Anora and the changing depiction of sex work in Hollywood | CBC News

Andrea Werhun didn’t have to wait long to see her influence play out onscreen.

Because as the Toronto-based artist and former sex worker watched just the opening scenes of Anora, she already saw something so familiar, and yet groundbreaking. As the Oscar-frontrunner for best picture introduced its main character — Anora, an exotic dancer and sex-worker about to be taken on an equal parts exciting and terrible trip by a client from hell — we first get a quieter moment. 

Sitting in the breakroom of the stripclub where she works, the film shows Anora casually, carefully, eating packed lunch from a plastic container. It’s a seemingly everyday activity, one that Werhun specifically suggested to director Sean Baker when he hired her as a consultant, advising on how to ground the film in reality.

It’s also a moment that one might more expect to see from a different sort of character, like an office worker — and perhaps not from someone in Anora’s line of work.

But Werhun knew different. 

“When I saw that on the big screen, I was like, ‘Yes, yes, because that’s real,'” she said. “And that’s not something that as an outsider, as someone who’s never spent any time in a strip club locker room, you’re ever going to notice, think about or consider.”

However small that action seemed on the surface, to Werhun and others with experience working in or studying sex work, it represented much more. Because, Werhun said, for as long as they’ve appeared in film, sex work and the sex workers have largely been depicted as either wrongdoers needing to be vilified, or victims needing to be saved. 

And that kind of perception, she says, has real life repercussions.  

“We’re victims were villains, we’re dead, we’ve got hearts of gold,” she said. “These are such shallow depictions that flatten our humanity and remove nuance and complexity from who we are as human beings, as people.”

Heartbreak, reform or tragedy

The usage of sex workers in media is no new thing in general: Lauren Kirshner, an assistant professor at Toronto Metropolitan University and author of Sex Work in Popular Culture, pointed to it as the most common job portrayed by best actress winners at the Oscars. It’s seen in such defining Hollywood classics as BUtterfield 8, I Want To Live! and The Sin of Madelon, ahead of the next most common professions of singer and teacher. The tradition even goes as far back as the very first winner, Janet Gaynor, who took home the trophy in 1929 for her work in three films. In two of those films, Street Angel and 7th Heaven, she played a sex worker. 

The majority of those roles though, she said, also featured shared storylines that ended with “love and implied marriage, heartbreak and reform … or tragedy, murder, suicide, or accident.” Otherwise, they are often supporting characters used to tempt or simply define the actual protagonist — such as in the long-running series House M.D., which saw the rule-breaking doctor visit sex workers throughout its run to outline his character.

Anora, Kirshner said, is part of the change seen in the past few years, alongside other films like Oscar-winner Poor Things and the Canadian film Paying For It, a film in which Werhun stars. Anora — which follows its star as she first is offered the chance to be saved from her circumstances before plunging back into the realities of her world — never uses her as a prop, and never wavers from her point of view. 

“The sex worker character is becoming that dynamic character. So we’re seeing it more and more. She’s centre stage, she is the main character,” Kirshner said. “And I think the sex worker finally being the main character and not an accessory and not a pretense to show something sexy or dangerous, that is a sign of how far pop culture has come.”

The beginnings of that shift, she said, can perhaps most famously be seen in Pretty Woman, the Julia Roberts-led film about a sex worker eventually swept off her feet by a rich lawyer.

Kirshner said that film and others like it, like its spiritual predecessor Klute starring Jane Fonda, were actually in many ways watershed moments: films that depicted sex workers as extremely likable, dynamic and with an inner life and backstory. 

But those films also perpetuated the idea that a happy ending is escaping from a lifestyle forced on them. That, Kirshner says, makes it seem like those characters — and real people like them — have little or no agency.

“There’s still a lot of moral judgment attached to the decisions women make. There’s a lot of assumptions that no sex worker could truly choose sex work,” Kirshner said.

“I mean, all workers are choosing their work within constraints, and sex workers are no different. The only difference is their work is criminalized.”

Fraught realities

And it is films like Anora, she said, that make the important distinction of what sex workers may actually want to escape from. In that movie, Anora wants to be lifted out of the workforce that all workers struggle to survive in, instead of being lifted out of an inherently shameful profession. 

That depiction is particularly important for the wider perception of sex workers in real life, said Chandra Ewing, the executive director of Maggie’s Toronto Sex Workers Action Project. Though the act of selling sexual services is not illegal in Canada, purchasing sexual services is. While this distinction was meant to protect sex workers while still decreasing prostitution, Ewing said it creates a grey area. 

Because sex work has some protections as a legitimate business, alongside legislation making it more clandestine, she said sex workers are often in a constant state of fear of being “outed.” That could put them at risk of having their profession “weaponized against them” due to preconceptions, and lead to them potentially losing custody of their children, their housing, or status as residents and be removed from the country. 

“So it’s not even really like an implicit choice that sex workers are making. This is a very real reality that they do not have rights and agency and autonomy over their own lives,” she said. “Because of that, sex workers do unfortunately have to exist in the margins.” 

Cinema’s changing depiction of sex workers as more fully-fleshed characters is important, she said, as it humanizes them and can work to undo the idea that they should be stigmatized. But, she said, that has to be done hand in hand with a realistic depiction of the fraught realities sex workers face.

In Werhun’s opinion, that can only be done by getting those with direct experience in the industry to tell their own stories — or at least influence the way they are told. 

“Because otherwise it’s civilians — that’s what we call people who don’t do sex work — telling stories for us,” she said. “And that’s just never going to be good enough.”