. But come journey’s end, Iris’ moments of getting lost, chatting with strangers, incomplete sexual fumbling, and even refusing to do the deed become as memorable and maybe as life-affecting as the arbitrary holy grail of lost virginity. Brave as it is to risk those stomach parasites for the sake of a shag, it’s cooler to risk them for a story like this one.
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