'The Girlfriend Experience:' Is it Possible There's a Decent Movie About Sex Workers?

By Greta Christina, The Blowfish Blog. Posted May 23, 2009.

And in one of the most upsetting scenes of the movie, Chelsea visits the proprietor of an "erotic connoisseur" escort-review website (Glenn Kenny), a grossly unpleasant man who blows right past the pleasantries of the screening process and bluntly demands free sex in exchange for a review on his site. The scene highlights the crass, tacky, ugly aspects of a business that prides itself on class and sophistication -- a theme that's repeatedly echoed when the movie takes a hard look at the Wall Street financiers, and the ugly, self-involved bigotry that underlies the slickness and class of that scene. And while the movie depicts the social niceties of personal/ financial relationships as complicated at best and hypocritical at worst, this scene also makes it clear just how important they are ... in sex work, but also just in life in general.

So while the movie doesn't shy away from the idea that sex work has emotional consequences (an idea I think few sex workers would dispute), it's surprisingly non-judgmental about it. It presents sex work as just one of many types of human relationship -- both business and personal -- that have complicated, sometimes problematic dynamics when money and emotions mix. (To emphasize this, the movie is set in October 2008, right before the Presidential election and at the height of the economic panic and freefall ... a time when emotions and insecurities about money are running unusually high.)

And now we come to the flaws.

The Number One flaw, alas, is actress Sasha Grey in the starring role. Her character seems lifeless, with a flat affect that's somehow both disturbing and dull. You almost never get a sense of how she feels or what she wants: her entire character is a blank canvas, pleasant and easy-going, but unfathomable and largely passive, giving virtually no clue as to what, if anything, is below the surface. (A little like the actives in "Dollhouse," if you ever watch that show.)

Now, to be fair, this may be part of the point. One of the main concepts of the movie is that, when you sell emotion as well as goods and services -- or, more accurately, when emotion is one of the services you sell -- you can lose touch with your own feelings and desires. (And speaking from personal experience -- not only with sex work but in other jobs as well -- I know that this can be true. There's an entire book about it, in fact: The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, focusing not on sex workers but on flight attendants and collection agents.)

But there are two big problems with this approach. One is that the movie overdoes it by about twenty zillion degrees. Yes, doing sex work can make your relationship with your own emotions and desires complicated and sticky. But it doesn't turn you into a passive automaton. The sex workers I know have very strong personalities indeed, with passionate feelings and vivid hopes and dreams. The pleasant but impenetrable blankness of Chelsea in "The Girlfriend Experience" is a misrepresentation of sex work -- and a serious one at that.

The other problem is purely one of entertainment. It's kind of hard to sit through a movie where the main character essentially sleepwalks through her life; where pretty much all you see of her is the pleasant professional face she goes to great lengths to compose; and where you almost never get a sense of how she feels or what she wants. It's just not very engaging. It's a fascinating intellectual exercise -- the movie had me thinking practically nonstop, and I was very rarely bored -- but it left me a little cold.

That being said, I can still recommend "The Girlfriend Experience" pretty strongly. It's not as emotionally engaging as I would have liked ... but it's smart, complex, and nuanced, with plenty of food for thought. And it has a unique take on prostitution: not condemning it for connecting emotion and money, but using it as a lens to look at the connection between emotion and money in the world at large.

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Read more of Greta Christina at her blog.

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