At the Oscars on Sunday night, the glammed-up, botoxed and bejewelled audience of Hollywood’s most elite broke out in applause when Mikey Madison, in her speech after being crowned Best Actress, said she wanted to honour the ‘sex work’ community.
I put sex work in quotation marks because many anti-sex industry activists and fiery feminists, including those who managed to exit the sex trade, fought for many years against the rebranding of prostitution and porn as “sex work.” The fact that they did not succeed in this is evidenced by the term being mainstreamed now, especially across liberal media and academia.
“I want to again recognise and honour the sex work community. I will continue to support and be an ally,” the 25-year-old said, stopping briefly to take in the rousing applause.
Madison said that the sex workers she had met had been “one of the highlights” behind the making of Anora, a film about a New York stripper.
But Best Actress was only one of Anora’s five Oscars, and the sex worker comedy-drama went on to win Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing, and Best Supporting Actor, too.
The film is by far the most explicit Best Picture in the 97-year-history of the Academy Awards, classified 18 by the BBFC for “strong sex and drug misuse” and became the first adults-only winner since 2007. Described as a “wild, profane blast” by Vanity Fair, it’s a far cry from Pretty Woman, which turns 35 this year, which showed no actual nudity. There are some similarities to the 1990 whirlwind romance in Anora’s plot and its total detachment from real life – with a Brooklyn stripper falling for the playboy son of a Russian oligarch.
It has been praised with adjectives like energetic, risqué, and realistic – but in truth it is more like soft porn, portraying prostitution as morally complex, when it’s anything but. There are grey areas everywhere, and we cannot judge, Hollywood preaches – but really, things should be pretty black and white. Sex work should not be portrayed as some raunchy form of empowerment because the truth is that it’s rarely a choice in a mostly dark world which is powered by exploitation. The women are not the winners. That doesn’t change just because the Hollywood stars tell them they are – before going back to their mega mansions.
It’s incredible that we can be outraged about modern-day slavery – for instance, the viral outrage around fast fashion brands like Shein employing underpaid and overworked staff in foreign factories – when there is a far worse form of abuse happening not only in the US, but in Ireland and the UK too. We don’t call ‘sex work’ abuse though, because it is now justified in the name of ‘liberation.’ We’ve become browbeaten by celebrities and journalists and influencers into believing that prostitution is a legitimate – even a positive – way of earning a living, and we look the other way.
Keen to portray the project as one for those on the margins, organisers of the film held special early screenings for sex workers last year. Sex workers were among those who consulted for the film, and while many have praised it, it should be noted that among those involved with the film, one woman – a former escort of 15 years – spoke out against the amount of violence in it. Andrea Werhun said that the most “brutal” moments meant she risked being “retraumatised” – claiming in an interview with the Daily Mail that she spoke to Director, Sean Baker, about her concerns, but that her concerns were not taken on board.
“As a sex worker, I feel like we’ve seen enough violence against sex workers on screen,” she said, adding: “’There are parts of the movie that feel very authentic, but when there is so much violence, it feels that a sex worker wouldn’t have made a film like this.”
It’s clear that only the women in the sex trade who champion the film, posting glowing reels on TikTok about how much they loved it, have been welcomed into the Anora buzz. What about all the former prostitutes who have spoken up about escaping the trade? About the continual abuse, and the violence that goes hand-in-hand with prostitution? Where are the voices of those who campaign for an end to the sex trade, or who run training courses for police officers and professionals about the realities of prostitution? They do exist, but hell will freeze over before they can expect to be welcomed into the fold.
Women who earn money from prostitution have been reinvented in our culture as hustlers – as the ones in charge. But this just does not hold up. How can it be the case, when women involved in prostitution are often at risk of very serious violence, particularly from the men who buy sex and from the men who may be exploiting or coercing them into it. Women in prostitution are 18 times more likely to be murdered than the general female population. It is well documented that they more often than not have suffered extensive abuse and violence, and have very high levels of drug addiction, and poor mental and physical health.
