The movie industry keeps profiting off our stories—without truly listening to us.
Spoiler Alert: This review contains detailed discussion of Anora, including major plot points and the ending. If you haven’t seen the film yet and want to go in fresh, consider bookmarking this piece for after your viewing.
I’m at a networking event for local writers, wearing my tortoiseshell glasses, trying to look scholarly. We’ve been asked to share what we’re working on, so I give the elevator pitch of Strip, my memoir in progress. Even in this open-minded community, people’s expressions shift when I mention sex work. I see surprise, curiosity, discomfort.
A moment ago I was a middle-aged writer lady with a messy ponytail; now I’m the shapely silhouette on a mudflap. The go-go girl on a neon sign.
When we break for coffee, I think about leaving but a writer I’ve just met approaches, smiling.“You need to see Anora.” She doesn’t know my taste in movies; all she knows is that I’m writing a book about my years as a sex worker. She loves the movie, and she’s sure I will too.
I was initially curious about this new film described as a romantic comedy-drama centered around a stripper, Anora aka Ani, who meets Vanya, the son of a Russian oligarch, when he comes into the New York club where she dances. Vanya engages Ani’s services outside the club and shortly thereafter they impulsively marry. When Vanya’s parents find out about the wedding they go to great lengths to have the marriage annulled. The movie is written, directed, and produced by Sean Baker, known for making independent films about marginalized communities. His 2017 film The Florida Project received critical acclaim. Anora is not his first movie about a sex worker. Knowing this thumbnail sketch of the plot and then seeing the poster, a young woman, partially undressed, looking over her shoulder with come-hither eyes, my response was no thanks.
A few weeks later, a poet friend emails an article describing the Oscar buzz that’s building around Anora. He writes, “You must be thinking, there’s hope!” I’m not sure if he means that there’s hope for sex work as a topic, or for me to win an Oscar.
I’ve never doubted that a story of sex work could sell. We love a sex-work narrative. There’s always been an appetite for stories about hookers, strippers, dominatrices. Spicy and titillating, sweet and heartwarming, dark and disturbing: Klute, Taxi Driver, Irma La Douce, True Romance, Pretty Woman, Trading Places, Moulin Rouge. The list goes on. Many have been box-office successes and won awards. The writing I’ve published about sex work has had an enthusiastic reception.
In the produce aisle, an acquaintance, who knows the subject of my book, promises, “You will love Anora. It’s right in your lane.”
The insistence that Anora will speak to me, or for me, rankles. I call a trusted friend, a writer and psychologist. “I’m fed up with people saying I have to watch Anora. Am I supposed to deep throat all the shit our patriarchal culture has to say about women making money from sex? Do we insist that doctors watch ER?”
“You’re writing a book about sex work,” she says.
“My book is different. I’m trying to tell the truth of my experience.”
“How do you know it’s different?” She pauses.“I hate to say it, but I think you’re going to have to watch Anora.”
Maybe she’s right.
I play hooky from work so I can watch the film while my daughter is at school. I wrap myself in a fuzzy blanket, cuddle on the sofa with my dog, and turn on the TV. Articles and interviews have detailed how, in preparation for making this film, Baker, the director, and Mikey Madison, the actress who plays Ani, interviewed strippers and escorts and hired sex workers as consultants and actors in the film to make it feel real. When accepting awards, both Baker and Madison thanked the sex-work community. I’m cautiously hopeful that Anora will tell the sex-worker story in a way that allows for complexity. But even as I hope, I also fear that the film will be another cliched narrative about a hooker as a victim, a whore with a heart of gold, catfighting strippers, or gold-digging exotic dancers. I want badly for this film to recognize the world I once inhabited.
I press play.
The film opens on nude, undulating female bodies bathed in red and violet light. It’s clear we’re in a strip club. The audience is solidly in the spectators’ point of view, with a front-row seat at the club. Like the customers, we’re getting little hits of softcore porn as we watch. Anora may be a story with a sex worker as the main character, but Ani isn’t the narrator.
What if the camera were placed behind Ani’s eyes? From experience I know we’d be watching the men; their behavior, their reactions, their requests. Hands reaching; holding money, beckoning us to lean in, bend over, turn around. The facial expressions range from flirtatious to menacing. When I was working in strip clubs, I was on my guard each time someone handed me money. There was always that guy looking to grab my wrist, pinch my ass, or pull me off the stage. The men wanted to talk. They wanted a date, a phone number, our real names. They wanted to whisper messages into our ears. Saying things that ranged from; “You’re pretty” to “I want to fuck you up the ass” to “You’re nothing special, bitch.” And oh, the acrid cologne, the smell of greasy food and beer that clung to their clothes, their breath. The other strippers were flashes in my periphery; I barely registered their nudity. Still, we gave each other signs of solidarity, exchanging half smiles or a wink. But staying alert, always watching the men is how we stayed safe, how we made our money.
Telling the story from the sex worker’s point of view would’ve been new, uncomfortable, perhaps even revolutionary. It would’ve been a brave way to show the audience the inside of this world.
Later in the film, Ani and Lulu, another dancer at the Headquarters strip club, stand outside on a smoke break, talking and laughing about customers. I watch hopefully; again, I feel let down. I spent at least half my time at work in community with women—in the dressing room, getting ready for a shift, during breaks between sets was when I felt human. I’m disappointed that this scene between Ani and Lulu is short and superficial.
