ELSC's work at the British Museum & Bishopsgate Institute assessing the history of sex work depictions in visual culture, art history & literature reveals a long-standing fascination with the image & mythology of sex workers. 

Kaytlin Bailey's  one-woman show "Whore's Eye View" evaluates nearly 10,000 years of sex worker representation & how we ended up with the culture of stigma & misogyny we have now. 

The value & quality of acting & film as a medium is often measured by its “accuracy”. With regards to sex work, I challenge the need for accuracy. I don't think I need works of fiction to be "accurate" - I could watch a documentary or just live my life alongside my community of strippers & sex workers if I wanted an accurate portrayal.

Across film & more broadly across pop culture, theatre, art & writing, there is an increased appetite for sex worker storytelling. This past August, I had the pleasure of performing with ELSC's co-founder Stacey Clare for her sold-out show, "Ask A Stripper" at Edinburgh Fringe. This is incidentally where we met Kaytlin Bailey. Edinburgh fringe was heaving with more than a handful of poignant, self-produced & self directed shows made by the Sex Workers themselves - including “Really Good Exposure” by Megan Prescott of Skins fame. 

In these productions, sex workers weren't simply "consultants" for a script, or hired as extras, they were architects of their own stories, with full control over their bodily autonomy & agency over their own image that is rarely given to sex workers in blockbuster films. 

There's a shift happening; an increase in SWer content. This could be due to a number of factors (the ubiquity of Onlyfans, or more likely, the massive uptick in women entering sex work due to the cost of living crisis, reported by the Financial Times). 

The thing I'm interested in is not necessarily "accuracy" but rather ownership, authenticity & agency. Audiences are wisening up to the notion of the "gaze" - in the sense of the "male gaze" or "queer gaze" or someone like Sophia Coppola's "female gaze". We are aware of the differences in an objectifying vs ‘empowering’ lens. We notice the differences in an sensationalised & stigmatising depiction of sex work vs. an honest recount of someone's story, told through their own voice, that reflects their circumstances & the world around them. Accuracy is not the same as authenticity. 

Authentic sex work stories are on the rise for sure - I'm not sure Sean Baker's Anora quite hits the mark in the same way as A24's Zola - in which Zola herself tells her own story through the iconic twitter thread before having heavy involvement in the film's production & marketing.
 

The longer I thought about Anora, the less I liked it. Don't get me wrong, it is very beautiful, funny, irreverent & well acted, but the ending falls flat for me - both as an ex-stripper, an ex-hot-mess-express & as someone educated in arts & culture with a critical eye. 

Anora received accolades at this year's Cannes Film Festival. I believe it is deserving of the hype, but not for the reasons you might think. The best bits of the movie have almost nothing to do with sex work. In the second half of the movie, Ani & a motley crew of Russian speaking, Armenian Orthodox Christian priests, body guards & hired muscle are driving around New York chasing down the son of a Russian Oligarch, in order to annul their Vegas hitch marriage. The unmitigated chaos of Ani & co. during their rat-race serves as a perfect allegory for the ways in which we all chase money, in neoliberal, hyper capitalist society. 

There's a short scene where Anora snaps at her strip club boss, telling him that when the he gives her a 401k, health benefits & insurance, he can tell her when & how to work. This is one of the only scenes we get that tackle workers' rights head on, exposing the realities of stripping. The job itself can be fun, rewarding & fulfilling; it's the working conditions that need improvement.

As with all things ‘sex work’, everyone tends to be interested in the "sex" part, but the impact & potential for change really lies in the "work" part.

At many points, even though Ani & co. are constantly bickering, they have a strange solidarity linking them all. Their shared experience of dealing with Ivan, the spoiled brat, presents opportunities for collective commiseration. The movie works as a cautionary tale about how wealth inequality & capitalism coerces us all into morally dubious decisions - & how a small form of salvation & comfort can be found in class solidarity.

 

I'm going to be really transparent about my own agenda here about "what makes a good story about a sex worker": the best ones are the ones we tell ourselves. I love the insane, ridiculous, looney toons situations me & my friends get into - but those stories belong to us. I no longer care for stories co-opted from us and told through the lens of civilians - these stories are our "cultural clout" & I want it gatekept it so SWers  can build wealth & advocate for our own interests.
 

I hated the ending.

