Two sex workers weigh in on No Hard Feelings

13:43How some sex workers feel about No Hard Feelings

Oscar-winning actor Jennifer Lawrence is back on the big screen this summer with a new so-called "raunchy" comedy called No Hard Feelings.

In the movie, parents hire her character to sleep with their timid 19-year-old son. But what do real-life sex workers think of this fictionalized comedic interpretation of their industry?

Escort-turned-author Andrea Werhun and stripper/sex-advice columnist/academic Alex Tigchelaar provide a sex worker's perspective on the film, and what it says about where we are with sex comedies.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Andrea, I'm going to start with you on this. You've seen No Hard Feelings. What were your impressions of the movie as a piece of entertainment about sex work?

Andrea: Pfft, um … mediocre, at best?

Elamin: Your face is not telling me that you like this movie. Continue. Sorry.

Andrea: It's really hard to say whether this is a film about sex work, or if it's just a film about work in general and the lengths that people will go to survive a capitalist hellscape. Because at the end of the day, she's trying to get a car so she can go back to being an Uber driver, so that she can save her house. This is the meandering plot. If it was a real sex worker film, it would probably involve her realizing she could get to her financial goals a lot faster if she wasn't just trying to have sex with a 19-year-old for a Buick. There's an easier way to do that.

WATCH | Official trailer for No Hard Feelings:

Elamin: The disdain dripping from your voice from this movie is evident. I think it's true that this is a movie about work. The premise of No Hard Feelings reads like a sex comedy from the '80s or '90s — sort of like Risky Business or American Pie. But honestly, the movie feels like it's an attempt to situate a story about sex work in our current social and economic climate. It's set in Montauk, a sort of vacation town that is rapidly gentrifying, and there's a lot of class tensions within that town. The main character is this Uber driver working in this precarious gig economy. Did all that contextualizing work for you as a premise for the movie, Alex?

Alex: No, because there was actually no context. What I felt after a while [was] like, "What's wrong with this one?" There's always something wrong with sex work films, unless they're actually made by sex workers. But what is the problem with this script? And I finally realized, I felt like the characters were being tweeted and not written. So if you would describe "tweeting" as a writing style, like prose or poetry or screenwriting, they were not screenwritten; they were tweeted. So I just felt like I was following some liberal college student's social media feed.

Elamin: You mean to say that it's a bit superficial in the way that these ideas are treated?

Alex: A bit? More like massively, yeah. It was quite superficial, for sure.

Elamin: Andrea, is that your read of these characters also?

Andrea: Yeah. I mean, there's only one sex worker in the film and she shows up like a little plot device right in the middle. She doesn't appear before this point, and she does not appear after this point. She's a talking point.

Elamin: You're talking about the sugar baby.

Andrea: I'm talking about the sugar baby. And Jennifer Lawrence's friends in the film are telling her, "Well, you know, you could probably get closer to where you need to be if you became a sugar baby." And what Jennifer Lawrence says is, "If I ever get to that point, I have completely lost myself and you should just kill me because I shouldn't be alive if I do that." Meanwhile, she's trying to have sex with a 19-year-old for a Buick. So, yeah, I would say the characters are these superficial, sort of flat, empty vessels of meaning that are used strictly as plot devices. Terrible.

WATCH | Official trailer #2 for No Hard Feelings:

Alex: Well, and as Andrea points out, it checks one of the boxes in the hooker film genre which is the dead hooker, right? Like, "Kill me if that's where I go."

Elamin: Let's go further down the rabbit hole, because it feels like it's a movie that is nominally aware of the changing politics about sex work, but also not particularly buying into that idea. Even in that moment, she's still dismissive of the idea of doing sex work for a living as she's trying to actually engage it. Is that what I'm reading there, Alex?

Alex: Yes, and that's actually not complicated. This is a very common theme in the universe, too — they want to be able to use a sex worker, and use the idea of a sex worker, but also kind of have plausible deniability that they're doing it. I noticed that the filmmakers did that; they were like, "This is not a film about sex work." And I don't think they're saying that because it's not a film about sex work in their minds, because it seems like that's what they think sex work is. They just want to be able to deny it in case they're accused of taking a liberal stance around sex work.

Elamin: Andrea, we should say early in the movie, Jennifer Lawrence's character makes a decision to answer the Craigslist ad. The way that she rationalizes that is that she says she's engaged in plenty of unfulfilling sex for strategic purposes before, so what's the big deal? Did that rationale feel particularly authentic to you?

Andrea: It's sort of like civilian-hooker dress up, like, "Oh, I've had lots of meaningless sex. I could be a sex worker." No sex worker in their right mind would not collect money for this job. Rule number one is collect the money upfront. All the emotional labour that she puts into seducing a teenager, and she's not paid a single cent for that? I'm sorry, she's a civilian trying to dip her toes in, and it's sort of a common thing. You have to respect it as a form of labour, and if you don't, you're going to get hurt — and you're going to hurt other people. And that's what happens in this film.

Elamin: That is exactly what happens in this movie. We should say, Alex, this story does reinforce this old idea that sex work is purely economically motivated — a decision made out of desperation. What do you make of that trope?

Alex: All work is made out of desperation in capitalism. I don't think any of us would be sitting here if we didn't have to pay our way through life. In capitalism, that's who we are. We are homo economicus, right? And so sex work to me really qualifies as labour, because you're doing it to make money, to participate and to be able to be here in in in this particular way of life that we live now, which is very economic-based.

Elamin: From the thing that you both are saying, it sounds like saying this movie is a movie about sex work is actually giving it too much credit, because it's not actually even doing the nominal work to enter the arena of actually engaging with the arena of sex work in movies.

Andrea: I would agree with that … and if anything, its depiction of sex work actually takes us back a couple notches, because it still insists on perpetuating stereotypes that sex workers aren't worthy of being alive, that it is still something that she is going to look down upon — even though, again, she is trying to have sex with a teenager for a Buick. That is not a moral high ground.

Elamin: You can actually keep saying that sentence and it will continue to get funnier every time you say it. That is a universal truth about this particular segment. Andrea, last thoughts on this. What do you make of the way that sex work has been used to show how people think about sex work in real life?

Andrea: I think sex work is used in film not to just depict sex work, but it's used as a metaphor for explaining other issues that civilians grapple with. It is a symbolic site; it's sort of like an empty vessel that civilians put their own feelings and confusions and shame into. And I just think that if we supported more sex worker storytelling, if we created the cultural conditions that allowed sex workers to tell their own stories, we would see a totally new landscape of what the sex worker experience truly is. And we can't rely on people who have no experience, or refuse to ask sex workers for their opinion on these crappy stories. We need more sex workers telling stories.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Stuart Berman.