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Popular Culture Review
pernicious side effects of sexual expression prohibition: our desire to enter into a
sender/destinatary relationship in order to exchange, or at least to receive,
sexually explicit information prevents us from perceiving the human side of
obvious sociological disasters, such as the lives of most prostitutes.
Furthermore, the direct exploitation of sex through pimping is not even
denounced, if only in financial terms; the viewer is left uninformed of the
percentage of the take the pimp receives for every trick his “employee’' does. To
the contrary, we are invited to see a “Pimp Award Ceremony,” therefore
contributing to present pimping as all but a glamorous activity. Sexploitation
here operates at two levels: the pimp exploits the prostitute and the cable
network exploits our frustrated need for explicit sexual narration. In the end,
there is no room left for a necessary sociological critique; hence, we render
mundane the spectacle of sex for sale, as if this association were part of a vague
natural order.
Hookers at the Point could be considered as a fusion between the two
shows previously discussed: candid conversations about sex but with prostitutes
from all walks of the trade. This particular pomumentary is probably the grittiest
of them all and retains some shreds of cultural dignity precisely because of its
harshness. Regardless of how much we enjoy having a direct view upon a
prostitute’s adventures, a thirty year old woman explaining seriously to the
camera that her only way out is probably suicide tends to calm ardors
significantly. There is no doubt that this show, as the others do, preys upon our
needs for sexual narration; however, in the present case, the sexploitation is
limited by its irremediably informative nature. It could be said that, instead of
selling sex directly, Hookers at the Point sells sexual disasters, and hence, forces
us to consider external factors to just sensual arousal.
All the visual artifacts mentioned above, films and pomumentaries
alike, participate in a generally voyeuristic tendency which has developed
exponentially throughout the second half of the twentieth century, thanks to the
multiplication of visual media and their increased accessibility. It is no surprise
to observe that a new type of exhibitionism has appeared with the possibilities
now open with the use of webcams and personal websites, and it was naturally
just a matter of time before it became tied to sexploitation. As of today, internet
sex sites gross a revenue of about $2 billion a year. Furthermore, there are
literally thousands of North American couples who broadcast their sex lives on
the net for a reasonable fee of about $15 to $20 a month. We are confronted here
by a new type of spectacularized prostitution as well as by the loss of the
individual values of intimacy and privacy. The system of sexploitation has
convinced some of us to turn our own sex lives into a spectacle, turning our
desire and fantasies to generating profits from casual onlookers. In a desperate
attempt to disguise the exploitation behind exploration, one internet consultant
has recently declared12 that web-sex allows people to explore their sexuality
without the risk of real life encounters, empowering them to “have a private
connection with someone who is not in your room" via the computer screen.