Olivier Meys’s 2017 film Bitter Flowers tells the story of Lina, a laid-off factory worker from China’s northeast in the late 1990s, who goes to France to work as a nanny in order to lift her family out of poverty and help her husband open a shop. Life in France turns out to be far harder than she imagined, and Lina is eventually forced into street prostitution. But paper can’t wrap fire forever — after she has saved up enough money to return home, her husband finds out anyway. In the end, he leaves the family, and Lina sets out on a path of reconciliation, seeking his forgiveness…

It’s said that the director spent a long time researching the lives of streetwalkers in Paris, which gives the film its understated, lived-in realism. Whenever Lina talks to her family on the phone, she’s evasive; when asked how she’s doing, she mumbles vague answers. This fear that comes with being a sex worker is something we can easily understand. Films on similar subjects, like Irina Palm and La Marcheuse, capture this same emotion. But setting aside Lina’s personal struggle, the film also prompts some other lines of thought.

A 2014 estimate put the economic activity generated by the sex trade in eight major U.S. cities at no less than four billion dollars a year. Judging by the substantial sums Lina earns, that figure may even be conservative. We can easily spot a recurring “social narrative” here — whenever someone is backed into a corner with no other options, a story is born about a good person forced into prostitution. What does the existence of such a vast economy, set against a “social narrative” that can’t possibly account for all of it, actually tell us? And it’s precisely because of these visceral, bloody stories that feminists convince themselves the sex trade degrades women’s dignity. One has to ask: in a market that large, is there really no one who enters the trade by choice? Is everyone really driven to it as a last resort?

That said, social pressure is of course real, and I imagine anyone entering the sex trade has to go through some process of overcoming it. In the end, very few could be as at ease as Maggie, the protagonist of Irina Palm, casually telling a friend that her occupational hazard is “Penis Elbow.”