Because the ending gave me the ick, I got the ick from the rest of the movie. It's probably quite “accurate” to how a young, fired up girl in her early twenties would act, but “accuracy” is not how I judge the merit of a film. The ending betrays Sean Baker's gaze on Ani & sex workers more broadly: after a whirlwind movie in which Ani bleeds her clients dry, single-handedly beats up 2 big Russian "thugs" & stands up to her short-lived mother-in-law, we're left with a pitiful scene that invites the audience to feel bad for her. 

Poor Ani, who has to go back to her very normal, pedestrian house share, who has to go back to public transport, who has to go back to the club. Why would any of that be bad or pitiful? You'd only feel bad for her if there was something inherently “bad” about stripping. Worse still, this scene leaves Ani holding the lingering shame, as if she is somehow at fault for the way events played out. There is no ethical consumption (or production) under capitalism; we are coerced to push our own boundaries & flog out anything we think might be of value - even if it's our own erotic capital - so we can survive another day. Ani is no different. I don't like that she ends up holding the shame at the end, instead of Ivan the son of the Russian oligarch - people who are guilty of far worse sins: hoarding of wealth & massive contributions to climate disaster by flying on private jets. 

This leads more broadly into my other icks that I generally have of most movies depicting sex workers (and women in general.) I'd like to reference Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita here. One strategy that Nabokov uses in Lolita that I find incredibly poignant is how little we know about Dolores (we hardly ever even see her real name used). We only see her in little glimpses through the eyes of her abuser: Humbert Humbert, the unreliable narrator. Sean Baker does a version of this - somewhat subverted, but it nonetheless exposes the limits of his perspective. 

Similar to Lolita, we learn very little about Ani as a person - we only know about her as a stripper & sex worker. Something that has always struck me about my community of sex workers is how complex, nuanced & diverse they are as people. I wish we got to see more of Ani as a person - but I don't think Sean Baker or indeed, anyone else in the movie, or the film's audiences, are interested in who she is as a person. I find it hard to believe the extent to which she pushed her own boundaries & went along with Ivan's whims without having an understanding of her motivations. 

She's not a survival worker; we see that he has a safe place to sleep & has most of her basic needs met. Most of the workers I know are funding something; whether it's paying for university, or supporting an art practice, or sending money back to their kids in the Global South, there's always a reason behind the hustle & it's what gives them their humanity.

 

I think the best encapsulation of my feelings about the ending comes from the Ways of Seeing, by John Berger:

"You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting 'Vanity', thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure" (Berger, 1972, p.51)

Audiences can't get enough of sex worker stories. They're often hilarious, slapstick, fun, tragic & Looney Toons all at the same time. I'm tired of films morally condemning sex workers whilst extracting their stories for entertainment.

 

 

Sean Baker hired former sex worker Andrea Werhun as a consultant for the character of Ani in Anora. This is pitched as somehow groundbreaking practice.  If you have any curiosity at all about your subjects, you'll do this naturally. Hiring professionals with lived experience is the bare minimum to tell a compelling story with accuracy.

I'm not about to celebrate a man doing the bare minimum. 

To tell a story with authenticity would require Sean Baker to give up his power & his perspective & have the story told by actual sex workers themselves. I don't think he can tell this story with authenticity. Ultimately, I feel the lingering gaze of Sean as both a man, a voyeur & (probably) a client. 

While I think it's extremely important to give well paid work to SWers to be intimacy consultants, writers, & more on movie sets & other cultural jobs, I think we should really work towards a cultural industry that platforms us without having to attach us to other people's projects. 

As beautiful & well made Anora is, it's ultimately still extractive. I'm glad Andrea Werhun was able to work so closely on such a critically acclaimed movie - however prostitution is still completely criminalised in the United States & nothing depicted in Anora challenges this. 

Bad clients & violent offenders target & kill vulnerable, drug-using street sex workers every day because we lack harm reduction infrastructure as a society; again Anora does very little to acknowledge this meaningfully. 

These issues are all delicately interconnected. When our stories are told without giving us agency over our own image, it normalises disempowering sex workers & reinforces the shame & stigma. 

To end off, I'd like to quote Maddie from research that the ELSC commissioned & published: 
 

Thanks for reading! I hope you found this insightful. Please go watch the film when you can!

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