Bangladesh is one of the planet’s poorest nations, with nearly half of its population living under the poverty line. According to the UN, 18 percent of the country’s women are “acutely malnourished” and more than two in three girls are married before they turn eighteen. There is no law against marital rape. Divorce often results in homelessness for the former wife. Child labor is common and found in unregulated, toxic industries. The country has been on the UN’s Least Developed Countries List for over thirty years and recently has appeared in the American media because of deadly garment-factory fires. The executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a US-based NGO, described Bangladesh as having “the worst labor rights record, lowest wages, and most dangerous factories.”

The documentary Whores’ Glory is not about garment factories, but it is about labor in Bangladesh, as well as in Thailand and Mexico. But because the labor covered in the film is sex work, American reviewers have uniformly lamented its grotesquery and ignored any deeper insights. A film about women using their bodies for physical labor — at least this type of physical labor — was, as Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir put it, almost “too difficult to sit through.”

Though the film was consistently praised as “nonjudgmental,” it yielded nothing but judgment from these audience members. “The fly-on-the-wall technique makes clear that what attracts flies usually stinks,” wrote Michael O’Sullivan for the Washington Post, while Stephen Holden of the New York Times declared that it “begins in an outer circle of hell ” — presumably Thailand, where the film opens — “and works its way to the depths” — presumably Mexico, where it ends. After acknowledging that “most of the women interviewed . . . are relatively cheerful about their occupation,” Mark Feeney of the Boston Globe concluded that “views of prostitutes differ, but all prove depressing.” The San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle declared it “as sad a film as you can possibly see,” depicting “a human tragedy of enormous scale,” and added that “to experience it is to be haunted by the bleakness and ugliness of prostitution, the hopeless trap of it.” In case the message hadn’t come across, LaSalle further clarified that prostitution is “a life-destroying catastrophe.”