A Tale of Two Moxes
Early on in Cyberpunk 2077, players will inevitably encounter The Mox. The Mox are one of the various gangs of Night City. They stand out, not just from their distinctive style (every gang in Night City has one), but from their very nature. The Mox are a protective gang. Their goals have little to do with running Night City or reaping the few unsavory benefits of a dystopian neon-noir future. Moxes exist solely to protect sex workers.
Evelyn Parker is one such sex worker.
Evelyn’s primary gig is as the escort of Yorinobu Arasaka, one of a handful of heirs to Saburo Arasaka, the head of the Arasaka corporation. A former (or maybe sometimes current) worker of Lizzie’s strip club and a “doll”* at the neon soaked dream of a brothel, Clouds.
Unlike sex workers in other games, Evelyn is not there for shits and giggles. An entity far beyond set dressing, she doesn’t exist to be treated with casual dehumanization of varying degrees without consequence, as we’re so used to from other video games. She is driven, intelligent, and commanding. All the same, she is reckless, over confident, and desperate. You know, like a real human being might be. Cyberpunk 2077’s inciting incident happens on the back of her plan. Evelyn breathes such life into the game that early on it seems possible she could be anything from a love interest to an antagonist. Hell, maybe both.
And so the Mox’s central hub, Lizzie’s, is a necessary stop during a string of required gigs in Act I. Lizzie’s takes its name from Elizabeth “Lizzie” Borden, a former sex worker turned club owner who prioritized fair pay and terms for all sex workers. When the Tyger Claws, another gang who are unfortunately still deeply tied to the club and sex work in the events of the game, harmed her workers Lizzie retaliated. The Tyger Claws in turn had her killed.
This is one of the real stand out elements of Cyberpunk 2077. The sex workers aren’t just decor. They don’t escape the brutality of the dark future by any means and hyper sexualization does not translate to sex positive. But sex workers are people. They move the plot, they influence the story, they’re woven into the very fabric of this cyberpunk world. Characters naturally have varying opinions on sex work and sex workers but the existence of these people is not built into the world to be a condemnation of their choices. If anything, the flesh and blood element of sex work is a welcome reprieve to the hard plastic of sex toys littered throughout the poorer areas of Night City, a breath of fresh air to find humanity juxtaposed to the über-horny advertisements for MILFguard, Bottoms Up!, and more. To put it simply, “high tech, low life” touches this part of society with as much nuance as it does every other.
In 2024 this shouldn’t be so significant, but Cyberpunk 2077 really commits to giving sex workers humanity.
As Rhiannon Bevan states in Where Cyberpunk 2077 Succeeds: Giving Sex Workers A Story, “As difficult as it is to see, it’s a full story, much more than sex workers have got in the past in video games. Rather than reveling in the violent misogyny, Cyberpunk reflects it in all of its ugliness and comments on how we ourselves view the people in that line of work.”
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think CD Projekt Red set out to do extensive social commentary on the nature of sex work. Some, perhaps rightfully, think that it’s a failure to not do so. If I’m honest, I go back and forth on that myself. What conviction remains on both sides of that pendulum swing is that I’m glad to see sex work be a thing a person does. I’m glad to see it be a job that has opportunities, pitfalls, pros and cons, inherent risk and seekable danger, just like every other job in stories like these. It’s never painted as the easy thing to do and it also isn’t villainized as a career that everyone inherently needs to be saved from.
Of course, Evelyn dies. Killing off any female character is fraught, but particularly one involved in sex work, a sex worker who was an escort to a very powerful person. It needed to be handled with care.
I believe that it was.
Evelyn’s death is deeply meaningful within the context of the game. The torture and death of a sex worker is not sold to us an inevitable. Through the urgency of Judy, a romanceable techno genius who is at the very least a most devoted friend to Evelyn, and the necessity of these quests to get to the rest of the game, Cyberpunk 2077 prioritizes finding and saving Evelyn. Initially, you do save her. You investigate Clouds, you interview her friends, you question (and optionally kill) her horrific boss, you interview (and maybe beat up) a sketchy RipperDoc who exploits sex workers who have nowhere else to go, you trace a series of violent, non-consensual BDs, and you crack the case.
I am often frustrated by the use of suicide in edgy little narratives but in the scope of Evelyn’s life to us, to the protagonist V, it’s haunting and beautiful that she dies by her own hand. There are worse things than death as a sentiment is arguably the largest thread throughout the entirety of the narrative. And it starts here.
