I'm struck by just how much this film clashes with other depictions of sex work within cinema. The work being done in Working Girls isn't eroticized in the ways you'd come to expect from films about sex workers. Instead the work here is just a job and it's a boring one at that. It's a very matter of fact, blunt, realistic look at sex work, and it's really refreshing. Much like Lizzie Borden's other film Born in Flames the material here is outright feminist and in contrast to many of the ideas that would be taught as gospel about sex work during those second wave years. In that way alone Working Girls is a progressive look at a job many…

Aptly titled, this film captures the working class atmosphere of a Manhattan brothel. With very little editing, this could be the story of women working in an entirely different field, but with the same basic ideas about working conveyed, which is, of course, one of the film's main points. This isn't a depiction of women in need of saving (though, as The Wire would later make blatant, they could probably do with a union). The usual stereotypes of prostitution are almost entirely absent. The madam is rude and unpleasant, but no more or less so than any boss, save with an added element of its being sex work. No one has a heart of gold, nor are they scheming, kittenish…

Cinema doesn't want for films about prostitution as perhaps the only logical profession in capitalism, the ultimate in selling one's body as labour-value. But I can't think of a depiction less weighed down by either purely political framing (hello, all you French cinéastes) or condescending pity than this. I also can't think of one that truly treats a brothel as an other workplace, complete with clients as a procession of sitcom-worthy goofs who make for great comedy. The madam who thinks of herself as a progressive, modern woman for no other reason than she doesn't beat her girls or get them hooked on smack is in every other respect a hilariously dead-on image of your shitty boss who blithely keeps…