Tick ​​sex positions on a bingo card

“Are you allowed to show that on TV?” asks the colossal naked German as the sex worker climbs on him. “I’m going to blur, you know,” the camerawoman says off-screen. “We’re blurring the action”, the sex worker clarifies, while a vague spot does appear in the picture at the height of ‘the action’. Moments earlier, the woman, lying on the bed with bare breasts, explained in a good mood that some things are more expensive: “Anal requires some preparation. If you want extra sauce on your sandwich, you understand, you also pay for the extra sauce.”

The four-part docuseries sex angels (PowNed) begins with a clear statement that emphasizes the professional pride and frustration of the sex workers portrayed in it. No one forced them, yet “society treats them like scum.” Director Sahar Meradji wants to show the oldest profession in the world in its most everyday form. She films her main characters Emma, ​​Lolita, Linda and Moira while they are at work, showering before an appointment and updating their paperwork.

Indeed, the everydayness of the scenes is striking. For example, we see how Emma comforts her two-year-old daughter before going to work, who reports to her mother with an inexplicable pain. She works from a secondary house attached to her regular home. “Sometimes a customer comes, that takes half an hour and then I’m ready again.” In the meantime, her husband is playing games or he is painting a wall (they are renovating). “It’s not that I think I’m going to participate or anything.” Emma is indeed back after half an hour: „It was not very exciting. That sounds a bit silly, but yes.”

No cut has been made on the domestic scenes when making sex angelsBut neither is the sex. For example, Linda explains using images that she enjoys making hardcore porn films and has Moira record how she records a video as an SM mistress. (A kind of ‘everything you always wanted to know about clothespins but were afraid to ask’, but different.)

Ultimate girlfriend experience

27-year-old Lolita wants to give her customers the “ultimate girlfriend experience”. She scatters rose petals on her bed and puts on a costume for a shy young man in a cap. The camera remains in the living room when Lolita and her client enter the bedroom and he announces that it “could be a good explosion.” Such an intimate sentence actually makes you feel more like a voyeur than the nakedness in the picture.

Afterwards, the viewer is told Lolita’s actions (“she gave him oral pleasure, then they did two sex positions and he came”) as if something had to be ticked on a bingo card. Lolita has to move on quickly. In the fifteen minutes before her next customer reports, she quickly prepares a plate of scrambled eggs for herself. Between bites she prepares the toys she thinks she needs. After the third customer of the day, she is exhausted, she says.

In spite of the good cheer, tragedy seeps through the domesticity. We see how Emma is grumpy waiting for a customer who doesn’t show up, which turns out to happen every week. Still four hundred euros a month, she calculates. Lolita takes DNA spray to a meeting with a man she’s heard bad stories about in the fellow app. Linda tells of a terrifying hour with a coke-filled customer who wanted her to play a nine-year-old girl and call him “pedo.”

This is how . offers sex angels at times illusory realism. When Meradji asks about what she feels during sex, Emma finally says: “I can feel it, but there is no feeling.”