Mad Men to Magic Mike: Sex Work in Popular Culture from Tits and Sass
Hello, readers! If you’re the sort of person who’s interested in these things, Tits and Sass has a panel proposal up at the South by Southwest PanelPicker. We’d greatly appreciate your support. If you enjoy reading us chat about Mad Men and Magic Mike, along with our discussions of why it’s not cool for pop culture figures to joke about how sex workers were abused as children, you’ll want to see this panel happen. Please go vote for us and help spread the word.
Mad Men to Magic Mike: Sex Work in Pop Culture
From the indecent proposal fielded by Joan Holloway on Mad Men to Channing Tatum’s semi-biographical role in Magic Mike, commercialized sex has been especially prominent in America’s cultural products over the last year. These portrayals filter into public consciousness and drive conversation, either giving people tools to talk about a sensational issue intelligently or teaching them that no intelligent discussion is needed. More than most populations, sex workers are subject to language and imagery that reduces them to punchlines and stereotypes. There aren’t jokes about dead waitresses in car trunks and no one suggested that Craig James killed five maids while at SMU, but the murder of prostitutes and strippers makes for frequest punchlines in Family Guy and 30 Rock. Lazy writing like this sustains the harmful, stigmatized environment sex workers navigate every day of their real lives. Let’s reject the standard tropes and establish better ways to talk about and depict sex work.
Kitty Stryker’s roundup of proposals at the Good Vibrations blog is a good guide to sex and sex work-oriented panels. And there are a couple of other proposals that, while not related to sex work, involve friends of Tits and Sass. Melissa Gira Grant and Sarah Jaffe’s panel is titled What’s Wrong On the Internet: Of Bubbles & Bros:
Once upon a time, the dudes we now call bros would never set foot near the internet – let alone try to make a living off of it. What happened? As we grapple with an impending (maybe? sure!) internet bubble and seemingly endless struggles (yeah) over the “bro” culture in our midst, we propose that these problems are one and the same. Join us for a strong mix of ’90’s nostalgia and ’10’s optimism, radical talk about money, and even some practical stuff you can do yourself to make the web just a little more strange and human again.
Molly Crabapple – visual artist, and Kim Boekbinder – musician, are both champions of the crowd funding age. Both have received international praise and recognition for their groundbreaking work in their respective mediums, as well as the way they run their careers. Though they work in different fields what the two have in common is that they have both built their careers on their own: no management, booking, labels, or galleries of any kind have made possible what they do. Yet they both make a living as full time artists in a world where we are told that fewer and fewer people are paying for music and art.
So if you are this kind of nerd, and we know some of you are, support us and our friends with your clicks. See you in March.
Almost every tv show has a reference to sex workers, animal practice, suits, covert affairs, new adventures of old christine, 90210, melrose place, degrassi, weeds, the list goes on and on even big bang theory.
How do I insist that Sex Work in pop culture gets chosen? I HAVE to see it.