But For a Good Time, Call… doesn’t think of itself as better than other films with sex workers as their protagonists, with Lauren using Katie’s virginity against her as a metaphor for her insecurity when they have their first major fight, a prevalent attitude that buys into virgins being lesser versions of sex-having humans. As Vivian in Pretty Woman resents Edward for making her “feel cheap,” Lauren’s treatment of her housemate brings up feelings of worthlessness for Katie. “You make me feel like I’ll never be good enough for you,” she cries. It seems we can’t win either way: women are slut- and prude-shamed no matter our real or perceived bedroom habits.
Welcome to the Rileys and Starlet are not flawless examples of how to depict sex workers in film, but they are a step in the right direction. With Hollywood’s repetitive use of sex workers as one-dimensional cardboard cut-outs with a single purpose, the indie genre often gives sex workers, both supporting characters and protagonists, expressed thoughts and feelings, making them fleshed out and human.
The vision of Eddie/Dirk’s home life at the beginning of the film shows us that no family is without its failures, and that true family and community bolsters individuals while forgiving and healing these flaws. The film is progressive in its inclusivity (of male, female, and queer characters), and specifically in its treatment of Amber as she constructs her own version of motherhood and family, for better or worse.
Randy defines the male sex worker in ways that are diametrically opposed to more traditional depictions of female sex workers. He is not oppressed by his clients, controlled by a pimp, or violently threatened until the very end. Even then, such “threats” are delivered as a comedy of errors after a group of husbands discover their wives have been ordering a lot of pizza with “extra anchovies,” the code for Randy’s clandestine services. Thus, he enjoys a much more privileged kind of work as a casual summer gigolo than as a professional prostitute who is often trapped in such work for extended periods of time and trapped by dominating patriarchal forces.
Some clues for her motives are in the scenes between Abby and her spouse. They are affectionate and loving with each other, even when they’re alone, but the sex has gone out of their marriage. After a disastrous first encounter with an escort, we feel Abby’s ache of longing when a second “better” escort begins to touch her. Later we see Eleanor’s first client, a 23-year-old virgin, react to Eleanor’s touch in much the same way.
Pretty Woman depicts a world where everyone is either a card-carrying member of the corporate caste or an obliging subordinate whose primary purpose in life is to serve, drive or blow members of that caste. It is obsessed with things and encourages the audience to share its obsession with things. These include Lotus cars, jets and jewelry. It also sells the City of Angels, of course. Rodeo Drive is one of the stars of the show. In fact, the whole movie is pretty much an extended Visit California commercial.
Season Two Episode One of Sherlock, “A Scandal in Belgravia,” is adapted from the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Holmes story “A Scandal in Bohemia.” The storyline focuses on Irene Adler, portrayed brilliantly by the arresting Lara Pulver, who has incriminating photographs of a member of nobility that Sherlock must retrieve.
When we are introduced to Ros, she is working in Winterfell but as war approaches she decides to try her luck in King’s Landing expressing the view that if all the men leave for war there is not going to be much for her in Winterfell. Once there she goes from being “just a sex worker” to getting involved in the politics of the realm by becoming the right hand woman of Little Finger and subsequently double crossing him by becoming an agent for Varys. However despite her many interesting qualities and potential for interesting storylines, Ros basically exists for one reason to provide exposition regarding male characters on the show while naked. She is sexposition personified.
Like much of Lifshitz’ previous work, Wild Side explores sexuality and emotional intimacy. Thankfully, Stéphanie’s gender identity or Mikhail and Djamel’s bisexuality are not the sole focus, but rather appropriately important facets of their characters.
Inara shows all the benefits to the cultural changes of the last 500 years. She’s a Companion, a highly trained and respected sex worker who ministers mostly to dignitaries, businessmen, and other elites. She’s taken a ride on Serenity, the ship around which most of the show’s action centers, because she wants to see the universe. Because she is a Companion, she can write her own ticket – there will always be clients, so long as they stick to planets with some level of economic stability, and she can just rent a shuttle for as long as she wants. Plus, Inara herself is fun, witty, and classy as all get out. She’s the woman we all want to be, and she’s a sex worker. That’s progressive, right?
The problem here comes not from what the show is saying about sex work. It’s saying very complimentary things. The issue is that this show, this wonderful lovely show, is showing us something entirely different. Namely, that sex work is bad and nasty and wrong.
Mark says he wants a girlfriend and that although he understands Rachel is a sex worker, he likes that Rachel makes him feel as though he has a girlfriend. That’s an important distinction that the trailer conveniently cut out. People with disabilities are not children who form childish emotional attachments from fantasies. We understand reality, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to escape it from time to time like everyone else.
On its surface, True Romance comes off as yet another story about a guy who saves a girl from a horrible existence as a sex worker and he protects her forever and they live happily together forever and ever, the end. But, if you’ve ever seen it, you know that this is not the case. Alabama Whitman is a hero in her own right. She’s never apologetic about her sex life or her choices; they are what they are and she’s OK with it.
Whether we make online videos that directly respond to terrible portrayals of us in the media, videos with the purpose of educating and doing advocacy, or produce feature films, sex workers who make media are constantly pressed up against all of our stereotypes. Over the last decade, I have dealt with documentary media about sex work as an audience member, a subject, and a producer. Whether we’re portrayed as villains or victims, pretty women or desperate girls, sex workers are a popular focus of documentary projects. But the only way to reach beyond simplistic narratives is for sex workers to be involved in the production of these projects.
When I reflect on the recent twitter conversation #notyourrescue project, 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.
Navigating male prostitution has always been tricky, but ‘Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo’ (Mike Mitchell, 1999) unburdens audiences from tackling any heavily philosophical explications through its potty humor, shallow characters, and offensive depictions of ailments such as Tourette Syndrome, Gigantism, Narcolepsy, and obesity. This same brand of mindless humor is found in ‘Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo’ (Mike Mitchell, 2005). However, despite what the movie lacks (and it’s certainly aware of itself as a raunchy, unconventional rom-com), its central themes are love and kindness, and what is perhaps less apparent is the seemingly rare ability to pause and see someone for who they truly are, as opposed to how they may be of service in terms of sex or money. This goofy film featuring Rob Schneider begs a feminist critique not only because the film lacks many multi-dimensional characters, but because it is a prostitution narrative encoded as a story depicting the pursuit of romantic love, rather than a cautionary tale about the dangers of the world’s oldest profession.
Navigating male prostitution has always been tricky, but ‘Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo’ (Mike Mitchell, 1999) unburdens audiences from tackling any heavily philosophical explications through its potty humor, shallow characters, and offensive depictions of ailments such as Tourette Syndrome, Gigantism, Narcolepsy, and obesity. This same brand of mindless humor is found in ‘Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo’ (Mike Mitchell, 2005). However, despite what the movie lacks (and it’s certainly aware of itself as a raunchy, unconventional rom-com), its central themes are love and kindness, and what is perhaps less apparent is the seemingly rare ability to pause and see someone for who they truly are, as opposed to how they may be of service in terms of sex or money. This goofy film featuring Rob Schneider begs a feminist critique not only because the film lacks many multi-dimensional characters, but because it is a prostitution narrative encoded as a story depicting the pursuit of romantic love, rather than a cautionary tale about the dangers of the world’s oldest profession.
Navigating male prostitution has always been tricky, but Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo (Mike Mitchell, 1999)unburdens audiences from tackling any heavily philosophical explications through its potty humor, shallow characters, and offensive depictions of ailments such as Tourette Syndrome, Gigantism, Narcolepsy, and obesity. This same brand of mindless humor is found in Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (Mike Mitchell, 2005). However, despite what the movie lacks (and it’s certainly aware of itself as an unconventional rom-com), its central themes are love and kindness, and what is perhaps less apparent is the seemingly rare ability to pause and see someone for who they truly are, as opposed to how they may be of service in terms of sex or money. This goofy film featuring Rob Schneider begs a feminist critique not only because the film lacks many multi-dimensional characters, but because it is a prostitution narrative encoded as a story that illustrates the pursuit of romantic love, rather than a cautionary tale about the dangers of the world’s oldest profession.
We see Deuce’s priorities are obviously askew when he pours Fiji water into his fish tank while he drinks murky tap water.
While sex for pay is in fact criminal in most places, we’re positioned to believe that any form of prostitution is also unsafe and downright gross. However, audiences respond differently to Deuce due to his male status. Female prostitutes are typically interpreted as vulnerable, desperate, and revolting–quite the contrary, we sympathize with Deuce, we root for Deuce, we like Deuce. Would most audiences feel the same way about a woman protagonist? Probably not. In fact, TJ’s (Eddie Griffin) continued use of terms like “he-bitch” and “man-gina” only serve to further affix a pseudo-stigma to Deuce in his pursuits as a hooker. Indeed, Deuce is not stigmatized; rather, he’s reigned a sort of hero for his accomplishments as a “he-bitch,” as he helps to develop the self esteem of his clients and urges them to remember that they’re worthy of love. Also, Rob Schneider is not a traditionally handsome man, which may aid audiences in feeling more at ease with Deuce’s profession. Gender in comedy is certainly an issue here–many viewers find male characters like Deuce funny precisely because we don’t take men seriously when they’re sexualized, especially awkward, goofy Schneider. It is this quietly confident brand of masculinity that feminist viewers endorse, if we can excuse the insulting placement of minorities, people with disabilities, and others. TJ fulfills the stereotyped role of the token Black friend and the experienced pimp, yet he’s Deuce’s only source of guidance in his misadventures as a gigolo. What is perhaps most troubling is when, in the film’s concluding scene, Deuce spots TJ sitting behind him in court, disguised in “white face” to avoid being accosted by the police for his involvement in pimping. This disguise surely eliminates any suspicion of wrongdoing or affiliation with the prostitution business.
We’re struck with the sobering fact that Deuce is indeed desperate, and yet the effect is still one of comedy and likability.
