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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HOLLYWOOD’S NEW SEX WORKER ROLES ARE GIRLBOSS HEROINES  
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Emma Paling
October 5, 2024
Jacobin
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_ In Hollywood, sex workers have become the ultimate girlbosses. The
message is clear: there’s no need for collective empowerment when
one can escape the low-wage economy by cashing in on the power of
bootstrapping entrepreneurism. _

Mia Goth stars as Maxine Minx in the new film MaXXXine. , (A24)

 

Review of _Sex Work in Popular Culture_ by Lauren Kirshner
(University of Toronto, 2024)

There is a memorable scene in this year’s film _MaXXXine_ in which
a stranger stalks the main character through an alleyway. The alley
predictably leads to a dead end. But the scene leads somewhere less
expected: he never gets his hands on her.

Maxine, an adult film actor played by Mia Goth, defends herself with
the handgun she has stashed in her purse. She forces her attacker to
strip naked and, in an obvious reversal of her role as a porn star,
tells him to lie down on the pavement “face down, ass up.”

The scene ends on an extended shot seemingly intended to make male
viewers squirm — and to subvert the typical imagery used to depict
sex workers like Maxine on screen. She crushes one of his testicles
with her stiletto heel.

On its surface, the film could pass as a feminist work. And from a
neoliberal feminist perspective, it probably is; Maxine is
self-sufficient, sexually empowered, and pursues her goals without the
help of a male partner (who was killed in an earlier film).

A new book, however, argues that portrayals of sex workers like the
one in _MaXXXine_ are more complicated than “good” or “bad,”
“feminist” or “regressive.”

_Sex Work in Popular Culture_
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Toronto writer and professor Lauren Kirshner, tracks the portrayal of
sex workers on screen from Hollywood’s early days until now. Drawing
on interviews with sex workers and a decade of research, the book
demonstrates how much progress has been made since the twentieth
century — and even since 1990s films like _Pretty Woman_. But it
also exposes how contemporary film and TV often turn sex workers into
“neoliberalism’s ideal subjects: ‘entrepreneurs’ and flexible
precarious service workers who are young, conventionally attractive,
individualistic and apolitical.”

Kirshner’s book critiques not only what’s lacking in Hollywood
films but also what’s lacking in neoliberal feminism
itself. Neoliberal feminism
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the version of feminism that has gone mainstream, ultimately
reinforces capitalist ideals and reproduces its injustices. Women are
shown as empowered when they adhere to beauty standards, make loads of
money, and act ruthlessly in their own interests — even at the
expense of other women.

Lean-In Sex Work

The portrayal of sex workers has come a long way from the early films
Kirshner cites. Public advocacy by sex workers has contributed to more
realistic and complex characters on screen.

“Once upon a time, popular culture’s sex workers were cautionary
tales about the fate of a woman who ‘goes wrong,’” Kirshner
notes in the book’s conclusion.

Sex workers threatened patriarchy with their sexual independence,
financial autonomy and disinterest in serving one man through
marriage, so the screen restricted them to predictable typologies and
storylines leading to death or marriage, these endings reinforcing
restrictions around women’s sexual expression and bodily autonomy,
access to power and money, and independence.

In such films, unrepentant sex workers often die young, while those
who repent are “saved” by their husbands or fathers, returning to
bourgeois comfort after their brief taste of rebellion.
Unsurprisingly, these films were almost always made by men. Kirshner
reports that in the twentieth century, 95 percent of Hollywood movies
with sex worker leads were made by male directors.

 

Considering this history, Mia Goth’s portrayal of Maxine, as well as
the existence of films written or acted by former sex workers
like _Cam_ and _Tangerine_, represent
progress. _MaXXXine_ presents an adult film actress as a complicated
person with agency. The rest of the story, though, takes the
neoliberal feminist bait.

Catherine Rottenberg, the author of _The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism_
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this brand of feminism urges women to constantly focus on increasing
their own socioeconomic value, and even to view their children as
capital investments. This “dominant strand of feminism . . . has
been disturbingly unmoored from such key concepts as equality,
justice, and emancipation.”

The final goal is not women’s collective liberation but professional
success, wealth, and work-life balance for a select few.

Neoliberal feminism’s proponents, including Ivanka Trump and Sheryl
Sandberg, have been criticized from the outset
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Socialists and other feminists on the Left understand that such
politics depends on mostly white upper- and middle-class women
outsourcing their housework and childcare to poorer, often racialized,
female workers. Neoliberal feminism, then, fits neatly into capitalist
structures, reinforcing and rationalizing its inequalities as it does
so.

Bootstrapping as Self-Actualization

While this brand of bourgeois feminism may be in decline
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its influence in Hollywood depictions of sex workers remains subtle
and insidious. The economic hardships sex workers face _before_ they
enter sex work are likely to be portrayed, but sex work itself is
often shown as an empowering individual choice. The hard parts of the
job and the need for legal rights are often written out of the script.

