Tamara MacLeod:

There is a moment in Adrian Lyne’s film Lolita (1997) that is burned onto my memory. I was probably around 12, up late, watching it on terrestrial television. Lolita and her guardian, lover or captor have been moving between seedy motels, the romantic aesthetics waning until they wrestle on distressed sheets in a darkened room. The bed is covered with coins. Humbert has discovered Lolita has been stashing away the money he has ‘become accustomed’ to paying her, and he suddenly fears she is saving it in order to leave him, something that has not yet occurred to him. The shots are intimate, violent and jarring, ruptured by a later scene in which Lolita shouts: ‘I earned that money!’ We realise that Lolita has learned that sexual acts have monetary value.

My own realisation came through different circumstances. Like Humbert, some of the men who exploited my vulnerability were probably unconscious of the role they played in the power struggle between an impoverished young woman and the men who could offer her resources. Humbert is exploitative. He also believes in the love between himself and Lolita. To him, the commodity-exchange or transactional aspect of their relationship is the perversion. Its articulation shocks him, the truth of it (or the mere fact that Lolita understands it herself) threatens him so much that he strikes her across the face. He immediately regrets it and submits to her blows, insisting that she be silent.

Humbert’s violence, his refusal to accept the whore, stands for the ages. From religious fundamentalists to certain kinds of radical feminists, a lot of different types of people agree that work is respectable and even noble, and that sex work is degraded and criminal. In truth, sometimes sex work is degrading, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it is illegal, often it’s legally complex; but why is sex work not understood to be work?

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