A particularly significant scene in this discussion depicts Deuce accidentally taking home an actual prostitute in a classic case of mistaken identity. Claire adamantly requests $500 for her services, and they argue over who exactly pays who. We find ourselves comfortable with Deuce’s new career when he insists that he wants only $10, which is clearly the price he believes he’s worth after a kinky woman dresses him as a German tourist and her rabid dog chases him out. This run-in with a female prostitute is a refreshing reminder to audiences that sex workers can indeed be ambitious and business-savvy, and works as a wake-up call to Deuce that perhaps he should stick to cleaning fish tanks for a living.
TJ uses the term “man-whoring,” which implies that “whoring” itself is a practice reserved exclusively for women. Deuce agrees to “man-whore” to replace the expensive fish tank that he breaks in Antoine’s home. However, money is not the motive; Deuce simply wants to do what’s right by replacing the expensive item he broke while housesitting. We may also note that Deuce returns the money given to him by Kate’s (Arija Bareikis) friends to take her out, and also stands up for her when they argue that she’s “not normal.” When Deuce first meets Kate, he’s thrilled that she seems so “perfect,” of course not like his other clients who attract unwanted attention in public. Also vital to unravelling character development is that Deuce’s discovery of Kate’s prosthetic leg takes place during foreplay: an act of intimacy, exploration, and trust–and he doesn’t bat an eyelash.
A portly girl scout serves as our surrogate when Deuce answers the door to offers of cookies shortly after he accidentally turns on pornography. “You’re a sick man, and I’m gonna tell!”
Each of Deuce’s clients present a challenge: to “normalize” their bizarre behavior and off-putting appearances. Deuce takes Ruth (the lovable Amy Poehler), a woman with Tourette Syndrome, to a baseball game so her disorder doesn’t alienate her in public. He exercises with the hefty Fluisa (Big Boy) and even plays a food trivia game with her, and he accommodates Carol’s (Deborah Lemen) Narcolepsy to prevent self-injury.
Detective Fowler can’t seem to stop whipping out his junk for Deuce to assess.
The film is resolved in a court scene where all of Deuce’s “clients” testify on his behalf. Tina (Torsten Voges), an exceedingly tall woman from Norway, declares, “Deuce and I never had sex. It was physically impossible. It’s true I paid him money to be with him, and I’d do it again because he made me feel good about myself.” Deuce must admit that he did, in fact, sleep with one woman who was a client, but he asserts that he is in love with her. He is pardoned since she never actually paid him for sex. “This whole gigolo thing was just a mistake,” he tells Kate. His time as a man-whore essentially leads him to love, to a woman he finds ideal. Deuce refuses to ostracize any of these women simply because they are society’s “throwaways,” and other men have perhaps rejected or abandoned them due to their quirks or impairments. We can argue that the film hates fat women, tall women, perhaps all women, but we must consider the possibility that these characters represent the hyperbolic caricature images many women imagine of themselves: “I’m too fat,” “my feet are too big,” “I’m no fun to be with.” We all have insecurities, especially about our bodies and social identities; however, enter Deuce to confirm that we all have the right to unapologetically be who we are.
All of the “flaws” Deuce’s clients exhibit only serve to highlight that nothing is actually wrong with any of them at all. Every woman Deuce “pleasures” is “broken” in some way, as the film seems to insist. Even Kate’s roommate Bergita, a very minor character, is newly blind, a disability which serves as comic relief throughout the movie. While the placement of disabled, queered, othered, or otherwise “damaged” women in the film is no doubt offensive, these characters undeniably aid in the narrative structure of Deuce Bigalow. Although Deuce is obviously not destined for life as a sex worker, his sampling of the trade offers viewers the reality that prostitutes are indeed hard workers and human beings.
Bergita worries that something is wrong with her “cat.”
Deuce actually grows by choosing to become a prostitute, primarily because he’s so horrid at it. His redeeming quality, amid choosing such an unsavory career path, is his unrelenting kindness, his willingness to please, and his natural role as the “good guy.” Deuce tells Kate, “This whole gigolo thing was just a mistake…but I’m glad it happened, cause I never would have met you. I never would have known what love was.” Throughout Deuce’s time as a man-whore, he comes to know himself well, he forges authentic friendships, and he finds the girl of his dreams. Deuce tells one client, “I just can’t do this. I’m head over heels for a girl. We’re going through a rough time, me being a man-whore and all, but I know it’s gonna work out because I love her,” a moment that negotiates the shady boundaries between romance and plain raunchiness. Although he initially recoils at the idea that he doesn’t bring any women “pleasure,” Deuce provides comfort, support, and friendship to all the women he takes on as clients. As Ruth explains in court, “Deuce taught me to be comfortable with who I am.” If we pause to look past the poop jokes, the unoriginal stereotypes, and a cop who can’t stop flashing Deuce his “thin” dick, we can easily detect a genuine person who simply wants what we all want: love.
_______________________________
Jenny has a Master of Arts degree in English, and she is a part-time instructor at Alvernia University. Her areas of scholarship include women’s literature, menstrual literacy, and rape-revenge cinema. You can find her on Pinterest.
When I reflect on the recent twitter conversation #notyourrescue project, 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.
Jennifer Love Hewitt in The Client List
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 ClientList poster
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.
Aya de Leon is a Black/Latina writer/performer whose work has received acclaim in the Village Voice, Washington Post, American Theatre Magazine, and has been featured on Def Poetry and in Essence Magazine. Aya has been a Cave Canem poetry fellow, and a slam poetry champion. She is currently working on a sex worker heist novel. She is the Director of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program, teaching poetry, spoken word, and hip hop at UC Berkeley. She’s on Twitter @AyadeLeon and blogs at AyadeLeon.wordpress.com.
Whether we make online videos that directly respond to terrible portrayals of us in the media, videos with the purpose of educating and doing advocacy, or produce feature films, sex workers who make media are constantly pressed up against all of our stereotypes. Over the last decade, I have dealt with documentary media about sex work as an audience member, a subject, and a producer. Whether we’re portrayed as villains or victims, pretty women or desperate girls, sex workers are a popular focus of documentary projects. But the only way to reach beyond simplistic narratives is for sex workers to be involved in the production of these projects.
Anna Saini from The Red Umbrella Diaries
This guest post by Audacia Ray appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Sex Workers.
“I took you into my house and allowed you to shoot and you have laughed at us,” Anita’s subtitle reads as she looks directly into the camera in a 2010 Youtube video produced by Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad (VAMP, the Prostitutes’ Collective Against Injustice). VAMP’s video garnered a little shy of 19,000 views against the nearly two million views of Prostitutes of God, a VICE documentary that inaccurately depicted sex workers in Sangli, India and reported one sex worker as being HIV positive when she was not. VAMP’s video response to the VICE documentary was swift, fierce, and supported by sex worker and human rights activists. VICE edited out the clip falsely identifying a woman as HIV positive, but otherwise did not respond.
Whether we make online videos that directly respond to terrible portrayals of us in the media, videos with the purpose of educating and doing advocacy, or produce feature films, sex workers who make media are constantly pressed up against all of our stereotypes. Over the last decade, I have dealt with documentary media about sex work as an audience member, a subject, and a producer. Whether we’re portrayed as villains or victims, pretty women or desperate girls, sex workers are a popular focus of documentary projects. But the only way to reach beyond simplistic narratives is for sex workers to be involved in the production of these projects.
In 2009, I led my first media spokesperson training for sex workers in New York. At that training, I shot a one-minute PSA video (and I added more footage in 2011) called “I Am A Sex Worker.” In the video, the participating sex workers say one mundane fact about themselves, followed with “and I’m a sex worker.” The purpose of the video was to speak to a general audience and humanize sex workers as people who are multifaceted. I have to admit that it is not a technically “good” video. It’s all people talking directly to the camera in front of an uninspiring background, and the lighting and sound leave a lot to be desired. This lack of technical filmmaking finesse is not uncommon in sex worker-made media. Figuring out how to make the videos ourselves is resourceful; it is preferable to make a video with content completely controlled by sex workers ourselves, instead of handing the power over to a filmmaker we might not trust. Furthermore, there’s something compelling and awesome about sex workers telling even a sliver of their own stories while making eye contact with the camera.
Some sex-worker-created advocacy-driven online videos have a much narrower audience than mine though. The subtitle of the 2010 video conceived, developed, and produced by Lusty Day and Beef Jerky, “Every Ho I Know Says So” spells it out: “advice for partners, lovers, dates, and sweethearts of sex workers.” In this nine-minute video, shot mostly on handheld iPhone video and combining clips shot by many different people, 21 sex workers address the viewer as “you” and give advice about how best to treat a sex worker in a dating situation. The video is offered up as a resource for sex workers to show to their romantic partners and potential partners and for partners to find on their own.
Both of these videos feature the identifiable faces of sex workers, with a couple of exceptions where people’s identifying characteristics are concealed. But exposure can be risky for many sex workers. Whether a sex worker is doing legal or illegal work, exposure can mean loss of income (especially if the sex worker has another job or tries to transition into work outside the industry), loss of child custody or housing, or threats to their well-being from the local community. Showing people’s faces, of course, is an important part of establishing humanity and depth of character in any film project. But some sex workers have been successful in creating videos that don’t reveal their identities while revealing intimate details about their work and motivations.
Live Nude Girls Unite! poster
The Amsterdam-based organization Voices of Women Media (VOW) works with marginalized women to develop media skills so that they can tell their own stories. In a video documentary collaboration with two women who are sex workers in Amsterdam, VOW supported a woman named Chantal as well as an anonymous woman to script, produce, and shoot documentary shorts based on their lives. The resulting pair of 2010 videos, “Drowning” and “Los Caminos,” are portraits of women that are intimate, showing the interior of their work spaces behind the famed Amsterdam red light district windows, but also protect the identities of the women. As more stylistic elements are introduced, like b roll, staging, music, and with them, more complex editing, more skills are needed to create films like these. Collaborations like the Voices of Women Media project can work well if the stories and skill development of sex workers are centered, and if creative control remains with the sex workers and isn’t handed over to someone who will reshape the story for what they perceive as a better narrative. Authenticity is important, though it certainly takes longer to do a project this way. Authenticity, by the way, is not what happens when two young filmmakers decide to “pose as strippers” for two weeks (aka briefly become strippers while also looking down on actual women who strip for a living) and make videos about it, as an upcoming series on VICE touts.
