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The idea that prostitution is unsexual for these women is hard for people to believe. What strikes me is that people who would morally judge sex without feeling during prostitution don't judge the same act in other circumstances: for example, a woman decides to give her husband a quick fuck because otherwise he's going to be pushing up against her all night, not letting her sleep; she's not into it, but it's quicker and easier to get him off, to get it over with, than to be continually dealing with it. How many times does that happen in this culture? And there are cases where a woman has gone too far with a man: he's bought her a million things, and she's made out with him, and she realizes, ''I don't want to be with this person," but it's too late. It's either a fight or she goes along with it.
MacDonald:
You obviously know a great deal about prostitution. How did you learn so much?
Borden:
I was interested in prostitution theoretically. And then I found I knew more and more women who worked. I encountered women who knew I was interested, and I got brought to these different houses and hung out with them. The result was that I had to transform my way of seeing prostitution. It hit really close to home. These were women within the art world, and there are so many, you can't even imagine. I'm sure you've known women who've worked in the sex industry at one time or another.
So what happened is that the minute I went from theory to actual practice, I saw that the women who do prostitution are people who are like me in absolutely every other way. I knew I had to use what I was discovering. I just didn't know how. I've been frustrated with all the documentaries I've seen on prostitution because they never go far enough.
MacDonald:
Have you seen Vivienne Dick's
Liberty's Booty
[1980]? In some ways her film gives me the same sense of prostitution as
Working Girls
does.
Borden:
Oh, yeah. It's funny because some of the people in her film were people I knew. She actually did her film about one of the same places that I did
Working Girls
about. I was writing my script at about the same time she was doing that movie. The two films share some thingsespecially the sense of prostitution going on downtown in the art world and being very accessible. The problem with Vivienne's film is that it's hard to separate what her vision of prostitution is from these women just hanging around in messy lofts and carrying on about one thing or another. And since there's zero production quality in her film, it was kind of hard to locate the women within any class framework. I was really anxious to see her film. When other people are working in the same area as I am, I always wonder, does this mean I don't have to do