Bill Maher has some questions surrounding the “sex worker community” — mainly why it’s referred to as the “sex worker community.”
The host of HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher took some time during his “New Rules” segment to exclaim, “Whores are having a moment.”
“You gotta give me more than a week to get used to a new word or phrase or name for what we call something,” Maher began. “We did this with homeless until it was unhoused. We did this with illegal alien until it was undocumented migrant. We did this with midget until it was, ‘How dare you, we say little people now.’ And now we’re doing it with prostitute. I don’t know if you saw the Academy Awards this year, but I’m just gonna say it: whores are having a moment.”
The comedian was referencing the Sean Baker-directed film Anora, which won five Oscars earlier this month, including best picture and best actress for Mikey Madison, who plays a young stripper from Brooklyn. During Baker and Madison’s acceptance speeches, they both took a moment to “recognize and honor the sex worker community.”
“Wow, three weeks ago it was a bunch of hoes and now it’s a community,” Maher said in response on the latest episode of Real Time. He proceeded to question, “If it’s such an important liberal cause” not to use the term prostitutes, “why didn’t you do it 10 years ago or 20 or in 1975?”
“A few years ago, the New York Post ran a story about a paramedic who couldn’t make ends meet and so started an OnlyFans to pay her bills, and then got publicly shamed for it. And Congresswoman [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in her defense, ‘Sex work is work,’” Maher continued before quipping, “First of all, sex shouldn’t be work at all. You wives know what I’m talking about.”
He added, “Moreover, we’re saying sex work is work. It’s kind of like saying slavery is work, strictly speaking. But is that really the message we want to be sending?”
Maher later pondered “why so many hookers” have been featured in films throughout the years.
“If half of all male stars in Hollywood had at one point played, oh, I don’t know, a porch pirate or a used car salesman or a Three Card money dealer or a lobbyist, you know, something really sketchy, would we not wonder about that?” the host asked. “What does it mean? Does it mean that we’re still locked into the Madonna-whore complex? It would seem so since there’s 1,000 movies about whores and Madonna has never made a good one.”
“Anora is a good one. It’s a great movie,” he said about the Oscar-winning film. “So is Sean Baker’s other movie about a sex worker, Tangerine, and his other movie about a sex worker, Red Rocket, and his other movie about a sex worker, Starlet, and his other movie about a sex worker, The Florida Project. Look, I think Sean is a huge talent, but he does think about whores a lot.”
Maher concluded the segment by explaining why he thinks “whore was a better term” than “sex worker community.”
“You can get so caught up in the virtue signaling that you actually do harm to the cause, and using ‘sex worker’ makes it sound too benign, like it’s a temp job at a call center being done by a woman in a cubicle with a cactus on her desk,” the comedian said. “But it’s not that, and it’s not usually the woman’s choice to do it. The language may have changed, but the job hasn’t.”
The guests featured on the latest episode of Real Time included Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, journalist and author Batya Ungar-Sargon, and journalist Sam Stein.
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