It’s a big leap from DIY web videos to feature documentaries in terms of skill and of course fundraising; there have not been too many feature films about sex workers told from our perspective. The first one I saw was Live Nude Girls Unite, a documentary released in 2000 about the unionization process of the Lusty Lady strip club in San Francisco. There is a lot of hand-held camera work in the film as Julia Query, the producer, co-director, and a character in the film, takes the viewer through the club. In the film, we meet the dancers, attend their meetings, and even get to sit in on Julia’s coming-out to her mother. The dancers create a union, and a historical moment in sex worker labor organizing is documented.
More recently the 2013 feature film American Courtesans, produced by Kristen DiAngelo, an escort who also serves as the interviewer in the film, has played the festival circuit and won critical acclaim. The film features 11 cisgender women from around the United States who Kristen found through her personal networks. There isn’t a narrative structure; instead the film is a series of spotlight shoots of the women, who do sit-down interviews with Kristen and tell their life stories. The film strives to create empathy for the experiences of escorts as both workers and people. Though it doesn’t gloss over the challenges the women have faced in their lives–there are tears on camera more than once in the film–ultimately the filmmakers’ intent is to portray escorting as a legitimate and positive career choice for the women in the film.
After many years of working to produce media with sex workers and create spaces for sex workers to individual stories about our experiences, in the past year I’ve set out to produce my own feature-length documentary, The Red Umbrella Diaries. The film will tell the story of seven LGBTQ sex workers (myself included) as we prepare to tell our stories on stage at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in NYC.I’ve learned that my previous experience shooting web shorts as well as directing and producing a feature-length porn film, The Bi Apple (which won a Feminist Porn Award in 2007), has not really prepared me for this process. I’m grateful that I have been able to step aside and not be the filmmaker–instead I’m leaving that to the professionals, an Emmy-award winning crew–but I’d be lying if I said that its been easy. I have said no to many filmmakers who approached me over the years because I don’t trust just anyone to tell my story, and now I’m not signing away my right to review the final product – I’m doing the opposite actually. As an adult model and in other media situations, I have signed those releases, and I know how it feels to see myself represented in a way I dislike and not being able to do much about it.
Now I’m working with a crew I trust, guys who attended the storytelling events I produce for almost two years before showing up with a camera. We are currently working on our rough cut of the film. I’ve learned that having creative control over the final product still means that I need to trust the filmmakers I’m collaborating with. For me, there is definitely such a thing as being too close to the subject matter. I forget that there are elements of the lingo around my former profession that need to be defined, and that if this film is going to be accessible to a general audience, we do have to take the time to spell out things that I think are basic. But I know, and the filmmakers agree, that sex workers are experts on our own experiences, so there won’t be any professors or other experts explaining things on camera. Just us. I feel certain that we’re contributing something positive to documentary film, and I’m excited to prove that a collaboration where the “subjects” of a film have the final say over the content can be a rich and interesting project with complex storytelling.
Audacia Ray is a former sex worker who is the founder and executive director of the Red Umbrella Project, a small organization based in Brooklyn. She is the editor of the literary journal Prose & Lore: Memoir Stories About Sex Work and the executive producer of The Red Umbrella Diaries, a feature documentary with a targeted premiere of spring 2015. http://redumbrellaproject.org, @audaciaray on Twitter/Tumblr/Instagram.
On its surface, ‘True Romance’ comes off as yet another story about a guy who saves a girl from a horrible existence as a sex worker and he protects her forever and they live happily together forever and ever, the end. But, if you’ve ever seen it, you know that this is not the case. Alabama Whitman is a hero in her own right. She’s never apologetic about her sex life or her choices; they are what they are and she’s OK with it.
Proving that love is a strength, not a weakness
This guest post by Shay Revolver appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Sex Workers.
The year was 1993. For the most part the 90s were starting out to be a good year for non-traditional female characters in film. Having sat through Pretty Woman on video at a sleepover once, I found myself not impressed. I got that Julia Roberts’s character was a sex worker, but I didn’t get the whole appeal of a character whose sole purpose was to be a damsel in distress. I was always more of a fan of stories where a woman could handle herself and it was cool if a guy came along to help but, for the most part, she had it covered. True Romance was one of those films and the first time I saw it, I loved it so much that I watched it in the theater three times that day, only breaking for meals and bathroom breaks.
On its surface, True Romance comes off as yet another story about a guy who saves a girl from a horrible existence as a sex worker and he protects her forever and they live happily together forever and ever, the end. But, if you’ve ever seen it, you know that this is not the case. Alabama Whitman is a hero in her own right. She’s never apologetic about her sex life or her choices; they are what they are and she’s OK with it. In fact, had she not met and fallen in love with Clarence, her short career as a sex worker might have continued. After their met, via set-up, and fall in love, it was Clarence’s idea to save her. Alabama was content to just stay with him, or run away, and continue living her life as she wished. Clarence, on the other hand, feeling emasculated by the idea that her pimp Drexl still existed and had somehow sullied his wife’s virtue, goes on the offensive and decides to show how manly he is by being a valiant knight, retrieving her belongings and saving her from her past. He reads her logical concern for his safety as yet another challenge of his manhood and sets off to right the wrong.
Alabama the survivor
While Clarence goes off to play night in shining armor, which in this film is code for getting his tail kicked by Drexl and his body guard, Alabama sits at their apartment watching TV. She doesn’t actually think that Clarence would be stupid enough to actually go and confront Drexl. But he does, and after a stroke of luck with a misfired gun, Clarence returns to present his lady love with news of her former pimp’s demise and her things. Alabama finds this all super romantic because he fought for her. But not in the Pretty Woman, or traditional damsel in distress film, way where she falls into his arms and thanks him for taking her away to a better life because she never could have done it in her own kind of way. She thanks him because it was a sweet gesture and she really didn’t expect him to do it, or survive if he had, and she was happy that he cared enough to try. Alabama, being the smart, capable, woman that she was, would have been totally OK with leaving all of her stuff at Drexl’s and continuing her life with Clarence, never looking back. It wasn’t the “rescue” that made it romantic for her, it was the caring. Granted, Clarence’s motives were equal parts love and a male sense of ownership, but there was still something endearing about it.
There was also something endearing about the fact that you knew that this movie was about to go all kinds of crazy and with Alabama being the only female in a film full of men, you knew in that moment that she was going to be OK and would totally be able to handle herself. From the very beginning nothing about Alabama’s character said damsel in distress. Even when she was crying about being in love on the roof, that came off as genuine emotion and guilt for starting out on a lie. She was a real person and she was about to go through some real things and you felt for her. You rooted for her and above all else you wanted her to win.
Alabama and Clarence meet
The rest of the film follows Clarence and Alabama on a cross country trek to LA to unload the drugs that they discovered in Alabama’s suitcase. Clarence has no idea what he’s doing and there is something wonderful about watching Alabama stand by her man while slowly guiding him into making decisions that are better than the ones that he comes up with on his own. He listens to her suggestions and leans on her, just as much as she leans on him. They act like pure equals. Despite Alabama’s past he never treats her like anything other than a human being. He also doesn’t allow anyone else to. There is something nice about the way the film doesn’t paint broad stroke generalizations of women who choose to be in the sex industry. Her job choice wasn’t a scarlet letter that followed her. Outside of Clarence’s initial must-save-my-woman reaction at the beginning that spawned his initial jump to action, the fact that she used to be a sex worker wasn’t really brought up. She didn’t get the usual movie treatment of women who didn’t color in the lines, or who enjoyed sex, or who needed redemption. She existed and she was OK. She wasn’t forced to feel ashamed or bad about her choices. There wasn’t the typical punishment for her “actions” of being a sexual being, or getting paid for it. She was allowed as a character to grow outside of that mold.
Alabama defiant and strong in the face of fear
Throughout the film, Alabama proves herself stronger, and often smarter, than most of the males on screen. This strength and her smarts, combined with her survival instincts, drive the film. Watching her fight her way out of her hotel room, taking down James Gandolfini’s Virgil in pure gladiator style, was beautiful. She showed no fear, no hesitation, just power. And not the brute force, masculine power that Virgil displayed as he tossed her about but mental power. She realized that physically she was outmatched and used her brain. She was able to overpower him and eventually defeat him using her mental advantage. She didn’t wait it out for Clarence or another man to show up, which I’m sure most of the audience was expecting to happen after the brutal beating she received; she defeated him on her own. To this day, that scene is one of my favorite fight scenes in a film. Half of the audience expecting Clarence to barge in at the last moment, the other half hoping she would finish him off on her own and no one being disappointed with the outcome. That scene cemented Alabama Whitman as a hero, not just another pretty face in an iconic film, or a damsel in distress. After delivering that death blow she proved what anyone watching the film had known all along: she was a force to be reckoned with.
Alabama and Clarence get married
When Clarence finally does return to whisk her away to the drug deal so that they can put this gruesome past behind them and start like anew together in Mexico; she’s battered and bruised, but still OK. She sits there during the doomed drug deal, wearing her bruises like a badge of honor and still managing to show just enough feminine charm to keep things moving along while simultaneous giving off a “don’t mess with me” vibe. It was brilliant and beautiful. She retained her wits and strength throughout the downfall of the deal when everything crumbled around her and Clarence emerges from his chat with Elvis and gets shot in the eye amidst a massive shoot out. Alabama then saves the day again as she not only grabs the money but manages to drag an equally bloody and bruised Clarence out of the hotel room, through the lobby and on to safety.
In the on-screen version, Alabama and Clarence escape together and are seen frolicking on a beach in Mexico with their son. Clarence is missing an eye from the shoot out and you can see a happily ever after in their future. You’re very happy that they made it as a couple, but you’re even happier that Alabama got the life she wanted and you can’t help but cheer. Owning the special edition version of the DVD, I have seen the ending that Quentin Tarantino wrote. Tony Scott famously shot it and didn’t use it because he didn’t want to split up the couple; he wanted them to both win. In the Tarantino ending, Alabama drives off on her own with the money and heads on to her new life. Clarence is dead and she’s upset by his stupidity in not listening to her in the first place. It was a cold ending, but you are still happy knowing that she made it, she’s OK, and she will continue to be OK because she’s proven herself nothing close to a damsel in distress. She’s strong, smart, and capable. Most people who have seen both endings have their favorite. I will go on record and say that either way is fine with me because Alabama is a character that not only resonated with me but has also stuck with me since I first saw the film. She showed that even in a “guy” film, filled with testosterone, violence, and blood that the only woman on screen doesn’t have to be scenery, a distraction, a hindrance or some”thing” that needs protecting. She can hold her own with the guys and be a true equal in the story and on screen. We no longer had to be seen as victims or damsels in distress; we could be heroes too.
