Editor’s Note: Mentions sexual abuse, child abuse, interrogation of sex workers by interviewer/ exploitation of power dynamics
A white Austrian man who is from a country where sex work is legal travels to three brothels in the Global South to make a documentary. Two white girls trying to be filmmakers, but not quite making it, “run away from Brooklyn” in 2014 to fulfill their “dream” of becoming strippers and to make some money in what they are told is “the strip club where strippers go to die.” A famous rock singer writes and performs his most iconic song, the lyrics of which are a chastisement of a sex worker he says he loves. Brace yourselves people—a civilian is about to tell a story about a sex worker.
Whores Glory, a 2011 documentary directed by Michael Glawogger, was one of my first exposures to sex work before I became a worker. It is a critically acclaimed documentary that was described, in the way civilian creations about sex workers often are, as “gritty” by the Seattle Times and as “ground-breaking and surprisingly accurate” by The Daily Beast. Sex workers in Reynosa, Mexico are filmed smoking crack. Shortly before this we watch a woman, who to me seems either to be intoxicated or having a mental health crisis run screaming, laughing, and stumbling through the streets while she repeatedly flashes her breasts to the camera; she doesn’t seem to know what she is doing. This is what the audience, for the most part, have come to see–because this is what they expect to see.
They’ve learned–from seeing countless stigmatising portrayals of drug use by sex workers on television and in movies, or seeing the mentally ill sex worker supervillain Pretty Persuasion in Marvel comic books–that this is the only possible sum of our parts. This is not to say that Whores Glory has no redemption to it; the film displays some moments—namely the after-work late-night conversations of brothel workers in Thailand about the number of new girls and wages earned, and the workers’ connection to religion in each location across Buddhism, Islam, and the cult of Santa Muerte—which to me as a worker, resonate as reality.
Brace yourselves people—a civilian is about to tell a story about a sex worker.
Yet the section of the documentary taking place in Faridpur, Bangladesh is where Glawogger makes one of the worst and most common errors a civilian can make in trying to portray sex work: he conflates sex work with sex trafficking. There is a scene in which we see an underage girl being trafficked to a madam by another woman. There are multiple single interviews with underage girls who have been trafficked and who speak about how they cry all day, or with women who discuss how they were tricked into coming to the brothel with their child at the promise of a place to stay. It does nothing for the trafficked children and women that he films to call them whores, and it does nothing for those of us who are actually whores—including the clock-punching workers in Thailand and those in Mexico who have entered into the industry consensually—to have our experiences explored in the same narrative thread as trafficking victims. To his credit, at least Glawogger apparently compensated his interview subjects for their time, on the correct assertion that, “every hour of filming was an hour when they weren’t earning income,” and performed some due diligence and aftercare by returning to each of his interview subjects after filming to share the film with them. But without having the cultural competency of a background in sex work, his film is an example of how a civilian perhaps trying so hard to do the right thing can still get it terribly wrong.
It took only sixty seconds of an “Interview with a Prostitute” episode of Mark Laita’s YouTube show Soft White Underbelly before I became physically ill and had to turn it off. Laita’s obvious voyeurism and clear arousal from the graphic descriptions of trauma from a Black sex worker in response to his invasive questions was appalling. Laita, who came to fame in the early 2000s for his black and white photograph book of unhoused people in Los Angeles, now makes video interviews primarily with vulnerable people about their deepest traumas for an audience of (at the time of writing) over five million subscribers. If viewers wish to see even more salacious material, they can subscribe for $10 USD per month for fully uncensored versions of the interviews. It has been described, I feel accurately, as “poverty porn” by Vox. There are entire threads on Reddit devoted to answering the question on many people’s minds: is this guy a creep?
It is striking to me how many episodes of Laita’s series feature sex workers who are young women of color, and for their interviews are dressed in what a civilian would expect to see as their ‘work outfits,’ (revealing lingerie, fetish gear, or micro-bikinis) instead of everyday clothes. Laita has an entire playlist on his channel entitled ‘Thailand,’ in which he exclusively interviews transgender sex workers and describes them in the video titles as “Ladyboys.” His sex worker interview subjects tend to be asked questions like whether or not they were sexually abused as children, contributing to the stereotype that all sex workers have suffered childhood sexual trauma while also exploiting these very real people's trauma for entertainment. Whereas his videos featuring drug users tend to garner a respectable thirty to sixty thousand views, his interviews with sex workers—notably those with teenage or transgender sex workers—gain on average views of one million or more.
What is it about this particular depiction of sex workers that civilians love to see and perpetuate? In the article “POV of a GTA Stripper”, author Chloe Davis writes:
Powerful men love sex workers because we are perceived to be powerless. No matter what they confess to us–affairs, resentment of their spouse or children, crimes they may have committed, weird fetishes–a whore is in no place to judge by nature of being a lowly whore. […] It’s said that the truest judgment of a person’s character is how they treat the waiter. In my opinion, the best way to gauge a person’s misogyny is to see how they treat sex workers. Deep down, the way a man treats a sex worker is the way he wishes he could treat all women. (The Holy Hour: An Anthology on Sex Work, Magic, and the Divine, 2024).
Is it, then, the perceived powerlessness and low status of sex workers as they are portrayed in these kinds of shock-value sequences that enthralls non-sex workers? Civilians can feel superior to someone, anyone, and rest easily in the knowledge while watching at home: At least whatever I’ve done in my life, I haven’t done THAT. There is someone out there who has no room to judge me. As Vox sums it up, “Content that makes a spectacle out of poverty can make us feel ‘safe,’ reassuring us that poor people are ‘not like us.’ A filmmaker treats a sex worker the way they wish they could treat all people: as nonhuman beings to be examined under a microscope, their insides turned out and fully exposed, to satisfy the viewer’s curiosity.
