This guest post by Aya de Leon appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Sex Workers.

When I first sent literary agents my novel about a former prostitute who starts an escort service and robs rich and unscrupulous men to support a clinic for sex workers, I was told frequently that my character was not relatable or likeable.  What?  She’s robbing rich guys to pay for street-based sex workers to have health care.  What’s not to like?  But in the process, I learned how deeply women have been conditioned not to identify with sex workers, unless they have done sex work or have close relationships with sex workers.  I have friends and family members who are current and former sex workers, so I underestimated the amount of effort that would be needed to make my character “likeable” and “relatable” to mainstream audiences.  While I saw her as a badass, many may have seen her as a wrongdoer.  While I created a story in which she was rewarded for her daring rule-breaking, others might expect her to be punished.

The conventional expectations of female sexual transgression and punishment are often played out on the screen, and the Lifetime movie The Client List is no exception. Samantha Horton (Jennifer Love Hewitt) is a Texas mom on the verge of financial ruin who turns to sex work to save her house and support her family.  For Samantha, sex work becomes a desperate but predictable conclusion from her upbringing as a beauty pageant winner: “This is America.  If a girl is pretty, she’s not supposed to be poor.”

Sam says this in a moment of financial crisis.  She’s standing in a filling station with a gas-guzzling American truck on empty.  Her credit card is declined, and she digs through the wallet of her drunk, self-pitying husband who had to be carried to the car.  She can only find a single dollar for gas to get home to a house that’s weeks from foreclosure.  Sam is a massage therapist, and had applied for what she thought was a non-sex work massage job.  She left abruptly when she found out that the place offered erotic massage and full sexual services.

But in the moment at the gas station, she sits on the verge of financial ruin.  Sam finds the massage parlor’s business card, and tries to talk to her husband about the decision to begin doing sex work.  She prepares to open her heart to him, but he’s passed out.  Sam steps out of her drunk husband’s earshot, and calls to accept the job.

In my novel, the protagonist has a similar revelation.  In her case, she had been a sex worker, but she stopped servicing clients and started a clinic for sex workers.  Then she’s become a madam of an escort service to keep the clinic open in tough times.  However, a billionaire client wants to bring her out of retirement.  Like Sam in The Client List, she initially said no, but then changed her mind when the circumstances got more dire; her clinic building will also face foreclosure if she doesn’t take immediate action:

The decision had slid into place like a deadbolt, with a sharp click, locking her in.  Just like when she was seventeen and standing in a grimy hallway with a red eviction notice in her hand.  I don’t care who I have to fuck, I’m not gonna end up out on the street.

Back then it had been her sister Cristina that she’d been determined to protect.  Now it was all the girls who came to the clinic, even the girls on her team.  In particular, she thought of Dulce:  wide eyes, bruises and silver platform boots.  Marisol would make sure that the clinic would always be there for girls like Dulce.  She didn’t care if she had to fuck an arrogant billionaire.

I hadn’t seen The Client List  when I started my novel back in 2008, but I identify with both of these female protagonists’ willingness to do whatever is necessary to protect those they love.

There’s also a similarity between the two stories in the communities of sex workers they depict.  Both reflect a range of other interests that they support via sex work.  The women of The Client List include an aspiring novelist, a dancer in musical theater, a tattoo artist, and a teenager with a strict Pentecostal family who ran away to try out for American Idol.  In my novel, the secondary protagonist is getting her degree from Columbia University in Public Health.  She’s prepared to take over the running of the clinic when she graduates and is working her way through school as an escort.

Similarly, both stories provide a range of attitudes toward sex work.  On one end are those who do it only out of economic desperation and feel a sense of disgust, and on the other end are those who feel like one sex worker in The Client List says:  “I love sex. I’m gettin paid to do somethin I love.”  In The Client List, what they all agree on is that sex work “beats the hell out of waitressing.”

There’s a similar moment in my novel, when the secondary protagonist gets a phone call:

“It’s the public health department,” Tyesha said laughing.  “I put a resume on file with them when I was job hunting last year.”

“Oh hell no,” Kim said.

“Dear public health department,” Tyesha fake typed on her phone.  “Please kiss my black ass.  I am now gainfully employed as an escort fucking one well-behaved client a week, and making more money than you offer at any of the sorry-ass jobs I applied for.”