It starts with Evelyn.
The weight of what happens to Evelyn- incapacitated, hacked as a punishment for reaching too high by a gang who devalues her for her meddling and outlier status before they do so for sex work, abused by her boss then tossed away to be BD fodder, conscious but paralyzed for the entire horrific experience- is not delivered purely as detail to prove how hardcore this story is…
Judy makes that impossible. Her frustration, her horror, her grief, coming miles before Evelyn is really gone.
The physical existence of Evelyn makes it impossible. It is you, your V, who must disconnect Evelyn from the BD equipment and carry her body, badly bruised and more. As you carry Evelyn to relative safety in a jacket you picked out, with arms and hands you customized perhaps to resemble your own, the game forces you to move at half your walking speed. Forget about your little joystick power walking. Evelyn has weight. You cannot rush past this. You cannot run from this. Confident, smart-mouthed, strong-willed, Evelyn, is in your arms, barely alive, bruised, bloodied, and worse, reduced to the weight of the quest line.
When you return to Judy’s apartment, Evelyn is barely responsive. She flinches at touch but does not speak. She won’t even look at you. Not even at Judy.
Evelyn’s life officially ends off screen. Judy goes out for supplies and returns to find her gone, she recounts over a call. You go to her. Once again, Judy asks you to carry Evelyn. You lift her now truly lifeless form from the bathtub and take her into Judy’s small bedroom. It is somehow less awful than the first time you carried her.
Johnny Silverhand makes a few comments earlier in the game that you’d expect of a bitter edgelord. He is none too pleased as Evelyn’s death takes with it your clearest hope for a solution to the Relic he is trapped on, the one causing him to replace your synaptic patterns and memories with his own whether he wants it or not. Confronted with the reality of Evelyn’s suffering, even he is stunned. There are no quips, no superiority complexes, no womanizing tag lines left. Johnny shares your body, feels what you feel. This fragmented existence finds him, for not the first time, feeling the weight of a bright, bold woman gone slack in his arms.
Just as Alt Cunningham haunts Johnny Silverhand, as Johnny Silverhand haunts you, as So Mi haunts Reed (and arguably Meyers) in the Phantom Liberty DLC, Evelyn haunts the entire narrative.
So I was surprised when Cyberpunk 2077: No Coincidence, the spin-off standalone novel by Rafal Kosik, seemed to disregard the sentiments and nuances of the canon of the game so early in his story.
As a note: neither the story of No Coincidence or the formation of the Mox have concrete dates that I have found (though I am still in the process of organizing years of Cyberpunk 2077 screen captures and will be replaying the game specifically to note the sex work elements). However, due to a main character’s asserted timeline in relationship to war and an old post on Cyberpunk 2077’s socials in 2020, it’s possible that the events of No Coincidence and the murder of Lizzie happened in the same year (2076) and so the formation of the Mox was only just beginning in the timeline of No Coincidence. It is my belief that the Mox is far more established than this but I thought I’d mention it in any case.
No Coincidence has frankly too many POV characters for both its length and substance (and its inevitable framing of one character, Zor, as the true protagonist regardless). One such character is Aya, a stripper at an unnamed club in Night City. There are clear problems with this depiction of sex work right away but for now I want to focus on a few things.
Aya is not like other girls.
She doesn’t like sex work, she likes dancing. The implication seems to be that she is above all of this, which for obvious reasons has the potential to be (and ultimately is) harmful regarding the tropes that aid or even encourage us to dehumanize sex workers in real life. Aya desperately needs the money but refuses to do many of the gigs the other workers do as standard. She doesn’t scroll BDs. She doesn’t have sex for money. The workers who do- women, only one male sex worker is mentioned despite the game’s inclusion extending to men, women, and direct nods to various gender expressions- are sold as foolish, either because their goals aren’t lucrative (despite BDs being a huge deal in the game and Aya also remaining broke as fuck) or because their character is in some other way too casual, too silly.
While these boundaries are of course feasible, valid, and should be respected when set by sex workers, Kosik’s motivations are questionable in the context he provides. Kosik couldn’t find the time to create a better term than “synth-vag” for sex enhancing cybernetics but he did take the time to ground Aya’s perspective as the good and smart one, largely because she is miserable and doesn’t enjoy sex work. My excitement for a POV character that was actively involved in sex work faded as soon as I realized she would be the main love interest for who Kosik just won’t admit is his only protagonist, Zor. I’m not opposed to a love story but here, being Zor’s love interest means that she never crosses the line into being touched by others for work or having tangible, followable proof of sex work as a part of this gig. She is the painfully patriarchal fantasy of an innocent Madonna who knows everything a dirty whore does.