Prostitution is driven not by a want to be ‘empowered’ – but by economic disadvantage, and is associated with significant levels of harm. Research brought before a UK parliamentary committee recently noted that up to 70 per cent of women involved in prostitution have a history of being in care. 85 per cent reported having been physically abused by family members, testifying that such trauma left them with low self-esteem and self-worth. Some projects that have worked with women in the sex trade have reported that almost all said they had been sexually abused as children.
The same Hollywood producers and actors making millions from a narrative that ignores many of these realities simply would not want their own daughters or children to end up as prostitutes, I can assure you. And the vacuous celebs seeking to “honour” the sex trade aren’t being groped, mauled, beaten or raped while they sell their bodies in desperation to feed a habit or their children. There’s nothing glamorous about seeking to sanitise a trade which exploits, demeans and humiliates the women and men who are seen by ‘clients’ as pieces of meat.
We’ve seen the same push in favour of ‘sex work’ here in Ireland, where ‘Only Fans’ girls selling explicit content to (mostly) men, are repackaged and thrown into the public eye as girl boss queens. The stories of single mums selling nudes online to strangers are featured in the pages of our national newspapers and weekend lifestyle spreads, and we are all supposed to applaud, and issue supportive chants of “you do you.” It’s a farce, because deep down, we are all aware that such ‘creators’ are not self-made at all. They rely on fuelling and satisfying the lusts of men who see them as items for their own gratification and pleasure – to be used. It may seem harsh, but you can’t tell me it’s not the truth.
People are complaining that conservatives are getting the wrong end of the stick, and that Anora is not actually promoting prostitution. Granted, it takes apart the fantasy of Pretty Woman, but it is blatantly ‘pro-sex work’. Its own director has more or less indicated that he would like to see sex work decriminalised, saying that sex work “has an incredible, unfair stigma applied to it.” The film rallies against the idea that women who work as prostitutes are victims – but they are in need of rescue just as much as victims of modern slavery or trafficking.
Canadian journalist and writer, Meghan Murphy, who was previously banned from Twitter, has ben one of the most outspoken voices on this issue – having rightly rejected the term ‘sex work’ as a manipulative reframing of sex and the sex industry that intentionally obfuscates the dark reality of porn and prostitution.
It is not an empty activist mantra, she points out, writing:
“The idea that sex is not special, that it is “a job like any other,” akin to serving coffee or building a house, has become popularized in recent decades, alongside the normalization of concepts and practices like surrogacy, artificial wombs, sex robots, online dating, and virtual reality. We seem to believe we can move past humaness. Post-modernism similarly has pushed us to detach from nature and material reality.
“We no longer can or should have fixed morals, we should be open and inclusive to everything from polyamory to men in women’s washrooms. Age of consent is deemed oppressive, so is “kink-shaming,” and anyone who criticizes the practice of commodifying sex or questions the ethics of a man who pays for sex is “slut-shaming” or “whorephobic.” Reality is in the eye of the beholder, so holds no meaning. Good, bad, right, wrong, true, false — it’s all relative.”
As Murphy points out, sex is supposed to be one of the most pleasurable things in life, because it creates intimacy, bonds, and physical pleasure unlike anything else. It is supposed to be special. The release of dopamine and oxytocin, known as the “love” hormone facilitates trust, romantic attachment, and mother-baby bonding through breastfeeding. Whether we like it or not, sex is intimate, especially for women. It is the closest we can possibly be to another person. It also – and this is the thing Hollywood loves to ignore, even deny – creates life, which is the most fundamental point of all. It is an act of huge magnitude, and is for that reason, completely different to making someone a cup of coffee or giving someone a hug.
To reduce sex to “work” is unethical and downright harmful. It is a betrayal of beauty and truth, and will only leave more broken and hurt people in its wake. For that reason, we should be wise to the dazzling but sinister repackaging of ‘sex work’ as empowerment.