Bonding (2019)

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May 13, 2019

“It’s your life story!” a friend texted me on April 24th along with a screenshot of Netflix’s new show Bonding. It was one of five or six texts I received that day from friends and clients making sure I’d heard about this new program that follows a dominatrix/grad student in and out of the dungeon. As a dominatrix/grad student myself, friends were sure I’d be interested in the show. I’d already heard about it on social media, where opinions were pretty starkly divided between sex workers and non-sex workers. I wasn’t exactly interested in this show so much as I was morbidly curious, because I could tell from these reviews and from the show’s own promos that Bonding was not made for someone like me.

Hell, Bonding isn’t really even about someone like me; it’s really about the dominatrix’s best friend, Pete (Brendan Scannell). An audience surrogate, Pete starts the series as a vanilla naïf knocking on a dungeon door, summoned there to be Mistress May (aka Tiff)’s (Zoe Levin) bodyguard, or, as I shrieked while watching the promo, “a FUCKING body guard!” No domme I know can afford to pay twenty percent (later in the series, forty percent) of her income to a bodyguard, as Mistress May inexplicably decides to do. We don’t really need to, either; we often work in incall spaces with receptionists and other dommes. But a story about two women sex workers working together for safety wouldn’t allow us an audience surrogate, and if there’s one thing a non-sex working show runner like Bonding’s Rightor Doyle wouldn’t abide, it would be throwing the audience in head-first into a world populated mostly by sex workers.

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Did 8 Minutes Lie to Sex Workers?

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suzyhooker

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April 27, 2015

UPDATE

5/1/15 Kamylla’s GoFundMe was taken offline and replaced with a Tilt fundraiser, which has also now been closed down. We will update if we hear news of another fundraising effort.

5/3/15 Here’s an updated fundraiser link.

There’s been no shortage of coverage of A&E’s 8 Minutes, the ostensible reality show in which cop-turned-pastor Kevin Brown makes appointments with sex workers and then has the titular amount of time to make a case for them to stop their work. Lane Champagne wrote here in December that

Of all the professions to produce potential sex work interventionists, law enforcement and clergy are at the very top of the Unsuitable list. Behind those two are literally every single other profession, because sex work interventions are vile exercises in the hatred and shaming of sex working individuals and shouldn’t exist.

Supposedly, women who want to leave sex work will be given help. From A&E’s website: “8 Minutes follows Pastor Kevin Brown and his Lives Worth Saving team as they help sex workers and victims of sex trafficking leave their dangerous situations behind to start over.” And how do they do that?

Last week, one woman, who goes by Kamylla, came forward on Twitter to hold the show’s producers accountable for promising her assistance in exchange for her appearance on the show, then leaving her twisting in the wind when she was arrested soon after, having returned to work from economic necessity when they didn’t provide the promised help in exiting the industry.

Kamylla received a call on her work number from the producers of the show, who immediately identified themselves as such (this is in contrast to the premise of the show, which implies that the women believe they are coming to a normal appointment, only to be met by Brown). She agreed to tape a segment for the show, in which she said she wanted help getting out of the business, and after the taping was told she’d soon hear back with more information and assistance.

She never heard back from them, and instead reached out herself, but no meaningful help was to come. Kamylla found herself broke and needing to work again. She posted an ad, using the same number the 8 Minutes producers had contacted her on, and was arrested in a sting. Now she was broke, frightened, and facing criminal charges, and when she reached out for help from 8 Minutes, Brown offered to pray for her.

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A&E Pulls 8 Minutes From The Air

By

Bubbles

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May 5, 2015

novideo — The above screenshot is from A&E’s website this morning, where it appears the network has been busy removing all materials related to 8 Minutes.

In the face of increasing media interest and consistent pressure from sex worker activists, A&E has deleted the website for 8 Minutes from its site and pulled the next episode, which was scheduled to air this Thursday night. Tits and Sass left a message with the show’s publicist (and even spelled out the name of this blog), so if they choose to reply we will update this post. (Edit: the website has re-appeared sans video.)

On Sunday, reporter and sex worker activist Alana Massey spoke to On The Media about the A&E docudrama in which cop-turned-pastor Kevin Brown tries to convince sex workers to leave the business by offering them help getting out. The show is pure artifice. Supposedly, Brown poses as a client, calls workers to make an appointment, and then once they are in the room (outfitted with hidden cameras, Brown wearing a clumsy earpiece to communicate with his “team”), he has 8 minutes to make his case. In reality, the show was scripted, and producers identified themselves to workers to explain the setup and offer them compensation at filming. The premise was as much a sham as the offer of help, which took the form of phone numbers for counseling centers and hotlines rather than housing and job assistance.

Before the show’s premiere, Massey wrote about the show for the New Republic. “Any attempt to coerce them out of sex work in the absence of viable work alternatives is an invitation to starve.” In her On The Media appearance, she said that everything that sex workers had been saying about the show had proved true: Not only did it further an unhelpful and sensational narrative that all sex workers were victims, it failed to actually come through with meaningful help for those who wanted to leave the business and possibly put them at higher risk of arrest.

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Something Beautiful You Can Truly Bone: Prostitution For Partnership on Mad Men

By

Bubbles

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June 1, 2012

TOTAL SPOILER ALERT. If you watch Mad Men but haven’t seen Sunday’s episode yet, you’ve been warned. But the whole wide internet has been talking about this episode all week, so we don’t really know how you don’t know. Despite this being Friday, Charlotte and I couldn’t possible expect you all to get along without hearing what Tits and Sass had to say about “The Other Woman.”

Bubbles: Along with the smoking, racism, Beatles references, and plastic raincoats, the subordinate place of women in the workplace and the home is one of the ways Mad Men reminds viewers it’s set in the Sixties. Last Sunday’s episode, “The Other Woman,” gave each female lead gender-related obstacles: Peggy Olson was thwarted in her efforts to be recognized professionally, Megan Draper had to assert her independence within marriage, and Joan Harris confronted her treatment as an asset to be used to win an account.

Joan turned/was turned out for one very expensive trick in this episode when she agreed to sleep with a sleazy Jaguar dealer—thought to have a crucial say in whether the agency would land the account, and willing to booty call- blackmail the firm —in exchange for a partnership stake in Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (Harris? Holloway?). The act was revealed in an effective, emotionally manipulative bit of story structure. First we think she didn’t go, as Don Draper stops by her apartment to tell her that 1) he wasn’t in on the partners’ decision to extend the offer to her and 2) it wasn’t worth it (I hoped she’d just look at him and say “I’m not your damn mother, Don,” instead of giving him that maternal “good boy!” pat on the cheek). But then in cutaways, we see he came by after the deal was done. My first reaction was mild panic as I thought “Oh, no, I hope this doesn’t mean she misses out on the payday!” It would be like getting ripped off by a customer/client. And then I thought “Boy, when Sal wouldn’t bang the closet case from Lucky Strike, they didn’t offer him shit, and then they just canned his ass.”

But Joan went through with it and grabbed the brass ring of partnership, which in my opinion is as much of a happy ending as we’re likely to see on this show. Opinions in the weird world of television recapping varied widely, though, and give us a great opportunity to look at some of the tropes that get trotted out whenever people talk about prostitution. Woman’s bodies don’t just belong to their inhabitants, after all. They’re for everyone to have an opinion about! Starting with their value.

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The Girlfriend Experience (2016)

By

Rosi

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May 12, 2016

Christine (Riley Keogh) and Avery (Kate Lyn Sheil). — Christine (Riley Keough) and Avery (Kate Lyn Sheil).

I didn’t quite know what to expect from Starz’ new escorting drama,The Girlfriend Experience. After seeing the network’s Flesh and Bone (the story of a ballet dancer moonlighting as a stripper and being terrible at it), I had no doubt it would be very dramatic, rather too serious, and visually appealing. After all, as far as visuals go, Riley Keough as The Girlfriend Experience’s protagonist, Christine Reade, has it all—she’s white, she’s skinny, her features are pleasingly symmetrical, and her hair is reminiscent of Kate Middleton’s.

Christine Reade, the law student heroine with the hidden depths, enters our lives walking down a hotel corridor in the first shot of The Girlfriend Experience’s first episode. We see her from behind—sensible hair, sensible clothes. But the dim lights and the plush carpet she’s walking on are promising that some kind of salacious scene is imminent. Not yet though, not yet. Christine is on her way to meet her friend Avery, who has been left alone in a swanky hotel room where she’s determined to rack up the room service bill of her life.

It’s pretty obvious that Avery is going to be the one to introduce Christine to the good life of middle-aged men, money, and endless room service. (Well, not that last one, maybe, since I doubt many clients would enjoy receiving a room service bill that could cover the down payment on a new car.) Avery’s got a benefactor, a booking agent, and a taste for expensive booze. Christine, on the other hand, has drive, loose morals, and student loans. She ends up going on a double date with Avery, her sugar daddy, and a friend of his.

She is offered an envelope full of money just for being young, beautiful and willing to make tedious small talk with a balding stranger. Will she or won’t she? It’s an age old question, comparable to the moment of downfall in Shakespearean plays. In itself, taking the money is a small thing, but society’s judgment of us weighs so heavy that once you take the cash, you’re a whore, and you will remain a whore until you are dead and buried—and long after that sometimes. It’s the beginning of a chain reaction, and it hardly ever ends well—at least, not on TV.

So, in a tasteful restaurant’s bathroom (real towels!!!), Christine takes the cash and the show really shifts into gear. The booking agent, Jacqueline, is introduced. If you know one, you know them all. She’s almost a carbon copy of Secret Diary of a Call Girl’s Stephanie. She likes cash, nice restaurants, and cash, in that order. What she decidedly doesn’t like is uppity girls. Now, Christine has drive, as I mentioned. “Why should I give you thirty percent”, she asks and we want to know, too. She really shouldn’t give it to her, as it turns out. Jacqueline is sort of the Evil Queen of The Girlfriend Experience escorting world, and surprisingly unprofessional.

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