Anora and the changing depiction of sex work in Hollywood

Andrea Werhun didn't have to wait long to see her influence play out onscreen.

Because as the Toronto-based artist and former sex worker watched just the opening scenes of Anora, she already saw something so familiar, and yet groundbreaking. As the Oscar-frontrunner for best picture introduced its main character — Anora, an exotic dancer and sex-worker about to be taken on an equal parts exciting and terrible trip by a client from hell — we first get a quieter moment. 

Sitting in the breakroom of the stripclub where she works, the film shows Anora casually, carefully, eating packed lunch from a plastic container. It's a seemingly everyday activity, one that Werhun specifically suggested to director Sean Baker when he hired her as a consultant, advising on how to ground the film in reality.

It's also a moment that one might more expect to see from a different sort of character, like an office worker — and perhaps not from someone in Anora's line of work.

But Werhun knew different. 

"When I saw that on the big screen, I was like, 'Yes, yes, because that's real,'" she said. "And that's not something that as an outsider, as someone who's never spent any time in a strip club locker room, you're ever going to notice, think about or consider."

However small that action seemed on the surface, to Werhun and others with experience working in or studying sex work, it represented much more. Because, Werhun said, for as long as they've appeared in film, sex work and the sex workers have largely been depicted as either wrongdoers needing to be vilified, or victims needing to be saved. 

And that kind of perception, she says, has real life repercussions.  

"We're victims were villains, we're dead, we've got hearts of gold," she said. "These are such shallow depictions that flatten our humanity and remove nuance and complexity from who we are as human beings, as people."

The usage of sex workers in media is no new thing in general: Lauren Kirshner, an assistant professor at Toronto Metropolitan University and author of Sex Work in Popular Culture, pointed to it as the most common job portrayed by best actress winners at the Oscars. It's seen in such defining Hollywood classics as BUtterfield 8, I Want To Live! and The Sin of Madelon, ahead of the next most common professions of singer and teacher. The tradition even goes as far back as the very first winner, Janet Gaynor, who took home the trophy in 1929 for her work in three films. In two of those films, Street Angel and 7th Heaven, she played a sex worker. 

The majority of those roles though, she said, also featured shared storylines that ended with "love and implied marriage, heartbreak and reform … or tragedy, murder, suicide, or accident." Otherwise, they are often supporting characters used to tempt or simply define the actual protagonist — such as in the long-running series House M.D., which saw the rule-breaking doctor visit sex workers throughout its run to outline his character.

Anora, Kirshner said, is part of the change seen in the past few years, alongside other films like Oscar-winner Poor Things and the Canadian film Paying For It, a film in which Werhun stars. Anora — which follows its star as she first is offered the chance to be saved from her circumstances before plunging back into the realities of her world — never uses her as a prop, and never wavers from her point of view. 

"The sex worker character is becoming that dynamic character. So we're seeing it more and more. She's centre stage, she is the main character," Kirshner said. "And I think the sex worker finally being the main character and not an accessory and not a pretense to show something sexy or dangerous, that is a sign of how far pop culture has come."

The beginnings of that shift, she said, can perhaps most famously be seen in Pretty Woman, the Julia Roberts-led film about a sex worker eventually swept off her feet by a rich lawyer.