But more than just humanizing the sex trade, The Deuce offers a sharp critique of the inequalities and exploitations of late capitalism by examining sex work as labor—highly lucrative labor—that comes saddled with a stigma that makes it easy to abuse. "What I stumbled into seemed to be a ready-made critique of market capitalism and what happens when labor has no collective voice," Simon told The Guardian. "That seemed to be apt for this moment because I think a lot of the lessons of the 20th century are going to have to be learned all over again thanks to Reagan and Thatcher and all the neoliberal and libertarian argument that has come after."

This is Simon’s stock-in-trade. His most famous and beloved series, The Wire, earned praise for being less about drugs—or moralizing about drugs—and more about the systematic forces that preyed on marginalized people trying to survive. The Deuce, similarly, is less concerned with sex itself or the morality of sex work and more with the societal layers that combine to make sex workers’ lives worse: misogyny; a legal system more interested in punishing them than protecting them; and, of course, capitalism.

Although free enterprise has a way of reducing all human beings to how well their bodies generate money, its intersection with sex is especially fraught. Sex work means commodifying an act so intense and varied that, depending on who is doing it and why, it can mean love, pleasure, procreation, or degradation. For its part, The Deuce doesn’t offer much commentary on whether sex work is inherently exploitative, only that many of the socioeconomic forces swirling around it certainly are.

The Deuce doesn’t offer much commentary on whether sex work is inherently exploitative, only that many of the socioeconomic forces swirling around it certainly are.

The most obvious sources of exploitation are the pimps, who hang around train stations looking for fresh-faced girls arriving in the big city, and then break them down psychologically and physically until they’re obedient and codependent. At the end of night, the women turn all their earnings over to their pimps; keeping any of their hard-earned cash for themselves is a quick way to get a beating. Although the show doesn’t make the pimps into cackling villains, it’s difficult to see the them as anything besides abusive middlemen profiting off of other people’s work—an arrangement that may look intimately familiar to many corporate employees.

The women are treated as commodities not just conceptually but literally; when an inexperienced girl named Bernice gets lured into the trade, her first pimp sells her to another for $2,000. When a young woman named Darlene ends up with a bruise on her face from a customer who went too far with the rough sex, her pimp Larry is furious, indignant. He tells Darlene to relay a warning: "If he fucks you up like this again, he’s gonna have me raise up on him." Of course, Larry beats Darlene and his other girls too—but they’re his. He’s not defending a woman he cares about so much as protecting something he owns. An assault on her is an assault on both his merchandise and his reputation, and he responds accordingly.

One exception to the rule is Gentle Ritchie, a mumbly, mellow pimp with Marxist leanings. He never abuses the one woman who works for him and actually seems to value her as a person, a laid-back approach that earns him scorn from the other pimps. "I don’t dig hierarchical oppression, man," Ritchie says when a pimp advises him to hit her for talking back. "She controls the means of production." It’s a bit of a joke at the time, but its larger point about labor becomes unexpectedly relevant.

When a pimp named Reggie rolls in to a local dive bar to drink while his girls are working, the barmaid, Abby, caustically asks him if he’s ever had a job. “I see Shay and Melissa doing all the work," she says. "I don’t know exactly what it is you do, except count the cash and treat them like shit." This is exploitation, to be sure, in all the most obvious ways. But take sex and abuse out of the equation, and you can see the same dynamic driving income equality across the country: money trickling up to people who aren’t doing the work, rather than down to the people who are.