Truly Shameless

I like Shameless.  I really do.  I like capable, long-suffering Fiona with her barely-hidden vulnerability.  I like ‘Lip with his perfect SAT scores, deadpan delivery and criminal creativity.  I like Ian with his adulterous Muslim boyfriend and his sweet face.  I love Debbie, who is somehow both depressingly old for her age and achingly young.  I like Kevin and Veronica, especially Kevin, and kind of wish they were my nextdoor neighbors.  I don’t really like Frank, that’s pretty much impossible to do, but I find him extremely accurate and enjoyable in a laugh-so-you-don’t-cry kind of way.  The plotlines are generally fun and sometimes clever and almost always heartfelt.  Except one.  I mean, really, who decided that Sheila, an otherwise sweet lady dressed like a 50’s housewife who’s good with kids and imprisoned by anxiety, should also be a rapist? I know it was supposed to be funny when she handcuffed Frank to her bed  and did kinky things to him that he most certainly did not consent to.To state the obvious, it wasn’t, not even slightly, not to me.  What it was was the epitome of a trend I just don’t understand, in which men being raped is a punchline.  It’s not just that these jokes are in extremely poor taste and irredeemably offensive; I also honestly don’t get where the humor is supposed to come from.  Is it the role reversal?  The perceived humiliation of a man being sexually overpowered by a woman?  The supposed impossibility of the scenario? The mere concept of a sexually aggressive woman?  As far as I can figure, it’s the unexpectedness, that shock of the unexpected, two things that don’t belong together (women as sexual predators? Men as victims? Men who don’t want sex? Women who do?).  I guess my problem is that these juxtapositions don’t seem so strange to me.  Afterall, I know that men and boys are sexually assaulted, though most often by other men.  That it’s not half as rare as most people would guess.  And knowing that, Frank screaming “stop” and being ignored isn’t just unfunny, it’s downright nauseating.

Same Old Story

Day two of my new job and already the sexual harassment is, well, in existence.  "C'mon Rosa, show a little leg, get us some customers. And by the way, wear a skirt tomorrow." Um, no.

Not So Intimate Adventures

Lately I’ve been watching Secret Diaries of a Call-Girl. It’s a lovely piece of fluff, or appears to be anyhow. I mainly picked it up because I was intrigued by the idea of Rose Tyler, working girl, and have now seen enough of Billie Piper’s bare skin to more than satisfy my curiousity (and can I just say that if that’s her body post-anorexia, I shudder to imagine what she must’ve looked like in the midst).  Also, I once spent an afternoon reading the blog it’s based on, The Intimate Adventures of a London Call-Girl, and was cautiously interested in how it’d be translated to the small screen.  Not half badly, it turns out.  It’s engaging and fun, nothing to get passionate about but I don’t feel like I wasted those four-ish hours I spent watching the first season.  Like all decent shows about vocations, it gives a neat look into an unfamiliar world, the tools of the trade, the jargon, etc..  It manages to address sex work head-on without moralizing or being unbearably pedantic in either direction (it’s not a one-way ticket to hell but it’s not without costs) with just enough meat to chew over.  One of my favorite parts was when Billie Piper’s character, Hannah/Belle (the later being her psuedo-nom) tells a friend (her only friend, but more on that later) that though she makes 105,000lbs per year, a fifth of that goes to “being Belle”, meaning make-up, clothes and other beauty items.  She later explains via narration that “I feel like I spend half my life removing hair and maintaining my body”.  The irony is that one of her main explainations for her choice of profession is laziness, which is clearly not the case.  Her on the clock hours may be deceptively few, but being beautiful professionally is no part-time gig.

From what I've seen so far, the show completely skirts the fact that the story it's telling comes from the most privileged perspective imaginable - that of a thin, white, college-educated and conventionally-attractive young heterosexual with a posh accent, a British citizenship, and no health problems - but compared to the usual mainstream media portrayals of sex workers as passive, victimized and women of color, it's refreshing. Granted, those portrayals are still a step up from the selfish, irresponsible temptress of color and the equivalent white trash bimbo stealing other women's men and spreading diseases to decent males who're helpless in the face of their feminine wiles, but it's nice to see some of the real diversity of sex workers acknowledged. And I can't help but warm to the fact that Hannah explicitly identifies as a feminist. Just the fact that she says the word on-screen made my heart warm just a bit.

Now, what did I mean by “apears to be” pure fluff?  Well, the more I think about it, the less fluffy it seems.  By the end of season 1, it’s apparent that Hannah has effectively alienated her entire family (Mum, Dad, older sister) and all of her friends but one, Ben, an ex-boyfriend who doesn’t tell her he’s engaged until six weeks after the fact and who doesn’t know she’s a call-girl even though she’s been doing it for two years.  An ongoing arc is that Ben feels (not unduly) shut out of her life and like their closeness has fallen victim to her tight-lippedness.  Hannah refers to him frequently enough as her best mate while simultaneously concealing the bulk of her life from him to make both Ben and this viewer suspicious that the lady doth protest too much.  In one episode in which she meets and briefly befriends another callgirl, her desperation for companionship is so obvious it's downright sad.  Her other close relationships are with her regular clients, which is problematic for clear reasons.

The concept of a romantic relationship seems an equally foreign one to her, I suspect for reasons that are both obvious and less so.  Understandably, many men would have a problem with their girlfriends doing sex work, especially the kind Belle does when she provides “the girlfriend experience” to men who pay her over a thousand pounds to pretend to be in love with them for an evening.  The show also strongly implies, and I know this to be true, that it can be difficult for someone who’s been paid for sex to go back to doing it recreationally.  When you’re used to walking away from encounters with substantial amounts of money in your pocket, it’s hard to go back to leaving empty handed.  I don’t think this is exclusive to sex work; I’ve heard musicians and professional athletes say the same thing.  Nor do I think it’s necessary or an automatic part of going pro.  It is always heartbreaking, but it might be more so in this particular case.  Hannah hasn’t just lost the ability to enjoy an activity she excells at purely for its own sake; she’s also lost access to one of the fundamental ways people connect with each other.

I didn’t read enough of the blog or book to know if this is aspect of Hannah’s life is drawn from reality or is fiction (I suspect some of both), but it certainly adds to the impression that she’s just sort of drifting, and doing so in a profession where her youth is a crucial element of her earning power.  I give props to the show and its writers for addressing some of the subtler costs of selling sex while refusing to play into catastrophic stereotypes, but watching a young woman flounder is not something I really enjoy.  Ultimately, the novelty and glamour wear thin and it all gets to be kind of depressing.

A Beginning (somewhere to run from)

As human beings, we like contrasts.  We get a pleasant little buzz from things that don’t belong together: a suite worn with a pair of converse hightops, a petite blond girl with supernatural strength, a macho man scared of spiders.  We’re fascinated by men in eyeliner and women in ties, vulnerability concealed by bravado, a very young face claiming to be so very old, a velvet glove cast in iron.  Hence the title of this blog; after all, dispatches come from war zones and frontlines, the heart of crisis, but behind the sofa? That’s where children and cowards hide from Daleks.  I’m not envisioning this as exclusively dedicated to these mismatches, though they are fun to find and mull over, but more of a general place for me to put down my thoughts and musings on pop culture, feminism and life in general and send them out into the void.  If that interests you, welcome aboard, and if it doesn’t, so long, but with no further ado, allons-y!