‘Anora’: How on-screen portrayals of sex workers trap women in the heterosexual male fantasy

Female actors are encouraged to operate in stories that centre on men, demean women, strip their characters of dignity, and put themselves through questionable public moral discussions

In a custom Louis Vuitton gown studded with silver sequins and a sleek side part reminiscent of Old Hollywood, Emma Stone presented the Best Actress Award at the 97th Academy Awards to Mikaela ‘Mikey’ Madison Rosberg. As Mikey walked onto the stage in a strapless Dior haute couture gown, she was embraced by Stone. For a moment, they shared an air of familiarity, for they are two of the 47 women who have won an acting Academy Award before they turned 30. However, the similarities do not stop there; both the actors won for their portrayal of sex workers — Stone for the Yorgos Lanthimos directorial Poor Things and Madison for Sean Baker’s Anora. The duo follow in the footsteps of stalwarts like Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda, who won the award in 1960 and 1971 for their portrayal of sex workers. In fact, every female performer who won an Academy Award for acting has played a sex worker on the screen.

A video of Shery Lee Ralph underscoring this pattern has recently gone viral in which she proclaims, “But I have told people over and over again the fastest way to an Oscar is either on a pole or have — I’m telling you: sex sells, baby. Sex sells.”

In real life, where women are pushed to the margins and desired for their invisibility, on-screen, they are forced to bare their bodies for public consumption to get recognised for their acting chops. In a bizarre manifestation of the Madonna-whore complex, female actors are encouraged to operate in stories that center on men, demean women, strip their characters of dignity, and put themselves through questionable public moral discussions. These portrayals often rely on stereotypes to position women in the sex trade as cautionary tales, or they are made to transcend their profession courtesy of their male clients like Vivian Ward in Pretty Woman or Linda Ash in Mighty Aphrodite, and promised a fairytale ending. While Sean Baker tried to challenge this fairytale ending with his latest Oscar-winning directorial, he still ended up forcing his titular character to dance to the tunes of heterosexual male fantasy.

Anora, who likes to go by Ani, is a young sex worker from Brooklyn who meets and impulsively marries the son of a Russian oligarch. The result? A sequence of chaotic and dangerous incidents that test Ani’s grit and reassert social hierarchies. At the end of 139 minutes, the audience does not become familiar with Anora; her personhood is shadowed by Baker’s penchant to go after stereotypes. She is not human, just an archetype of a sex worker. If anything, as the film progresses, the empathetic gaze that was believed to be centered on Anora slowly shifts to Igor, a male character. Her alleged independence rings hollow in the minds of the viewers as the credits roll.

This pattern of putting the focus on men in tales of female sex workers is a long-standing Hollywood tradition. In Leaving Las Vegas, as soon as Elisabeth Shue’s Sera meets Ben Sanderson (Nicholas Cage), her life trajectory is shaped by his needs, wants, and desires. She is transformed into his caregiver, and by the end of the movie, she is left traumatised and brutalised and eventually kills herself. This highlights the misogynistic desire to kill a female lead as an act of catharsis.

The 1976 film Taxi Driver showcases Jodie Foster’s Iris as a child sex worker. However, she is seen as a mere pawn in Travis Bickle’s redemption arc.

With the dilution of Hays Code and a surge in third-wave feminism, we are presented with sex workers who are strong-willed and exercise their agency — an archetype Sean Baker has attempted to bring to life in Anora. However, Molly Haskell, a film critic and the author of From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, confessed in an interview to The New York Times that she was not really sure if the new breed of sex workers on film — that is, the independent-minded woman who does what she does of her own free will — was necessarily a positive.