I actually have never seen “Pretty Woman,” nor would I consult a Hollywood movie for evidence of how sex work actually is.
I think Sydney places too much blame on drugs. Yes, some girls do it for their next fix but less than stereotypes suggest.
You make some good points. Unfortunately, many prostitutes do have sexual abuse in their backgrounds. But fewer are literally forced into it by pimps than we would assume.
And there are the high-flying escorts and Stormy Daniels’ of the world and the like, but they are just a small, albeit highly visible subset.
I myself do not judge practitioners of the world’s so-called oldest profession.
However, I would place most of the “blame” — if you want to call it that — on an economy that simply does not work well at all for those at the bottom and does not provide much of a safety net for dealing with unexpected life events.
A death in the family. A divorce. Getting fired from a job. Medical bills. Crushing debt. An unplanned baby and one more mouth to feed.
All things that might cause a woman to take up sex work, either part or full-time, just to make ends meet.
Or maybe it’s just a lifestyle choice: A girl thinking to herself she’d rather work an hour a day and make the same money that she would by flipping burgers or bagging groceries for 15-20 hours.
And broaden out from full-service prostitutes to encompass all sex and sex-adjacent workers (including webcammers, strippers, amateur porn models, fetishists, erotic massage therapists, etc.), and you’ll easily find women from all walks of life.
All considerations that cannot be captured in words like “w**re,” “s**t,” or some of those more creative pejoratives for sex workers you conjured below.
