Sex Work & Stigma: Examining the Problematic Representation of Sex Workers in Popular Culture
M y first encounter with how our culture portrays sex work occurred while playing Grand Theft Auto, Vice City with a cousin at my dad’s house. I couldn’t have been older than ten years old, and my cousin, enthusiastically playing the game next to me, was nearing his shift into puberty. I remember taking the controller and playing the game, merely excited to drive around in the expensive-looking car on the screen. My enjoyment, however, turned to horror when I accidentally ran over a woman, identified solely as one of the game’s seemingly disposable prostitutes. Having been raised primarily from my mom, aunt, and grandmother, I was taught from an early age to respect women, and felt sick from what I had done. After the driving incident, I put down the controller and broke down in tears. As my cousin continued to play the game unperturbed, my dad told me I had to “man up” and insinuated that the virtual woman I had hit “deserved it” for being a prostitute. While I was too young at the time to define things like “misogyny” or “sexism”, I had a strong awareness that the nameless prostitute didn’t deserve to be hit by a car, or shot, or tortured via a myriad of other ways that Rockstar Games actively encourages players to do throughout the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Having arrived a decade after that incident, I want to examine how popular culture, through video games, music videos, and everything in between, manages to stigmatize and promote a culture of violence against sex workers. This appears to be a fruitful exercise at a time when our nation is debating what ideas, rhetoric, and visual representations we should tolerate in the public discourse, particularly when it comes to the blurred, contested lines between exploiting and empowering womxn.
Let’s start by unpacking a few important terms. The World Health Organization defines sex work as “the provision of sexual services for money or goods”. In addition, they describe sex workers as “women, men and transgendered people who receive money or goods in exchange for sexual services, and who consciously define those activities as income generating even if they do not consider sex work as their occupation”. In contrast, the National Institute of Justice describes sex trafficking as “[when] a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age”. The differentiation between sex work and sex trafficking is crucial for policymakers, advocacy groups, and media outlets to make. Despite this, Lauren Maffeo of Mic.com indicates that “sex work and slavery are often framed by the media as synonyms”. This framing is problematic because the only tie between sex trafficking and sex work is that both involve paid sexual services.
S ex workers themselves are not inherently trafficked through their job profession, and there are plenty of individuals who find empowerment and/or economic stability in selling sex to consumers. Nobody who is arguing for the legalization of sex work is saying that we should legalize sex trafficking, and presenting a false equivalency between the two only serves to stigmatize sex workers even further into the fringes of our society. Far too often, people with even the best intentions will assume that someone is being trafficked when the sex worker themselves does not believe this to be the case. The most concrete way to know a sex worker’s treatment is to ask sex workers themselves without personal judgement or indignation. If more policymakers, and law enforcement asked sex workers about their day-to-day experiences rather than relying on their own assumptions and implied moral values, the United States would likely be a far safer country for sex workers to operate in than it is today.
W hile policymakers and law enforcement certainly contribute to cementing the structural stigmatization and harm towards sex workers, the media’s depictions of sex workers, pimps, and consumers of sex have heavily contributed towards the cultural stigmatization of sex work itself. When it comes to video games, sex workers are often depicted as an object or commodity for players to use and discard at their convenience. The Grand Theft Auto franchise is notorious for condoning the dehumanization, rape, and murder of sex workers as a means to supplement the main character’s story arc. Following the release of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the Sex Worker’s Outreach Project USA called upon all gamers and parents to boycott the franchise for “[encouraging] the denigration and destruction of prostitutes” by providing extra points within gameplay to players who rape and murder virtual sex workers.
Other video game franchises fare no better in their depictions and treatment of sex workers, with the Saints Row franchise almost a carbon copy of Grand Theft Auto’s violence towards sex workers and Red Dead Redemption rewarding players with “an achievement for kidnapping a sex worker and murdering her”. The real danger of games like these, as Cassie Rosenberg indicates in her opinion piece for The Guardian, is that they can inadvertently influence players to act these scenarios out on real-life sex workers because the violence against virtual sex workers in these games becomes desensitized to the point of blurring reality. It would be hypocritical for me to say that I’ve never played games like these, and I want to be clear that I’m not against video games as a whole. However, I think it’s crucial for us to think through what it means for real-life sex workers (particularly female-identifying ones) to have entire games center themselves around sexually assaulting, dehumanizing, and outright murdering virtual sex workers. Since 30–50% of sex workers report sexual violence in any given year, I’d argue that this is no laughing matter.
While video games are one way for the stigmatization of sex workers to proliferate, movies and television programs can (and should) have their depictions of sex workers interrogated as well. Janet Mock, a renowned author, transgender rights activist, and former host of the MSNBC show So POPular!, summarized how many popular culture depictions of sex work fail to accurately portray the practice itself:
“From the silver screen to TV documentaries, our culture is obsessed with the objectification and victimization and oftentimes silencing of sex workers. But rarely do we see nuanced portrayals of their lives, their bodies, experiences, and politics.”
