“Because sex workers shouldn’t be dead to be on film”, argued the promo blurb for London’s first Sex Worker Film Festival. And who aside from Henry of Portrait of a Serial Killer could disagree? Organised by the Sex Worker Open University, a “grassroots collective” of sex workers, academics and activists, the declared goal was to challenge the stereotypical representations of strippers and hookers as vulnerable “fallen angels” or “shallow, manipulative and without ethics”. Sandwiched between donation appeals and Q&A sessions with activists, the sold-out event presented 11 shorts and drew in a diverse, polysexual crowd to East London’s Rio Cinema.
Following a live performance that offered some rather dusty drag queen humour (condom jokes and the like) we were treated to the opening flick, Isabel Hosti’s 69 Things I Love About Sex Work (2006). One of the few contributions that was not a straightforward talking head documentary, this was a collage of straight sex scenes backed by My favourite things from The Sound Of Music. The twosome and threesome activities on display were real and resembled hardcore porn as it was known up until circa the 1970s minus the prison tattoos: attractive yet hardly flawless bodies, playful smiles, and the odd awkwardly small cock. The ’69 things’ that the filmmaker, a bisexual Canadian sex worker, loves about her job appeared as subtitles in numerical order, ranging from ‘the money’ to ‘the drugs’ and from ‘the dancing’ to ‘bi-curious wives’. Promoting prostitution as a fun and rewarding lifestyle, the account was as honest as it was innocent, wholly unconscious that it represented only one particular facet of middle class, semi-entrepreneurial sex work – as opposed to, say, the legions of streetwalkers that regularly appear in the ruins of collapsed economies.
The documentary short Hands Off (UK 2011) by Winstan Whitter catapulted us back to our Hackney borough in East London, administered by a particularly puritanical Labour government. Whether it’s the left populist MP Diane Abbott campaigning against ‘lads mags’ at local newsagents or councillors plotting to ban “sleazy sex establishments” from the area – here, the paternalistic spirit of New Labour’s political correctness programme is hanging over us well into the Tory era of take-no-prisoners working class annihilation. No statistic is too flimsy to imply a direct causal relationship between strip joints and rape and no feminist website is too rightwing to be cited in support of such arguments. Isolated symptoms of an unequal society are treated as causes of inequality, and despite all the crocodile tears about their ‘degradation’ and ‘objectification’, the
women who dance at those clubs are not consulted.[i]
Hands Off provided a platform for those who make a living at Browns, a Shoreditch strip joint under fire from the council’s moral cleansing brigade. According to director Winstan Whitter, speaking at the Q&A, the councillors “would have never agreed to be interviewed if we had approached them”. What we got to see instead, then, was a miniature popular front of dancers, bouncers, a supportive local vicar who could tell the difference between ‘moralistic’ and ‘moral’, and the venue owner. Slight problem: imagine someone shoots a documentary of your workplace under the premise that your boss gets to view the final product – how much honest criticism can we expect to hear from the succession of talking heads? Well, exactly.
Accordingly, owner Denise Chandler is idealised as an indispensible, saintly matriarch. Chandler herself emphasises the cosily “independent” and “family run” nature of her business, which gives women the opportunity to strip in a “well managed” environment instead of being “exploited” by “criminals” whose venues aren’t even “properly licensed”. In her view, Hackney council is “sexist” – but not because it views strippers with contempt, dear reader. No – Chandler insists that the councillors think “a woman shouldn’t run a strip club”.
This is not to say that Brown’s is not an “exemplary” strip club, as Jennifer, a resident dancer for more than ten years, put it in the Q&A session after the screening. The safety measures and working conditions may well be excellent in comparison to other venues and you might even believe the dancers find the experience of stripping for Chandler “liberating” and an act of “artistic self-expression”. But who can know for sure if sex workers don’t organise, educate, and agitate independently of their employers? And why leave questions around work conditions and wages up to the parasitical owner and manager strata? The sex industry nationalism that informed Hands Off sometimes, in its weakest moments resembled those ‘behind the scenes’ documentaries from Hollywood’s x-rated backyard, where porn barons like to present themselves as caring, health-and-safety obsessed father figures.
Alas, class collaboration is a streak that runs through the sex worker activist milieu like a tape worm that feeds off its marginalisation from the broader workers’ movement. One audience member asked the panel: Are the owners of adult entertainment venues not piggybacking on sex workers unions by positioning themselves as equal? It is true that “some club owners exploit dancers”, went the rather evasive answer courtesy of Luca, a sex worker and human rights activist, but unionisation would help to combat that and regulate the industry. In the meantime, to destigmatise and decriminalise was top priority. “A lot of managers are ex-sex workers, and a lot of them are women”, he assured the sceptic in the audience – along the same lines as we are often reminded that one boss or another comes “from a working class background”.
There is an important truth in Luca’s words, however. As long as the sex industry exists in a moral and legal grey zone in isolation from more ‘respectable’ forms of wage slavery, the interests of sex workers are to a considerable extent congruent with those of their employers: decriminalisation of prostitution, social acceptance of strip joints. Desirable though these aims are for many reasons, an organisation such as the GMB affiliated International Union of Sex Workers will remain as hardly more than a campaign group – a yellow union at best – as long as it encourages “agents” and “managers” to fill out its membership application form[ii]. If they are to fight consistently for their interests, sex workers will need to shake off and oppose this kind of sex industry corporatism. In order for sex workers to be integrated in the broader labour movement, in turns, certain leftists will need to come to terms with the old truth that The Pop Group made into a song: in essence, We Are All Prostitutes.
