It’s no secret that the media loves to reduce people into tropes and cautionary tales, especially when it comes to sex workers. The public is constantly bombarded with clichés that feed into stigma, too lazy and self-righteous to spend time listening to anyone else but their pastors and PragerU. But sex workers aren’t just a plot device or an abstraction that exists so somebody else can have a character arc. They’re actually the real main characters, and ProMomme Vol. 2 is finally giving them the pen.
After months of work, the zine for and by sex worker parents was officially released on July 23. To celebrate, the ProMomme team hosted a screening of Kim Ye’s accompanying documentary at Kult:LA to provide an inside look into the making-of process. Deeply embedded in the community herself, Ye landed intimate interviews that most film crews can only dream of while also torching the traditional media narrative that thinks of sex worker parents as “either hyper-sexual or desexed completely,” she says.
Countering the moralizing beliefs of zealous scaremongers through specificity and humanizing moments, the documentary contains adorable footage of parents interacting with their kids and a powerful and emotional group discussion that was staged to look like the set of a daytime talk show. The point was to show that sex workers are parents like any other, because apparently there aren’t enough brain cells in media to hold more than one thought about sex workers at a time.
Instead, sex workers have to save the day themselves (per usual) by using different media formats to show that the way a story travels matters as much as what’s in it, especially in our TikTok brainrot world. Because as Lain said, autonomous authorship is key to showing Hollywood and journalists what actual sex worker representation should look like.
The screening was packed, with people cheering, awwing, and laughing throughout the film and the 45-minute panel that followed. Featuring a conversation between Ye, Lotus Lain, and researcher Dr. Lauren Levitt, the panel was moderated by Chloë Flores, who curated the Feminist Center for Creative Work’s Radical Kinship exhibition. Towards the end, parents from the film were also invited onstage to answer questions and talk about their experience being part of the documentary and the power of seeing their stories on screen.
During the discussion, the panelists talked about the unfair scrutiny sex worker parents face and how it’s led to overpolicing, custody threats, and other parents not letting their kids near theirs. But as Ye noted, there’s nothing disqualifying sex workers from being parents, as both jobs are performances of care, where you show up, hold space, and support someone who’s struggling.
Meanwhile, Lain broadened the conversation to talk about organizing and advocacy, mentioning that they’re working on creating a sex worker banking union, since accounts often get frozen and funds are seized with little recourse. Dr. Levitt also got into other ways sex workers are locked out of legal, medical, and labor protections, meaning that they’ve had to build their own infrastructure based on care and connection. And last time we checked, those are two things that every good parent should have anyway.
ProMomme Vol. 2 is available now. Read our interview with Kim Ye here.