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.
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.
Movie poster for Loverboy
This guest post by Kristina Fennelly appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Sex Workers.
At first glance, the 1989 comedy Loverboy, directed by Joan Micklin Silver and starring Patrick Dempsey, may not seem a likely choice for inclusion in films specifically focused on sex workers. After all, how could a seemingly trivial movie about a failing college student, a pizza parlor, and a group of rich yet unhappy California wives possibly inform and challenge dominant definitions of sex workers, traditional gender roles, and even heteronormativity?
Yet this film, largely derided in the late 1980s as “hopelessly tacky,” and “a pitiful waste,” speaks to these issues as it chronicles the maturation of college sophomore Randy Bodek (played by Dempsey). The film makes the claim that the education Randy gains through his summer employment, both as a pizza delivery boy and as a gigolo, prepares him to return to college in the fall as a man: a man more serious about his academic goals, his professional future, and his long-sought-after girlfriend, Jenny. Just as Randy gains a great deal of knowledge about himself, so, too, can viewers today gain a great deal of insight when analyzing this film through a feminist lens.
In the March 2008 issue of the journal Gender Issues, scholar Jeffrey Dennis gives voice to the often ignored and silent male sex workers in his article “Women are Victims, Men Make Choices: The Invisibility of Men and Boys in the Global Sex Trade.” Dennis argues that the accounts of men and boys as sex workers have largely gone unnoticed, which seems ironic given Dennis’s observation that, “Male sex workers are easy to spot anywhere in the world…Yet they are almost completely ignored by social service agencies, administrative bodies, the mass media, and scholarship” (11-12). Critically examining Randy’s profession as a sex worker in this film seeks to do the kind of intellectual and gender-conscious work that Dennis calls for: “a re-evaluation of scholarly preconceptions about male and female bodies, about objectification, about the inevitability of heterosexual identity and about the impossibility of same-sex desire.”
At the onset of the film, Randy concludes his sophomore year of college where he has failed, yet again, to make the grade. In addition to failing at school, Randy has also failed in his relationship with his live-in girlfriend, Jenny. When Randy returns home for the summer, he is admonished by his father, Joe, for his lack of any visible work ethic. Thus Randy must pursue a job as a pizza delivery boy in order to earn $9,000 to pay for his own tuition. While working for $4.80 an hour—a rate that Randy and his co-worker crassly describe as less than wages earned by “people who swim here from Mexico”—he realizes that his life of privilege as a young, white, middle-class male is not automatically guaranteed. Gone is the financial protection from his parents, Joe and Diane. Now he must venture forth on his own to earn the money. His goals, at this point, are not based whatsoever in academic or professional ideals; rather, he wants to earn the money simply so he can return to college, recapture his girlfriend, and continue on with his “party hard” lifestyle.
Randy, having returned home from college, explains to his parents that he is failing at school
One day, a chance encounter leads him to meet Alex Barnett (played by Barbara Carrera), a wealthy Italian businesswoman (presumably in her 40s) who owns a chain of high-end clothing stores. Soon, Alex lavishes Randy with expensive clothes, allows him to drive her racy red sports car, and seduces him. Randy is not a morally bankrupt character, however. He quickly tells Alex that he is in love with Jenny, to which she replies: “I think I can handle it.” She understands the arrangement before Randy does because she has established the parameters of such an arrangement. At this point, the viewer cannot help but pity Randy’s naiveté and obvious lack of experience with an accomplished and mature adult; after all, his social circle in college has consisted primarily of party-driven peers with a similar penchant for goofing off.
Alex, however, shows him the kind of privileged lifestyle he is missing out on at making only $4.80 an hour. When she awakens him the following morning by dropping $100 bills on his pillow, he tries to refuse the payment by telling her, “Alex, I can’t. It makes me feel…” Though Randy does not explicitly give voice to his feelings in this scene, the audience can infer that he feels bought and paid for, much like a traditionally-defined prostitute. He even acknowledges the quickness of the exchange when he says, “I’m never going to see you again, am I?” Their brief and fleeting affair is framed in more financially pragmatic terms by Alex who explains that if their roles were reversed and she needed the money, she knows he would give it to her. “So what’s the difference?” she asks as she gets up to leave. It is at this point in which the film seems to ask this exact question of its audience: What’s the difference between a male sex worker and a female sex worker? What’s at stake for a “gigolo” versus a “prostitute,” even from a purely rhetorical analysis of those classifications? Does sex work involve the same kind of possession, objectification, and violence for men as it does for women?
Randy, a pizza delivery boy, meets Alex, the owner of high-end clothing stores
These questions do not go unexplored or entirely unanswered in the film. 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.