Shay Revolver is a vegan, feminist, cinephile, insomniac, recovering NYU student and former roller derby player currently working as a New York-based microcinema filmmaker, web series creator and writer. She’s obsessed with most books, especially the Pop Culture and Philosophy series and loves movies and TV shows from low brow to high class. As long as the image is moving she’s all in and believes that everything is worth a watch. She still believes that movies make the best bedtime stories because books are a daytime activity to rev up your engine and once you flip that first page, you have to keep going until you finish it and that is beautiful in its own right. She enjoys talking about the feminist perspective in comic book and gaming culture and the lack of gender equality in mainstream cinema and television productions. Twitter: @socialslumber13.
Mark says he wants a girlfriend and that although he understands Rachel is a sex worker, he likes that Rachel makes him feel as though he has a girlfriend. That’s an important distinction that the trailer conveniently cut out. People with disabilities are not children who form childish emotional attachments from fantasies. We understand reality, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to escape it from time to time like everyone else.
I was originally hesitant to give Scarlet Road a chance. As a general rule, I hate documentaries about sex and disability. Most of them are incredibly patronizing and spoonfeed the presumably able viewer flowery messages about compassion for the human experience that do little to actually help the audience understand disabled sexuality or the problematic consequences of assuming universal asexuality for people with disabilities. Plus, the trailer really overdoes it with the piano music, which is never a good sign.
That said, this was the first documentary on the subject that I genuinely enjoyed. At first, I was a little put off that Scarlet Road was subtitled “A Sex Worker’s Journey” because I felt that it was trying to pull focus away from the disability aspect of the film and emphasize the importance of able subjecthood. I was soon able to work past that when I realized that the film was tackling much more than disability alone. Director Catherine Scott chronicles the daily life of Rachel Wotton, an Australian sex worker who frequently works for the disabled, as she attempts to break down stigmas around sex work and disability. Rachel’s situation is especially unique because she lives in New South Wales, where sex work is decriminalized, and so she is able to advertise herself and others as any other business would.
Rachel could not have been a better spokesperson. She is fun, relaxed, and articulate. Rather than seizing the podium to “educate” the audience about the mechanics of sex with the disabled, she simply advocates for everyone’s right to sexual expression in a manner that’s casual and friendly, rather than appealing to sympathy and shaming able people for their social superiority complex. Rachel is the sort of person that you could imagine yourself sitting down having coffee with and when you’re dealing with allegedly taboo subjects, that sort of familiarity is vital. It’s easy to see why she excels in her profession. I never doubted that any of her passion wasn’t 100 percent genuine.
John enjoys a session with Rachel.
All of Rachel’s clients who were interviewed were disabled men. Some of them presented relatively familiar disability narratives. The first client, John, a man with multiple sclerosis, talked about nearly being driven to suicide by the degeneration resulting from his disorder. He says that working with Rachel “makes him feel like a real man again.” It’s also implied that his sessions with Rachel have even restored some of his functions or created some sort of new pathway for sexual response. Basically, masculinity is once again inextricably tied to regular sexual expression, but I won’t gripe too much because it isn’t framed in a way that compels us to pity him.
Rachel and Mark walk hand-in-hand as they go to lunch.
There’s also another guy Mark who has cerebral palsy (like me, holla!). Mark looks to be in his 30s and just chills with his parents. His parents are awesome and the three of them seem to love hanging out together. After so many stories of disability being a draining burden on everyone you love, it’s really refreshing to see a family that doesn’t bat an eye at the logistical complications. Mark’s mom gives him an allowance to pay for his sessions with Rachel. Mark’s mom is a cool lady. Mark says he wants a girlfriend and that although he understands Rachel is a sex worker, he likes that Rachel makes him feel as though he has a girlfriend. That’s an important distinction that the trailer conveniently cut out. People with disabilities are not children who form childish emotional attachments from fantasies. We understand reality, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to escape it from time to time like everyone else. Mark and Rachel have lunch while Mark’s parents set up his bed, complete with flower petals and chocolate. Not only do they seem completely at ease, but they chuckle and chatter excitedly the whole time about how pleased they are for Mark. Can they adopt me? Mainly, this documentary convinced me that I need to move to Australia.
Displays of vaginal swabs taken from sex workers and non-sex workers.
I was surprised with the amount insight we were given into the sex work industry and the prejudice it faces. I was pleased that the scrutiny was taken off of disability for a while. Rachel helps run and facilitate an organization called Touching Base, which aims to educate sex workers on a variety of topics, including how to best assist disabled clients. She goes to a conference on sexology in Belgium. Even there, many participants express uneasiness or confusion about sex work. Really? I know it’s unfair to expect everyone to be an expert, but you would think that sex work would be a pretty big field in sexology. Rachel remarks on a poster that displays images of a vaginal swab of a sex worker versus that of a “normal” woman. She points out that images like these perpetuate the myth of sex workers as “vectors of disease.” The film makes it clear that people with disabilities face a lot of unfair hurdles and social judgment, but moments like these remind us that sex workers encounter similar biases. Both groups are routinely dehumanized to create an imagined sexual hierarchy of authenticity.
Rachel relaxes in bed with her boyfriend.
Nonetheless, Rachel thrives in her personal life. She has a boyfriend, Matt, who doesn’t seem to mind her choice in career at all. He’s just as laid-back as she is. When asked the obvious question of whether or not he gets jealous, Matt flatly shrugs it off. Interestingly, when asked about Rachel’s disabled clients, he says that he understands why it needs to happen because they don’t have opportunities. I held my breath at this point because it looked like he was teetering on emasculating the disabled men by insinuating that it wasn’t “real sex” to shore up his own masculinity, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t appear to perceive any of her clients, able-bodied or otherwise, as a threat to him or his relationship. He knows Rachel’s work is her work and understands the sexual economy in relation to the disabled as evening out (one aspect of) social inequality. You go, Matt. I just want to give everyone in the film high-fives.
Rachel on her graduation day.
Adding yet another element, Rachael graduates from university with a bachelor’s, having done her research in sex work. She wishes to pursue her PhD. I think that the unexpected fusion of these two areas reveals something very important about our cultural biases against sex workers and why we view them as unworthy of social respect. On one hand, academia is revered as taking quite a lot of skill to master. Supposedly, you have to be smart to earn a bachelor’s or PhD, and if you’re intelligent you must be someone worth talking to! On the other hand, sex workers are harshly stereotyped as often lazy criminals. Even when they’re marketed to be palatable to mainstream, like in Secret Diary of a Call Girl, escorts are portrayed decadent and opportunistic. In truth, there can be much more overlap between sex work and almost any other walk of life than most would care to admit.
Ultimately, the audience can recognize that there’s a great deal of intersectionality in the way that both sex workers and disabled people are policed and shamed about their sexual expression. Rachel reminds us that the two groups can work together to lessen collective stigma. Some of the issues that sex workers face directly impact the disabled community as well, such as the tendency to demonize or prosecute the client in areas where sex work is illegal. Rachel holds a banquet for Touching Base to celebrate the organization’s progress. Fun fact: she tells us that her current boyfriend, her three ex-boyfriends, her mother, plus several of her disabled clients and their families are there. No one even flinches. I love Australia. She talks at length about how much her disabled clients mean to her. After the preceding documentary, we can truly believe in her commitment to the cause.
The future of sex work and disability looks bright with Rachel Wotton at the helm.
Inara shows all the benefits to the cultural changes of the last 500 years. She’s a Companion, a highly trained and respected sex worker who ministers mostly to dignitaries, businessmen, and other elites. She’s taken a ride on Serenity, the ship around which most of the show’s action centers, because she wants to see the universe. Because she is a Companion, she can write her own ticket – there will always be clients, so long as they stick to planets with some level of economic stability, and she can just rent a shuttle for as long as she wants. Plus, Inara herself is fun, witty, and classy as all get out. She’s the woman we all want to be, and she’s a sex worker. That’s progressive, right?
The problem here comes not from what the show is saying about sex work. It’s saying very complimentary things. The issue is that this show, this wonderful lovely show, is showing us something entirely different. Namely, that sex work is bad and nasty and wrong.
Inara (Morena Baccarin)
This guest post by Deborah Pless appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Sex Workers.
The first time you watch Firefly, Joss Whedon’s sprawling but criminally short-lived space western, it’s easy to think that it gives you a rather progressive view of our future. While some things haven’t changed, like the need of governments to meddle in the affairs of their people, and the way that humans will always find a way to piss each other off, the universe it portrays is one pretty far advanced from our own. Most cultural conflicts have been whittled down by years of inter-marriage, the universe even speaks a pidgin of American English and Mandarin Chinese, and prostitution is not only legal, but respected.
All in all, a pretty good outlook, right? Especially for sex workers. Because in this world, they have rights, they have solid healthcare, they have independence, and they even have a pretty high level of social recognition. We know all of this because one of the main characters on the show, Inara (Morena Baccarin) is a Companion, the best of the best.
Inara shows all the benefits to the cultural changes of the last 500 years. She’s a Companion, a highly trained and respected sex worker who ministers mostly to dignitaries, businessmen, and other elites. She’s taken a ride on Serenity, the ship around which most of the show’s action centers, because she wants to see the universe. Because she is a Companion, she can write her own ticket – there will always be clients, so long as they stick to planets with some level of economic stability, and she can just rent a shuttle for as long as she wants. Plus, Inara herself is fun, witty, and classy as all get out. She’s the woman we all want to be, and she’s a sex worker. That’s progressive, right?
