LAURA OHIO | IN REAL LIFE
Sound by Ryan Snyder

She is both a goddess and a woman. Any woman. Both faceless and singular. She asks him what he wants, verbally or not. She finds a way to accomplish it so that they meet halfway between his fantasy and her own interests and expectations. She is paid well.

A piece of sandwich foil is crushed underneath a woman’s shoe. She doesn’t notice the foil or him, watching. As a child he had a reputation for being well behaved. When his aunt would come over with his cousins, he would lie still underneath her feet at the kitchen table until she was ready to leave.

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Like art, sex is a playspace. We may choose to inhabit cliches, power reversals, or engage in humiliating acts for the thrill and satisfaction of it. We can find ourselves or forget ourselves in it. We can leave when we want to; the same or transformed.

Alfred Gell, an anthropologist of art among other things, wrote that art is “a system of action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it.”

Sex workers have a set of tools, codes, and archetypes with which to work. It’s a job, yes. But because it involves sex it is also a game. And while we use the rules handed to us (the ones that value certain bodies for some things and not others) our work does not encode propositions about the world or cement ideas about the value of women. In fact, we break the most coveted rules about what women are supposed to do with sex.

In Real Life is a short experimental documentary about the mediation of fantasy and reality. The video blends truth with fiction and categorizes art work and sex work as “affective labour”: involving the production of emotional experiences, the construction of fantasy, and the business of “selling oneself.”

LIES:

The film was not just an elaborate excuse to wear the green dress

I loved listening to you tell me your life story

I did not feign interest so that you would be in my film

I was not in love at the time of making this video; they were not in love with someone else

I did not roll my eyes when you told me you were enjoying it because I was enjoying it

I did not take a shit in the bush closest to the parking lot after we were done filming

I did not feel sorry for you





Special thanks to Dylan Pearce and aAron Munson
Made with the support of the Edmonton Arts Council
www.laura-ohio.com