Sex Work Goes Mainstream on Reality TV

By Marcy Marzuki, Spread Magazine. Posted December 30, 2008.

"It made me want to sit down and be friends with some of these women," says Leigh, who appeared on an episode of HBO's "Real Sex" a few years ago. "I like the way it shows the communal situations that you rarely see portrayed; the fun that you sometimes have; the sisterhood; the interesting bonding that takes place." She also found footage of how "the clients just lie there passively and the women do all the work" to be a truth rarely told elsewhere.

But Leigh, like Shakti Ziller, of Sex Workers Action New York, is only too aware that the show is, in Ziller's words, "a promotional advertising" piece. "There is no way to escape the fact that every girl who is on the show knows that every time she appears she is promoting the ranch and herself to potential customers, as well as reinforcing with her boss that she is a true Bunny Ranch girl," Ziller says.

Does that fact destroy its credibility? To Leigh, the show is no more real than if you took cameras into the offices of Exxon or Hewlett Packard. "The people who are on-camera are employed there," she notes. "The owner of the business is privy to the comments they make. So how free are they to express anything?"

Leigh, perhaps not the series' typical target viewer, has other criticisms as well. Condom use, especially for oral, is not emphasized enough. ("Can't they get some product placement?" she wonders, not unreasonably.) "But what's really missing," she says, "is how they talk about the money; what they do with the money; what they need to do with their money. And stories of children taken away, discriminations and the families that treat you shitty because of what you do."

But Ziller counters, "Just because the negatives are basically left to the wayside, doesn't mean these kind of observations that emphasize the positive aren't true."

Emphasizing the positive can spark a backlash. "Family Business" was criticized for skirting the drug use that is so much a part of the videos its protagonist, Seymore Butts, produces. When ratings declined, the series was not renewed. The Bunnies, meanwhile, were recently featured in the National Enquirer for Vegas peccadilloes that won't be seen on "The Girls Next Door." HBO was picketed earlier this year by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, who showed up outside the corporate headquarters with signs reading "HBO = Pimp." The series, they charge, "glamorizes" prostitution, and by extension, human trafficking, a charge that industry insiders like Leigh, Ziller and Chicago SWOP member Serpent Libertine dismiss.

"Why don't they protest 'The Sopranos'?" Libertine complains. "That's about illegal activity; that's about violence. They are so focused on this trafficking issue, and it's such a small part of the industry. We're not saying it's not a problem [or] it's not terrible, but it has nothing to do with the majority of sex workers."

"Those who are anti-prostitution try to define [prostitution] in a very narrow way," Leigh agrees. "It's hard for society to embrace the diverse truth of the sex industry."

We're just so tired of it," says Libertine. "As a result, not a lot of us trust the mainstream media. We get media requests every day, but nobody wants to talk to them."

This kind of backlash is what worries many in the industry, even though, in general, advocates favor a higher profile for adult-industry workers, even if it's only on reality TV.

"Decreasing the invisibility and silence of sex workers is a good thing," says Ziller.

"We need a more healthy public discussion of sex," Leigh agrees. But at the same time, she adds, "Things become cheaper if they become seen as commonplace."

Liv Osthus, the stripper known as Viva Las Vegas, sums up the conundrum: Reality shows, she says, make sex workers more mainstream, more acceptable. For the first time, she notes, she was interviewed "by my fancy college newspaper."

On the other hand, "Overexposure is bad for the sex business. I've always admired the mystery of sex work; and it's the mystery that's sexy. A lot of these shows, they don't want mystery. They want train wrecks."

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