Season One of Harlots , a Hulu series produced and written entirely by women, captured me with its surprisingly authentic portrayal of indoor sex work. I was struck, last year, by how a story set three centuries ago could yank my mind right back to the massage parlor as urgently as running into a former client outside the 59th Street Bloomingdales which, for the record, happened to me twice. Harlots becomes, like our very lives themselves in the year of our thwarted lordess two thousand and eighteen, the story of women, queers and people of color desperately clawing for some access to freedom β whatever that is or looks like, whoever actually has it.
Last year it was easy to say that powerful men like these β who casually organize recreational gang rapes of kidnapped virgins, and murder anybody who gets in the way of their plans β still exist. We knew some names, sure, but not like we do now. Now we know, beyond any wish to believe otherwise, that men like this make the movies we watch, tell the jokes we laugh at, control our government and lead our academies.
It remains true that the official legal authorities are notoriously uninterested in pursuing the murderers of sex workers, as with Kitty in Harlots , and workers feel they have to take justice into their own hands. Regardless of the era, legal and cultural reactions to sex work and workers lay bare conceptions of who is worthy of agency, of respect, of self-determination, of basic safety to their physical beings and the expectation of that safety remaining constant.
Sex work remains an illuminating and superior lens through which to take stock of the restless, uncomfortable gender dynamics and power structures that may experience shifts in style or public acceptance, but never by degrees of import or influence.
But Harlots also flips us over, revealing the soft underbelly of this hard life: the respite of chosen family and the intensity of those bonds, more genuinely rewarding and life-sustaining than those that unite sin-soaked, supremacist brotherhoods.
