Since its original iteration in , The Girlfriend Experience has taken many different shapes. First, there was the Sasha Grey-starring, Steven Soderbergh-directed movie; then came a television adaptation on Starz from Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz in , with Riley Keogh starring as a legal assistant moonlighting as a sex worker for white-collar men with excessive amounts of money and sex drives.
The success of the TV version with which Soderbergh is involved as an executive producer is largely because of its depiction of women providing "the girlfriend experience," aka a sexual and romantic relationship in exchange for money and gifts. Both the film and TV series are notable departures from how most popular culture depicts sex workers, by alternately demonizing them or portraying them as victims of circumstance, in effect unwilling participants with no agency of their own.
But in The Girlfriend Experience , the women hold the power and harness it to decide what is best for them; they also don't let the rest of their lives become defined by their profession. Reflecting the ethos of its other iterations, Season 2, which premiered last night, is also something of a departure in that it takes on a new type of narrative.
The same with this. Strangely, the choreography did not include other forms of fucking that frequently occur between two women. Or do we break the cycle? Is it possible to deal with a broken cycle? Friel has been acting since she was a teenager, first starring in British TV soaps like Emmerdale and Brookside , the latter of which solidified her place in history as one-half of the first-ever lesbian kiss that aired on network TV in You can only hope for the same progress in the following 25 years.
The kiss received so much attention that Friel shied away from other sapphic roles for most of her career, hoping to distance herself from any typecasting. The series was beloved but short-lived, pulled by ABC for poor ratings. I think that would be a slightly narrow-minded way to look at it To this day, I have girls come up to me and say, "Thank you so much—you helped me.
