[This is Chapter 1.3 of Sex, Cash & Privacy: A Case for Allowing People to Profit From Their Own Sexuality in Peace. For previous and subsequent segments, click on that link.]
With all that, let’s get back to Ashley Judd’s genuinely impressive sexual performance in Normal Life. In this film, she deftly plays an emotionally-unhinged lab technician, with a passion for astronomy, and a serious problem with pills, alcohol, and overspending. She gets involved with a cop played by Luke Perry. Her sexuality (starting from an inability to orgasm) begins to open up to him, the more she spends his money, and the more he lavishes her with gifts he can’t afford on his cop’s salary. Liking the sexual effect his gift-giving has on her, Perry eventually turns to bank robberies to fund their lifestyle. Their newly-rich lifestyle leads to increasingly explosive sex between them, including the fuck-a-thon described at the opening of this chapter.
Here, a production company “bought sexual access” to Luke Perry and Ashley Judd for their explicit and impassioned performance. This purchase including access to their “orifices” as they made out with each other passionately, and as Luke Perry licked Judd’s cleavage.
(Note: the phrases in quotation marks in the paragraph above, and in the paragraph below, are from Ashley Judd’s tweet about sex work here.)
Was this “body invasion”—as Judd calls sex work—of Perry’s mouth into Judd’s mouth and vice-versa “inherently harmful” to either? Was “cash the proof of coercion” for Judd’s sexual performance? And if “buying sexual access commodifies something that is beyond the realm of capitalism and entrepreneurship,” as Judd puts it, then why did she accept payment for this sexual performance? Is the Hollywood film industry not a part of capitalism?