The documentary and interview from Vice’s 2014 Life as a Truck Stop Stripper features two “regular girls”, Natalia Leite and Alexandra Roxo, who decide to “go undercover as strippers” and record their experiences on camera for Vice. We watch the girls go to Walmart and buy what they believe to be stripper clothing: Day-Glo shorts and an electric purple leopard-print bra which one of them holds between her teeth for the camera. We watch them sign contracts to work at a strip club that they and Vice describe with zero awareness or sensitivity as “where strippers go to die.” They refuse to do lap dances. They set off fireworks in the desert. They talk to truckers. In fairness, they do visit the homes of two of their coworkers, Daisy and Mocha, and speak to them about their dreams and views on the work. They last about thirteen days, and leave after one of them attempts to do her first lap dance and a customer tries to cross her boundaries.
The accompanying text interview with Natalia Leite and Alexandra Roxo about their experience momentarily salvages some of the cringe-factor of the film. In it, they speak about having gained respect for strippers and how there is too much stigma attached to the occupation. Yet in the next breath, one of the filmmakers states, “One of the girls there clearly didn’t like me, and for no good reason. But then again, she was probably on drugs. She was talking about how she sometimes dances with her daughter who is a meth addict and ran away with a midget [sic].” (Roxo and Leite apparently found this anecdote so hilarious that they chose to include it as a plotline for Roxo’s character in Leite’s 2015 cringe film Bare, which is set in a strip club and casts the dancers from the 2014 documentary). In a single moment, she stigmatizes the sex worker she just claimed was undeserving from stigma, distances herself from that stigma, and affirms for the readers of Vice a common caricature of sex workers: ‘drug addicts who engage in unacceptable behavior’. Why do these civilian women feel this need to distance themselves from sex work when moments ago, in the interview, the two told Vice that “running away to be strippers” was their “fantasy?” Davis writes, “Civilian women already exist in the world with limited humanity, so to avoid further dehumanization they’re taught to distance themselves from the stigma of sex work.” These women, to themselves, are not women who tried sex work and found it wasn’t for them—they are filmmakers, observing while undercover. Artists. Edgy girls willing to have an adventure. Perhaps this is why not all of the dancers at the club warmed to Roxo and Leite?
Is it, then, the perceived powerlessness and low status of sex workers as they are portrayed in these kinds of shock-value sequences that enthralls non-sex workers?
Who doesn’t know and at least modestly enjoy the song “Roxanne” by The Police? The chorus is relatively easy to learn, and the song has been featured in the cult-classic show Community as an upbeat, feel-good song to sing with friends. “Roxanne”, a song about a man who thinks he is in love—my phrasing—with a sex worker, has been confirmed by Rolling Stone magazine as the band’s most popular and successful song. According to Rolling Stone, it was in Paris that Sting was inspired to write the song after seeing a group of sex workers outside of a club where the band was scheduled to play. The lyrics to the song, when they are actually read and understood, shame the sex worker the singer is speaking to. The lyrics also don't quite make sense—if Roxanne is walking the streets, why would they put on a red light? Is Roxanne a street-based sex worker, or does Roxanne work in a brothel or from home? Does Sting even care? Not really, I’d guess.
What I find most problematic about the song “Roxanne” is that it is sung from the point of view of a man trying to convince a sex worker he claims to care about into leaving their work. The second verse of the song, which goes, “I loved you since I knew you / I wouldn't talk down to ya / I have to tell you just how I feel / I won't share you with another boy / I know my mind is made up / So put away your makeup / Told you once, I won't tell you again / It's a bad way” genuinely seems ripped out of the speech I’ve heard of jealous boyfriends giving—the kind who show up to strip clubs mid-shift trying to convince their girlfriends (or ex-girlfriends, in some horrifying cases) to leave with them. In 2008, the song was given the high honor of being inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and the same Rolling Stone article which ranks it as the top song by The Police estimates that as of 2013, the song has been played on radio stations about 20 million times. Millions of people have unconsciously absorbed these lyrics and the meaning behind them, and The Police have gained fame, and I would guess, quite some money, off of this song.
Whether it’s movies like Pretty Woman convincing clients that, if they are charming and special enough, a worker will break their no-kissing rule and fall in love with them, or any other piece of media—there are too many to name—written by and for civilians about sex workers, these messages have staying power. Civilians should think twice—no, three times—before trying to design a project focused on sex workers, and instead see how they can first support sex worker-led films, television, documentaries, music, protests, initiatives, etc. Before creating, consider the impacts of how any error in a narrative can enshrine harmful stereotypes about our community in the minds of everyday people who vote on policies which directly affect us, of government officials who create the policies themselves, and of clients who see fictional models of how we should be treated as service providers.
Media References:
Documentary – Whores’ Glory (dir. Michael Glawogger)
Song – ‘Roxanne’ by The Police
‘Life as a Truck Stop Stripper’ Vice Documentary & Interview
Text Reference:
Davis, C (2024). ‘POV of a GTA Stripper.’ The Holy Hour: An Anthology of Sex Work, Magic, & the Divine. 2024. Working Girls Press.
Are you a sex worker with a story, opinion, news, or tips to share? We'd love to hear from you!
We started the tryst.link sex worker blog to help amplify those who aren't handed the mic and bring attention to the issues ya'll care about the most. Got a tale to tell? 👇☂️✨
