You’ve got to get on to get off
For those of you who haven’t seen Shortbus, I highly recommend you do. (Warning, it is very sexually explicit — critics complain the movie merely pornography, but they simply cannot see the art beyond the sex). Click the link to read a description of it. If you haven’t seen the film and want to, I suggest you don’t read the rest of this post because it will contain SPOILERS.
This particular post is about the portrayal of sex workers in this film. On the one hand, I felt that the sex workers in the film were given enormous complexity and depth. James is a former hustler from a small town. He is unable to see or feel the beauty he knows surrounds him in his daily life. His inability to see his own self-worth led him to prostitution. He used prostitution as means to find his value as a person.
The other sex worker in Shortbus is Severin. Severin is a dominatrix who is unable to make real human connections. (I feel that the film creators are implying that she cannot make human connections because of her work.) She spends the film discussing how she would like to leave the industry and just create art. We are given the impression that something bad happened to her in the past that drew her to the sex industry.
However, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed by this portrayal of sex workers, even though I loved the characters themselves. Films never hesitate to show sex workers as unstable or the byproduct of an abusive childhood home. These stereotypes need to be broken. Yes, these stereotypes might prove true to many sex workers, but scroll through a few sex workers’ blogs, and you’ll find that this does not fit for all sex workers. Negative depictions of sex workers encourages the vast majority to see all sex work as degrading, unnatural, and unhealthy. It allows people to say that all sex work is a form of slavery, which completely denies any human agency for those who voluntarily enter the sex industry.
Representing sex workers as damaged human beings is simply taking the easy way out for a story-writer. It doesn’t challenge us as an audience — we know these story-lines and stereotypes. Perhaps portraying a sex worker as a “normal” person is too radical for Hollywood right now.
