Women’s pleasure on the agenda thanks to Emma Thompson’s new film

Emma Thompson has been generating a conversation about women’s sexual empowerment. The importance of it. The barriers to it. And, one rarely considered pathway to it – paying for it.

Since starring as retired religious education teacher Nancy Stokes, who employs a sex worker in the recent film, Good Luck to you, Leo Grande, Thompson has been vocal about the effect playing the role has had on her private life. She now understands the patriarchy as the system supporting the slut-shaming of empowered women and robbing them of their true sexual potential. And she is angry.

Emma Thompson plays Nancy, a recently widowed woman looking for the pleasure she has long craved, with sex worker Leo, played by Daryl McCormack.Credit: AP

The public response has been largely heartening. Suddenly, the gender gap in sexual satisfaction is in mainstream consciousness and the benefits of sexual thrills to physical and mental health have been illuminated. The right to women’s sexual pleasure has been championed in various interviews regarding the movie.

What has seemed glaringly obvious in its omission from this otherwise sex-positive, feminist conversation of support for Nancy’s sexual awakening has been the significance of the sex worker, Leo, played by Daryl McCormack. Leo gives Nancy an education into the political and sexual plight of her status as a woman.

Given it’s a film, the viewer might be forgiven for thinking Nancy’s awakening has no basis in reality. However, women can, and do, learn sexual life skills from sex workers.

The benefits of women paying for the services of sex workers were found to be transformative in my doctoral research about women buying sexual services in Australia. Sexual pleasure was a motivator for the women I interviewed to learn to identify their desires, initiate, negotiate and control their sexual activity. Acquiring these skills gave the women a feeling of power that allowed them to challenge both the stereotypes about women’s sexuality and the gendered roles that keep women in subservient positions to men.

Women buying sexual services have largely been overlooked or dismissed due to the skewed way in which we think about the sex industry. The fact women buy sexual services from sex workers has been sanitised by arguments such as not many women do this (not true), or that the behaviour of women and men buying sexual services is different (also not true).

We don’t know how many people buy sexual services because the characterisation of sex work is far removed from the reality. Not everyone is willing to admit to seeing a sex worker, and if they do, women often think they are not paying for sex in ways they believe men do. This is because most people don’t know that buying sexual services includes human connection and intimacy, perhaps some therapy, or some other defined goal not habitually linked to sex as work.

Another reason why we don’t know how many women buy sexual services is because gender-role-purists construct men as being inherently exploitative when they buy sexual services from women, but women doing the same thing as errant.

Half of the 21 women I interviewed for my research said they had therapeutic goals such as healing from sexual trauma or physical conditions such as vaginismus (painful or impossible penetration due to vaginal spasm). Others wanted to learn about their bodies and sexual function, and experiment with different desires or types of partners.

Another huge benefit the women shared was about being able to explore their responses to receiving pleasure, particularly in a situation where they didn’t have to consider the sexual needs of the other person. They said they had not experienced this luxury in their previous sexual lives. All the women I interviewed described feeling more confident in general as well as in the bedroom, after seeing a sex worker.

Thompson’s promotion of the importance of women’s sexual pleasure is well over-due. And let’s not forget that women can and do learn about their bodies and pleasure through the work of sex workers.