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    Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On—The Subjects

    By
    Holly Marie
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    I want to believe with all my heart that material can be made about sex workers that doesn’t demonize or belittle us. I want to get the same feeling chefs get while watching Chopped or car enthusiasts feel watching Top Gear UK. Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On is not that feel-good series—there is no perspective through which it is not problematic.

    The show eases you into the material in the first episode with living legend producers Suze Randall and her daughter Holly working on photoshoots and erotic film. The episode focuses on their business practices, how they treat the talent, and their issues with male producers. This segment is the only redeeming portion of the show. Savor the mother-daughter bonding and camaraderie; no warm and fuzzy feelings lie ahead.

    I could give you a blow-by-blow of the other five episodes, but to be perfectly frank, it’s a waste of time. This docu-series is even more harmful than its predecessor, 2015 documentary film Hot Girls Wanted, which covered amateur porn. Creator Rashida Jones and the other people behind this film are not sex workers. In fact, Jones has a long Twitter history of belittling women and out-right slut shaming other celebrities.

     

    The show creators have no experience in sex work and aren’t even close to anyone who uses the sex industry as their main source of income. They use adult film star Lisa Ann as their poster girl, but she has never dealt with stigma the same way transgender performers or performers who are people of color do. In fact, she is apathetic about the plight of more marginalized sex workers.

    The series features screen caps of people surfing cam girl sites. Though these cam performers signed up to be on those platforms, they did not sign up to have their identities exposed on a Netflix documentary. When sex workers on Twitter saw this, they exploded in response, and soon tweets by other sex workers roped into the project revealed further outrages: Not only did HGW:TO reveal screen caps; they showed the legal names of other performers; interviewed workers and agents under false pretenses, insisting the material wasn’t for Hot Girls Wanted; and even used interview footage of someone who’d changed their mind about being involved. Lisa Ann has been less than sympathetic about this, stating on Twitter:

     

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    The Doctor Is In: Sex Work Goes Whovian

    By
    Josephine
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    (image via http://nerdquestionoftheday.com)
    (image via http://nerdquestionoftheday.com)

    by Josephine and Caty

    The year is 3056 and some things never change. You’re filing your nails in the dressing room. Just another dull night in the Martian strip club. Perhaps you’re idly thumbing through an old Cosmo as you wait patiently within the brothel at the end of the universe.

    It’s not always this slow, it’s just that time of the year…Right?

    You hear some odd whirring and clanking over the music. What the heck was that? That was nothing, you think. Probably someone trying to parallel park a junky lunar module outside. Whatever. Time to hit the floor.

    A man across the room looks weirdly familiar. You approach him and say hello.

    He responds in the most cliché way possible: “Do you want me to take you away from all this?”

    Why does this man look so familiar? Could it be? Is he…the Doctor?

    Hey, it could happen. Even Time Lords have needs.

    We wondered, what would our good Doctor be like as a client or a customer?

     

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    Support Hos: Game of Thrones

    By
    Maggie McMuffin
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    Well, >i>Game of Throne viewers aren't ever allowed to forget (gif created from screenshots of Game of Thrones)
    Well, Game of Thrones viewers aren’t ever allowed to forget (.gif created from screenshots of Game of Thrones)

    Warning: Major spoilers below.

    Game of Thrones, HBO’s biggest show, is bringing the fantasy genre to the masses in a major way. Featuring a sprawling cast and storyline that’s been pared down from George R.R. Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire, it’s full of fantastic performances, high production values, international sets and scenery, and some of the most exciting and tense moments on television.

    It is also filled with violence against women, particularly, the sex workers who inhabit the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros.

    Westeros combines traditional medieval fantasy lore (think knights and dragons) with the history of feudal Europe. Brothels are everywhere. There are half-naked women running about ready to please whichever male character needs pleasing. But, since it’s a vaguely historical setting, these women must be sad and put upon because as every fan of Moulin Rouge has told me, there were no happy sex workers in the past.

    Critics and fans agree that Game of Thrones subverts many classic fantasy tropes. Ned Stark, the noble hero, dies at the end of the first season instead of prevailing. His daughter Sansa Stark is set up to be a damsel in distress, but learns to manipulate her abusers to her advantage. Yet the show still falls prey to many predictable sexist tropes. And of course, many of those tropes extend to mistreating sex workers.

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    Men Love It When You Really Glob It On: Sex Work via Futurama

    By
    Johanna
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    55af2f5c2dc8597660f8fd02e7aad25c
    Futurama: definite contender for “greatest show of all time.” You already know it’s hilarious, but do you also know that it’s actually about sex work? Allow me to demonstrate with a series of GIFs, clips and humorous macros that I am convinced we can all relate to.
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     Few television characters embody the Douche Client more perfectly than Zapp Brannigan. You know the type: massive yet fragile ego that requires constant stroking, weird obsession with own perceived attractiveness, and a stable of skin-crawlingly irritating “seduction” techniques.

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    Support Hos: Archer’s Trinette Magoon

    By
    Maggie McMuffin
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    The author as Trinette in a burlesque tribute to Archer (Photo by Meneldor Photography of "Danger Zone," produced by Smooches and Science and Sailor St. Claire Presents.)
    The author as Trinette in a burlesque tribute to Archer. (Photo by Meneldor Photography of “Danger Zone,” produced by Smooches and Science and Sailor St. Claire Presents)

    In 2010, FX premiered Archer, an animated show that balances adventures in espionage with workplace comedy. The titular character is Sterling Archer, “world’s greatest secret agent” and colossal douchebag. While the rest of the cast eventually joins Archer in the land of functionally good but typically awful people, Sterling is usually the worst of the bunch. As the whole show plays with spy genre tropes, Archer is presented as being a more realistic version of characters like James Bond. He’s great at his job but he’s also self-centered, vain, reckless, and constantly trying to get drunk and/or laid. Getting laid is a challenge, though, because he’s a jerk. Enter sex workers.

    While Archer is shown to have sex with women who aren’t sex workers, he isn’t typically shown having sex with them more than once. He regularly calls an agency for last minute date needs and one of his continuing relationships is with one specific worker named Trinette Magoon.

    Trinette is, to put it plainly, fucking amazing. I recently portrayed her in a burlesque tribute to Archer and ended up rewatching every episode she appears in. Seeing all of Trinette’s supporting appearances at once rather than spread out over four seasons made it clear the creators really took care with her character.

    Trinette first appears in the second episode of the first season. Archer is training a new agent and hires her to help out while he orchestrates a party simulation. The new agent, Cyril, is nervous as he has “never been this close to a–.”  Cyril is unable to figure out how to refer to Trinette,  so Archer remarks that he can call her a call girl as “Trinette takes pride in her work” and Trinette agrees. It’s going well until Cyril uses her as a human shield during the exercise and she tries to leave, accidentally pricking herself on a poison-tipped pen Cyril was given earlier. She passes out, the men roll her up in a rug, and throw her in a trunk.

    If Trinette’s storyline had ended here I would not have been surprised. That is how our stories usually end on television. But there is a twist; Trinette bangs on the trunk and demands to be let out, and once she’s free she berates Archer for his treatment of her, demands his watch, threatens to have his kneecaps broken by her employer, and drives off with the car.

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