Sex workers as you've never seen them before: why The Girlfriend Experience gets prostitution right
“We’re the sort of people who are usually just plot devices,” British sex worker and campaigner Cat Stephens told The Independent earlier this year. “The people who are murdered in the first scene.” Looking at the landscape of television over the past few decades, you'd have to agree with her.
On crime dramas, like Law & Order, CSI, Criminal Minds – even high-budget critical darlings such as True Detective – sex workers are almost always depicted as victims of extreme violence. In these shows, they’re often dead on arrival, significant in death but not a moment before.
Other genres fail them, too. Even in comedies, they’re the butt of lazily written jokes. There’s a plotline in the usually warm-hearted sitcom Friends where the guys hire a stripper who turns out to be a sex worker. “OK, rock, paper, scissors for who tells the whore to leave,” says Chandler, to howls of laughter from the studio audience.
Things are changing, of course. On BBC drama Happy Valley, the sex workers are fleshed out and humanised, and the lead character Catherine Cawood chastises her fellow police officers for not treating them with respect – but they’re still largely murder and assault victims. On HBO's prestige drama Westworld, the prohibition-era brothel houses some of the show’s strongest and most interesting characters – but they’re still non-consenting and non-human.
Which is why The Girlfriend Experience, the Starz and Amazon Prime drama about sex workers who offer their clients intimacy as well as sex, is such a fascinating and welcome break from tradition.
Since it began life in 2009 as a Steven Soderbergh-directed feature film, The Girlfriend Experience has placed sex workers in their own light, rather than the shadow of a client, pimp or male saviour. The TV version, now in its second season, is hardly naturalistic – in fact it’s arch and hyper-stylised – but it avoids the broad strokes with which women in the profession are so often painted, and subverts the usual narrative that either victimises or demonises them.
The debate around sex work has shifted into mainstream consciousness in the past couple of years, but the show isn’t interested in taking a moral stand. Its characters don’t explain themselves or their profession, and nor are they defined by them. In fact, despite what the show's name suggests, it's often treated more as a subplot.
Season one followed trainee lawyer Christine Reade (Riley Keough) in her first steps into high-end sex work. At first, the escorting was a way to make ends meet, but as the world of law became increasingly ugly and hostile, the balance shifted. She seemed more fulfilled earning a living through sex than she did through being a lawyer – though neither option was exactly straightforward. The new season, currently airing weekly on Amazon Prime, is as compelling as ever.
Amy Seimetz (who recently starred as Eleven’s aunt Becky in Stranger Things) and Lodge Kerrigan, the series’ writer and director duo, have taken two bold decisions this time around. The first is to move away from Christine Reade entirely, leaving the ambiguity of the season’s final episode to hang unresolved. The second is to split apart and write two separate storylines, to be shown back to back on a weekly basis.
One strand, written and directed by Kerrigan, moves into the murky world of politics. Kerrigan tweaked the plot after Trump was elected, to make it even more corrupt and misanthropic. Part political thriller, part psycho-sexual drama, it focuses on Anna (Louisa Krause), an escort enlisted by GOP fundraiser Erica (Anna Friel) to help blackmail a Republican politician. He’s a client of Anna’s, and she’s willing to help bring him down because he’s “a misogynist and a f---ing pig.”
As Erica takes increasingly dangerous decisions to further her career, she begins an intense relationship with Anna – though it’s not so much a relationship as a power struggle, fuelled by lust, obsession and self-loathing. Kerrigan’s world is somewhat cold and detached – his characters sit bolt upright, their delivery is often dispassionate, their houses eerily uncluttered. “It’s a fake world,” he says, “and part of that fake world is by design.”
The mid-Western setting and rich colour palette of Seimetz’s storyline offers some relief from Kerrigan’s, but sex, power and identity still loom large. It follows Bria Jones, a former high-end escort, played by Carmen Ejogo, forced to start a new, significantly less glamorous life in New Mexico after testifying against her criminal ex-husband. She’s in witness protection, though the police marshal assigned to look after her insists she’s “not innocent, not by a long shot.”
She learns a series of lies to tell her neighbours and colleagues to avoid suspicion, which she learns by rote while hooked up to a strange, flashing machine that’s supposed to help psychologically entrench her cover story. “We’ve moved here from Toronto to start a new life,” she repeats, over and over.
Both Seimetz and Kerrigan’s storylines explore issues of power and identity through their exploration of sex work. In Anna and Erica’s world, sex and politics are two sides of the same coin, each used as a way of asserting or relinquishing power. “It’s not unnecessary,” Anna Friel says of the show’s graphic sex scenes. “If you’re dealing with something where you know that sex is going to be involved, it’s something that we really shouldn’t shy away from.” And shy away it does not, but the sex scenes – explicit though they may be – are as much displays of control, dominance and submission as the fast-paced political negotiations are.
Power is explored in Bria’s world too, through the complicated dynamics between her and the men she encounters. The marshal assigned to protect her, played pitch-perfectly by TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe, can’t seem to decide if he wants to help her, sleep with her or hurt her. Her client, Paul, is played with a compelling balance of innocence and threat by Harmony Korine.
Though the question of whether the profession is empowering or degrading often dominates the public conversation around sex work, the most pressing issue being debated at the moment is how best to ensure the safety of those who do it. It is a complex and nuanced debate, pivoting around the various complications that come with criminalisation, decriminalisation and legalisation. The nuance is necessary, given that no two sex workers are in the same situation – they might be doing it through necessity or desire, in Washington DC or the plains of New Mexico, and their clients may be motivational speakers, Republican politicians or anything in-between.
In telling multiple stories, The Girlfriend Experience reminds the viewer that there is no one archetypal sex worker. In asserting its characters’ agency, and the fulfilment they get from their job, without ignoring the threat the men around them can pose, it adds to the debate while refusing to participate in it.
Seimetz and Kerrigan don’t want us to understand their characters’ every decision. They’d rather make us question why we felt entitled to an explanation in the first place. “How could you possibly understand?” Bria tells a client at one point, but she might as well be talking to us. It’s this defiant inscrutability that makes The Girlfriend Experience one of the most potent viewing experiences of the year.