Not Your Pretty Dead Body: Sex Workers as Main Characters
Stop me if you heard this one already.
A beautiful dead girl turns up in a trash-strewn alley of any city. Usually white, preferably naked, violated and discarded. And, more often than not, a sex worker.
Before her fall from grace, we are told, the dead girl was somebody’s pure and precious daughter. A little lost lamb led tragically astray. Which makes our male protagonist feel horny and paternal and violent in equal measure.
This is the Sad Daddy trope. A woman is raped and/or murdered and that makes a man feel Big Manly Feelings. It’s my least favorite cliche in all of crime fiction.
You see, the dead girl is not a person in this kind of story, she’s a sexy catalyst. She has no interiority or agency, she is simply a narrative key that turns inside a man’s locked up heart and motivates him to kick ass, clean up the streets, and/or engage in emotionally satisfying vengeance.
Not all dead girls in the Sad Daddy fictional universe are sex workers but enough of them are to make me want to include it here.
Even when sex workers are allowed to remain alive in these stories, they are often used as gritty/titillating set dressing. Nameless bodies writhing in the background while the important male characters talk about important man stuff. Scantily-clad and potentially dangerous cell mates for wrongly accused “normal” women. Sassy detainees being dragged through the scene for comic relief while the real characters do serious police work. If sex workers are given speaking roles, they often have the standard issue Hearts of Gold (tm) and exist primarily to help the (usually male) protagonist.
It does feel like things are shifting and changing. We’re starting to see these kinds of characters being centered and given agency. Books like THESE WOMEN by Ivy Pochoda, UNTOUCHABLE by Ava Marsh and HURT FOR ME by Heather Levy.
And, you know, my shit.
Movies and TV are also getting into the game. Shows like P-VALLEY. Flicks like FEMME or TANGERINE.
But here’s the thing about TANGERINE.
The guy who made that flick, which I really loved back when I first saw it, has a new movie out. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s called ANORA.
I had read my friend Jen Johan’s brilliant, thoughtful and deeply personal essay about it and was primed to love it. I really wanted to, only I somehow didn’t and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why not.
Then I saw this thread on Bluesky
Okay. I was already having a fucking week, but I finally made myself watch Anora, and I can’t sit on this anymore: Baker stole the characters, setting, themes, and tone from a tiny sex worker-made production I was in in 2015, and which was shared with him in 2016 to solicit his advice.
— EDW, Defiant Jazz Era (@emilydwarfield.bsky.social) 2025-03-05T06:11:17.856Z
This feels like yet another Tarantino situation. One in which a straight white man takes stories from other groups and garners critical acclaim for remaking them in a way that is more palatable to the American mainstream.
To be fair, there are some aspects of ANORA that I did enjoy. I’m a huge fan of what I like to call Chaos Noir, crime fiction in which nothing goes according to plan in the most over-the-top way possible. Also, the visuals are gorgeous and I would never claim that Sean Baker isn’t a talented filmmaker.
But I was still struggling to articulate the pervasive discomfort I was feeling as I watched ANORA. Why it felt so wrong to me despite the apparent involvement of actual sex workers in a consulting capacity.
Lucky for me, I found somebody whose post said it better than I ever could. Unlike Baker, I’m not going steal her ideas and present them as my own, so you should go read her post now and then come back. I’ll wait.
Still with me? Good, because this brings me back to the reason I wanted to write this post in the first place. Straight white men have been benefiting from our labor for centuries, but it’s beyond time for sex workers like us to seize the means of fucking production and tell our own damn stories.
So if you’re a sex worker, don’t let anyone make you feel like you aren’t good enough to tell your own story. Don’t buy into the Cinderella narrative! You don’t need a rich/famous/powerful man to rescue you, marry you and give you legitimacy and neither does your book or movie.
And if you’re not a sex worker, but you want to write about us, talk to and (more importantly) really listen to us! Share the spotlight with us and give us credit, not just in a general way but specifically and by name. And most importantly, support our basic human rights in every way possible. Defend us when your friends use us as punchlines or insults. Speak out against legislation that harms and dehumanizes our trans siblings. Educate yourself about FOSTA/SESTA, bills that were sold as a way to protect women from trafficking but in practice actually hurt sex workers more than they helped us.
Most of all, pass the fucking mic. Use your platform to share and promote us and our own work.
Which reminds me to remind you that I have a book coming out this month. It’s got a sex worker main character and you should preorder the shit out of it.
