Despite its provocative title, Nicole Bazuin’s documentary “Modern Whore” feels like an introductory seminar on the politics and practice of sex work. Starring Andrea Werhun — author of the photo memoir of the same name and a longtime collaborator of Bazuin — it pivots between stylized vignettes taken from Werhun’s experiences as a full-service sex worker and stripper, straight-to-camera analysis from Werhun and conversations with Werhun and fellow sex workers, her mother, her favorite client and her boyfriend. With women’s rights and basic sexual freedoms under attack in America, the film helps normalize not just sex work, but the practice of self-determined sexual autonomy. Because “Modern Whore” is essentially a visualization of Werhun and Bazuin’s book, the stories and sentiments are often lifted directly from the page. That brings, at times, a sensation of predesigned construction to Werhun’s stories and conversations with co-workers and loved ones that undermines the film’s sense of candor. While there are occasional flashes of genuine emotion (an especially moving moment with Werhun’s mother, who clearly loves her daughter fiercely and worked hard to overcome her own shock and initial despair regarding Andrea’s line of work), many of the conversations feel, at the least, measured. Werhun and Bazuin clearly want a specific image of sex work to come through: one where challenges can be admitted and faced, but ultimately the work is worthwhile, valuable, sometimes empowering and, most importantly, a best career fit for Werhun and others she knows. (In other words, like a reasonably fulfilling professional path.) Werhun and Bazuin clearly want a specific image of sex work to come through. Sometimes, when speaking directly to the camera, Werhun offers a word that could be new to some — something like “trauma porn” — and a little text bubble pops up in the corner, offering a definition for the uninitiated. This element, alongside the sometimes hammy (a word Werhun uses herself!) reenactments of past exploits give the film a retro, ’90s educational video aura, almost as if it were designed to be played in a high school social studies class. One of “Modern Whore’s”main goals appears to be to make Werhun’s experience as legible as possible, and she leaves little room for her perspective to be anything but crystal clear. The detailed peeks behind the curtain of the work culture are interesting — a breakdown of all the complex lingo on client-based review sites is a standout example — but some of the more elementary discussions of consent and sexual and bodily autonomy bordered on overexplaining Werhun’s already inherently justified personal experiences. It is easy to understand Werhun’s desire to make herself and her work legible to her audience, but it’s also disappointing that every new attempt to present sex workers’ perspectives must retread the same ground in order to appease those who are ungenerous — if not outright opposed — to the work and those who do it.
This tendency to overcommunicate does make it especially obvious when Werhun’s ideas could be better fleshed out or described with more subtlety. When she states that sex workers are almost always portrayed as “villain” or “victim,” it’s easy to long for a little more time with these archetypes and the many ways they can be subverted, or how Werhun relates to them. The film works best when it embraces the nuances — and yes, everyday frustrations — of the work. For example, Werhun and a few of her colleagues discuss online forums for clients to review sex workers; these digital spaces hold the power to either rapidly change a worker’s career fortunes or completely ruin a reputation, with no way to verify whether reviews were truthful or not. Canada’s history of documentary and autobiographical work about sex work — ranging from stories created and told by sex workers, johns and sex work opponents alike — is notable. In 1981, Bonnie Sherr Klein’s “Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography” provided a mostly one-sided, pearl-clutching, but occasionally curious exploration into the strip club and porn theater scene in Canada (it was briefly banned in Ontario despite being, for the most part, against the consumption of pornography). In 1984, Janis Cole and Holly Dale released “Hookers on Davie,” a portrait of a group of sex workers living and working in Vancouver. In 2011, graphic novelist Chester Brown (who made the poster for the “Modern Whore” film) published his book “Paying for It,” which was part autobiography, part deconstruction of the social, political and legal arguments against sex work. There have been artistic representations of sex work as long as people have been making art, but art made by sex workers (or, at least art with any hopes of reaching a mainstream audience) about sex work is still a fairly new development. Documentaries featuring sex workers speaking to their experience — films like “Hookers on Davie” and Nick Broomfield’s “Chicken Ranch”— allowed sex workers to share their experiences, but the way they were represented was ultimately in the hands of the filmmakers. In the case of Werhun and Bazuin’s film (built on a decades-long artistic relationship and full creative control by Werhun), “Modern Whore” allows Werhun to tell exactly her story and to tell it exactly the way she wants it. “Modern Whore” functions as a wonderful baseline perspective about sex work. It wouldn’t be entirely unfair to call “Modern Whore” a bit of a puff piece for its representation of the inherent power of sex workers. Werhun describes herself as a comet flinging herself into her johns’ lives for a brief hour at a time, a flower that can grow again and again, regardless of how many times it’s been plucked. Werhun also notes a key feature in her personal sex work story: her distinct privilege as a feminine, white, cisgender woman. The hurdles she has to cross are often interpersonal, or internally felt (Werhun herself plays “Shame,” her dudely inner voice with a goatee and a backwards hat who calls her a whore and declares her worthless). But in a material sense, Werhun is able to more easily move through the world of sex work as a white, femme and cisgender woman in ways that her colleagues who are marginalized due to their race, sexuality or gender expression cannot. Maybe the most meaningful balance that Werhun strikes is the one between recognizing her privilege, acknowledging the shame she experiences from a life of anti-sex work socialization and celebrating the empowerment and liberation she is able to find within the work.
Even with its imperfections, “Modern Whore” functions as a wonderful baseline perspective about sex work for those who either know little about the actual profession or have been fed a cultural diet of misinformation (which is most of us; the project of ostracizing, punishing and degrading the profession of sex work and the people who do it is a well-funded, global one). Werhun hammers home again and again that this work is indeed a job, and that like other jobs that carry risks or are physically demanding, making it as safe as possible should be our main social focus, not morality. As a piece of documentary art, “Modern Whore” is best treated as a launching point: one story among thousands, where — pleasantly — the sex worker at the heart of the tale is the one telling the story. It’s good to have it around.
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