Hollywood’s New Sex Worker Roles Are Girlboss Heroines
In Hollywood, sex workers have become the ultimate girlbosses. The message is clear: there’s no need for collective empowerment when one can escape the low-wage economy by cashing in on the power of bootstrapping entrepreneurism.
Mia Goth stars as Maxine Minx in the new film MaXXXine. (A24)
There is a memorable scene in this year’s film MaXXXine in which a stranger stalks the main character through an alleyway. The alley predictably leads to a dead end. But the scene leads somewhere less expected: he never gets his hands on her.
Maxine, an adult film actor played by Mia Goth, defends herself with the handgun she has stashed in her purse. She forces her attacker to strip naked and, in an obvious reversal of her role as a porn star, tells him to lie down on the pavement “face down, ass up.”
The scene ends on an extended shot seemingly intended to make male viewers squirm — and to subvert the typical imagery used to depict sex workers like Maxine on screen. She crushes one of his testicles with her stiletto heel.
On its surface, the film could pass as a feminist work. And from a neoliberal feminist perspective, it probably is; Maxine is self-sufficient, sexually empowered, and pursues her goals without the help of a male partner (who was killed in an earlier film).
A new book, however, argues that portrayals of sex workers like the one in MaXXXine are more complicated than “good” or “bad,” “feminist” or “regressive.”
Sex Work in Popular Culture, by Toronto writer and professor Lauren Kirshner, tracks the portrayal of sex workers on screen from Hollywood’s early days until now. Drawing on interviews with sex workers and a decade of research, the book demonstrates how much progress has been made since the twentieth century — and even since 1990s films like Pretty Woman. But it also exposes how contemporary film and TV often turn sex workers into “neoliberalism’s ideal subjects: ‘entrepreneurs’ and flexible precarious service workers who are young, conventionally attractive, individualistic and apolitical.”
Kirshner’s book critiques not only what’s lacking in Hollywood films but also what’s lacking in neoliberal feminism itself. Neoliberal feminism, the version of feminism that has gone mainstream, ultimately reinforces capitalist ideals and reproduces its injustices. Women are shown as empowered when they adhere to beauty standards, make loads of money, and act ruthlessly in their own interests — even at the expense of other women.
Lean-In Sex Work
The portrayal of sex workers has come a long way from the early films Kirshner cites. Public advocacy by sex workers has contributed to more realistic and complex characters on screen.
“Once upon a time, popular culture’s sex workers were cautionary tales about the fate of a woman who ‘goes wrong,’” Kirshner notes in the book’s conclusion.
Sex workers threatened patriarchy with their sexual independence, financial autonomy and disinterest in serving one man through marriage, so the screen restricted them to predictable typologies and storylines leading to death or marriage, these endings reinforcing restrictions around women’s sexual expression and bodily autonomy, access to power and money, and independence.
In such films, unrepentant sex workers often die young, while those who repent are “saved” by their husbands or fathers, returning to bourgeois comfort after their brief taste of rebellion. Unsurprisingly, these films were almost always made by men. Kirshner reports that in the twentieth century, 95 percent of Hollywood movies with sex worker leads were made by male directors.
Considering this history, Mia Goth’s portrayal of Maxine, as well as the existence of films written or acted by former sex workers like Cam and Tangerine, represent progress. MaXXXine presents an adult film actress as a complicated person with agency. The rest of the story, though, takes the neoliberal feminist bait.
Catherine Rottenberg, the author of The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism, has written that this brand of feminism urges women to constantly focus on increasing their own socioeconomic value, and even to view their children as capital investments. This “dominant strand of feminism . . . has been disturbingly unmoored from such key concepts as equality, justice, and emancipation.”
The final goal is not women’s collective liberation but professional success, wealth, and work-life balance for a select few.
Neoliberal feminism’s proponents, including Ivanka Trump and Sheryl Sandberg, have been criticized from the outset. Socialists and other feminists on the Left understand that such politics depends on mostly white upper- and middle-class women outsourcing their housework and childcare to poorer, often racialized, female workers. Neoliberal feminism, then, fits neatly into capitalist structures, reinforcing and rationalizing its inequalities as it does so.
Bootstrapping as Self-Actualization
While this brand of bourgeois feminism may be in decline, its influence in Hollywood depictions of sex workers remains subtle and insidious. The economic hardships sex workers face before they enter sex work are likely to be portrayed, but sex work itself is often shown as an empowering individual choice. The hard parts of the job and the need for legal rights are often written out of the script.