Kim laughed.  “You should sign it ‘Miss Tyesha, one of the smartest bitches on the block.’”

Kim and Tyesha high fived.

“Ladies—” Marisol began.  “Remember, you are not bitches,” she admonished Kim.  “You are hoes.”

The four women laughed.

I added this part, this celebratory attitude toward sex work at the suggestion of a sex worker activist who has been consulting with me on the book.  She explained that contemporary sex worker culture includes the self-congratulation of having figured out how to have a level of economic freedom in today’s society.

So, up until this point, The Client List, like my novel, has painted an empathic portrait of a woman who does sex work.  However, after this, the perspectives of the stories begin to diverge.  In my novel, the protagonist and her team pursue a daring heist to save the clinic.  While I won’t spoil the ending, I will say this:  there are some consequences to her choices of robbery and sex work, but they have more to do with the organization of society and attitudes toward sex workers.  These are obstacles that will not hinder my protagonist from triumph.  In The Client List, however, the story’s plot moves into cliché and the perspective moves into a moralistic tone of judgment and punishment.

Sam Horton gets addicted to the fast money, starts to do cocaine, and gets caught in a police sting.  Later, Sam says that she also got hooked on the lavish gifts of jewelry from her clients, and the constant male attention.  At the character level, however, these motives ring hollow, as do her reasons for doing cocaine, which don’t even make logical sense.  She gets arrested and divulges client information in exchange for minimal jail time.  She does 30 days.  In the process, her husband leaves her and takes the kids.

The lesson for the fallen woman is driven home by the best friend who had warned her to stop: “I knew it would end like this…at first you did it to save your family; I get that.  But then it was for you.  You threw your whole life away for what’s on your ears and around your neck.”

The Client List is “…a dramatization inspired by a true story…characters and events [have been] fictionalized.”  I would be very curious to see what the real story had been.  By making Sam into a gold-digger, they paint the husband as humiliated victim, and the sex worker as penitent sinner.  But I should have known that the film’s underlying conservative Christian values would prevail when Sam kept talking to the angel on her dashboard on the way to and from work.

There are, however, a few touching moments that feel true to the realities of sex work.  When Sam is with her first client, her daughter calls, and Sam takes the call.  The client gets upset because seeing Sam as a mother, a human being beyond her role with him, sort of kills “the feeling” he was trying to get.  Later, Sam says she’s running behind because “the last guy was in real estate, and he wouldn’t stop crying.”  Finally, after Sam is caught, she experiences another occupational hazard of sexwork, TMI: “ever since this happened [being outed as a sex worker], people think they can tell me anything. Checkout girl at the Save-A-Lot says she doesn’t like to do it doggie style.”  These moments reflect a feminist perspective on sex work, key aspects of sex industry work where women who provide sexual services for men are expected to be exclusively sexualized, to play key emotional roles, and are expected to be sexually available to everyone in every way at all times.

These moments, however, are fleeting.  And because it is a Lifetime movie, the latter part of the film moves into what I will call “faux feminist” revelations.  The first is when the angry townswomen caravan from church on Sunday morning to show up at her door like an angry mob.  They hear her tearful confession. Sam says:

My whole life I just always depended on my looks, and I thought this was just gonna be another one of those times. I really thought I was doing the best thing for my family. But in the end the very thing I was trying to save I lost…and I’m just real sorry…for the pain that I caused you.

But instead of vengeance or penitence, it turns out they want information:

“Why do they come to you?” the women ask. “What do you do that we don’t?” and “How can we get them to think about us the way they think about you?”  Sam answers, “You all want tips?”

They agree, and she brings out a banana and two apples to give them sex techniques.

This provides the girl power moment where the women cooperate, but it is also steeped in misinformation.  The allure of sex workers for married men is not all about skills and techniques, it’s also about power, compartmentalization, and fantasy.  The sex worker is playing the role that a man pays her to play.  She can keep it up throughout the entirety of their interaction, because it is limited and is a transaction.  Whatever happens in the bedroom, a man knows that his wife has a full picture of his weaknesses, his failures, his funky smell in the bathroom.  Nowadays, his wife also has a right to expect their sex life to include satisfaction of her needs and desires.  There’s nothing Sam could teach many wives with that banana that would address those reasons that men pursue commercial sexual services.

