Comic actress Mira Sorvino won an Academy Award for her part as escort and porn star, Linda Ash, in the film Mighty Aphrodite (1995). It is one of the most well-known and critically regarded portrayals of a sex worker in modern cinema. And yet it solidifies one particularly pervasive sex worker stereotype: the hooker with the heart. Linda Ash is the perfect version of the archetype: a sexy, flimsy, chronically ignorant “good egg.”
She is the low-intelligence, warm woman who has “fallen” klutzily into a bad life. She doesn’t thrive on shrewd self-determination and social insight, but survives on a breezy, unbreakable spirit. She is affectionate, good-natured, talkative. Brash, and thoughtlessly candid. A contradictory mix of idealistic optimism and bitter misanthropy. She is sweet and clueless. Amusingly unguarded in her crudeness. Worldly through experience but naïve by inclination. Destructive through misplaced enthusiasm rather than ill-intent. Foolishly romantic but interpersonally unperceptive. Spiritually troubled. Charmingly so.
This softly-softly version of sex work stigma is most popular amongst the thoughtful, liberal middle classes—conservative society favours a more explicit demonisation of “whores”. It’s a tolerance that seeks its own reward by relegating “deviant” women to the role of harmless simpletons. The hooker with a heart is implored to be grateful for generous entry into middle-class acceptance, presumed to be wide-eyed and wondering at its manifold sophistications. Indeed, in liberal cinema, she has often been “dropped” into bourgeois circles as a farcical enterprise, compared to formidable, serious women who know how to run things (but don’t know how to have fun). The hooker with a heart, the buxom, big-smiler, bulldozes about with honesty and working-class whimsy, enthusiastically overlooking the perplexed judgement her sincerity provokes.
This softly-softly version of sex work stigma is most popular amongst the thoughtful, liberal middle classes...
She’s Funny That Way, Pretty Woman, and Trading Places, all utilise this same theme. The hooker who brings an intuitive authenticity to the “acted” role of the whore at the theatre, but spells trouble for the famous cast with her haphazard sexual transgressions. The streetwalker who is trussed up in finery but can’t help but use playful gutterspeak at the opera or polo ground. The surviving-on-a-dime hooker who tricks a downwardly mobile financial trader and then takes pity on him, becoming his lover-cum-mother.
The hooker with the heart stereotype has the underlying assumption that those who sell sexual entertainment for a living are so limited in inner richness, that they can “make up” for their cultural deficits via a bounty of social generosity, jocularity, flexibility and fortitude. This serves the purpose of nullifying the whore’s subversive potential: she isn’t a sexual renegade using her willingness to transgress arbitrary moral boundaries for the sake of her personal freedom. She is simply profoundly and profanely stupid, her light spirit essential to overlook the cool, haughty judgement this presumed stupidity induces. Especially by those striving—superficially—for respectability and status. Thus, the whore’s role as an erotic entertainer seeps into her social function. She becomes an emotional concubine, another in a long history of court jesters. Sent as a balm to calm the anxieties of those “on the strive.” Her place in the “conversation of life” forever contested, even where it is politely tolerated.
And if she doesn’t play ball—that is, displays interests outside of sex, shows financial or political acumen, or speaks with authority or confidence—a spikiness swiftly follows. The bar for entry to acceptability as a whore is high, and often easily and angrily rescinded. The irritability is coming from a semi-conscious sense that she has cheated on her proper role. If you are an out-whore, keep tabs on patronising impatience, infantilisation, presumptions of naivety, lack of curiosity in your inner world, and lazy disdain. Have you ever felt cudgelled into accepting the role of “the android” with friendly, but functional programming? Coo-cooed, patted on the head, spoken at slowly? Eye-rolled when talking with enthusiasm or confidence about any subject (other than sex)? Parentified? Assisted in the basics and educated in the obvious? Welcomed to take a seat at the child’s table and embargoed from trading in mature conversation?
The bar for entry to acceptability as a whore is high, and often easily and angrily rescinded.
Perhaps you’ve had the hooker with a heart dress slipped over your shoulders when you weren’t looking. This is particularly destructive territory. When other people see themselves as your social superior, they claim the right of “interpellation”—to define your personhood for you. And despite our best of intentions, it can be all too easy to crack ourselves into that limited space assigned for us.