Although later we see the friends together in other settings, the film never goes deeper. In the dressing rooms of the clubs where I worked, our conversations got intense. An intimacy forms when you’re naked together for a 10-hour shift. The work was hard. We were constantly on, both admired and judged. The work was physical; the pace, the pole, the flashing lights, the six-inch stiletto heels, the contortionist poses, and the repetitive moves meant aching backs, swollen feet, and joints that popped. During the short breaks between sets we hustled for private dances, grabbed water, and changed our costumes. The club was loud, smoky, and dark. We weren’t allowed to leave.
It was the camaraderie backstage that helped keep us all going, especially during difficult shifts, when a customer threatened or groped. I longed for Anora to show the love and protectiveness we had for one another. There was the time a dancer was killed in a car accident. We wept backstage, then communally decided to donate our night’s tips to a funeral fund for her family. After learning a coworker was being abused by her boyfriend, we held an emergency meeting in the dressing room to find her housing. She couch-surfed with us for weeks as she charted her next steps.
The movie makes a big deal of the competition between Ani and Diamond, another dancer at Headquarters, who is set up as Ani’s nemesis. There’s the obligatory girl-on-girl brawl. At the clubs where I danced, there was occasional competition or dislike of another girl, but most of us were focused on work. We were too busy paying for college, law school, or graduate school, supporting our kids, paying off our debts, or pursuing our artistic dreams to pull each other’s hair backstage. Sex work was a means to an end. Some of us liked the work, some tolerated it, some felt they were performing a service. We all acknowledged it’s one of the more lucrative, flexible opportunities for attractive young women.
As the movie progressed, I questioned the lack of a palpable sense of the danger that’s baked into sex workers’ interactions with men. At the club, men surrounded us. They were the customers, the managers, the bouncers. Often the men paid to protect us weren’t trustworthy. Private rooms and private dances required constant vigilance. The bouncers, supposed to make sure the rules were followed, often were distracted or let things slide. Too many times customers thought an extra twenty allowed them to get handsy in any way they desired. We were in a sex club after all; there was a sense of entitlement, a couple extra dollars and anything goes.
Engaging with male customers was transactional. We didn’t become romantically involved or make friends with them. When Ani attended Vanya’s New Year’s Eve party, I was terrified for her. Especially because his friends know she is a sex worker. Later Vanya runs away. Ani is left alone with the henchmen Vanya’s family hired to force the couple to annul their impetuous marriage. I knew what would come next. When Ani screams that the strongmen are trying to rape her, they laugh as though the accusation is a joke. As I watched the scene, my throat caught. Were we supposed to find her kicking and biting the men funny? I did not. I’d had my own experiences of fending off assault at a bachelor party that got out of hand. I’d heard numerous stories from girls who’d been sexually violated while working. I was stunned Anora didn’t acknowledge this danger as a real possibility. From their research, the film’s creators must’ve understood how often sex workers are assaulted.
Vanya pays Ani for sex, then the relationship morphs into something else. I was skeptical. It’s called sex work. Sexual acts were performative. I raised an eyebrow at the scene where Ani tells Vanya that he paid for an hour so they can have sex again. Although some women I worked with had moments of empowerment, pleasure, and joy, they didn’t offer extras just to be nice, or make sure a customer got his money’s worth.
Performing sexiness as a stripper or escort changes the experience of sex in your body.
Throughout the film, Ani is smiling and good natured about Vanya’s frantic and self-focused humping. At the club she giggles and charms clients. Her sex work attitude is perfect. She’s a fantasy woman. But we never saw the mask drop, the exhaustion, the disgust, the trying to get it over with so she could go home, read a book, take a bath. Later in the film Ani seems to seek out sex with Vanya; there’s an implication that the sex was good, or good enough. But the sex was basic, penetrative. A familiar portrayal of sex from a heterosexual male point of view as in most mainstream media. Boring. I turned to my dog beside me on the couch to sigh.“We’ve got a loooooong way to go.”
At the end, I was still praying for a revelation. Ani’s been dismissed, divorced, and discarded by Vanya. She sits in a car with Igor, the hired muscle man tasked with getting her back to Brooklyn after the divorce. This is the same man who’d held her down and tied her wrists with a phone cord earlier in the film. In her final onscreen moment, Ani initiates sex, mounting Igor in the car. It’s almost violent, mostly clothed. She appears to climax, then cries. This final fuck was the most heartbreaking misstep of the film. The parting message is that Ani can only communicate through sex. It’s an overplayed assumption of a sex worker’s emotional world. This was a missed opportunity to explore the critical difference between sex and intimacy that allows sex workers to do their work.
Empathy and imagination mean we don’t have to limit storytelling to only those who have lived a particular story. Baker notes that he’s drawn to tell the stories of marginalized communities. We need those stories told. Sometimes the members of a fringe community are too busy trying to survive. Sometimes those on the margins are denied the chance to tell their own story because they’re on the margins. They lack the time, the resources, the megaphone.
As the credits rolled, I felt empty. I’d been told I needed to see this film. I’d hoped to feel seen and represented. I didn’t. The acting, the directing, the writing, and the cinematography were executed with talent, and there was such potential to take the audience to a new place. I believe there’s an audience ready to go there. After all, sex work titillates and fascinates and sells as proven by the box office numbers for Anora.
Anora had a domestic gross of $20.2 million and an international gross of $32.3 million, with a production budget of $6 million.
Sex work wins awards. Anora racked up six Oscars, a Palme D’or, a Critic’s Choice, and both Producers and Directors Guild awards. More and more people are watching this story. Anora has seen an 854 percent increase in domestic box-office revenue since the Oscars.
But the more complicated story of this work, and the real women who do it, has yet to be truthfully told. As women continue to lose their bodily autonomy and have our voices muffled by the current administration, it’s time we tell these stories ourselves.
