Girls on Cam: The Many Problems of ‘Hot Girls Wanted’

This is a guest post by Kyle Turner.

There seems to be a fallacy surrounding much of the discussion around the Netflix distributed documentary Hot Girls Wanted, directed by Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus and produced by Rashida Jones. My friend pointed it out to me the other day that some have noted that it is, by its very existence of showing someone leaving the sex work industry, anti-feminist. I should disclose that I am a cisgendered queer male, but I consider myself a sex positive feminist ally nonetheless. I don’t really have a place to say what is or is not feminist, and I’m disinclined to mansplain. The issue with Hot Girls Wanted, though, is that it takes the cognizance of its subjects and casts it aside in favor of portraying its performers as infantilized victims, which seems like it will do more harm than good.

From the opening moments of the film, a collage of images rushes across the screen in quick succession, a montage ostensibly to illustrate the current culture’s obsession with female sexuality and the objectification of women’s bodies. Included in this clip reel in the din are an interview with Belle Knox, the Duke Porn Star (we’ll talk more about her later) and a clip from Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” music video. Immediately, the film either has a misunderstanding of these clips, or wants to portray them deliberately out of context: Belle Knox has been open about her experiences in the sex work industry, a move that she’s explained is based both in financial need as well as a desire to reclaim a kind of image or agency which is seen to be robbed of women in pornography, or in other facets of sex work. Nicki Minaj’s video is also an interesting thing to pick out and then utilize in this supposed introduction to one’s thesis: sampling Sir Mix a Lot’s “Baby Got Back,” Minaj is overtly trying to subvert and reclaim the gaze upon Black women’s butts, the lyrical and visual content of the full video nodding to denial, sex with a specific goal (personal pleasure), and castration. Yet, out of context, both of these clips just seem like, in the grand scene of this film’s argument, objects for a male audience devoid of autonomy.

It isn’t that that is not true in many cases, that women are often subject to a kind of leering gaze in media that is not used on men, it’s that Hot Girls Wanted has a bunch of rather interesting, very intelligent young women who are cognizant of what they are doing and why, and yet want to invalidate their agency in doing such. The film broadly wants to argue that the pro-am, or professional amateur, porn industry is exploitative and dangerous. While I don’t doubt that that is true, the footage contained in this film not only does not actually show the exploitation it so desperately wants to use as argument, but also, rather than suggest solutions to protect women and other performers in the sex work industry from exploitation (like harsher regulation), suggests rather vehemently that they should not be doing it in the first place.

We encounter and get to know Tressa, Rachel, Karly, Michelle, and Jade, all introduced in some invariably “normal,” inconspicuous way, in addition to their name, stage name, and period of working in the sex work industry via an onscreen rendering of a Twitter profile. This Twitter motif is used throughout the film, but surprisingly little thought goes into it making any kind of cogent meaning with regard to the subjects of the documentary. Though some performers speak explicitly about the characters they play for certain scenes, this idea of performativity, never mind persona, in conjunction to social media is never explored. It’s as if the film is trying to make the subjects seem as bland as possible (which doesn’t totally work) to contrast against the work that they do. They’re all around 18-22, a point that’s made in order to infantilize each person.

Despite the fact that nearly all of the performers are, as aforementioned, cognizant of what they are doing and why, the directors take specific steps to invalidate their words: moribund music cues underline Tressa’s declaration that this is what makes her happy; Michelle says “people are going to see it anyways” not once, but carefully edited so she says it three times; Jade examines the performative nature of facial abuse, but the scene leans on the actual performance to undercut her agency in the matter; Rachel talks about a mild injury on the set of a bondage scene and recalls how sensitive and receptive the crew was in terms of her safety, but the scene it against framed with grim music; the girls watch another Belle Knox interview, which is then juxtaposed against one of Knox’s scenes of facial abuse, again seemingly utilized to invalidate her autonomy in the matter.

The Belle Knox scene is particularly interesting because, for a poor documentary that mostly fails to build any kind of substantive argument (regardless of whether or not I agree with said argument), it’s able to articulate several different discourses that the film at large never seems interested in. On the one hand, it’s several Latina performers, including Jade, watching this interview. They scoff, Jade remarking that, in response to Knox’s vehement feminism and financial need, she and other performers have been doing it for years and already know how that model works. Jade succinctly critiques a racist capitalist model that benefits rich white women going to prestigious universities. (Another thing the film never gets into is why these subjects would be interested in doing this work in the first place, inasmuch as the current job climate necessitating it.) From another approach, there is that sharp contrast between Knox’s confident interview and the facial abuse scene itself, which feels to be used intentionally in a maternal way, skeptical of this young woman’s awareness.

Which is one of Hot Girls Wanted’s major issues: the maternalistic skepticism with which it treats all of its subjects. We follow Tressa perhaps the most closely, from her home life where her mother knows and vehemently disapproves of her work, to her boyfriend, who also disapproves of her work, to the actual work, and back again. As the film profiles her towards the beginning, she mentions how happy this job makes her, how she would hate to live at home (in Florida) and work a minimum wage job. By the end of the film, both her mother and her boyfriend essentially guilt trip her into quitting, almost victim blaming her. “Dignity” and “self-respect” are thrown around in the conversation, inferring she has none because she’s in the sex work industry. The last time we see her on screen, she’s living with her boyfriend, saying that getting out of porn was all she ever wanted. But there’s an odd reticence to her voice, as if she’s trying to convince herself.

Which is where the fallacy I mentioned at the beginning of this piece comes in: it’s entirely her, as it is anyone else’s, prerogative to do sex work or to leave sex work. But it’s hard to be on the side of the documentary that continually treats its female subjects like they don’t know what to do, like they’re little girls who’ve wandered off the trail of goodness, like they don’t know any better and the terrible things they’ll experience here will teach them a lesson. That kind of sex negative attitude, and what’s more, “rescuer” mentality that does more harm than good to sex workers.

The intentions are well-placed to some degree, but the tone deafness and willful ignorance of what its subjects are actually saying and how they feel about the work is worrisome and even dangerous. Hot girls may be wanted, but in an ironically patriarchal move, their voices and opinions are not.

Kyle Turner (@tylekurner) is a freelance film critic and writer. He’s also the assistant editor of Movie Mezzanine and began writing on the Internet in 2007 with his blog The Movie Scene. Since then, Kyle has contributed to TheBlackMaria.org, Film School Rejects, Under the Radar, and IndieWire’s /Bent. He is studying cinema at the University of Hartford in Connecticut and relieved to know that he’s not a golem.