Indeed, there are many reasons sex workers keep their job a secret, not just because they may be seen as dirty, cheap and immoral. It’s also because of the risk of having one’s character defined by the prevalent assumptions that sex workers have a poor intellect, a narrow worldview and a “simple soul”. Liberal society has to “wrestle” inelegantly with whores, because strictly speaking, their open values should imply acceptance. Indeed, sex workers sit at the junction of free enterprise and eroticism. They ought to be the sacred cows of liberal, late-capitalism. And yet, they can no more introduce themselves mundanely at middle-class dinner parties than can con artists, coke dealers or drunk drivers.
In neo-feminist society, this stereotyping shows up in the liberal re-construction of the conservative “virgin-whore” complex. Whores are often the negative point of feminine comparison, fulfilling the role as the “bad version of womanhood.” Here, the idealised woman is no longer the virgin-wife, but the institutional-professional. The woman making her way through promotional institutions with savvy and sense. In conservatism, the whore was a threat to the acceptance of women’s submission to male power, and so she had to be demonised; made ugly, unstable, dangerous. Here the whore poses a threat to the idea of social mobility through the corporate career path, so she has to be neutered: made funny, feeble, and foolish. In the anglophone world, smart women have been de-sexed. The sensual has been de-coupled from the cerebral to maintain the unspoken assumption that human wholeness is masculine. The relinquishing of pleasure and playfulness are the unspoken conditions by which women can gain entry to (partial) cultural legitimacy.
And so, ‘professional’ women can be suspicious of whores because they’ve had to cover and suppress facets of themselves to thrive in an legitimised occupational landscape where they have to qualify themselves, over and again.
Many women (and indeed men) labour in jobs, lifestyles, relationships and communities they don’t enjoy, because those choices garner respect and an (often false) sense of security. To keep plugging away at daily discomfort, one must imagine that outsider lives—whores, waifs, and wanderers—be miserable, favoured only by the irretrievably flawed. Thus, whores are to respectable professional women what spinsters are to tradwives; the damned “other option”. What a great patriarchal ruse! If women were to be theoretically open to being whores—if they were less afraid of tossing respectability to the wind when it threatens to undercut them—then they might demand more from their current path.
Whores are often the negative point of feminine comparison, fulfilling the role as the “bad version of womanhood.”
Simpler than that, whores are a cheap win. In a world where femininity is compared negatively against traditional masculinity, even the most occupationally successful women can feel the cut of devaluation. Of being treated as “not quite as good” as her male equivalent. To treat whores as human equals with their own depth and integrity, is to forgo one group of people it would be easy to feel superior to, to make up for some lost ground. Generally, women are more keenly chided for displaying arrogance and self-satisfaction. For thinking themselves “better”. Feminine culture is toxified by an aversion to tall poppies, sometimes to its own detriment. But few people would narrow their eyes at a professional woman pampering herself with the assumption that she must be smarter, more interesting and evolved than any sex worker.
The reformed whore is a twist on the theme; suffering from internalised whorephobia, she doesn’t job-swerve to expand her horizons, but in a vain attempt to reclaim her respectability. Her priorities are even more anxious—her former colleagues are no longer her equals, but her underlings, and she hasn’t learned the social delicacy of wearing that self-importance lightly. She doesn’t pinch their cheeks gently; she holds out her hem contemptuously—ironically exposing the fragility of her position. With whorephobia, like all class politics, there is an oafish form of outspoken self-importance, and a more effective, dexterous kind. These latter social animals have understood that the way to cement their status is not to be overt about their belief in their greater sophistication, but to proactively assert the “simplistic savant” attractions of a marginalised life.
For clients, some whores play the role of bubble-headed loveliness, for dollars and larks, padded in the confines of explicit transaction, just as some wear catsuits and don a sharp tongue and sharper whip. It’s a game of boundaries and the rules are morally hers to define. But in life she owes no-one such sweet simplicity; few people can afford to patronise her so generously.
For more on sex work and stereotypes, check out these articles: Dismantling and Reclaiming Stereotypes as a Black Domme and Sex Work is Not a One-Dimensional World.
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