The Companion training room
The problem here comes not from what the show is saying about sex work. It’s saying very complimentary things. The issue is that this show, this wonderful lovely show, is showing us something entirely different. Namely, that sex work is bad and nasty and wrong.
How? Well, let me tell you a thing.
The first thing you might pick up on in the show is that while Inara is not ashamed of her career, and she meets with no real prejudice about it from most of the characters, she does get a lot of blowback from one place in particular: Captain Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion). Mal hates that Inara is, as he puts it so gently, a “whore,” and he makes his feelings known on the matter a lot. And then some. And then a little more.
In and of itself, this would be a perfectly reasonably addition to the story. Granted, it would give lie to the idea that sex work is now perfectly respected in this universe, but one out of countless characters to decry what she does isn’t so terrible. There’s always someone who disagrees, right?
Well, Mal isn’t just the captain of the ship or the plucky hero, he’s also the audience avatar. His is the emotional arc in which we invest. And Mal is the one who has the biggest objection to Inara’s work. This implies that we too should have an objection to what Inara does.
Inara Serra, played by Morena Baccarin
It goes even further. In episode six, “Shindig,” Mal and Kaylee (Jewel Staite) must attend a party where Inara will also be with a client. Kaylee is happy to just go and admire the finery, have some strawberries, and maybe dance a little, but Mal takes it upon himself to find Inara while she is working and get into a fight with her. A fight that then escalates because Inara’s client, Atherton Wing (Edward Atterton), turns out to be kind of a jerk and calls her a whore on the dance floor. After he offers to buy her. Yeech.
Mal is enraged that someone else dared to call Inara what he calls her on a daily basis, and steps in, punching Atherton and accidentally challenging him to a duel for Inara’s honor. And then we spend the rest of the episode with Inara trying to save Mal from inevitably getting murdered, and Mal refusing to be rescued because a lady’s honor is at stake.
The problem, again, comes from the context. It wouldn’t be so bad if Mal were genuinely defending Inara, though it would undermine the idea that as a Companion Inara is a strong independent woman who can handle herself. That she needs to be rescued at all and can’t handle it or won’t handle it until Mal steps in is problematic in and of itself. No, the real issue here is how Mal steps in. He steps in by using violence to assert that while he can denigrate Inara’s work, no one else can. And that’s just kind of creepy.
Again, though, because this narrative is really Mal’s story, it supports his actions. He is shown as totally good and right and understandable to act like this, and Inara forgives him for being an ass. They share a nice drink and laugh over it all. Also, Inara reveals that she had the power to get back at Atherton the whole time, but didn’t want to use it, I guess.
Inara Serra, played by Morena Baccarin
And it doesn’t stop there. While Inara continues to be our “good” whore, the one who can get the crew out of any tight spot with her power of sex and sexiness (this happens at least two different episodes, and since there are only 13 total, that’s a lot), all other sex workers are considered inferior and, well, whores.
You have Saffron/Yolanda/Bridget (Christina Hendricks), a con artist with Companion training who marries men when they’re drunk and then robs them blind, or just pulls long cons on them in order to get their money. You have the whores that Jayne (Adam Baldwin) beds, who are denigrated by their proximity to Jayne – he’s a man-beast after all, so any woman who would sleep with him, especially for money, must be doubly unclean, right? And we have the Heart of Gold, from the episode of the same name, a little whorehouse in the middle of a desert planet run by a former Companion named Nandi (Melinda Clarke).
In the episode, “Heart of Gold,” the crew heads out to this brothel in the middle of nowhere at Inara’s behest. It seems that Nandi has been having some trouble with one of the local men, who is insistent that not only is one of the girls pregnant with his baby, that he is within his rights to take it from her. The crew comes in to save the day, keep the baby with its mother, and make sure that this man doesn’t get to ruin the Heart of Gold.
Chari from “Heart of Gold,” played by Kimberly McCullough
In the process, though, we learn a lot more about sex work in this universe, and it’s not pretty. While the show makes it very clear that these sex workers are the good guys, and the mean man trying to steal a baby is a bad guy (very subtle), it doesn’t do much to support this thesis. For starters, Nandi is shown to be “slumming it.” She stopped being a Companion in order to become an unlicensed whore because she wanted her freedom, but look where it’s gotten her. Stuck in the middle of nowhere with no resources, a hostile environment, and the law breathing down her neck.
Her girls (and boys), while nice, are completely undeveloped as characters. We know nothing about the plight of the everyday sex worker in this universe. But we do know that we as an audience are supposed to be mildly disapproving. What Inara does is safe and respected, you see, whereas these people are doing it wrong. We know this because of the implicit messages the show sends: only Jayne takes Nandi up on the offer to use the brothel’s services, and while several other characters could, were they so inclined, they don’t. This is most notable with Kaylee, who is shown to be a character comfortable with her sexuality, happy to indulge, and at this point, deeply sexually frustrated. But she wouldn’t stoop to paying for it, I guess.
The only other character who does have sex in this episode is Mal himself, who beds Nandi, but only after they make it clear that this is about feelings and fun and definitely not about money. Because, again, only a monster like Jayne would stoop to paying for it.
The double standard here is both annoying and also indicative of the show’s real attitude. Because if the show really does want to claim to be permissive toward sex work, then it has to be permissive on both sides. Not only is it okay to be a sex worker, it’s okay to be a client of a sex worker.
Or neither. I’m not saying which way the show should go here, I’m saying that by stigmatizing the clients of sex workers, the show is stigmatizing the workers themselves.
Inara Serra, played by Morena Baccarin
Oh, and there’s the thing where all the “good” prostitutes have to die. As penance.
Now, off the top of my head, the only actual sex worker who dies during the show is Nandi, who is very tragically killed during the siege on her brothel. Of course she is revenged and it has a happy-ish ending where the girl gets to keep her baby and everything is right in the world. Only Nandi is still dead. And one can only surmise what the reason for that is. On the one hand, this is Joss Whedon and he does bathe in the tears of his viewers. But on the other, Nandi’s death is largely unnecessary as far as the plot goes, and it only serves to put a wedge between Mal and Inara, as well as to figuratively punish her for the choices she made in life.
As usual, this wouldn’t be noteworthy or even that offensive if it were a singular event. It isn’t. We (the fans) recently learned a little bit of trivia about the show that would have come out had the show gone on longer than half of a season. Namely, that Inara was terminally ill.
So, now this means that of the sympathetic sex worker characters on the show, both of them were killed off or going to be killed off in suitably tragic and noble ways, but also in ways the figuratively punish them for their sins.
Like I said, the show has very mixed feelings about sex work.
Inara Serra, played by Morena Baccarin, and Captain Mal Reynolds, played by Nathan Fillion
I think what happened is this: while Firefly really does want to show us a world where sex work is accepted, or more accepted, and a lot of cultural barriers have broken down, the show is much more concerned with portraying a world of incredibly harsh class divisions. For example, our heroes are all working class or fallen upper class, and the main struggle in the series is that of our plucky underdogs fighting against the rich and powerful who seek to dominate them.
This isn’t a bad thing. It’s a huge part of what makes the show watchable. But it comes at a cost. You see, by making the narrative more about class, it creates a need to work a class narrative into all of its stories. A story about a brothel in the wilderness can’t just be a story about sex work, it has to be a story about class and sex work. By doing this, by setting up Inara as the high class sex worker and everyone else as lower class and therefore bad, the show stigmatizes sex work as a whole. After all, if the only difference between the good whore and the bad one is her paycheck, then there’s no difference at all.
Look. Whether you’re okay with it or not, Firefly is kind of lying here. It says it’s progressive and open-minded, but it really isn’t. Shows, and people, are defined by what they do much more than what they say. So while Firefly and Inara say they’re liberated, independent, and free-thinking, their actions say differently.
And I do not hold to that.
Deborah Pless runs Kiss My Wonder Woman and works as a youth advocate in Western Washington. You can follow her on twitter and tumblr just as long as you like feminist rants and an obsession with superheroes.
Like much of Lifshitz’ previous work, ‘Wild Side’ explores sexuality and emotional intimacy. Thankfully, Stéphanie’s gender identity or Mikhail and Djamel’s bisexuality are not the sole focus, but rather appropriately important facets of their characters.
Some topics to avoid at a holiday dinner (aside from the fact that Columbus was an awful, awful man or that Jesus probably wasn’t born on December 25): politics, religion, and, if several generations of feminists are sitting around your table, sex work. I can’t bridge that chasm here, but I can tell you that I support the recognition of the human rights of both sex workers and transgender people (big of me, I know). Consequently, I appreciate stories that portray sex workers and transgender people as real people.
Unfortunately, I wince reflexively whenever I hear about a transgender character in a new movie or TV show. The notable exception of Laverne Cox in Orange is the New Black not withstanding, transfolk on screen are usually one-dimensional, and typically function to fill in a story or to be a catalyst for another (cis)character’s development. We’re familiar with the transgender character as a caricature: the “tranny” who is deceptive, immoral, dirty, ugly, and undesirable. These characters don’t develop. They’re either cheap punchlines, or they provide an opportunity for the main (cis)character to develop tolerance or sensitivity. Continue reading “An Authentic Portrayal of a Transgender Sex Worker in ‘Wild Side’”
When we are introduced to Ros, she is working in Winterfell but as war approaches she decides to try her luck in King’s Landing expressing the view that if all the men leave for war there is not going to be much for her in Winterfell. Once there she goes from being “just a sex worker” to getting involved in the politics of the realm by becoming the right hand woman of Little Finger and subsequently double crossing him by becoming an agent for Varys. However despite her many interesting qualities and potential for interesting storylines, Ros basically exists for one reason to provide exposition regarding male characters on the show while naked. She is sexposition personified.
While Game of Thrones is frequently problematic, one of the things it does well is having a wide range of interesting female characters. Despite this, there are some women on the show who fall into the roles that are normally reserved for women on film and television; that is, to tell us things about dudes. This is particularly true of the female sex workers on the show. A perfect example of this is Ros. Interestingly, Ros is a character that does not exist in the books. She is an invention of the television show’s writers and producers. It is likely that she takes the place of two other sex worker characters who are women of colour.
