TAKING STOCK

strange crossroads was met in the 1980s and ’90s. Hollywood was moving away from the gritty auteur fare and complex antiheroes of and , and more wholesome action adventures filled with quippy one-liners like and reigned supreme. This shift took place alongside the third wave of feminism, which championed more rights for every type of woman and a general embracing of sex-positivity – that a woman’s sexuality was something to be not just tolerated but celebrated. These two cultural waves crashed into one another, creating one of the defining tropes of the era, ‘The Tart With A Heart’. This was embodied by female sex workers who acted as the moral compass of the film, often while still being the object of desire, a damsel in distress and/or a punchline. Pains are taken in each film to distinguish our character from your ‘normal’ sex workers – they are more ethical, ambitious or intelligent than) and Jane Fonda as a hard-as-nails call girl catching a serial killer (), this era instead saw warm-hearted sex workers more likely to be accepting a marriage proposal than a plea-bargain.