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May 01, 2002
Untitled Article
By Juhu Thukral
Bitch
We can always count on Aaron Sorkin to spice up our Wednesday nights with an up-to-the-minute West Wing, but as poised an assured as his characters are, let's not make the mistake of thinking he actually knows what the hell he's talking about.
Last fall, on episode found the First Lady all riled up over an international convention that would outlaw forced prostitution. Mrs. Bartlet wanted the word "forced" removed from the convention. (She apparently took up the cause because she felt guilty about not taking enough of a stand on other women's issues. thank god for prostitution, which allows even the most lackadaisical feminist to start crying the exploitation blues and earn back her political street cred.)
Because she's the big boss' wife, Josh, deputy chief of staff and one of the show's two resident cerebral hotties, is forced to deal with the women's-rights group that's got its collective panties in a twist over the issue. So he heads over to said group's ridiculously fancy offices, a light and airy suite creatively furnished with expensive art. Amy, the head feminist (a nice little role for Mary-Louise Parker), describes all sorts of horrible conditions in which young girls and women are trapped or tricked into engaging in prostitution. "So how isn't that forced?" asks Josh. Ah, there's the rub.
Rather than have his characters engage in a debate that might actually mean something, Sorkin simply has our feminist heroine ignore the question -- she sadly and with furrowed brow replies that only a small percentage of the thousands of known cases of forced prostitution are ever prosecuted. Neither she nor Josh mentions that this pathetic state of affairs has nothing to do with prohibiting all prostitution in the first place. But -- since it looks like he might get a date with Amy -- Josh agrees to "see what we can do" about her little problem.
The issue is never resolved, but the subplot takes an interesting turn when, in conversation with his assistant, Donna, Josh defends a woman's right to sell access to her body when she freely chooses to -- with language that could have been cribbed from a book like Whores and Other Feminists. But Donna argues against decriminalization of non-forced prostitution that could give sex workers the full benefit of labor laws and other worker protections by noting that stigma might prevent prostitutes from coming forward to claim these benefits. Apparently Josh has not studied his sex-worker feminism enough, because he has no reply. So the debate ends there, tacitly confirming the sick, sad state of all prostitutes and eliding once again the distinction between forced and freely chosen prostitution.
So not only does Sorkin completely blow a chance to fully address this issue, he makes a feminist leader look like she can't answer a question directly because she knows she's full of shit and can't justify her position. Plus, he puts the only articulated pro-sex work stance in the mouth of a boy who treated the whole issue as unworthy of his time. With all the other honors he's garnered, I'd like to nominate Sorkin for our Thanks for Getting My Hopes Up and Then Chickening Out, You Wannabe Progressive Award. The coy undercutting of political controversy and the flirty vibe he injected into Josh's dealings with the big important feminist didn't work for me. (And it's worth noting that a later episode had Josh unsuccessfully racking his brain for a feminist issue on which the administration was failing, so he could see Amy without needing to be all vulnerable and ask her out.)
But I'll say one thing for Sorkin: I do love his sense of interior design.
Posted by MorganG at May 1, 2002 12:11 PM