The Stripper Consultant for 'Hustlers' on The Authenticity & Sexual Freedom in the Film

One of the biggest surprises of the Toronto Film Festival has turned out to be the Jennifer Lopez-Constance Wu starrer, Hustlers. Not only has the bold concept of the show managed to strike a chord but the authenticity, sexual freedom and dignity with which the life of a stripper is portrayed is applauded even more.

Talking about applause, the film festival had a moment when a statuesque woman strutted on stage, rocking six-inch platform heels and a pastel tie-dye bodysuit. It wasn't the stars of the film or the director but Jacqueline Frances, who was introduced as a 'comfort consultant' for the movie. According to Variety, Frances is a sex worker who goes by the handle Jacq the Stripper, and indeed served as a consultant on the STX film as a resource for both the actors and producers to combat what she says is a longstanding toxicity in our culture: “The representation of sex workers in mainstream media is trash.”

Scafaria and Frances devised the term “comfort consultant” as an offshoot of an intimacy coordinator, an increasingly popular role on film and TV sets that coaches and supervises actors through love scenes and other explicit acts surrounding the body. 

“My involvement in this film was two-fold: doing my best work to make sure strippers felt seen and represented, and also making sure the actors felt comfortable representing them and doing this work. There’s this idea that strippers just have to show up and be sexy according to what someone else thinks sexy is. That’s not really how stripping is. It’s an expression of your own sexuality and people pay you for it,” Frances said.

Frances said “Hustlers” represents a community desperate for an accurate portrayal of their emotional lives.

“Strippers are anxious about this movie. They want it to be good because a lot of the movies about strippers have been really problematic and made things worse. A lot of the narratives are really sad or pathetic, they pathologize what brought them to do this. This movie doesn’t do that,” she says.

“These are entrepreneurial women doing their best to survive. Sex workers are criminalized all the time. Banks won’t take our money if they find out we work at a strip club. PayPal will seize our assets if they find out we are [cam models] or strippers. The violence we face is from the media portraying us [like] we’re sad and destitute when we’re really just struggling to survive under capitalism,” she said.