Randy, by contrast, appears to benefit greatly from his work as he grows attuned to romance and intimacy, cultured in ballroom dancing and photography, and refined in his ability to genuinely listen to women and their needs. For example, he fulfills the fantasy of his Asian client, Kyoko Bruckner (played by Kim Miyori), whose husband has stereotypically assumed she, like “all” Asian women, will submit, remain silent, and above all, satisfy his every whim. Randy also provides much-needed validation to Monica Delancy (played by Carrie Fisher), a photographer whose husband personally trains women with “Barbie doll”-type bodies. Finally, he reminds the cynical doctor Joyce Palmer (played by Kirstie Alley) that romance still exists when he engages in an act perhaps even more intimate than sex: ballroom dancing.
Dr. Joyce Palmer (left) teaches Randy how to dance
As he seeks to explain his time with Alex to his horny co-worker, “That isn’t all we did. We talked…,” he again tries to resist traditional definitions of sex workers as objects of pleasure. Unlike heteronormative prostitution, which tends to rely on an exchange of sex for money and positions women as the object of men’s desire, the kind of “work” Randy finds himself doing requires him to be more of a companion than a lover, more of a listener than a performer, more of an adored “loverboy” than a mere sex object.
It is no accident that Randy’s first delivery of “extra anchovies” is to Alex (short for Alexandra), a woman with a name typically considered for boys. She, in fact, assumes a traditionally masculine role as she—a powerful, successful, and rich businesswoman—pursues a partner for her own sexual satisfaction. It should not surprise the discerning viewer that just as Alex showers Randy with expensive clothes, so does Edward Lewis (played by Richard Gere) provide prostitute Vivian Ward (played by Julia Roberts) with a new wardrobe in Pretty Woman, a popular film which proved a box-office hit the following year in 1990. The inclusion of Randy’s improved clothes, combined with Alex’s more masculine name and behavior, are not incidental matters in this film.
In an effort to further the comedic effect of the movie, Randy’s first gift from Alex—a $500 sports coat—is delivered by his co-worker, Tony, who drops it off at Randy’s house after it arrives at the pizza shop. Randy’s father, Joe, who has already told his wife, “Our son is a fruit,” reads the attached note from Alex and believes the coat is actually a gift from Tony, the presumed gay lover. It is not a stretch to qualify his father’s comments as homophobic when he tells his wife Diane, “A guy shows up at our door wearing enough cologne to make me puke.” After bemoaning the fact that Randy never talks about any girls, he tells himself, “You always think it happens to the other guy”—as if the reality of a gay son has now become an affliction, an “it” that one “always think[s]” (read as “always hopes”) will happen to, or pain, someone else. Thus, not only is Randy atypical in his role as a male sex worker, but he is also cast as aberrant (especially in 1989 at the height of the AIDS crisis) in his presumed homosexuality.
Randy, unsurprisingly, is clueless about his father’s fears. Instead, his primary concern is to improve his own identity, to transform himself from a part-time gigolo, defunct college student, and inconsiderate boyfriend into a mature student, respectable son, and loving boyfriend. Inevitably, he must answer to Jenny, who shows up on the day of his parents’ twentieth wedding anniversary. Ironically, it is on this same day that his mother places a pizza order for “extra anchovies” as revenge against her husband, whom she believes has cheated on her. As Randy’s parents try to sort out their mistakes, Randy tries to explain to Jenny that he engaged in such work for the money so that he could return to college and ultimately return to her. His actions prove unforgivable, at least initially. Soon, though, Jenny comes to see Randy as a matured man willing to go to great lengths for love: not only for her love, but also to preserve the love between his two parents. She is heartened and warmed by him and his parents who welcome her with open arms. How could they not since they are so happy and grateful to have a heterosexual son? All is forgiven when Randy promises to return the money, and Randy’s father even promises to pay for his tuition.
Randy’s girlfriend, Jenny (right), is not forgiving of his work as a gigolo at first
If this film succeeds in doing the kind of work Dennis calls for, to acknowledge male sex workers largely ignored by “mass media,” does it fail in its treatment of homosexuality? Does it insist on “the inevitability of heterosexual identity”? Not entirely. Before Jenny is identified as Randy’s girlfriend, Randy’s father embraces him and tells him: “You’re my son. I love you.” Certainly, this father-son relationship appears progressive for 1989, especially from where we sit 25 years later when gay marriage is one of the most contentious political and social issues of our time. What’s most potent is the way in which the film anticipates Pretty Woman by framing sex work as a means to a financially and emotionally secure future…when we know it rarely fulfills such dreams. Yet before we toss this movie aside as irrelevant, as “instantly forgettable…the kind of movie that’s perfect for a lazy summer afternoon,” it behooves us to acknowledge how this film can and should encourage conversations about male sex workers that have heretofore been silenced.
Kristina Fennelly is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Kutztown University in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching interests focus on composition and rhetoric, gender studies, and digital texts.