Ros is the first sex worker we see on Game of Thrones. She is masterfully acted by Esme Bianco who does wonderful things with the limited material she is given. Her portrayal of Ros allows us to view her as intelligent, witty, ambitious, and pragmatic. At first Ros manages to avoid most of the traditional sex worker tropes that exist such as the disposable sex worker and the hooker with the heart of gold. She makes no apologies for being a sex worker and does not consider herself to be a tragic victim of her circumstances. She is simply making money in the most efficient way she knows how.
Ros and Tyrion Lannister
When we are introduced to Ros, she is working in Winterfell but as war approaches she decides to try her luck in King’s Landing expressing the view that if all the men leave for war there is not going to be much for her in Winterfell. Once there she goes from being “just a sex worker” to getting involved in the politics of the realm by becoming the right hand woman of Little Finger and subsequently double crossing him by becoming an agent for Varys. However despite her many interesting qualities and potential for interesting storylines, Ros basically exists for one reason to provide exposition regarding male characters on the show while naked. She is sexposition personified.
The very first time we see her she is entertaining Tyrion Lannister at the Winterfell brothel. Their interaction serves to inform us that Tyrion is both famous for being a philanderer and generally a good hearted person who is nice to people who exist on the margins despite his great wealth and power. Next up there is Theon Greyjoy Ros helps reveal to us as the audience a number of things about him. Firstly, that he has a chip on his shoulder about his status in Winterfell. Secondly he is basically a hostage living with the Starks because of his father’s traitorous actions. She helps to reveal his particular insecurities as well as expose some of his backstory, all without any clothes on – handy. In fact Ros basically spends the entirety of season one with her clothes off allowing men to tell her things about themselves. Littlefinger gets to fill in some back story while she is naked on screen. Joffrey reminds us of just how evil he is (again) by forcing Ros to brutally beat her friend and fellow sex worker when Tyrion buys a night with them for Joffrey as a present. On and on it goes.
Ros as Littlefinger’s Right Hand
The saddest part about Ros is that while she mostly exists as a plot device, there was always potential there for her to develop as a character. She had many traits that would have made her very interesting to watch as the story unfolded. However that is not to be, because those who make the decisions decided that Ros had outlived her usefulness. She had proven just how terrible Little Finger and Joffery were and the final flourish was her death. Ros turned out to be a disposable sex worker after all and the way that she is killed off proves it.
It was her compassion for Sansa Stark that is Ros’ downfall. She tells Varys details that only she could know about Littlefinger’s plans for her and despite Varys promising to protect her he finds out and she ends up dead. Her death is graphic and horrifying. We do not see her die, we are just treated to a vision of her corpse as Littlefinger tells Varys that one of his investments had betrayed him and therefore had to be disposed of. We are treated to a vision of Ros tied to Joffery’s bed, semi clothed with arrows piercing her body including her genitals. The camera lingers over the gory details. The idea is clear, as we look at Ros’ ravaged body we are meant to think about Littlefinger and what a horrible person he is. Ros’ death is a simply a footnote in the stories of the great men who she fucks.
Interestingly, Esme Bianco mentioned in an interview that she argued for having less nude scenes so that she could have cool costumes like the other characters on the show. Perhaps due to her self-advocacy, her character ended up with no nude scenes in season three, and it seemed as though she was very much on the verge of becoming a proper character, one that is fully realized and has their own plot. Before that could actually happen, she was killed off as if she didn’t matter at all.
There are many things I enjoy about Game of Thrones, but there are perhaps just as many things that I find problematic within it; their treatment of Ros is definitely one of them. The excuses that Game of Thrones is set in both an extremely patriarchal and extremely violent culture do not fly. I think they are cop-outs. The show has beaten us over the head with the evilness of Joffrey and Littlefinger. I personally feel that the scene where he takes Ros aside when she starts crying in front of one of her clients after the baby of her friend is killed in front of her, is much more chilling than the gruesome horror of her death. Subtlety is obviously not something the show is interested in. At the end of the day, the Game of Thrones treatment of Ros simply reinforces dominant societal narratives about sex workers, i.e. that their humanity is unimportant and that it is a dangerous occupation that women should know better than to take up. This is disappointing from a show that is often progressive in the way that it handles female characters.
Gaayathri Nair is a writer currently located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, although this is set to change soon. She is the child of diaspora two times over and is passionate about all forms of social justice. She likes to travel and prefers television to movies; however, she feels a strange compulsion to watch all movies that have fish-eating people in them, no matter how terrible they are. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Political Studies from the University of Auckland and she has spent her formative years working at various types of feminist organizations from the community to the regional in both New Zealand and around Asia. Her work has been featured around the feminist blogosphere including Flyover Feminism, Feministe, and Leftstream as well as in United Nations and NGO publications. You can find more of her work at her blog A Human Story and tweet her@A_Gaayathri.
Season Two Episode One of ‘Sherlock,’ “A Scandal in Belgravia,” is adapted from the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Holmes story “A Scandal in Bohemia.” The storyline focuses on Irene Adler, portrayed brilliantly by the arresting Lara Pulver, who has incriminating photographs of a member of nobility that Sherlock must retrieve.
Season Two Episode One of Sherlock, “A Scandal in Belgravia,” is adapted from the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Holmes story “A Scandal in Bohemia.” The storyline focuses on Irene Adler, portrayed brilliantly by the arresting Lara Pulver, who has incriminating photographs of a member of nobility that Sherlock must retrieve.
In the original version, Adler is an opera singer who had an ill-advised affair with the prince of Bohemia, and he discontinued the affair because he was to become king and thought she was beneath his station. Adler threatens to expose the photos if the now king announces his engagement to another woman. In the updated TV episode, Adler is a high-priced lesbian dominatrix who operates under the pseudonym “The Woman” and holds photos of a high-ranking female member of the British nobility.
Irene Adler: lesbian dominatrix and general BAMF
Confession: I love Irene Adler. She’s infamous for her sensuality, independence, intelligence, and her ability to manipulate. Throughout the episode, Adler and Sherlock match-up wits, and Adler proves to be the cleverer one right until the very end. Adler establishes herself as the quintessential femme fatale. When contrasted with the other female characters throughout the series, she is the only one who is given a strong representation. The coroner, Molly Hooper, is a doormat, waiting for Sherlock to notice her and her inexplicable affection for him. Mrs. Hudson is a doddering old lady whom Sherlock abuses but takes umbrage if others treat her in a similar fashion, in a way claiming her as his property to abuse or reward at his own whim. Finally, there’s the recurring character of Detective Sergeant Sally Donovan, a tough, but mistrustful police officer who always thinks the worst of Sherlock and is too simple-minded to follow his deductions.
Though Sherlock doesn’t know it, Adler is well-prepared for their first encounter when Sherlock shows up on her doorstep impersonating a mugged clergyman. In parody of his earlier nude appearance at Buckingham Palace, Adler presents herself to Sherlock in her “battle dress,” i.e. completely naked. This proves to be a cunning ploy because Sherlock can deduce little about her character without the aid of clues from her clothing. Not only that, but Adler maneuvers Sherlock to help her ward off some C.I.A agents by using her measurements as the code to open her booby trapped (har, har) safe. Adler then drugs and beats Sherlock until he relinquishes her camera phone, which contains a host of incriminating evidence that she claims she needs for protection. She ends their memorable first encounter by saying, “It’s been a pleasure. Don’t spoil it. This is how I want you to remember me. The woman who beat you.”
Minus all the sexy dominatrix stuff, this is where the original Holmes story ends. Irene Adler disappears, retaining her protective evidence, and Sherlock must forevermore admire and be galled by The Woman who beat him. The BBC episode, however, takes creative license to continue the story, having Adler fake her own death only to show up six months later demanding Sherlock give back the camera phone that she’d sent to him presumably on the eve of her death. For six months, Sherlock has done his version of mourning, as only an admittedly high-functioning sociopath can (becoming withdrawn, composing mournful violin music, smoking, etc.). Does he mourn, we wonder, the death of a woman for whom he’d grown to care, or does he regret the loose end, the loss of a chance to ever reclaim his victory and trounced ego from such a superior opponent?
Before her faked death, Adler sent frequent flirtatious texts to Sherlock, with the refrain, “Let’s have dinner.” Sherlock responded to none of her messages, lending increased weight to the significance of their relationship. Upon her resurrection, Adler confesses that despite the fact that she’s a lesbian, she has feelings for Sherlock. Her feelings, in a way, mirror those of Watson, a self-proclaimed straight man who clearly has a deep emotional attachment to Sherlock. Sherlock then forms the apex of a peculiar love triangle at once sexual and cerebral.
“Brainy is the new sexy.” – Irene Adler
Adler tricks Sherlock into decoding sensitive information on her camera phone. After breaking the code in four seconds that a cryptographer struggled with and eventually gave up on, Adler feeds Sherlock’s ego.
Irene Adler: “I would have you, right here on this desk, until you begged for mercy twice.”
Sherlock Holmes: “I’ve never begged for mercy in my life.”
Irene Adler: “Twice.”
She then follows up on all her sexual attentions toward Sherlock by sending the decrypted code to a terrorist cell. She reveals to Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes that she’d played them both and consulted with Sherlock’s arch enemy Jim Moriarty to do so. It turns out, she was playing a deep game, exerting endless patience in her long con with blackmail as her goal all along. She demands such a sizeable sum for the code to her valuable camera phone that it would “blow a hole in the wealth of the nation.”
At this point, Irene Adler has won. She’s literally and figuratively beaten Sherlock Holmes repeatedly at his games of deduction and intrigue. She’s planned for and obviated every contingency. Adler is the only woman to arouse Sherlock’s sexual and intellectual interest all because she proved to be better than him. Adler masterfully manipulates the emotions of a man who cannot understand how and why people feel, a man who seems incapable of anything but his own selfish pursuits. Her problematic confessions of interest in Sherlock despite her sexual orientation are negated in light of her schemes.
Unfortunately, this is where it all goes to shit.
Just as Mycroft is giving his begrudging praise of Adler’s plot (“the dominatrix who brought a nation to its knees”), Sherlock reveals that he took Adler’s pulse and observed her dilated pupils when interacting with him. He deduces her base sentiment has influenced her into making the passcode more than random, into making it, instead, “the key to her heart.”