Inevitably, Aya finds herself forced into situations she is uncomfortable with (a pink token summoning her to a booth for a private dance) and one she is outright against (a red token symbolizing a private room and “something much more intimate than a dance”).
This happens as Zor sits at the bar with a coworker and, having worked with Aya on the strange motley crew’d gig that opens the book, notices her in the booth and finds something “familiar” in her dance moves. I guess she twerks the way she shoots? It’s important that you know this is just as much about Zor as it is Aya.
Aya grabs the clothes she dropped in her striptease and backs away, saying she doesn’t want to. The man responds with a smile, “the fuck do I care?”
As she tries to escape, a few things happen. The club security witnesses the act and refuses to help her. Dora, her fellow sex worker, also refuses to help her, rolling her eyes when she sees Aya in trouble, saying, “grow up already. Fucking princess…”
Her boss, Crispy (I don’t know why he made up a gal named Crispy), makes eye contact with Aya and still does nothing. Even the two women who accompanied her client seem suddenly animated and excited to watch her be brutalized and humbled. Sure, women aren’t beacons of openness when it comes to sex work and within any oppressed or maligned group there is bound to be a whole lot of internalized -isms. But why on earth make every single women Aya has interacted with a bad guy who doesn’t care about her? Twisted sorts who even like the idea of this happening to her?
Well, OF COURSE it’s so that a man can save her.
It’s a slap in the face to Cyberpunk 2077’s careful work of establishing sex work as is.
It hits even harder when you take a look at No Coincidence’s description of club security and compare it to the Mox.
We cut to Zor who takes a break from thinking about his dead wife to notice the row taking place and thinking to himself that security will do nothing, “Wouldn’t surprise him if the club’s bouncers pretended not to notice. Zor spotted them immediately. Mean-looking punkettes, almost all, pretending to be preoccupied with something else.”
He’s describing the Mox. A few paragraphs later, he makes it even clearer.
“The bouncers couldn’t keep up their stone — faced charade any longer . Five girls with spiked baseball bats stood in a semicircle around the epicenter of the brawl . Tipped with something , probably . Even so , five of them — one of him.”
The unique gang style for the Mox is all of the above. Mean-looking punkettes. Spiked baseball bats, sometimes other melee weapons. Kosik’s description is only particular about these elements. It’s as if he missed or ignored what the Mox is, what they stand for entirely. A man who took the job writing a Cyberpunk 2077 novel either doesn’t understand why the Mox are “mean-looking punkettes” who fill the local strip club or he doesn’t care.
My first read of Cyberpunk 2077: No Coincidence, I found myself wishing I was instead spending my time reading the frankly much better fan fictions I had bookmarked on AO3. But I pushed myself to keep going, to finish the book. Maybe there would be some twist that would make it all worth it. Maybe I just loved this world too much, was being too sensitive. With time, I find myself more and more upset that for all of the elements Rafal Kosik did prioritize, the execution lacked the depth, nuance, and emotionality of even the most basic cut scene in the game. And I think it’s a symptom of the larger issue…
Many people either won’t recognize or won’t care to contemplate the nuances of the grimdark future. Especially when it comes to sex work. Not even if they decided to make a POV character someone in that world.
— —
This piece is part of larger project on sex work in modern Cyberpunk stories. You can learn more, support the project, and get early access to pieces like these by joining my ko-fi.
— —
*a brief introduction to sex work in Cyberpunk 2077 — you have joytoys, dolls, scrollers, dancers, and some who do a little bit of everything. At Lizzie’s, folks are dancing on stage or privately and may go into private rooms to join someone “scrolling” a Braindance or BD (a full sensory video experience) starring the SWer. Joytoys are traditional sex workers (though it’s heavily implied in the game that many of them have special cybernetic enhancements for said work) and Dolls have an implanted behavioral chip that allows them to run through specific fantasy sequences while being checked out of the work. This is similar to “Meat puppets” (ugh) in Neuromancer and also similar to the 2011 film Sleeping Beauty, if that is helpful context
