So I’m ringing in a new year in Australia. Next to moving in with my girlfriend and not being buried under five feet of snow in a Midwestern winter, the best thing so far has been catching up with the Australian drama Satisfaction. You might remember it
as the show set in a brothel featuring a lesbian sex worker as part of the regular cast.
I have to admit to being skeptical about the show. First, there’s Heather, the lesbian character. A self-professed gay girl who is able to sleep with men on a daily basis is not the most convincing evidence that we all aren’t just waiting for the right man.
But what I was really afraid of was another show about victimization, albeit very pretty victims.
TV and movie stories about prostitution (insert your favorite Law and Order franchise here) are littered with the corpses of dead hookers. Those who aren’t horribly raped and murdered usually fall into two camps.
1. She’s a Pretty Woman.
She’s a street-smart hooker, who really just needs a good man to transform her into an elegant woman, who really just needs love to put her on the straight and narrow. She fell into the life because of her circumstances and people who put her down. Maybe it’s just me, but I always found Vivian (and Eliza Doolitle, for that matter) more interesting before the Pygmalion play.
2. She’s a Monster. She’s the abused little girl who tries to find a way out of the life but never is quite able to manage it, possibly because she never finds the love of a good man to put her on the straight and narrow. She fell into the life because of her circumstances and people who abused her trust from a young age.
Yes, I know this one’s based on a true story. But the way her story is filmed, beginning with the clips of an abused childhood, fits right into the cinematic framing of prostitution. The premises of the two movies actually sound a lot alike. Neither character ever has had any power to change her own life.
Satisfaction flirts with this story line, it’s true. (More about that is to come.) Thankfully, the only thing brutalized on the show is so-called respectable society, which is revealed to be hypocritical and mean in just about every episode. Instead of passing judgment on sex work and the women involved, Satisfaction tells stories about a handful of women who happen to be sex workers, and who through their work find financial freedom, independence — and occasionally, well, satisfaction. It’s like Firefly’s Inara got her own show.
So on a scale of cliché to creative, original writing, so far Satisfaction is winning. Mostly.
