Roastie.

https://psmag.com/social-justice/actresses-and-sex-workers-arent-so-different

For centuries, actresses and sex workers faced similar stigmas due to the performative, public nature of their professions—which, in the case of acting, has only recently fallen away.

Kirsten Pullen, an assistant professor of performance studies at Texas A&M University, has written at length about the overlapping categories of “actress” and “whore” throughout history. In her 2005 book Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society, she writes that there is an "enduring tie” between prostitutes and performance. From Eleanor “Nell” Gwyn, who was both an actress and mistress to King Charles II, to Mae West, who was arrested for her stage performance of a sex worker, actresses have often been branded with stigma due to a combination of eroticism and visibility. Because they worked outside the home and occasionally emphasized their attractiveness and sexuality in performances, actresses on the stage were also perceived to be disreputable, publicly available women—whether or not they actually sold sex for money.

Not so long ago, it was thought that women who acted for a living needed to be pulled out from a bad employment situation. In the 19th century, social workers who took prostitutes from the streets and trained them for “respectable” jobs also “rescued” dancers and actresses. This, Pullen wrote me in an email, was because these do-gooders assumed actresses “were only a small step away from prostitution (if that).” Two centuries ago, activists and reformers might have signed petitions calling for Meryl Streep to be saved from violence on the set of It's Complicated, or argued that her workplace should be criminalized in order to protect her from casting directors and talent agents.