Why Sex Workers are Angry with Meryl Streep and Rashida Jones

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Sex workers are fuming over Sell/Buy/Date, an upcoming documentary produced by Meryl Streep and Rashida Jones that they say will conflate consensual sex work and sex trafficking.

Kyndall Cunningham

Entertainment Reporter

It seems that non-sex workers in Hollywood cant leave the topic of sex work alone, even at the behest of people who work in the sex industry.

Only two days after the announcement, however, Cox rescinded her role in the documentary after sex workers began expressing their concerns and frustrations with the film on social media.

America considers people they define as trafficked persons or slaves as fundamentally ineligible to live in a free and democratic society, she said. The idea that migrants dont have agency, that we arent empowered or we arent making choices anyone should respect, is used to strip us of rights.

Like the stage production, Jones documentary wants to explore exploitation within the profession, according to its press release, reigniting a tired debate about the validity of sex work based on the amount of harm and danger that can occur within the field. This particular question has divided the feminist left since the sex wars of second-wave feminism. Is sex work liberating or degrading? Progressive or regressive? For Rose, this is a flawed framework.

Anytime this dichotomy is applied to a conversation about sex work, its a moral dog-whistle, Rose said. The issue is not that trading sex or sexual fantasy is inherently exploitative, its that (usually) women have commodified a thing that many people feel entitled to for free.

Another aspect of Sell/Buy/Date that sex workers feel poses a threat to their community is the films producers, Rashida Jones and Meryl Streep, who share a track record of publicly using anti-sex work rhetoric, advocating for the criminalization of sex work ,and taking advantage of sex workers.

By focusing entirely on younger girls just entering the industry by signing up with an exploitative talent agency rather than also including independent amateurs who manage their own businesses, they portray sex work as something young women are lured into rather than a career choice like any other, said Bottoms, an escort and performer.

But it was the alleged mishandling of certain participants and alleged non- obliging sex workers in the documentarys 2017 follow-up series Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On that cemented Jones as an official threat to the community, along with her fellow showrunners Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus.

They all basically shit on us, saying we did this to ourselves, and no one would have ever recognized us, Kayy wrote in an email to ishonest. To this day, almost four years later, I still have people coming to me asking me if I know Im in a Netflix show.

Actress and producer Rashida Jones

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Critics of Sell/Buy/Date also point to Streeps history of advocating for anti-sex work laws, which include signing an open letter to the human rights group Amnesty International in 2015, along with other Hollywood actresses, rejecting their proposal to decriminalize sex work despite studies that show criminalization puts sex workers, particularly marginalized groups of sex workers, at a greater risk for police abuse.

Hollywood has often found itself at odds with the sex industry, whether for negative, sensationalized portrayals, a lack of input and decision-making from actual sex workers, or more direct acts of harm like exposing Kayy to a giant streaming audience without her full permission. Even the makers of the 2019 film Hustlers, which was lauded for its nuanced, humanizing portrayal of stripping, were called out by dancers at New Yorks Show Palace for leaving them without a weeks pay when the strip club shut down for shooting.

While Jones claims to come from a place of sisterhood and empathylike many an outsider who has made a film about sex workit may not be enough to quell her critics. During a time when credit card companies are blocking payments to Pornhub, U.S. senators are pushing a bipartisan bill that would drastically reduce content on porn websites, and one of SESTA/FOSTAs co-sponsors is preparing to move into the White House, sex workers cant afford to give projects like Sell/Buy/Date the benefit of the doubt.

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