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, by 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…
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Auteur: Emma Paling
