The Prince in Crypto Armor

Third episode, „Selling Sex,“ ARD Mediathek. Aurora steps out of a white van, two women with clipboards and headphones at her side, and the whole scene is so polished it almost looks like a model casting. This is the moment to stop and think. Not because of what is being shown, but because of the calm with which it is shown. No alley, no pimp, no van with blacked-out windows. Just glamour. And that is precisely where the series‘ problem begins — which is also, at the same time, its recipe for success.

„Selling Sex“ can only be judged from one of two perspectives, and the series has chosen the more comfortable one. Perspective one belongs to the target audience: ordinary viewers who arrive with fixed assumptions. Sex work is morally grey, economically exploitative, and cannot possibly involve desire or intimacy, because both are excluded from the narrative from the outset. Women are victims, clients are perpetrators — regardless of gender. To keep that watchable, the series relocates everything from the street corner to penthouse aesthetics. Female-run agencies instead of pimps, which reassures the viewer without changing the power dynamic one bit. The agency bosses ultimately behave no differently from any boss who recruits her employees as unpaid consultants for her own ego. It is not the women’s bodies that carry this series — it is the money surrounding them.

What unfolds is a modern urban fairy tale. An indebted young woman makes a decision, is not rescued in the end but supported by a prince in gleaming crypto armor, and because the show wants to be a feminist empowerment series, she eventually does her own thing. In between: generalized sex work scenes that some viewers will find plausible and others will not. For what it’s worth, I can’t picture everything that supposedly happens in the long-running soap opera „Unter uns“ either, and yet it has been running for over thirty years.

Perspective two falls by the wayside, even though the series claims to have been made from exactly that vantage point. A former escort served as a consultant and co-writer in a significant capacity. From where I stand, a considerable amount of reality had to be cut from the script to make that work.

Why am I in a position to say that? Some time ago, I spoke with Salome Balthus for the „Leben nach Maß“ podcast — Germany’s best-known sex worker — about her life as a high-end escort and about the clients who in the trade are simply called „Bucher,“ meaning bookers. We met again later at the Frankfurt Book Fair, between two stands; that time the conversation was about books rather than bookers, even if the two words sound suspiciously alike. That does not make me an expert on this world — I park somewhere in the grey zone between informed and presumptuous — but it did allow me to form my own picture, one that bears only a distant resemblance to what „Selling Sex“ puts on screen.

You will find little engagement with this second perspective in the press, because that would require someone to publicly admit they know more than the average person. That does not fit the format of a review.

What is perhaps realistic — and credit where it is due, at least for the final episode — is exactly this: unpaid feelings between Aurora and a man who immediately wants to „rescue“ her so he can live out his own dream through her. This is where the two perspectives actually meet. It is the men who use the women to get what they want for themselves. One pays with money, the other with lovestruck naivety, and in the end both are the same transaction.

„Selling Sex“ scratches the surface of an industry that is more than women in a van on the way to a bachelor party. Aurora’s exit from the escort world at the series‘ conclusion is, in reality, an entry into dependence on a single man. She could just as well have married the lover from episode six. He had a dream too. Just no bank account.

Picture: Adobe Stock as symbole

This English version was created with the help of AI (translated from the German original) and may differ slightly from a professional human translation.