Price of a good Hooker Doc

The Price of Sex promises to be yet another career-making documentary about enslaved women. This time we’re in Eastern Europe, but it’s like every MSNBC, CNN, etc expose about “trafficking”. Statistics for all types of trafficking, including labor, which accounts for the overwhelming majority of trafficked persons, are bandied about in such a way as to be conflated with the number of 12 year-old Bulgarian orphans kidnapped into sexually slavery. 

Mimi Chakarova, the filmmaker, refers to the women as “broken” and explains, “My objective was to reveal their faces and to strip away the shame and stigma that trafficked victims have carried for decades.” Right, because exploiting them some more in the name of journalism, distribution deals and money is the antidote for exploitation in the name of money and sex. In the trailer we see a pretty blonde woman talk crying, “I wish I’d never been born. It would be better to be dead than to live like this.” 

I’m not a fan of films made about people in rough spots by people not in the same rough spot. The filmmaker is not a former sex worker, though she poses as one in the film. She also has a distribution deal with Women Make Movies, a supposedly feminist film company that has consistently denied support to out sex worker filmmakers – they like films about sex workers apparently – just not told by sex workers.

This film purports to give the sex workers a voice but they are the subjects, not the writers, directors or editors – they have no authorship. The appeal here isn’t to our humanity, it’s to our prurient desire to press our noses to the glass of a pretty girl’s defilement. The film puts us in the room where the girl’s raped, but offers no way for us to help albeit insisting, as these pieces always do, that witnessing the crime and shaking our heads in disgust is doing something. 

The argument isn’t even correct – it’s not the Price of Sex – it’s the Price of POVERTY. Poor people, especially women and children have limited choices and very little power. Being forced or not forced into prostitution as the case may be isn’t even the worst possible fate – there’s going hungry, there’s watching your children go hungry, or being abused. 

On the first page of her website Chakarova has a flash animation next to a picture of an old man. The camera looks down on him as he squats and stares up with watery eyes. It reads:

“Can I take your picture. 

For what?

To show others how you live.

Will they come here and make it better?

I don’t know…Probably not.

Why you want to shoot an old man anyway?

Because history is written on your face.

Go ahead if it pleases you.

What pleases you?

I don’t remember.”

I wonder if she gets it? Journalists from the first world (Chakarova was born in Bulgaria but moved ot Baltimore as a teenager) are in a place of power, like her camera, above the man. The text plainly says the images won’t make it better, so there’s nothing in it for him, but he acquieces, maybe because he’s used to acquiecing to people in power. Perhaps he knows if he allows her to romanticize his suffering, she may buy him a meal or offer a few dollars. 

 

 

 

 

 

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