Flutterby™! : SFSWF&VF

Went into the city to stop by Felicity's Fetiche and a few other places, and ended up at the 2PM session of the San Francisco Sex Worker Film & Video Festival, "Sex Worker Skivvies" (ie: shorts). It was like watching demo reels with people who got more in-jokes than I. Of the fiction, Whipsmart was a funny look at the dominatrix with the roommate-from-hell; the first third of The Blind Date, a tale of a call-girl and a client who find out they know each other, was well written and performed with just the right amount of slapstick, unfortunately the rest was written on the nose, a little more subtlety would have made the point more effective. But it was fun to feel the audience reactions as the tired clichés were torn apart. Afterwards Katherine Bergeron said a few words about making Whipsmart as a film-school class project and talked about her teacher trying to impose a moral message that she thought was wrong. Sara McCool's Big Girls was a neat look at fat women in porn and sex work, including some interesting revelations on the power dynamics of some of those relationships. A few other pieces, all of which were quite watchable, although The Biter's Sex TV was as bizarre as you'd expect a French-subtitled Japanese comedy troupe to produce.

What was really striking, though, was being in the audience and hearing the murmurs of assent, the jeers, and the cheers and the applause as various takes on prostitution and sex-work in general were presented. Fun crowd, next time I think I'm going to try to clear my schedule to see more of it.