Sherlocked…get it? Get it? Snore.
With that simple, inane phrase, Adler is undone. Sherlock has broken into her hard drive and her heart. Depicting a lesbian character truly falling in love with a man is a complete invalidation of her sexual identity. Not only that, but it has larger implications that are damaging and regressive. It advances the notion that lesbians are a myth, that all women can fall in love with men if given the right circumstances.
Having a female opponent who is more cunning than Sherlock ultimately lose due to her emotions also implies that women are incapable of keeping their emotions in check. Sherlock insists that her “sentiment is a chemical defect found in the losing side.” While he can detach from his emotions, she cannot, and thus he will always be better than her at the so-called game. Not only that, but this emotion versus reason dichotomy further reinforces the destructive gender binary that assigns certain traits to men and others to women, giving privilege to those assigned to men. Even Adler’s seductiveness, her cunning, her manipulation of the Holmes brothers, these characteristics are coded as female. Adler even enlists the aid of the male Jim Moriarty with the implicit reasoning that he is smarter, slicker, and more capable of handling the Holmes brothers.
Irene Adler must make her way in the world as a sex worker who deals in secrets. (Remind you of Miss Scarlet from Clueat all?)Capitalizing on sex and thriving on the power dynamics inherent in sex (especially heterosexual sex, in which we know Adler engages) are attributes generally assigned to women even though they are fabrications. Having to engage in sexual activity for money does not give women power. It, instead, forces women to exploit themselves and conform to a regulated form of femininity as well as other people’s sexual desires and fantasies (regardless of what the woman herself wants, likes, or doesn’t like). Considering the appalling number of rapes each year, each day, each hour, we also know that power dynamics (from a hetero standpoint) don’t truly favor women. Though the episode doesn’t get into it, presumably Adler is finally cashing in on all her secrets in order to make a better life for herself, a life in which she does not have to sell her body to survive.
When Sherlock outwits Adler, he forces the dominatrix to beg for her life, which is worth little without her secrets. Though he feigns indifference, he ends up finding her after she’s gone into hiding and been captured by terrorists in Karachi. He then saves her from a beheading and falsifies her death in a completely untraceable way.
It’s poignant that Sherlock holds the sword over Adler’s neck, choosing whether she lives or dies.
At the end of the episode, Sherlock stands before a window chuckling to himself about how handily he settled the whole scandal with The Woman. He doesn’t only best her at their game of wit, but he debases and de-claws her. Divesting her of all her power, all her secrets, Irene Adler is completely at his mercy and must be rescued like a damsel in distress or, worse, like a naughty little girl who’s gotten in over her head and must be dug out by her patriarch.
Despite the frequent declaration that “things are better for women now,” it’s hard to ignore that a story written in 1891 created a larger space for a woman to be strong, smart, and to escape. It’s also hard to ignore that Sherlock doesn’t just outwit Adler, he systematically dismantles all her power and only then does he graciously allow her to live. We can wish the last ten minutes of the episode had been cut, allowing for an ending in keeping with the original story, an ending that empowered a woman as one of Sherlock’s most formidable foes. A potentially more fruitful wish would be that Irene Adler returns in future seasons, stronger and more prepared to play the game against Sherlock Holmes, a game we can only hope she will win the next time around.
———-
Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.
‘Pretty Woman’ depicts a world where everyone is either a card-carrying member of the corporate caste or an obliging subordinate whose primary purpose in life is to serve, drive or blow members of that caste. It is obsessed with things and encourages the audience to share its obsession with things. These include Lotus cars, jets and jewelry. It also sells the City of Angels, of course. Rodeo Drive is one of the stars of the show. In fact, the whole movie is pretty much an extended Visit California commercial.
Pretty Woman (1990)
Garry Marshall’s romantic comedy, Pretty Woman,is one of the most popular American movies of all time. A box office success when it was released in 1990, it still rates highly in those Greatest Romantic Comedy lists. Audiences all around the world have embraced Pretty Woman’s buoyant tone, pop soundtrack, Hollywood setting, and fairy-tale love story. The lovers, Edward Lewis and Vivian Ward, make an unlikely couple, of course. He is a wildly successful businessman and she is a hard-up street prostitute. The meet-cute takes place on Hollywood Boulevard. Both lovers have looks and personality, and both are portrayed as engaging and sympathetic. Julia Roberts and Richard Gere give winning movie star performances as the pair. The mass popularity of the love story is, no doubt, due, in great part, to the attractiveness of the stars and the appeal of the characters. Their love is, also, habitually read as perfectly romantic because it seems to transcend all differences.
This is not my Pretty Woman, though. The movie I recognize is a glossy yet insidious Hollywood product that seeks to convince viewers that street prostitutes are eternally radiant and movie star beautiful, and that their corporate clients are all gracious and movie star handsome. I’m not sure that there is a film out there that has sanitized and romanticized prostitution as much as Pretty Woman. The clear intention of the movie-makers is to drug and delude the audience. Music, beauty and fashion serve to seduce the viewer, and mask the fact that they are watching an impoverished street prostitute spend a week with an extremely wealthy man in his hotel room. In response to the question, “Isn’t it just a fairy tale?” we have to remind ourselves that there is no such thing as a meaningless fairy tale. Nor is there such a thing as an apolitical Hollywood film. Pretty Woman may be a fantasy but it’s a deeply sexist, consumerist fantasy.
Forever happy
Julia Roberts’s Vivian does not have the aura of a street prostitute. She is way too sunny and sugary. Although she initially comes across as a trifle feisty and seasoned, the impression does not last. For the most part, the character looks and behaves like an ingénue. Actually, you never even believe the wild child introduction. Vivian’s best friend, Kit de Luca (Laura San Giacomo), is portrayed as earthier and less attractive because Vivian’s essential wholesomeness and beaming beauty must stand out (This is the function of best friends in Hollywood films, of course). Vivian is, in fact, nothing less than a 90s reworking of two of the oldest stereotypes in cinema and literature: the “whore with a heart of gold” and “happy hooker”. Our heroine smiles, sings and laughs throughout the movie with excessive dedication.
It is Vivian’s good-hearted, unaffected ways that enchant Edward, of course. He is smitten by both her spark and beauty. There is, though, a deeply disquieting edge to Edward’s appreciation of Vivian. The makers of Pretty Woman have no problem infantilising their heroine and there is a child-woman aspect to her character. For Edward, it is a vital part of her charm. In one signature scene, we watch him move closer to Vivian to gaze at her laughing gleefully at I Love Lucy rerun on the TV. It is telling that Vivian’s family name is Ward. She is like Edward’s ward. He cares for, nurtures, protects and spoils her. The age difference is both acknowledged and overcome. The kind hotel manager (Hector Elizondo) and Vivian come to an agreement that she is Edward’s “niece” if any guest asks. The age gap is recognized but it is not understood as a major obstacle to true love. Pretty Woman is, therefore, yet another perpetrator of that old Hollywood gender age gap rule. Roberts is nearly 20 years younger than Gere and they basically play their ages. The older man-younger woman intergenerational relationship is normalized and naturalized, and the underlying archaic message is that that a heterosexual relationship can only work if the man is significantly older than the woman. Edward’s not a partner; he’s a patriarch.
At the opera
Pretty Woman is both sleazy and conservative. The first shot we have of Vivian is actually of her ass and crotch. We see her turn over in bed in her underwear. As she is not with a client but in her own single bed, in the run-down apartment she shares with Kit, the shot is only intended for the audience. It is, perhaps, the most explicit one in the film as the sex and love-making scenes between Edward and Vivian are neither graphic nor intense. We subsequently see her evade the landlord- she can’t afford the rent- by taking the fire escape route. Soon, she will be on Hollywood Boulevard conversing with Kit. The audience does not spend a lot of time with Vivian on her home turf. It is understood as a dangerous, seedy place but it is not depicted with any real grit or insight. The body of a dead woman has been found in an alley way dumpster but this is soon forgotten. Although Vivian is dressed for business in thigh-high boots, she cuts an incongruous, glamorous presence. However, thanks to a lost millionaire in a Lotus Esprit, the good, pretty woman will be magically transported from those streets in fairy-tale, Pygmalion fashion.
Although Vivian is an endearing pretty woman, she does not conform to class-sanctioned feminine styles and behavior. Cue the most famous makeover in modern movie history. To the tune of Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman,” Vivian is appropriately dressed and groomed for Edward’s perfumed world. Pretty Woman, unsurprisingly, patronizes its heroine. In the early part of the movie, at least, Vivian is portrayed as a wide-eyed hick from Georgia who spits out chewing gum on the sidewalk and (accidentally) flings escargots around restaurants. Fortunately, Edward is there to guide her. Note that he doesn’t only introduce her to snail-eating but he also takes her to polo matches and concerts. One evening, courtesy of his private jet, he whisks her off to San Francisco for a performance of La Traviata. “The music’s very powerful,” he helpfully notes.
Learning how to eat
Which brings us to Pretty Woman’s unashamedly antiquated and classist portrayal of Edward. The corporate raider is portrayed as an extremely cultured and intelligent man. He loves the opera, plays the piano, and reads Shakespeare. Pretty Woman does not only have a hilariously Hollywood, and frankly philistine, idea of what constitutes a cultured person but it also suggests that America’s astronomically wealthy are exceptionally intelligent and cultured. “You must be really smart, huh?” Vivian says to Edward, after he explains what he does for a living. This is one of the more mind-boggling messages of the movie.
Along with his tall and slender lover, Edward also embodies Pretty Woman’s lookist ethos. Handsome, self-assured and enormous successful, the businessman is seen as superior to other men. His lawyer (played by Jason Alexander), on the other hand, is a nasty, envious, little creep who attempts to rape Vivian at one point. True to the lookist philosophy of the movie, the scumbug character cannot be conventionally attractive or taller than our hero. In Garry Marshall’s fantasy Hollywood, beautiful equals good. But how good is Edward? The movie’s morality is, in fact, mystifying on many levels. Its hero doesn’t drink and or tolerate drug-taking but he has no problem with hiring out women or buying out companies.