As a former sex worker herself, Mock has become one of the most visible and vocal advocates against our nation’s cultural stigmatization of the commercial sex industry. She hosted a panel of sex work advocates and professionals on her show in summer 2016, and, in my view, all of them did an excellent job of problematizing the depictions of sex workers in pop culture today. Melissa Gira Grant, a journalist, former sex worker, and author of Playing The Whore: The Work of Sex Work, said that “The majority of stories in the media about sex work are either stories of arrests or, unfortunately, of violence and death, and we very rarely get to hear from sex workers themselves”. Sienna Baskin, former managing director of the Sex Workers Project, added that the bulk of pop culture representations of sex workers today are “so often used in entertainment and in media to generate titillation for the audience and for money”. In seeking the entertainment factor over a realistic portrayal, movies and television tend to sensationalize the life of sex workers and contribute towards furthering their stigmatization. The implication in this, as Mock states at the end of the clip, is that “when it comes to the fact of bringing up the hard and fast logical things that they need to actually support their lives, nobody necessarily wants to listen”.
Audrey Moore, a sex worker and contributor to Refinery29, echos and expands upon much of Mock et.al’s sentiments in her article, Why I’m Fed Up With The Way TV Portrays Sex Workers. She begins her piece by stating that “In the vast majority of their programming, sex workers are treated one of two ways: as punching bags or punchlines. Our lives are almost always sneered at, or pitied, or used as a symbol of inevitable tragedy”. She then continues on to add that sex workers are, “rarely given any agency or backstory as characters [and are] merely used to demonstrate the high-concept murderous impulses of a serial killer, or treated as collateral damage in the mission to save the morally ‘good’ characters.”
This concept Moore refers to, known as the “disposable sex worker trope”, presents itself throughout films and popular TV shows. One example comes from Blue Bloods, a crime drama series in it’s ninth season on CBS. During the show’s sixth season, there’s an extremely telling scene in which Anthony, an investigator from the District Attorney’s office, speaks to Erin, the assistant District Attorney, regarding a crime scene involving a murdered sex worker. The transcript of the scene goes as follows:
ERIN: I just want to know who killed that poor girl.
ANTHONY: Poor girl? Are we working on the same case? ’Cause I’m on the one with the hooker, not the soccer mom.
ERIN: Justice is blind, Anthony.
ANTHONY: Yeah, and dead hookers are easier to find than yellow cabs.
ERIN: Yeah, usually from suicides and OD, not a bullet between their eyes.
There are several things I’d like to unpack here. First, the disregard with which Anthony blames the unidentified sex worker for her death is disturbing, mainly in the way that this show, while fictional, mirrors how some law enforcement figures view sex workers and the crimes committed upon them. This is also reflected in how Anthony purposefully contrasts the murdered sex worker with a soccer mom, setting up the former to appear deserving of her fate and the latter as an example of purity, traditional values, and an undeserving victim of random acts of violence. Lastly, Erin, while sympathetic of the murdered sex worker, also inadvertently contributes to the stigmatization of sex work by implying that it’s almost expected for sex workers to overdose on drugs or commit suicide (as opposed to murder, which is much more interesting to investigate).
Other examples of the “disposable sex worker trope” include the film Very Bad Things, a dark comedy starring Cameron Diaz and Christian Slater in which the entire plot revolves around a Vegas bachelor party gone wrong. In the hallmark, gory scene, one of the men on the trip, Michael, solicits a sex worker and accidentally kills her during rough sex in a hotel bathroom. There is then a visual tableau in which the sex worker is sprawled out on the floor, blood pooled around her impaled head. Another example comes from the 1990 film Total Recall, in which a sex worker with three breasts is shot in the back while covering for the protagonists of the film. In Season 3 of the TV show True Blood, Russell Edgington, the main antagonist for that season, finds his husband’s dead body and falls into a form of psychosis soon after. Two days later, he hires a male prostitute that appears to be the likeness of his dead husband and murders him. The TV series Game of Thrones, known already for extremely graphic violence against female characters, has one scene in which Ros, a sex worker, is used as target practice because she was a spy. Even on the animated series Family Guy, the main character, Peter Griffin, states that there’s no point in killing strippers because “most of them are already dead inside”.
All of the visual depictions described above frame sex workers as valuable for sex and comedic purposes and then, once no longer needed, they can be violently assaulted and murdered without repercussions because they are deemed “disposable”. Audrey Moore says that these depictions are stigmatizing and have real implications on the safety of sex workers:
“As long as the viewing public continues to get a kick out of tropes such as ‘dead hookers in the boot of a car’, the violence some of us encounter at work will be seen as inevitable, and, worse still, unchangeable. A lack of realistic representation of our lives … only contributes to this dehumanizing attitude, and pushes us further to the margins when it comes to the way society sees us.”
