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tutes in her film, Borden helps us recognize the sad romanticism of conventional macho, the sexual self-delusions under which it functions, and the institutions that have developed to maintain it.
Working Girls
allows us a sense not only of the realities of women's bodies, and the ways in which they must be disguised for conventional sex roles to be enacted, but also of the vulnerability of men's bodies and the childish obliviousness of the "needs" that bring men to the brothel.
Despite the fact that
Working Girls
exposes men in a manner analogous to the way women have normally been exposed in film, it is anything but anti-male. Borden creates a sense that women and men are doomed to struggle through the world in relation to each other, but that, ironically, absurdly, the genders continue to exist at the expense of each otherdespite all the damage it does and all the time it wastes. Nevertheless, as is clear in the interchanges between the women in
Working Girls
and between some of the women and men, the possibility remains for a mutually rewarding synergy of the genders. Instead of spending our energies acting out cliched "erotic" scenes in order to fulfill gender images relentlessly promoted by the commercial cinema and mass media marketing, we need to have a more effective sense of what the real experiences of the genders are. Borden seems to assume that if we develop a stronger empathy with what "eroticism" is like for the women who do prostitution and for the men who use them, we might begin to see each other so clearly that abandoning our relentless cycle of mutual exploitation would seem like common sense.
In the following interview with Borden,
Working Girls
is the catalyst for a discussion of issues relating to the sex industry, including the depiction of prostitution and other forms of sexuality in cinema, and the ambiguities of female and male responses to pornographic films. When I first saw
Working Girls
at the 1986 Festival of Festivals in Toronto, I was simultaneously shocked and exhilarated; as a man, I felt exposedbut in a healthy, useful way. I also felt in tune with the sensibility of
Working Girls,
enough to send Borden a copy of my "Confessions of a Feminist Porn Watcher" (
Film Quarterly
36, Spring 1983: 1017) and to suggest we discuss the issues raised by her film and my article. She kindly agreed. We talked in January 1987.
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MacDonald:
One of the interesting dimensions of recent independent film is that body of work, mostly by women, which attempts to interrupt the conventional way of looking at women in movies: Yvonne Rainer's