The polo match
Ideologically, Pretty Woman is a love song to consumerism and capitalism. Yes, Vivian gets to disparage Edward’s superficial, affluent social circle at the polo match: “No wonder why you came looking for me,” she observes sadly–and yes, Edward learns to temper his rapacious corporate ways under her gentle influence- he now wants to build stuff and not just deal in money- but this never destabilizes the system. In fact, the system is, arguably, made more secure through reform. Edward just realizes he shouldn’t be so much of a dick. Pretty Woman depicts a world where everyone is either a card-carrying member of the corporate caste or an obliging subordinate whose primary purpose in life is to serve, drive or blow members of that caste. It is obsessed with things and encourages the audience to share its obsession with things. These include Lotus cars, jets, and jewelry. It also sells the City of Angels, of course. Rodeo Drive is one of the stars of the show. In fact, the whole movie is pretty much an extended Visit California commercial. It does its job well, of course. It’s a sleek product. There are many cars, rooms, gowns and suits to admire. But it’s a sleek Hollywood product jam-packed with dazzling fictions and lies about everything under the sun.
Transformed
The representation of gender and sexuality in Pretty Woman is equally seedy and reactionary. Prostitutes should be civilized and saved while young women should resign themselves to being sexually objectified. Vivian is, of course, portrayed as a deeply romantic being. When their week together is up, Edward offers to take her off the streets and set her up in an apartment. But Vivian refuses to be his mistress. “I want more…I want the fairy tale,” she says to Edward. We, the audience, are encouraged to see her as an all-American girl driven by the pursuit of happiness. But she is also, at the end of the day, a deeply conventional woman with very traditional aspirations. She gets the fairy tale, of course. But Pretty Woman’s not just a love story; it’s also about becoming the respectable partner of a businessmen. Vivian Ward may be a romantic, sympathetic figure but she is also a woman fated to marry well. They may have changed each other but Vivian is incorporated into Edward’s world. Her illicit sexuality must be contained. We see her appreciate Edward’s beauty in the quiet of the night, but we also see her take pleasure in expensive things that he has bought for her. There is a scene in Pretty Woman where we see Vivian go to back to a store on Rodeo Drive where she was previously snubbed and humiliated by snooty sales staff. Armed with gorgeous purchases and gorgeously attired, she reminds them of their “big mistake.” It’s intended as a crowd-cheering scene of course–we enjoy Vivian’s screw-you moment–but it also expresses an unquestioning acceptance of the Darwinian wealth equals power diktat. When she is finally saved by her prince at the end of the movie, Vivian vows that she will save Edward in return. Will she really be allowed to save him? Will she have a role of her own? Or will she just buy stuff on his credit card?
The gentleman and the raider
It would be hilarious if the whole enterprise was actually a send-up of sexual politics and consumerism. No such luck. There is not a whiff of subversion in Pretty Woman. Admire Julia and Richard’s beauty, and sing along to Orbison or Roxette, but never forget that it is one of the most misogynist, patriarchal, classist, consumerist, and lookist movies ever to come out of Hollywood.
Some clues for her motives are in the scenes between Abby and her spouse. They are affectionate and loving with each other, even when they’re alone, but the sex has gone out of their marriage. After a disastrous first encounter with an escort, we feel Abby’s ache of longing when a second “better” escort begins to touch her. Later we see Eleanor’s first client, a 23-year-old virgin, react to Eleanor’s touch in much the same way.
How many distinctive, acclaimed films about queer women can be released in American theaters at the same time? If we extrapolate from the actions of film distributors in the past few months, the answer is apparently: only one. Concussion was named one of the top 20 films of the year by Slate’sDana Stevens and was also named one of the top films of 2013 in Salon. Shortly after its premiere, at last year’s Sundance, The Weinstein Company acquired it for distribution. For most films that acquisition (and the later support from reviews in traditional media) would mean a national release, but the film had a very limited run in theaters this fall and never played a theater in my art-house-friendly city. The film is on Video On Demand, iTunes, and Google Play, but deserves much more attention than most films that never have a national theatrical run.
This film about a queer woman is, unlike Blue Is The Warmest Color, directed and written by a queer woman (Stacie Passon who is nominated for “Best First Feature” in the Independent Spirit Awards ), and in many aspects is the answer to those who dismissed Blue as a product of the male gaze. Instead of a teenage protagonist, the main character in Concussion, Abby (played by Robin Weigert: Andrew O’Hehir in Salonsummed up her performance as “OMFG”), is a 40-something, stay-at-home Mom, married to another woman and living in the suburbs.
When her son accidentally hits her in the face with a baseball, we see the confusion and blood in the family car ride to the hospital, as she moans to no one in particular, “I don’t want this. I don’t want this. I don’t want this.”
In the ER Abby says she is going back to work in the city (and that she really means it this time). Abby doesn’t need to work for money: her spouse, Kate, is a divorce attorney, kept busy by the dissatisfied wives in their social circle. We see the wives’ well-maintained bodies in slow motion, at the beginning of the film, in spin and yoga classes as David Bowie sings on the soundtrack, “Oh you pretty things…”
Passon knows this world well She lives in the town (Montclair) Abby does. She is married to a woman and has children, one of whom accidentally hit her in the face with a baseball. The parallels between her life and Abby’s may be why the character and setting seem so fully realized.
Abby for the most part blends in with her straight women friends but we see she’s different from them–and not just in her orientation. She reads books while she vacuums. When a friend is circulating a “new motherhood” survey for an article in a parenting magazine, Abby writes of dreams in which she sticks her then newborn son in the microwave–and other dreams in which she and her son are married. She writes, “My poor baby, I didn’t know whether to kill him, fuck him, or eat him.”
At times Abby’s queerness does separate her from the other women. When Abby mentions to her friend that one of the group of women they work out with is “cute,” the friend (played by Janel Maloney) reproaches Abby, “She’s not a lesbian!”
Abby and the contractor in the loft
Abby starts work with a contractor to refurbish a city loft. As they transform the apartment, she transforms too, first hiring women to have sex with her and then working out of the loft as a high-priced escort, “Eleanor,” whose clients are all women.
A woman character turning to sex work for reasons other than money is usually a male artist’s conceit, as in Luis Buñuel’s great Belle de Jour, which features stunning, beautifully dressed, doctor’s wife, Catherine Deneuve, working in a brothel while her handsome, attentive (but clueless) husband sees his patients.In women’s memoirs of sex work (like Michelle Tea’s Rent Girl) the money is the point of the work (as it is with most work).
A sex worker character whose clients are all women (when the vast majority of sex work clients are men) is also usually the creation of a straight male artist–and is usually a male character so the work avoids any explicit same-sex scenes.
Abby’s second encounter with an escort
Perhaps because Concussion turns that last trope on its head (or perhaps because New York is a big city that can cater to many kinds of tastes) we accept the conceit of a woman over 40 seeing women clients (for $800 a session) every day. The queer women we see in sexual situations in Concussion are not cut from the same Playboy-ready cloth as the two women in Blue: one client is fat, another is an obvious real-life survivor of breast cancer and some of her clients, like Eleanor herself, are nowhere near their 20s anymore.
Robin Weigert doesn’t have a Barbie Doll face or a porn model’s body, but does have a passing resemblance to the young Ellen Barkin. Weigert exudes the same confidence and sexiness–reminding us those two qualities are often one and the same.
Concussion has a scene similar to one in Blue in which a straight man interrogates a queer woman about her sexuality. But because Abby is in her 40s, the mocking tone she takes with him is completely different from what we hear from the 20-something main character in Blue, Adele.
The female gaze?
In Concussion are we seeing the female gaze? Well, we’re definitely seeing one woman’s gaze, that of Passon. The sex scenes in Concussion, unlike Blue, don’t seem like outtakes from an amateur porn video, but flow from the other nonsexual encounters in the film. (Concussion’s expert cinematographer is David Kruta.) We also don’t see full frontal nudity from any of the actresses, and although we see the bare breasts of some of Eleanor’s clients, we never see hers. Eleanor/ Abby is both a psychological and corporeal enigma to us.
Some clues for her motives are in the scenes between Abby and her spouse. They are affectionate and loving with each other, even when they’re alone, but the sex has gone out of their marriage. After a disastrous first encounter with an escort, we feel Abby’s ache of longing when a second “better” escort begins to touch her. Later we see Eleanor’s first client, a 23-year-old virgin, react to Eleanor’s touch in much the same way.
Abby and her spouse
In the city we see Abby in punk rock t-shirts (vintage Blondie and the now-defunct C.B.G.B) and boyshort underwear and in the suburbs we see her fitting in with her friends in yoga pants and an expensive down-filled jacket. At a suburban dinner party the guests talk about their days hanging out in pre-gentrified downtown New York clubs, Squeezebox and The Limelight, and we realize yes, many of the club kids of the 90s have become comfortable, suburban Moms and Dads.
The loft is decorated with posters for Louise Bourgeois and The Guerrilla Girls and has Diet For a New America on the bookshelf, distinct touches some of us in the audience recognize from our own living spaces. In the dialogue we hear echoes of conversations we too have had (or overheard) at parties: “I finally took the Myers-Briggs.” Writers of satire often seem to want their audience to hate the people, especially the women, they create (the Annette Bening character in American Beautyis just one example). Passon’s satire is much trickier–and kinder. She wants us to recognize these people. She wants us to recognize ourselves in them.
The film Passon says inspired Concussion is from the 1970s: Jeanne Dielman.., (and is also written and directed by a queer woman, Chantal Akerman).In Concussion, asin Dielman, we see the first signs of the housewife/sex-worker protagonist starting to unravel when she fails to stick to her usual daily routine: Abby misses picking up the kids after school for the first time in six years.Unlike Dielman, Passon’s film captures the monotony of domestic tasks, but doesn’t ask the audience to endure that boredom themselves.
Although Concussion was made before queer marriage became legal in New Jersey, the film brings up some interesting questions about the queer community’s quest for “equality.” What if we become just as disenchanted with being soccer Moms as straight women sometimes do? What then? At the end Abby throws herself into a home renovation project, the way so many of our married friends, straight and queer do, and we marvel at the mystery of other people’s marriages, not just in the film, but all around us.
