PRETTY WOMAN TURNS 30 - FAIRYTALE or FANTASY?

It’s been three decades since Julia Roberts stepped into a pair of over-the-knee boots to play working girl Vivian. Here, two Australian sex workers reflect on the legacy of Pretty Woman and how it measures up today

- ALLEY PASCOE

TILLY LAWLESS

“Pretty Woman was revolutionary because it depicted a sex worker as desirable and dateable –not just a drug addict”

I remember watching Pretty Woman for the first time as a kid, and wondering if sex workers really did refuse to kiss clients. It seemed silly to me, as a child who hadn’t been sexual with anyone, that you would allow someone to go inside you but not kiss you.

Now watching the film on its 30th anniversary, having been a ‘working girl’ for over six years, it’s the scene that most amuses me. The concepts that a) sex workers have boundaries and b) some things can be more invasive than penetrative sex, are ones that many people struggle to wrap their head around. I do mainly brothel work, and I am constantly coming up against men who complain that I have ‘too many rules’ when I won’t kiss or let them perform oral sex on me. I always explain that to me those things are more intimate than blow jobs or sex. Some are astounded that I have things I won’t do, as if they have paid for me in entirety and should have free rein with my body, but most get it. Those things are the most intimate to them too, and that’s why they want them, because they are chasing the ‘real’ experience.

Watching Vivian as she vivaciously totters across screen, I am simultaneously warmed and saddened by the film. Warmed, because it is wonderful to see a sex worker depicted as desirable and dateable, not just a drug addict or a nameless murder victim, a spectacle to the respectable – as the body of the girl killed on Vivian’s street is to the tourists that photograph it in one of the opening scenes. Saddened, because little has changed for sex workers around the world, particularly over in the US.