People like to tell me how I, a sex worker, should feel about Anora, the film about a young stripper named Ani that won five Oscars this year, including Best Picture. I am told I should find the film either insulting or unrealistic for how it depicts Ani (played by Mikey Madison), being mistreated and humiliated after marrying her young, wealthy Russian client Vanya (played by Mark Eydelshteyn) against the wishes of his family. In fact, I found it affirming and realistic.
I’ve spent 12 years in full-service sex work, having sex with men for money, with ten of those years spent in brothels and parlours. For me, Anora accurately captures the dynamics of a workplace that is both sexual and social; the skills and routines you use when you see back-to-back clients; and the way you move between performance and authenticity in a constant merging of the real and unreal, until sometimes you lose track of where the performance begins and ends.
I can’t speak to the specifics of the language used in Anora given that, as a “prostitute”, I am denied entry to the US. But I can speak to the depiction of the work itself—that of the sex worker and her muddied relationship with her client. We like to imagine ourselves as invulnerable to the lies clients tell us, but it makes sense to me that Ani would seek stability by marrying a “whale” (a high-value client who brings a lot of money to a business). Just as it makes sense that this situation would fast disintegrate, when her new husband’s family intervenes and he won’t offer her the support she needs.
Some sex workers I know have tried to turn a client into a sugar daddy or to find an arrangement that gives them better legal protection; most soon learned that the client could not be relied upon. I ended up in plenty of upsetting scenarios myself, when I was in my twenties and desperately dreaming of an escape from night shifts and drunk and difficult men. Despite not quite being able to fully trust Vanya, she decides to take the leap and marry him anyway, because the vision of a life beyond the daily hustle of the strip club is just so intoxicating.
Many clients are man-children: you can’t expect them to support you when push comes to shove. Rich clients especially have vacillating desires and don’t think about the impacts of their whims upon your life; think of Jennifer Coolidge’s character Tanya McQuoid in the first season of The White Lotus, who thoughtlessly leads on Belinda with promises of better things. Anora illustrates this also through the fleeting solidarity between Ani and Igor, the hired muscle of Vanya’s family; he is the only one who treats her with any humanity because he too is seen as expendable by the oligarch family. They are of the same class, there to serve and to be treated without consideration or respect.
The film’s director Sean Baker is heavily inspired by Italian neo-realism, a film movement concerned with the ways in which capitalism and social structures can destroy people. All his films have shown how criminalisation and stigma make tragedies out of sex workers’ lives, and in his post-Oscars press conference he directly called for the decriminalisation of sex work. Instead of talking about this, though, people online are preoccupied with two questions: whether a man should make a movie like this, and whether the film is offensive to sex workers. The first question is reductive; looking only at the director minimises the collaborative aspect of film. (Besides, I would rather watch an independent film made by a man, such as Flow, than a grossly corporate film made by a woman, such as Barbie; gender is not the be all and end all.)
The second question is a distraction, as sex workers are not a homogenous group. This film is not like its fellow Oscar nominee Emilia Pérez, which depicts specific communities but without consulting them; Anora went beyond consultation and even cast some strippers as strippers. If you are affronted by the film then you should be affronted by the conditions that created it, material conditions that are possible to change. Baker isn’t treating sex workers badly, the US does—and he is simply holding up a mirror to that. The ending is particularly contentious, as, like all of Baker’s films, it is somewhat depressing and forces you to sit in discomfort. It isn’t an ending with satisfaction or recompense, but instead one that casts the slapstick comedy found earlier in the film in a new light, making the audience question whether what had seemed funny earlier actually was. To me, it is a very relatable ending; when you are accustomed to trading something, whether for money or validation, you sometimes try to use it to gain a reward or to regain power. One of people’s problems with sex workers is that we can’t neatly be called either empowered or exploited, and instead we shift between those states; something that this ending shows, and which also explains some of the uneasiness with Baker’s films.
I don’t need a film to depict a sex worker as smart or sympathetic or successful; I know we are and can be all those things. I just want films that depict us as more than a faceless, nameless body; I want films that depict us as human, as flawed and complicated and sometimes triumphant and sometimes very much not. I want films that show that so much of what happens to us is a result of the legal and social conditions in which we work; that failed and violent systems beget failure and violence; that we need labour and worker protections. I don’t need films to be aspirational or fantastical or even positive, especially when a director explicitly makes work as a catalyst for change. After all, sex workers don’t deserve rights because we are respectable. We deserve them because we are human—a message that Baker reiterates throughout his oeuvre.
