The Sex Industry, from the Inside Out

Julia Query's "Live Nude Girl's Unite" was a very interesting look at the sex industry from the prospective not only of someone who is currently working in it, but also from that of someone raised to value women and their right to autonomy. In the film, Julia takes a job working at the Lusty Lady to pay the bills as she pursues her stand-up comedy career. When conditions get bad, she helps organize her co-workers to demand better working conditions and more rights. During this battle, Julia is also forced to tell her mother about her occupation, which she reveals through stand-up comedy routines, is harder than coming out to her mother as a lesbian.

The fact that the film is told from the perspective of a dancer gives it an interesting twist. Query, as A.O. Scott puts it in "Throw off the Yoke, but Keep the G-String", paints the women "without excessive political posturing, her film quietly dismantles stereotypes about women who work in the sex industry and makes its powerful feminist and pro-union argument with unpretentious good humor. The women who work at the Lusty Lady are diverse and, as their bosses (many of whom are women) soon discover, politically savvy." We see these women as comrades in the labor force, people who are working to support themselves and their families, and people we want to root for. They are not painted as people who need our sympathy, or as people we should be scared of, they are people looking for good working conditions. They are portrayed in this light because it is how the filmmaker sees them. She does not have a "save the prostitutes" attitude, nor does she have an anti-stripping political agenda.

Query was also able to obtain a lot of unprecedented access because the women were so conformable with her. While many of the ladies in the film were outraged by the fact that customers video taped them from behind the glass, they willingly took their clothes off in the dressing room as Query ran the camera. They also allowed her into the mirrored room of the peep show, having no problems with their bodies being shown. At one point, Query even interviews a subject as she is performing for a customer, blatantly illustrating the disconnect between the performance and the thoughts running through the performer's mind. She asks the woman what she is thinking about, and as she lays on her back making seductive faces, she reveals her thoughts are on wh

at she will do after work, or how much her back hurts, basically anything that is the opposite of sex. The intent behind the footage is what made their willingness to be on camera so different, but had it been a man or a stranger trying to get that footage, it is possible that their reactions would have been much different.

The fact that Query was the filmmaker as well as one of its dominant subjects does, however, make the film a bit less objective or honest. Many of the reviews for the film, including A.O. Scott's described a scene in which Julia told her mother about her career as "raw and painful". What they leave out is that fact that Julia tells the person filming the scene to get closer for dramatic effect. While this was meant for comic relief when the moment got too heavy to handle, it draws attention to the fact that she was never able to forget that the camera was in the room, and at times she was purposefully participating in situations and acting in a certain manner to make for a good film. It is arguable that the scene would have had to happen eventually, but it is the way in which it was filmed as well as the subjects in the scene that make it less genuine from the viewer's perspective.

Having Query behind the camera also made it impossible to get footage that would have added layers to the film. If an outsider had been running the camera and telling the story, they may have been able to get footage of the elusive meetings held by the management of the Lusty Lady. Meetings that, according to Miss Mary Ann in "Labor Organizing in the Skin Trade: Tales of a Peepshow Prole", were held to scare new employees away from the idea of the union by feeding them lies. The management may have been less skeptical of an objective camera person than they were of Query herself, who was purposefully not invited to the meetings.

Regardless of what footage Query got, and how she got, a majority of the subjects were honest and openminded about sharing their experiences. While many people would have thought of the sex industry in terms of if they "read the literature of radical feminists" which according to Bernadette Barton in "Dancing on the Mobius Strip: Challenging the Sex War Paradigm", assumed "that dancers are all victims of sexual and physical abuse whose employment in the sex industry perpetuates patriarchal disdain for women. In contrast, sex radical feminists will insist that dancers are empowered actors in charge of their own destinies, goddesses on raised stages accepting homage (and lucrative tips) from admiring men." After viewing the film, the audience members learn that, like A.O. Scott wrote in "Throw off the Yoke, but Keep the G-String", "some women insist that exotic dancing and other sex work is inherently degrading. Others find it a liberating expression of free choice and sexual independence. Ms. Query, after a while, just found it boring." There is no right or wrong way to think of dancing, and there is no clearly defined facts that can be applied to all dancers. Each person entered the industry and remains a part of it for their own reasons, and that is something that should be respected.

Vocabulary: Rabblerouser

In The San Francisco Bay Guardian ad for "Live Nude Girls, Unite!" Query is described as "a local comedian and a rabblerouser by birthright".

"Rabblerouser" is described by dictionary.com as "a person who stirs up the passions or prejudices of the public, usually for his or her own interests"

After seeing the film, I would agree with this. Query was raised by an activist mother, told to never be ashamed of herself, and is an aspiring definition of a stand-up comedian, an occupation that by definition stirs up passions and prejudices.