So there’s this guy. I’m not going to link to his stuff, because I don’t want to give him the clicks. But he’s made a video and put together an entire website about how every single Oscar-winning actress has played I believe his exact phrasing is “a character related to the sex trade industry.” As you might suspect, there’s a lot of wiggle room there, and he takes full advantage of that. Which is a shame, because it actually obscures the validity of an argument, which is that a lot of Oscar-winning actresses have played sex workers, and that’s something we don’t really address.

I mean, I’ve written before about the ubiquity of strip clubs scenes in movies and TV, and how many movie prostitutes there seem to be. And of course, that means that some of the roles are indisputable sex workers of one sort or another; no one can argue that Shirley MacLaine, Jodie Foster, and Julia Roberts have played prostitutes, though none of those three won for their prostitute role. On the other hand, the guy stretches the point by including at least two women who have played actual literal sex slaves, one who played the maid of a prostitute, and one who apparently played a prostitute in a church production of the Book of Jonah when she was nine. (What the hell kind of church did Jennifer Lawrence go to anyway?) Not to mention anyone who’s ever played a gun moll or Blanche DuBois.

Still, the number has to be as high as eighty percent. Everything from saloon madams to kept women to, well, Julia Roberts and Jodie Foster. Both of whom arguably made their careers by playing prostitutes. A fair number of women have actually been nominated for playing sex workers, and Janet Gaynor, who won the very first Best Actress award, even played a prostitute in one of the films listed for her nomination and attempted prostitution in a second. It’s a very long tradition, clearly.

If there is a corresponding tradition for men, a very little skimming through the list suggests it’s either lawmen of some sort—cops, detectives, and the like—or else soldiers. An argument can be made that a few of the male winners have played prostitutes, but it’s of course nowhere near as high as a percentage. (Would it have been higher if River Phoenix had lived? Probably.) Instead, their unifying role seems to be those who enforce social order.

It’s a thing to think about, anyway. Why the prostitutes? I suppose the reason for having saloon madams is that most of the women in certain Old West towns in certain times were prostitutes, and you have to have women in there to keep us from wondering if all those men are gay. I get that. But really, when you break down numbers, it starts getting seriously disturbing.

Once again, I’m loathe to start using the phrase “Madonna/whore complex,” but I do think it’s there. Because what a lot of these women have actually won for—and that includes Brie Larson, not to mention both Shirley MacLaine and Julia Roberts—is playing mothers. It’s far from universal, but it seems clear that the quickest path to an Oscar for a woman is to play a mother or other caregiver. Even if your character isn’t a good mother, just having kids is clearly the way to go.

These are all serious points worthy of discussion, and I’m really just skimming the surface of what there is to say about it. There’s the fact that even a lot of the women who haven’t actually played sex workers have played women who are in the movie’s eyes defined by who they’re having sex with. He picks on Blanche, but if Blanche had actually been making money, she wouldn’t have had to move in with the Kowalskis. But is not Stella equally defined by her sexual relationship with Stanley? It’s appalling to consider Lupita Nyong’o as having played “a character related to the sex trade industry” for having been in an acclaimed play where she plays a Liberian sex slave, for counting Brie Larson’s role in Room as being connected to the sex trade. But still, they were playing women defined by their sexual relationship to a man. In both cases, we see them on their own terms; in Eclipsed, the man raping Nyong’o’s character doesn’t even appear. But is that the case for even the theoretically free Joanna Kramer (Meryl Streep)? Or do we see her as she relates to her ex-husband and son?

It’s complicated stuff. It really is. How sex and women’s sexuality are shown onscreen, have been shown onscreen for the nearly hundred years of the Academy’s existence, is not something that’s going to be resolved in one article or by one data point, fascinating a data point as it turns out to be. We could go back and forth about this for a long time and not resolve everything. This guy did us no favours by stretching the point to breaking.

Because seriously, Hattie McDaniel?