Debauchette neatly eviscerates Showtime's new call girl dramedy, "Secret Diary of a Call Girl," which premiered last night. Deeming the program "both real and fake," a mix of real-life situations "dipped in cliche," she compares the show's narrative of working for an agency with her own experiences in the trenches and finds the show's "empty," nervous humor lacking in complexity, as if "someone off-screen keeps urging everyone to keep it light light light." That done, she lays into New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley's review of the show, tongue-lashing reporters for failing to recognize the possibility that some sex workers may actually like what they do.
"Aren’t we past this, yet? Is this even a question? Are journalists so incompetent, so incapable of carrying out the most basic research, that they can only assume that sex, for us, is intolerable? Or are these journalists really just uninterested in sex themselves and can’t resist transferring their sex-is-gross attitudes to the women who do it by choice? And why aren’t they capable of parsing the differences among sex workers, between those who have financial leverage and those who do not, those who are trafficked and those who act out of choice, those who have options and those with none, and so on? This isn’t rocket science. This isn’t even advanced sociology."
It would be interesting to see what would happen if, say, the team working on "The Girlfriend Experience" or, say, Darren Star brought Debauchette on as an expert consultant in the same way Susie Bright worked with the Wachowski brothers on "Bound."