In MaXXXine, the lead character’s economic situation is never discussed. For her, porn is more a vehicle for personal ambition than a job that pays the rent. Her goal is to become famous. And she makes it clear, when police try to get her help in solving the murders of other women around her, that the only woman she’s interested in helping is herself.
Her boss, a demanding movie director played by Elizabeth Debicki, tells Maxine that her work must become her entire life. “To stay here, you must make it your obsession, eliminate all other distractions,” she says. Later, she reprimands Maxine for being a few minutes late for work after her best friend is murdered.
The conditions Maxine faces at work reflect a broader truth about society. Though set in the 1980s, Maxine’s workplace feels very 2024, where bosses expect total availability, even at the expense of workers’ safety and well-being.
Rather than offering a critique of these unfair conditions, the movie shows Maxine persevering and being rewarded for it. The reward, of course, is more work. In the final scenes, Maxine is on another set, walking a red carpet, and gushing about how happy she is now that she’s famous. “I just never want it to end,” she says.
This contradiction — depicting an unjust economic reality while indulging a capitalist fantasy of self-actualization through professional achievement — is not an exception in Hollywood’s contemporary portrayals of sex work but part of a broader trend.
Many of the newer films and TV shows about sex workers do get it right in some ways, according to Kirshner’s study, which included one hundred movies and additional TV shows. She notes that “much of the popular culture . . . portrays women turning to sex work to escape stressful and precarious low-paid gig work and, in its non-judgmental tone, suggests a new understanding that everyone in neoliberal capitalism, in one way or another, has to be a hustler.”
What these characters are escaping is very real. In recent decades, wages have stagnated while housing and food prices have soared. The proportion of unionized workers has sunk while precarious gig jobs have become more common. And many bosses now expect their employees to be available 24-7.
Sex Work as an Escape from the Gig Economy
One fascinating part of Kirshner’s book explores how sex work has been made precarious in the same ways that other jobs have. Erotic dancers, for example, largely had full-time, sometimes even unionized, jobs in the 1980s, she writes, citing an article by Chris Bruckert. By the 2000s, many of these jobs became precarious, with workers forced to work erratic schedules without benefits, sick leave, or vacation time and lacking official recourse for misconduct from customers and bosses.
What Hollywood gets wrong is its portrayal of individualist bootstrapping as a means for women to escape danger and precarity. Rather than engaging with politics and collective action, many of pop culture’s new sex workers transform their lives by looking good, stacking their money, and not worrying about anybody else.
Hustlers, the 2019 movie starring Jennifer Lopez, portrays erotic dancers getting wise to capitalism’s workplace injustices. The women rank the “three tiers of Wall Street guys” by how corrupt and dangerous — and therefore how rich — they are. After the financial crisis of 2008, the New York City dancers turn the tables on their clients by drugging them and racking up credit card bills at the strip club, pocketing a portion of the profits.
Kirshner writes that
what is vexing about Hustlers, ultimately, is how its dancers attain empowerment by aping the crony capitalist practices of the men they stiff. . . . In this regard, Hustlers embodies “post-feminism,” or feminism’s collusion with neoliberalism, in its emphasis on rugged individualism in the marketplace as opposed to coordinated collective political action by and for the majority of women.
At the height of the dancers’ success, their scheme allows them to celebrate Christmas in a Manhattan penthouse, gifting each other iPhones and Louboutins. While no men are present, the scene portrays less a feminist empowerment narrative than a vision of liberation that is intricately tied to the very system the characters are forced to navigate. It reinforces the idea that personal achievement comes from embracing, rather than challenging, capitalist norms.
In contrast, some portrayals are more complex and truthful. Kirshner’s personal favorite is The Deuce, an HBO show that ran for three seasons, from 2017 to 2019.
The Deuce portrays a diverse array of sex workers, young and middle-aged, working on the street, at peep shows, and in porn. It also portrays a range of experiences, with some women facing violence and even murder, while others feel comfortable and excited by their work. What makes The Deuce even more compelling is its political message, which addresses not only sex work but also gentrification in New York and the broader economic landscape in the United States. “More than simply portray sex work as uniquely exploitative … The Deuce shows how the commodification of women’s sexuality runs insidiously through capitalist society,” Kirshner notes.
Early on in MaXXXine, one scene effectively illustrates this same point.
Maxine auditions for a horror film, a “real picture,” marking her breakout of adult entertainment and into mainstream cinema. She delivers a stunning performance.
Before she can leave, a female producer asks one last question. “Do you mind taking your top off so we can see your breasts?”
Maxine hesitates for just a second. “Yeah, sure.”