In 2016, actress and playwright Sarah Jones launched a one-woman show called Sell/Buy/Date. The show, in which Jones wrestled with the past, present, and hypothetical future of sex work through the lens of a variety of characters, was met with rapturous response. At first. But over time, critiques of the show grew, critiques that exploded when a film adaptation was announced.
See, Jones is not a sex worker. And like any marginalized community, sex workers don’t trust outsiders telling their stories. With good reason! Sex work has had decades of negative portrayal in pop culture. And Jones’ show, from many reports, plays into some of those negative stereotypes. Jones faced accusations of being a SWERF, a sex worker exclusionary radical feminist, that may have derailed the film.
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As a film, Sell/Buy/Date is, first and foremost, about Sarah Jones. This is its greatest strength — and, ultimately, the thing that ends up undermining it. The stakes of the film’s opening could not be lower. Will sex workers cancel Sarah? Will they get her film canceled? Is she losing her movie deal? Given that you are watching the movie, the answer to these questions is clearly a resounding no. That said, the fear of an online mob is very real, and one I understand. The targeting is off here, but the emotion is real. This is how someone who is friends or colleagues with Ilana Glazer, Rosario Dawson, and Bryan Cranston can come to believe that she is the oppressed one in this scenario.
Sarah gets a message on Instagram from Lotus Lain, a sex worker rights advocate, reaching out with an offer to educate her. From here, Sarah begins to reach out to and meet a number of professionals in a variety of aspects of sex work. She meets pole dancers and porn performers, brothel owners and porn platform creators. Sex work, she learns, is an empowering profession letting women reclaim their power. In her ear here is… well, herself, or at least herself in the guise of a woker-than-thou white college student character who is majoring in ‘sex work studies’, a thing that, as far as I can tell, is not real. Sarah seems convinced that it is, and that young impressionable white girls are being drawn into it. Strange.
But the entire time, there’s another voice in her ear: Nereida, her Dominican character, who is rabidly anti-sex work. Nereida makes sure she meets voices from the anti-sex work camp. Anti-sex work activists dominate the final third of the film. Nereida begins to monologue to the camera in a way none of Jones’ other personas did. Eventually, it becomes obvious: Sarah agrees with them. The first two thirds of the film’s strangely muddles messaging becomes clear only in retrospect.
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Initially, Sarah claims to start from a point of wanting to educate herself. She doesn’t understand why sex workers are so angry at her play. So when Lotus Lain reaches out, Sarah seems to leap at the opportunity. The thing is, for all her concern, Sarah also claims that she wants to stay neutral, not take a stance. And, of course, when you try to stay neutral, you are supporting power. Who is in power? Anti-sex work activists. All the aspects of cultural and political power are against sex workers. So the neutrality does ring hollow, particularly as Sarah chooses well-off and financially successful sex work advocates, while ignoring on the ground workers.
And when Sarah meets her first anti-sex work activist, she refuses to push back, even in the face of some pretty wild claims. Esperanza Fonseca, an anti-sex work activist, gives Sarah the basic anti-sex work spiel. The thing is, what Esperanza gives is a very good reason for Esperanza not to be a sex worker. She doesn’t feel safe. It wasn’t a choice. This is all fair, and I don’t think anyone would claim that Esperanza should be doing sex work. Intriguingly, however, Esperanza argues that because sex work was bad for her, it is thus inherently bad. To bolster that point, she introduces Sarah to three indigenous women who have had negative experience with sex work, who mostly make the same points: I was forced into this; therefore, no one should be able to do this. Sarah agrees.
Indeed, in the end, Jones comes off… well, like a SWERF. She aligns sex work positive stuff with ‘white feminism’, while aligning anti-sex work narratives with a more personal, emotional social justice language. As propaganda, it’s likely to be effective on folks who don’t know much about the issues. But as a film, it veers between unengaged and polemical, neither of which are terribly interesting modes for a documentary. Which is unfortunate! There is a very real critique one could make about what the brutal machine of capitalism would do to women’s bodies in a system of corporatized sex work. But to make this critique would involve criticizing people in power. Jones is not interested in that.
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Here’s the magic trick of Sell/Buy/Date: Sarah is the director. She’s the one who picked who they interviewed and what they aired. So when she posits sex work advocates as ‘white feminists’ seeking to undermine intersectional solidarity, the film is objectively on her side. Indeed, it would be easy to see this as an objective truth. After all, the film has positioned the sex work advocates as overwhelmingly white, privileged, and cisgender, while the anti-sex work advocates are queer, trans, and people of color.
But, of course, Sarah is the one who picked who they interviewed and what they aired. Sell/Buy/Date is an argument. It’s just not a terribly convincing one. Like that rabidly transphobic BBC article, Sell/Buy/Date tries to hide its prejudices by cherry-picking sources, ignoring inconvenient voices and highlighting the ones that help make her points. The problem is, once you notice what she’s doing, it’s impossible to unsee — and insufferable to watch.
Sarah Jones is clearly enormously talented as a performer. But the film warps itself so thoroughly around her fear of sex work that it becomes a challenging watch. What I find striking about Sell/Buy/Date is how passionately it argues for the status quo. The people in power should remain in power; the people suffering should continue suffering. Better things, Jones argues powerfully, aren’t possible.
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