In _MaXXXine_, the lead character’s economic situation is never
discussed. For her, porn is more a vehicle for personal ambition than
a job that pays the rent. Her goal is to become famous. And she makes
it clear, when police try to get her help in solving the murders of
other women around her, that the only woman she’s interested in
helping is herself.

Her boss, a demanding movie director played by Elizabeth Debicki,
tells Maxine that her work must become her entire life. “To stay
here, you must make it your obsession, eliminate all other
distractions,” she says. Later, she reprimands Maxine for being a
few minutes late for work after her best friend is murdered.

The conditions Maxine faces at work reflect a broader truth about
society. Though set in the 1980s, Maxine’s workplace feels very
2024, where bosses expect total availability, even at the expense of
workers’ safety and well-being.

Rather than offering a critique of these unfair conditions, the movie
shows Maxine persevering and being rewarded for it. The reward, of
course, is more work. In the final scenes, Maxine is on another set,
walking a red carpet, and gushing about how happy she is now that
she’s famous. “I just never want it to end,” she says.

 

This contradiction — depicting an unjust economic reality while
indulging a capitalist fantasy of self-actualization through
professional achievement — is not an exception in Hollywood’s
contemporary portrayals of sex work but part of a broader trend.

Many of the newer films and TV shows about sex workers do get it right
in some ways, according to Kirshner’s study, which included one
hundred movies and additional TV shows. She notes that “much of the
popular culture . . . portrays women turning to sex work to escape
stressful and precarious low-paid gig work and, in its non-judgmental
tone, suggests a new understanding that everyone in neoliberal
capitalism, in one way or another, has to be a hustler.”

What these characters are escaping is very real. In recent
decades, wages have stagnated
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food prices have soared. The proportion of unionized workers has sunk
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gig jobs
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become more common. And many bosses
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expect their employees to be available 24-7.

Sex Work as an Escape from the Gig Economy

One fascinating part of Kirshner’s book explores how sex work has
been made precarious in the same ways that other jobs have. Erotic
dancers, for example, largely had full-time, sometimes even unionized,
jobs in the 1980s, she writes, citing an article
[[link removed]] by Chris
Bruckert. By the 2000s, many of these jobs became precarious, with
workers forced to work erratic schedules without benefits, sick leave,
or vacation time and lacking official recourse for misconduct from
customers and bosses.

What Hollywood gets wrong is its portrayal of individualist
bootstrapping as a means for women to escape danger and precarity.
Rather than engaging with politics and collective action, many of pop
culture’s new sex workers transform their lives by looking good,
stacking their money, and not worrying about anybody else.

_Hustlers_, the 2019 movie starring Jennifer Lopez, portrays erotic
dancers getting wise to capitalism’s workplace injustices. The women
rank the “three tiers of Wall Street guys” by how corrupt and
dangerous — and therefore how rich — they are. After the financial
crisis of 2008, the New York City dancers turn the tables on their
clients by drugging them and racking up credit card bills at the strip
club, pocketing a portion of the profits.

Kirshner writes that

what is vexing about _Hustlers_, ultimately, is how its dancers
attain empowerment by aping the crony capitalist practices of the men
they stiff. . . . In this regard, _Hustlers_ embodies
“post-feminism,” or feminism’s collusion with neoliberalism, in
its emphasis on rugged individualism in the marketplace as opposed to
coordinated collective political action by and for the majority of
women.

At the height of the dancers’ success, their scheme allows them to
celebrate Christmas in a Manhattan penthouse, gifting each other
iPhones and Louboutins. While no men are present, the scene portrays
less a feminist empowerment narrative than a vision of liberation that
is intricately tied to the very system the characters are forced to
navigate. It reinforces the idea that personal achievement comes from
embracing, rather than challenging, capitalist norms.

 

In contrast, some portrayals are more complex and truthful.
Kirshner’s personal favorite is _The Deuce_, an HBO show that ran
for three seasons, from 2017 to 2019.

_The Deuce_ portrays a diverse array of sex workers, young and
middle-aged, working on the street, at peep shows, and in porn. It
also portrays a range of experiences, with some women facing violence
and even murder, while others feel comfortable and excited by their
work. What makes _The Deuce_ even more compelling is its political
message, which addresses not only sex work but also gentrification in
New York and the broader economic landscape in the United States.
“More than simply portray sex work as uniquely exploitative
… _The Deuce_ shows how the commodification of women’s sexuality
runs insidiously through capitalist society,” Kirshner notes.

Early on in _MaXXXine_, one scene effectively illustrates this same
point.

Maxine auditions for a horror film, a “real picture,” marking her
breakout of adult entertainment and into mainstream cinema. She
delivers a stunning performance.

Before she can leave, a female producer asks one last question. “Do
you mind taking your top off so we can see your breasts?”

Maxine hesitates for just a second. “Yeah, sure.”

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Contributors

Emma Paling is a journalist and writer in Toronto. Her award-winning
reporting has been published widely by CBC News,
the Breach, HuffPost, Vice, and the Maple.

 

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