Uploaded January 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Since the dawn of cinema, sex workers have served as muses to movie-makers. From the early white slavery pictures like The Girl Who Went Astray from 1900 to countless dramas and rom-coms such as Midnight Cowboy, Risky Business and Pretty Woman, hookers, hustlers, call girls, street walkers and strippers have been staples of the silver screen. Cinematic sex workers are often fantasy figures, or cautionary tales, or just punchlines. They are brutalized, killed off, scorned, sometimes rescued and almost always represented as if no sex worker is in the audience. Even in well-meaning documentaries, reality is distorted by filmmakers who are determined to show trauma, violence and pathos rather than the resilient and thriving communities that are the norm for many sex workers.
Since the dawn of cinema, sex workers have served as muses to movie-makers. From the early white slavery pictures like The Girl Who Went Astray from 1900 to countless dramas and rom-coms such as Midnight Cowboy, Risky Business and Pretty Woman, hookers, hustlers, call girls, street walkers and strippers have been staples of the silver screen. Cinematic sex workers are often fantasy figures, or cautionary tales, or just punchlines. They are brutalized, killed off, scorned, sometimes rescued and almost always represented as if no sex worker is in the audience. Even in well-meaning documentaries, reality is distorted by filmmakers who are determined to show trauma, violence and pathos rather than the resilient and thriving communities that are the norm for many sex workers.
