By now, you’ve likely at least heard of — if not watched — Anora. Directed by Sean Baker and starring Mikey Madison, the movie is a Cinderella-gone-wrong tale of a stripper who marries a Russian heir. It’s a critical and commercial hit, and it could possibly win a few Oscars this weekend. But what do actual sex workers make of it?
The answer is complicated. Sex workers aren’t a monolith. Baker hired sex workers to act as consultants on the movie. He’s been praised for his advocacy during the press cycle. Madison also hosted a screening for strippers and dancers where they clapped their Pleaser heels together to show love for the project.
However, others are less thrilled. I spoke to my 25-year-old friend Emma*, an escort and dancer who’s worked at a strip club in Manhattan for the past two years. There was one particular emotion that kept coming up for her while we talked about Anora: Anger.
For what it’s worth, Emma found many of the initial club scenes to be accurate. “When I watched the beginning, I was immediately bored — which probably meant that it was accurate because I felt like I was at work,” she told me. Indeed, this led her to initially think that the movie, which came recommended from a friend not in the industry, might actually be true to life.
The first moment where she became “confused” came when Ani is at Vanya’s house and asks him if he’d like to have sex again during the hour that he’s paid for. “At least for me — and all of my many friends in the business who I talked to — we would never just go ahead and try to do more because they already paid,” she explained.
However, Emma started to feel “very upset” when the movie showed the girls in their dressing room cheering Ani on for suddenly getting engaged. She said, “No one seemed to say anything like, ‘Are you sure you want to depend on this 21-year-old man who doesn’t make his own money?’ From my experience at the club, I really admire all the girls because they do not want to have to depend on anyone. And if they do depend on someone, they’re making the smartest possible decision for them. This is stable money — not your dad’s money, your own money.”
She also wasn’t a fan of the “mean girl” depicted in the club — as Emma noted, such behavior wouldn’t “survive in this industry.” She added, “What’s kept me in the industry, even during times when I’ve been really exhausted, is the girls in the dressing room and how amazing and smart they are.” Much of the movie, she thinks, could have gone ahead had Ani received stern warning from others not to give up her life for Vanya.
Once the two did get married, Emma found it strange that Ani would keep presenting as hypersexual. “That’s when it started to feel very much like a man’s fantasy of how this would go. The thing that makes a relationship with a man you meet in the club complicated is that I’m putting on a different persona that’s hot all the time. When I start to spend a lot of time with that person, inevitably, that persona has to come off,” she said. “I joke around with my coworkers all the time about how we act so horny at work, but, as soon as we leave, the last thing we want to see is a dick.”
Initially, Emma shook off the movie’s depiction of Ani as so “horny” as a continuation of her work even while they were together. But that presented a problem: “If she’s continuing the work, that means this is just work. And that means that it’s about the money, which means that if the money can’t be there, she’s out.”
Of course, the tables turn on the couple’s fortune: “There were two things that made me really angry in that moment. Why are they showing her suddenly attached to this man instead of attached to his money?” Further noting how Ani is depicted as an experienced escort, Emma continued, “Secondly, it just made me so sad to see this kind of character represented as naive enough to think he really would want to stay with her through all the ups and downs, even though it was blowing up his life. We would never really fall for that.”
“Somehow, she got attached to this boy,” she continued. “She somehow fell under the impression that Vanya, who just met her — and met her like at the club, as someone who she isn’t really in real life — would want to still be with her. And that was crazy to me. At the beginning, the movie was trying to show that sex work is work. Then, at some point, that went gray and all of a sudden she has this attachment to him.”
“She assumes that he has some form of attachment to her. That bewildered me because I don’t trust any man, especially in the club. We are easily replaced. We know that maybe we’re someone’s favorite, but we watch ourselves be so replaceable. We watch all these married men who love their wives come in and want us instead. We’re not gonna fall for you being in love with us,” she continued.
A big problem Emma will see around “eight times a shift” is from men who think of themselves as “nice.” She said, “We see them trying to be the good guy who will save us.” Contrary to popular belief, Emma explained, “A lot of people think there’s just old, seedy men [in the club]. I see so many young hot men, and they tend to be my least favorite. They always think that we’ll end up going on a date with them, or we’re gonna fall in love with them, or they don’t want to pay for things because they could get pussy for free.”
“When I initially watched the movie, I got really scared that young guys would — even more so than they already do — think that we would want to date them if they were rich and young and fairly good-looking. Especially in New York City, where everyone wants the girlfriend experience at the strip club, there’s a lot of muddiness from younger men who come in and think that we will go on dates with them. They think that we will have this emotional attachment to them and want to be their girlfriends. And they get really angry when I don’t,” she continued, adding that some men will feel “entitled” to information like her real name and number. “Now there’s a movie that is acted and produced beautifully that shows this happening.”
As for the movie’s ending in the car, Emma said, “[People think that] if we show pain, then it’s great representation. Like, how sad is the storyline of being a sex worker? I absolutely have experienced pain in this industry, but it doesn’t tend to come from sexuality. Maybe my pain is coming from money security or people not taking me seriously in the world. It felt like a man’s fantasy — my client’s fantasy — of me being emotional and sexual at the same time. People love to see a sad sexual girl. Oh my gosh, she gets emotionally attached, and she’s so sad, heartbroken, and she’s lost, and she fucks, and her pants are off, and she’s sexy.“
“I just don’t think that just because he’s nice, just because he didn’t want to rape her and kept the ring for her, she would feel the need to do anything,” Emma said, adding that she wished the movie ended with her tossing away Igor’s number.
In short, as she put it: “People are making money and fame and prestige off of a man’s fantasy. And it works because people think if it’s sad, then it’s real.”