Indeed, the media plays a pivotal role in maintaining a cultural system of stigmatizing sex workers into the fringes of society. Zahra Zsuzanna Stardust, a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, details the array of negative effects that stigma has on sex workers around the world. She notes that stigma puts sex workers at risk by contributing to “opportunities for violence where sex workers have to choose between safety and legality” and, in turn, “reduces the options for sex workers to turn to for support”. This results, among other things, in the development of structural barriers to accessing affordable and personalized health care, a fair draw from the criminal justice system, and equal labor rights to their peers in “legal” industries. Stigma itself is exhausting to deal with and, when piled onto existing mental illnesses and an ongoing potential of violence from pimps, clients, and domestic partners, can have long-lasting effects on a sex worker’s quality of life. Zahra closes out her article by describing the often overlooked aspect of stigmatizing sex work that may be the worst side byproduct of all:
“The greatest travesty is that stigma directs sex workers’ energies to the reactive work of responding to sensationalist headlines or political expediency and diverts it from peer education, community building and world-making — the very generative work that allows us to survive and thrive.”
Since the expectation to destigmatize sex work cannot (and should not) be placed on sex workers themselves, our nation’s institutions must do more to accurately present the sex trade without a hidden moral agenda. In their co-authored Huffington Post article, Katherine Koster and Lindsay Roth detail several ways that the media must improve its coverage of sex workers. First, they say that news outlets must end the practice of publishing the names, addresses, and mugshots of arrested sex workers because this has the potential of furthering stigma and violence against them even before they’ve been convicted of a crime. Moreover, it feeds into the narrative that sex work is a seedy industry that should stay criminalized rather than be legalized like any other labor industry. Their second piece of advice is for journalists to ardently check their sources when publishing on sex work and sex trafficking, since misinformation in coverage of both topics remain rampant despite a greater accessibility of knowledge in society than ever before. On a similar note, Koster and Roth advise journalists to question the ways in which race and class frame how sex workers are viewed in the media, as well as the side effects for sex workers who live under constant scrutiny from law enforcement, the media, their communities, families, and political figures. Most importantly, they advise journalists to prioritize quoting and interviewing sex workers themselves because “people who work in the sex trade by choice, circumstance or coercion, have a variety of experiences” and it is unfair to generalize them all under one umbrella, especially when that umbrella is developed by their oppressors.
A s for media depictions outside of the news reports, there has been some meaningful progress in the representation of sex workers on TV and in film. Both Criminal Minds and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit have made the deliberate choice to avoid blaming victims of violence, particularly when the victims are sex workers. An excellent Vox article by Dylan Matthews details how the framing of crime by television shows has evolved America’s views of incarceration and punishment over time. On Law & Order: SVU, Matthews says the following:
“Sex workers are frequently featured as victims, but their career is never treated as a reason not to believe them … SVU narratives repeatedly declare that a person’s sexual practices must not be used to undermine the person’s credibility. The series rejects the assumption that only virtuous and sexually chaste women can be violated.”
Antonia Crane, a contributor at MEL Magazine, conducted interviews among her own sex work community on the most realistic pop culture portrayals of the industry they’ve seen. She personally pointed to The Girlfriend Experience and Afternoon Delight as two films that reveal “ the naked heart of a person rising, resisting, failing, falling and thriving in sex work” without falling into harmful stereotypes. Domino Ray, a stripper, said that the TV series Friday Night Lights “was run on a major TV network and treated sex work with dignity, didn’t sensationalize or sanitize it and gave the sex-working characters depth and empathy”. Bella Bathory, a self-described “Kinky Courtesan”, said that the show Harlots is “the most accurate representation of what it feels like to be a sex worker — from the stigma to the camaraderie between the women”. In particular, she appreciated how the series defies the assumption that all sex workers are trafficked since many individuals within the sex trade are there by choice.
Siouxsie Q, an advocate for sex workers, chose Tangerine, saying that the film is “a humanizing portrayal of marginalized workers and centralizes the core values of community and sex-worker camaraderie — some of the very few tools we have for survival”. One last example (of many) from Crane’s interviews comes from Victoria Voxx, a stripper. She expresses her support for the Netflix series Strippers, saying that “Some of the ladies perfectly worded feelings I couldn’t describe as a dancer for years. Like they were taking the words right out of my mouth”. All of these films and shows should be looked to by the media industry as examples of how sex workers should be portrayed going forward, and I implore readers to find and share more positive representations of the industry among their peers so we can all begin to chip away at the buildup of cultural and structural stigma spanning hundreds of years in American society.
T o work towards the de-stigmatization of sex work in popular culture, we must put pressure on media producers, distributors, content creators, journalists, law enforcement, and countless others to reframe how they view sex workers. This task, as stated earlier, cannot fall solely upon sex workers themselves in a society that actively criminalizes their revenue stream, endangers them in and out of custody, constantly scrutinizes their every move, belittles them on the media, and then blames sex workers themselves when the crushing weight of stigma ends up translating to real-world violence. While consumers can help determine the acceptability of various depictions of sex work, a bulk of the stigma against sex workers can only be solved through structural and political reforms. Until the day comes when sex work is legalized and treated as equally valid as any other form of labor, we must continue to fight alongside sex workers for their basic human rights. Failing to address this issue with due diligence will continue the stigmatization and subsequent violence towards sex workers for years to come.
