A man in Florida was charged last month with sex trafficking a 29-year-old woman whose mental abilities were at the level of a 15-year-old girl. He sold her to men who specifically enjoyed sexual acts with women of diminished intellectual capacity.
Abusers seek easy prey. Targeting individuals with vulnerabilities they can exploit is a low-risk, high-profits game. Across the country, cases from Georgia, Missouri, Florida, California, and around the world, show that women and girls with disabilities bear an increased likelihood of abuse and have a higher prevalence of sexual exploitation than their non-disabled peers.
A 2020 study found that 28% of cases of girls who were sexually trafficked had an intellectual disability compared to the 1-3% of national prevalence. The more severe physical impairment and low cognitive abilities, the higher the risks.
Women with intellectual delays also face myriad personal and socio-environmental barriers in their sexual lives, such as difficulties with lack of sexual experience and negative sexual experiences with nondisabled individuals.
This sobering reality is the backdrop to one of the most critically lauded films of the year, Poor Things by Yorgos Lanthimos. Based on the novel by Alasdair Gray, Poor Things, earned 11 Oscar nominations and four wins, including Best Actress for Emma Stone..
Set in Victorian London, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) is a married, pregnant and depressed woman who jumps to her death from a bridge. A severely disfigured Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Defoe) plucks the unconscious woman from the river and brings her to his laboratory where he implants the brain of Bella’s fetus in her skull, reanimating Bella Baxter as an adult woman with the mind of an infant.
In real life, Bella’s condition would match many aspects of what researchers call the physical disability index, such as having limb difficulties; needing assistive care; difficulty standing, grasping or holding items; as well as low cognitive ability that includes the capacity to understand the sexual self. The mad scientist, whom Bella refers to first as Papa and then as “God,” observes her development from a state of toddlerhood into adolescence.
The men who take care of Bella refer to her as a “pretty retard” who learns 15 words a day. Her uncontrollable tantrums lead them to drug her into unconscious sedation.
Bella learns to walk, speak, toilet train, greet visitors without punching them, and discovers the pleasures of masturbation, which she performs at the dining table. Quickly, Bella decides she wants more orgasms.
So “God” arranges to marry Bella to his feckless student, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef). However, “God”’s smarmy lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) instead whisks Bella away to Portugal, promising to satisfy her unquenched sexual desires.
Midway through the film, we find out that discovering ones clitoris and enjoying the biological responses of sex are not passports to sexual abuse and in no way leads to self-awareness about the endangerments of sexual exploitation.
Things do not go to plan and Bella’s kidnapper-lover becomes broke and homeless. Looking for a solution, Bella walks into a brothel in Paris and is welcomed by a madam who tells her if one needs money, this place is the shortest route to acquire it.
Bella seems intrigued by the string of hideous and foul-smelling sex buyers who select her on the auction line. “How it agrees with you to be ravaged,” says one. Another ties her up in a leather BDSM getup. A father orders his two adolescent sons to take notes as they watch him fornicate with Bella.
When Bella blurts out a random thought, the pimp informs the sex buyer that “she is new and may have a mental illness.” She is his pick for the night.
Bella begins to exhibit dissociation (“I feel nothing”, she says) and signs of depression, trapped in controlled manipulation with no safeguards to protect her. Indeed, victims of sexual exploitation can acquire physical, cognitive or emotional disabilities in the course of their abuse. The sexual exploitation of girls with reduced mental capacity is no laughing matter; what Bella endures fits the legal definition of sex trafficking.
The movie invites us to see Bella’s evolution as a tale of women’s emancipation and sexual liberation. But really, she is an experiment subjected to a sadistic chains of events, camouflaged by extravagant and colorful costumes. Bella admits, as she stares into nowhere, that she always thinks life will be better.
The brothel scenes are not unusual. From Pretty Woman, to Hustlers, to Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, Hollywood has a sweet tooth for glamorizing prostitution and a strong track record on its brutal treatment of women.
Most film critics praised Poor Things for its “surreal humor,” “contagious fun,” or as “creatively uninhibited.” The film won a Golden Globe for Best Comedy or Musical, and Stone for Best Actress for her performance. But Lanthimos’ cinematographic fantasy of men purchasing a woman with impaired faculties for sex is neither original nor humorous.
Bella is not the female version of Frankenstein. Unlike Bella, he is not the constant object of male sexual desire and control. Even as her intellectual development progresses – Bella reads Emerson and opines on socialism -her social integration and cognitive abilities to process her position in the world remain limited.
“God” says he could have kept Bella alive but preferred the experiment of observing what a fetus’s brain in a woman’s body could generate. She is the captive of a series of men, each enthralled with creating a cage of their design and desires.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities considers the vulnerability of people with disabilities – including those with long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments – may hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others.
Disability rights advocates call to collect data and conduct research on the links between sex trafficking and people with disabilities, and report that women and girls with disabilities remain invisible in laws and policies to prevent sexual exploitation. It would appear to be the case in Hollywood as well.
Some movie-goers would ask us to lighten up: turning the vicissitudes of life into comedy releases anxiety and makes us laugh at fate’s sordid twists.
Perhaps. But neither Stone’s superb performance as Bella nor the avant-garde Dali-esque set design, which also garnered an Oscar, can mask that Poor Things is yet another production of misogynists’ dream: to create, own, control, sexualize, infantilize, and commodify women at their pleasure. One of Hollywood’s favorite themes.
About the Author: Taina Bien-Aime is the Executive Director of Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW)
