Anora swept 2025's awards season.

American filmmaker Sean Baker recently became the first person ever to be awarded four Oscars for one film. During his acceptance speech, Baker thanked Quentin Tarantino, explaining that if he hadn’t cast Mickey Maddison in ‘Once Upon A Time in Hollywood’ in 2019 ‘There would be no ‘Anora’... If there was ever a perfect metaphor for what mainstream media keeps getting wrong about sex work, it would be two middle-aged rich men patting each other on the backs for creating a film about an industry neither of them have any experience in. And then being wildly celebrated for it.

There would be no Anora without sex workers.

Baker gushed about his ‘deep respect for the sex worker community’, and his gratitude to them for ‘sharing their stories’ with him… There have been whisperings about where the original inspiration for Anora came from, indicating that perhaps this part in Baker’s speech was far more literal than we thought… But even if this is not the case, the fact that Baker gave credit for Anora’s existence, in any part, to another man with no lived experience of sex work, rubbed me up the wrong way.

We keep attributing the success of projects about sex workers to the Sean Bakers of the world, when in reality, what often makes stories about sex work so commercially viable is not the skill of the writer or the director (or the editor…) but simply the fact that they’re about sex work. Mainstream society is obsessed with sex work.

We know sex sells, but we’re now in a digital era where provocation is king. It doesn’t matter if something’s accurate. As long as it incites engagement (enragement?), it’s pushed to wider audiences by endless algorithms. And there’s little that the mainstream gets more worked up about than sex work. Whether we’re fetishising it........

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