Ni Coupables, Ni Victimes (EU 2006), a documentary about the European Conference on Sex Work in Brussels, dealt with the question of violence against hookers. There were hints as to how different roles within the sex industry breed distinct nuances of consciousness underneath the collective ‘sex worker’ facade. We saw a transsexual hooker, LGBT bookshop owner, and Green Party candidate parroting liberal platitudes of a “globalisation of human rights”. This attitude was contrasted with comrade Ana Lopes of the International Union of Sex Workers throwing us a lovely clenched fist salute and declaring that we have to get rid of capitalism if we really want to control our bodies, our workspaces and our lives. But is that also in the interest of the Austrian escort agency owner who just wants to “get the girls away from the pimps” and “work in a family atmosphere” because, after all, “we are all women”?
Nick Mai’s ‘sex worker trilogy’ – Comidas Rapidas (UK 2009), Mother Europe (UK 2010) and a trailer for Normal (UK 2011) – clearly wanted to appear more challenging than some of the more rah-rah fare at the festival.
Exploring the tension between the moral understanding and material aspirations of migrants involved in sex work and trafficking, the documentaries mirrored the post-left’s preoccupation with gender and ethnicity. Because class traditionally appears as a sociological rather than economic category somewhere on the bottom of the Cultural Studies milieu’s priority list, Mai’s collages of interviews and monologues were no more concerned with the often diffuse and unstable class nature of sex work than the less formally ambitious contributions screened earlier on. Instead, the director aimed to deconstruct the victim/villain and innocence/corruption dichotomies projected onto different roles in the international flesh trade. That was all good and well, but if any useful insight can be drawn from these musings at all, it is really just the basic, not at all postmodern realisation that individualised allocations of blame are counterproductive to understanding, let alone changing the world.
Exploring the tension between the moral understanding and material aspirations of migrants involved in sex work and trafficking, the documentaries mirrored the post-left’s preoccupation with gender and ethnicity. Because class traditionally appears as a sociological rather than economic category somewhere on the bottom of the Cultural Studies milieu’s priority list, Mai’s collages of interviews and monologues were no more concerned with the often diffuse and unstable class nature of sex work than the less formally ambitious contributions screened earlier on. Instead, the director aimed to deconstruct the victim/villain and innocence/corruption dichotomies projected onto different roles in the international flesh trade. That was all good and well, but if any useful insight can be drawn from these musings at all, it is really just the basic, not at all postmodern realisation that individualised allocations of blame are counterproductive to understanding, let alone changing the world.
If Mai’s Comidas Rapidas exposes a young Tunisian hustler’s deliberate detachment from any feelings of love and affection, Johannes Sjoberg’s Transfiction (UK/Sweden/Brazil 2007) depicts the search for tenderness in a dog-eat-dog world. Sjoberg shot the hour-long feature according to the rules of ethnofiction, a mode of anthropological documentary filmmaking in which the participants act out their real life experiences through improvisation. The point is to reveal hidden truths about their culture that would be difficult to find using conventional anthropological research, to re-enact situations that might otherwise escape a traditional documentary film team.
Meg (Fabia Mirassos) is a transsexual hairdresser in Sao Paulo while her friend, the transgendered Zilda (Savana Meirelles), makes ends meet as a hooker dreaming of a normal life. Nothing about their everyday encounters is too surprising: Zilda gets rejected for apartments and the most basic office admin jobs, and both she and Meg run the gauntlet whenever they hit the outdoors; boyfriends have trouble coming to terms with the stigma of openly dating a transsexual, and the struggle with persisting and reappearing palimpsest of one’s biological sex is a perpetual, traumatic undercurrent.
The strengths of Transfiction, though, lay not in uncovering hard facts about Brazil’s transsexual and travesti culture that might not have been exposed in a standard documentary, but in bringing to the fore the dreams and desires of its protagonists – as well as those aspects of their lives that keep them going. Europe – and Paris in particular – is the Promised Land they hope to enter one day. Until then, there is friendship: the sequence in which Zilda shoots up Meg’s boobs with silicone glows with a warm intimacy that counteracts the graphic nature of the footage. Elsewhere, the ethnofiction approach allows ‘Meg’ and ‘Zilda’ to unfold their street-tough charisma to the full. When, for instance, they improvise anecdotal dialogue about johns, they make for a terrific comedy double act. Performance is an aspect of daily life that the transgendered tend to be more aware of than the rest of us, and ‘Meg’ and ‘Zilda’ come to it like fish to the water.
In contrast to – and perhaps at odds with – the overall agenda of the Sex Worker Film Festival, prostitution in Transfiction is not a career choice, a ‘job like any other, but better paid’, but a result of being pushed to the margins of society; perhaps that is why Working Girl Blues, an unremarkable short film which once again extolled the benefits of sex work in comparison to ‘regular’ jobs, was tagged on at the end to provide a conciliatory closure to the festival. But for all of Transfiction’s ethnographic interest in travesti as a marginalised group, for all its emphasis on identity, it was the universal human qualities in Meg and Zilda which shone the brightest anticipating a better world for us all; you can’t argue with love and solidarity.
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[i] Earlier this year, Hackney’s strippers took to the streets to protest against the councillor’s latest proposals, which are to be pushed through despite having been rejected by 67% of respondents to the consultation.
[ii] Arguably, this is symptomatic of the rather diffuse class lines in the industry. A pole dancer depends on a venue owner in order to provide a service. A hooker, meanwhile, might be a self-employed entrepreneur and soon employ others. Porn stars work towards setting up their own production companies after a few well-paid years, and so on.
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