The second faux feminist moment happens when her mother gives her an apology for encouraging her too much to focus on her looks and not sufficiently praising her intellect and character qualities.

This is faux feminism, because it blames individual women for buying into sexism, as opposed to blaming the institutions of sexism.  It implies that sexism is something passed down from mothers to daughters, as opposed to understanding women as passing on the internalized sexism they’ve learned from the society, including the best strategies for survival and advantages, which often involve collusion with the institutions of sexism.  In The Client List, there’s never any accountability placed either on institutions, or on individual men.  In particular, her husband is never held accountable for choosing to get drunk at the toughest point in the family’s biggest financial crisis.  He chose to get blasted after having spent the day standing around trying to get hired as a day laborer.  He felt humiliated by his drop in status from football star.  Although he apologizes later, his actions are never factored in to her decision.  At the time, they were very clear:  her family was facing ruin.  This was the only job available.  Her husband had put himself out of commission, and she made an executive decision.  She stepped in as breadwinner and took care of her family.

In my novel, the protagonist also faces the challenge of losing a relationship because her partner can’t accept her history of sex work.  Of course, they are not the same–my character was not married and doing sex work in secret–but the core dynamics are the same.  My character justifies her actions, and turns the tables on the love interest for questioning her choices:

“I didn’t even hear it from you. [my character’s love interest complains] Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I would have told you eventually,” she said.  “I just wanted to get to know you a little better before I sprang my fucking prostitution past on you.  I thought you would run, and you did….I did what I had to do, then and now…you left me hanging for weeks trying to decide if you could fucking handle the fact that I was a hooker ten years ago,” she said.  “And it’s not like it was my first goddamn choice of a job.”

In The Client List, however, at no point does Samantha tell her husband off.  Instead, she’s tearful, fallen, and apologetic throughout the latter part of the film.

By conveniently (and unrealistically) making Sam money grubbing and a cliche cocaine addict who’s cold and mean to her family, the film creates a justification for her blame and downfall.  The Client List sidesteps the much more complex and realistic question:  what happens when a woman makes a justifiable decision to take charge of her family’s financial future?  How would a husband react if he knew he dropped the ball and his wife turned to sex work as the only option to save them from homelessness?  Let’s say Samantha did the more realistic thing based on her character, and got out of sex work as soon as the family was on their feet. I would have found the story much more satisfying (and believable) if she had stopped sex work after the family got their finances together, but was prosecuted in the sting because there was evidence that she had worked there in the past.  But the story would lose the vital moralistic tone if the best friend had to say, “You did it to save your family; I get that.  But you’ve moved on and are working at a sports clinic now.  Why are these assholes ruining your life?”   Similarly, when the husband got mad, she could really tell him off:  “We had one dollar left, and two weeks to get our house out of foreclosure.  I had a woman promising me money if I just gave a few hand jobs, and when I went to discuss it with you, you were passed out drunk.  So yes, you missed a crucial moment of decisionmaking.  And as the only adult left standing, I made a choice.  I did what I had to do, and I used what I had at my disposal.”  Turning Sam into a cliche is a cop out.

Finally, the film has a predictable Lifetime movie ending.  After Sam suffers her punishment—shame, losing her family, and jail—she straightens up.  She starts going to night school.  She and the sex worker who “loves sex” both become waitresses, settling for $5 tips where they used to get $1,000 tips.  But Sam clearly implies that it’s worth it, now that she has her dignity back, thus, undoing the “beats the hell out of waitressing” moment of camaraderie.  Now that her bond with the sex workers is broken, she is sufficiently humbled that her man can finally “look at her” again.  The film ends at her kid’s birthday party with the beginning of a reconciliation with her husband and children.

When I reflect on the recent twitter conversation #notyourrescueproject, I think of The Client List as a seriously flawed baby step forward in the portrayal of sex workers in the media:  the sex worker is the main character, she is portrayed as making a decision to do sex work in a situation of economic constraint, not abject victimhood.  But I can only call it a baby step forward from a perspective of harm reduction.  This type of portrayal is less harmful than portrayals that show sex workers as less than human, without agency, or deserving targets of violence.  If you’re looking for a film that presents a feminist perspective on sex work, you might have to “just say no” to The Client List.