The opening of Sean Baker’s 2024 indie film, Anora, takes you into the back rooms of a strip club called “Headquarters,” peppered with men sprawled in leather seats as young naked women gyrate on their groins. In soft-focus and voyeuristic, a facsimile of the male gaze, these first scenes make one wonder why softcore porn is doubling as an Oscar-nominated movie.
Ani – short for Anora – is 23, and one of the contracted women at Headquarters. Of Uzbek descent, she is feisty, scrappy, and always on alert for the next attack against her.
One night, the manager orders Ani to tend to a patronizer seeking a Russian speaker. Ani begrudgingly obliges and greets Vanya, whom she soon finds out is the son a Russian oligarch. A 21-year-old feckless man-child, Vanya spends his days playing video games and hosting lavish, drug-filled parties at his oceanfront Brooklyn mansion.
He hires Ani for a week-long, $15,000 “girlfriend experience.” the end of which, drunk on his paid-for-sex smorgasbord, proposes they marry in Las Vegas. Though the relationship between Ani and Vanya is manufactured and twisted by an acute power imbalance, Ani accepts as long as she gets a 3-carat diamond ring.
Rather than the Cinderella ending of the film’s precursor, “Pretty Woman,” Baker hauls us into a search-and-find jaunt ordered by Vanya’s irate parents and their hired thugs to hunt down the newlyweds and annul the marriage. Abandoned by Vanya and paid off by his parents, Ani returns to the modest house in Brighton Beach she shares with her sister.
Reviewers have showered extraordinary praise on Anora, from NPR to the New York Times, which called it “virtually unsurpassed in its use of place and architecture.” It has swept up the most prestigious prizes,including Canne’s Palme d’Or and five Oscars, including for Best Director, Actress, and Picture.
Alongside this unmitigated acclaim, Anora is also applauded for showcasing prostitution as a job like any other, and Ani, empowered in it.
In real life, almost all prostituted people have traumatic histories of childhood sexual abuse, homelessness, or are sex trafficking victims, a legal status that doesn’t evaporate when one turns 18. Other than showing us that Ani is fatigued and prone to trigger-fast anger, we know nothing of Ani’s path that led her to a brothel.
To his credit, Baker doesn’t glamorize the sordidness of Headquarters, nor the men who pick women like candy off a shelf to satisfy their sexual kinks (“he said I reminded him of his 18-year-daughter” one fellow stripper tells Ani).
But Baker does not touch on the brutal realities of the multi-billion-dollar global sex trade and its inherent violence. When Ani snaps at her manager that Headquarters offers no employee benefits, the audience laughs at her pluck. The film is not interested in exploring the chronic sexual harassment and degradation women in strip clubs endure, in violation of workplace protection laws, at a minimum.
Perhaps this is because Baker has a different agenda. Throughout the awards-circuit campaigns, the director pointed often to Anora’s success as a sign that society is more accepting of “sex work” as he calls it. In interviews, Baker deviates from auteur to activist as he endorses the legalization of prostitution.
“It’s important to explore what sex work is in the modern age and how it applies in a capitalist society; it’s a job, a livelihood, it’s a career and it should be respected,” Baker said at the Cannes film festival.
If Baker thinks this is a subversive stance, he’s late to the party. Forty years ago, sex trade profiteers coined the term as a marketing slogan, to redefine pimps as “managers” and the women they sell to men as empowered “workers.” The “sex work is work” motto strategically fostered a socio-cultural ethos that celebrates the commodification of human beings without questioning its harms.
With OnlyFans, “sugar dating,” and pornography, women and girls are constantly receiving the message that men are at liberty to consume them. Generation Z is coming of age consuming ubiquitous pornography beamed to them directly on their phones, imprinting in the synapses of their developing brains that boys are destined to dominate, and girls – to enjoy subjugation with a smile.
Perhaps unintentionally, Baker overlooks the racial segregation intrinsic to the sex trade – the Headquarters “dancers” are almost all white. Of the estimated 42 million prostituted individuals around the world, the majority are Black, Brown, Asian and Indigenous women, a legacy of colonialism and structures of oppression whose effects linger today, including sex buyers’ particular racist and ethnic fetishistic predilections when picking their prey.
Hollywood has a long history of perpetuating stereotypes of marginalized communities, especially women and Black people. In Anora, Baker doesn’t perpetuate the stereotype of the “happy hooker,” but he does something just as damaging. In portraying Ani’s plight as ordinary – even expected – he is pushing forth the narrative that prostitution is a viable employer for women whose life journeys gave them few choices.
“Of the two people engaging in paid sexual acts, the only one with the choice and power to consent is the sex buyer, who I call a “commercial sex offender,” said Andrea Heinz, a Canadian prostitution survivor and advocate for a law that supports survivors and holds patronizers criminally liable. “In all my years in prostitution, I was never a human being to these men, just a set of holes for their orgasms and power plays. “
As crises around the world proliferate daily, the sale and prostitution of women garners a tiny spot in the constellation of political and economic priorities. This is shortsighted. Supporting survivors and holding perpetrators accountable, including sex buyers, are essential to our efforts to attaining equality, preventing sex trafficking and investing in public health.
While Anora is praised for inspiring an end to stigma, it actually reinforces the lack of empathy for what women suffer in all forms of sexual violence. Dismissing the horrors of survivors’ lived experiences explains why governments propose bills to decriminalize pimping, from South Africa to New York. It also explains why the U.S. Congress doesn’t blink when confirming a jolly band of sexual predators to the highest levels of power, despite allegations of abuse, and why escort agencies operate on overdrive at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
The “sex work is work” ship has sailed from many shores, lulling us to distort the truths about the sex trade and the lives it destroys. The antidote is at our fingertips if we listen to prostitution survivors, who help us recognize that as long as men are gifted the right to sexual entitlement, equality for women will remain an illusion.
About the Author: Taina Bien-Aimé is the executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), one of the oldest international organizations dedicated to preventing and ending the trafficking and sexual exploitation of women and girls worldwide, through legal advocacy, raising awareness and supporting the global sex trade survivor-led movement.
