The sex industry has been going mainstream for quite a while. It’s increasingly becoming a talked about subject, no longer hidden in the bottom rungs of society. And nothing could be more evident of its spread into the core pillars of our modern world than its entrance into the arts.

Social Stigma

A phrase once coined by Rudyard Kipling, there is a reason that prostitution is known as ‘the world’s oldest profession’. Since the dawn of time, it has catered to our fundamental need for companionship. However, even armed by today’s liberal attitudes, true representation of sex workers is often skewed by social stigma and an inability to consider the legitimacy of the profession.

The preconception about sex workers and their supposed lack of self-determinism, having been supposedly driven into the dirty sex trade by some man behind a curtain, is exactly what a new play, named The Oldest Profession, seeks to challenge. The play is currently running at the Rainbow Theatre Project in Washington DC. It is written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paula Vogel, and explores the daily lives of five sex workers.

True to theatrical conventions, the play encroaches on some tabooed (or dangerous) modern precepts about the industry as well as the women that work in it. Firstly, that they’re not all teenagers trafficked from distant lands – the play presents five individually-driven women over 40, who are still very much loving what they do.

What’s interesting for us is the play’s critical response, with some critics criticising the play as a fantastical depiction of modern day sex work incongruously painted as reality.

A review by Michael Poandl, for example, describes the play as depicting ‘pure fantasy’, because, as she posits, ‘the lives of sex workers, almost without exception, are tales of misery peppered with violence, sexual assault, addiction and poverty’.

This archaic perception is at odds with the characters in the play, who are concerned with basic day-to-day troubles of sex work, from looking good to simply living a normal life.

Similarly, the same critic questions why the play was supported by the LGBTQ community to begin with, with a short-sighted interpretation of who the community literally represents. Yes, there are few lesbian and gay characters, but the play isn’t about that. The play is about the liberation of sex workers from the shadows of society, acknowledging the women not as victims, but as individuals with rights who make choices each day of their lives.

The Victimless Prostitute

The LGBTQ community has often been a voice against the so-called Swedish model of criminalising prostitution, specifically for its insistence on painting sex workers as victims in denial. So we’re entirely unsurprised by the Rainbow’s choice to perform the play, but what we are surprised by is the insistence from portions of the media to outright refuse the reality of a victimless prostitute – to the extent that even in the theatre, sex workers living non-torment filled existences is as foreign to them as a world of spaceships and dragons.

The theatre has always served to break down controversial issues into edible form, adopting the filter of fiction to help tackle socially tabooed subjects. So we suppose this is just another instance of people finding it a hard mouthful to swallow, but one day, with continued representation through the arts, the world of sex workers will be available for open discussion.