Louis Theroux’s newest documentary looked at women who legally sell sex. Women who sleep with men they’ve met mainly on the internet for money. And I had a big issue with this documentary, that being Louis himself…

Louis follows three women in this documentary. A mother of four who was abused as a teenager. An art student who has autism and was abused as a teenager. And a mature lady who is in a long term marriage but has had difficulty with sex from her upbringing. See a pattern here?

Louis spends time with all three of them individually, learning of their lives and why they have gone into sex work; and to be honest I found their answers fairly reasonable. From needing money for university, to wanting to take back power and wanting to feel wanted it all seemed understandable to me.

Let’s look into the mother of four and the art student. Neither of these women were coerced into this job, they were doing it because they wanted to. They wanted money and enjoyed sex so why not? But Louis kept referencing that he felt like he had to save them.

And this annoyed me to no end.

Louis, being 49 years old now and with no daughters, felt like he had to help these women and not at any point did these women say they wanted to stop this job or disliked this job. Yes the mother wanted to go more into porn but really that is just a safer environment for the same sort of work. It annoyed me that Louis felt like he had to be the white knight to save these damsels that were clearly not in distress instead of just accepting that maybe they were happy. The art students’ friends put it well when they said that maybe Louis didn’t understand it because he was from a different generation.

But what shocked me was that he didn’t feel like he had to save the mature lady. Like her age meant she was more in control than the younger women who were doing the exact same job. Now, with the mature lady she is married and has been for many years. It comes across as a good marriage but her husband speaks to Louis on a few separate moments, without the wife there, about how he isn’t too happy and that the job is causing a rift.

And my question for him is: why are you telling Louis and all of Britain this but not your wife?!

Relationships are a two way street but if something is playing on your mind then you should tell the person involved. If you don’t nothing will change and you’ll be stuck in an endless hole getting deeper and deeper until you crack. You need to find balance and this can be done through compromise and if it can’t then you need to decide if you can put up and shut up or leave.

I felt that Louis in this documentary felt like the wrong person to report on it and was too detached from the women and was letting his own feelings get in the way of good reporting. He’s done it before with porn in the early 2000s and in that he seemed to be much more relaxed and open to what the people had to say. Maybe it’s time he went in a new path, his return to Westboro was brilliant, so he hasn’t completely lost his spark, just dulled it a lot with this documentary.

What do you think?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding