Comment #2

This comment is for this blog entry.

[http://jeni-f.blogspot.com/2008/04/prostitution-in-relation-to-bad.html]

I thought your observation of Pretty Woman as being 'glamorous' was an interesting one. I'd say it was anything but. The only reason Vivienne gets to live in the penthouse for a week and go to posh polo matches and the opera and get dressed up so beautifully is because she got lucky. At the beginning of the film you can see how difficult her life is - her flatmate Kit steals the money she had been saving for the rent, and uses it for drugs. Vivienne ends up climbing out the window and down the fire escape to avoid her landlord. Similarly, the police are in Hollywood Boulevard where she 'works' because they found a prostitute's body in one of those big trash bin thingies.

I think that this shows that 'glamorous prostitution' is not something you can necessarily decide you want to be. When you're forced into the position of needing to do this for a living, I don't think you get much say in the matter, and as you said it can lead to an awful lot of
problems. But films such as Pretty Woman, and also the now popular diaries of people like 'Belle de Jour' (now a TV drama starring Billie Piper), lead us to believe that there's this classy world of prostitution, if only you have the luck to find yourself there.