Ziggy heath harlots character1/18/2024 ![]() ![]() Series Regulars: Samantha Morton as Margaret Wells, Lesley Manville as Lydia Quigley, Jessica Brown Findlay as Charlotte Wells, Dorothy Atkinson as Florence Scanwell, Pippa Bennett-Warner as Harriet Lennox, Rory Fleck Byrne as Daniel Marney, Kate Fleetwood as Nancy Birch, Edward Hogg as Thomas Haxby, Danny Sapani as William North, Hugh Skinner as George Howard, Eloise Smyth as Lucy Wells Team: Moira Buffini (creator, executive producer, writer), Alison Carpenter (ep), Coky Giedroyc (director), Debra Hayward (ep), China Moo-Young (director), Alison Newman (creator, ep, writer), Alison Owen (ep) At the risk of sounding anti-feminist, I am buying what they are selling. The world’s oldest profession is effectively employed to teach some of the world’s oldest lessons. As far removed chronologically as we may be, the show smacks of contemporary issues in a satisfying package. In a Trump world, women’s rights may be at their most endangered since before the feminist revolution of the 1960s, but Harlots, with its empowering feminist gaze, sets out to tell a story from female perspectives, a feat alone worth praise. The gratuitous nudity is largely reserved for the men (hello derrières) and they are often portrayed as the ones with the sexual quirks like reading poetry in bed, crawling on all fours, or cuckolding. With period dramas generally seeking upper crust society, the melange of everyday people’s key social justice issues like race (freedom papers + biracial children included), class, and even size are mixed in with unearthed specificity, gut-punching truthfulness, and a keen desire to survive + thrive that ring true even centuries later. Even the anachronistic soundtrack ranges from deep bass to guitar scratching rock. These women may sell their bodies, but admirably not wholly their souls, a common stereotype in sex work stories. For a show about sex, the women’s varying levels of connection with it as more a savvy than a pleasurable venture effectively demonstrate the way a harlot could gain personal freedom + security during a time when women were all but slaves to currency + social convention. Not that any of these issues should be disregarded - the main character sold her eldest daughter’s virginity when she was a tween + the other’s to buy a house, while she herself was auctioned off for a pair of shoes - but the show employs provocative characters, snappy dialogue, and bullish performances to attack the very uneven sexual power dynamics amongst men + women head on. So, that this ITV/Hulu co-production features a predominantly female creative team helps ease the more difficult themes of sexual trauma, human trafficking, and female reproductive authority. With prevailing legal precedent favoring perpetrators + a de facto public pardoning of the President’s putrid behavior, the commonplace terror of sexual violence against cis + trans women (of color, especially) continues to be portrayed in the media largely through the male gaze. ![]()
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