WORDS AMY MORETSELE
It’s a Sunday evening and I’m walking to the Ritzy in Brixton. Once a month I take myself to the cinema, to sit amongst the dark and mostly empty rows (it’s the age of Netflix and Prime Video after all) and consume the movie of the moment. This month I was sold on Anora. Partly because I’m a young woman in her twenties living in a major western city. The film is marketed as an edgier, Palm d’Or and Oscar winning, 2024 version of Pretty Woman. Partly because, I myself, am a stripper.
Sean Baker has made a career from his own brand of cinematic realism, highlighting the stories of underrepresented people and marginalised communities, to critical acclaim. Anora is no different. Set in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, the film follows the stripper Anora, nicknamed ‘Ani’, and the events that unfold when she meets the son of a Russian oligarch, Vanya, one night at work. By the end of the 2 hours and 19 minutes I’m biting the inside of my cheek with frustration. I can’t help but feel betrayed. After all the hype, all the talk of destigmatizing strippers, Anora is just another sex worker tragedy.
Marketed as a ‘modern day Cinderella story’ and a screwball ‘Cinderella story gone wrong’, the telltale signs were there all along. Cinderella, like Anora, first and foremost, is a girl who needs saving. Despite Baker’s heavy research into the industry and the consultation and casting of real working strippers, turning Cinderella into a sex worker was always going to have a moralising effect. The lead actress, Mikey Madison, spent several months taking pole dancing classes and going into New York strip clubs to buy dances. Her indefatigable performance has deservedly generated an Oscar’s buzz. Ani is assertive and quick-witted. Ani fights back. And yet, the film isn’t centred around its namesake at all.
Ani and the film’s focus shifts from making money off of Vanya, to her budding romance with Vanya, to then finding Vanya after he disappears. Midway through we’re introduced to Igor, the hired yet confused muscle, who assaults/restrains Ani at the behest of his boss and accompanies the search for Vanya. His working-class background and Russian family heritage parallels Ani’s. Following the assault, Igor attempts to support Ani with doleful glances, thoughtful gestures, and meek advocacy, most of which she defensively rebuffs. In the film’s climax, after being forced by Vanya’s parents to annul her marriage and return to her life as it was, parked in Igor’s car outside her apartment and finally released from the hostage of Vanya’s caretakers, Ani initiates sex with Igor before hitting him away when he responds to her advances, ultimately collapsing in tears onto his chest. Implicit in the film’s arc is a wish by Ani to be saved by a man, any man.
Throughout Anora, no two women have a conversation about something other than a man. The most notable female characters are antagonists to Ani, like Diamond, her stripper nemesis. She has no friends who care about her safety enough to check in on her during the two weeks she spends with Vanya, bar a co-worker who attends one party then disappears, or to rely on when it all falls apart. It’s disturbing that the film is being praised as a feminist triumph. Anora fails the Bechdel test, something even Disney’s Cinderella and Pretty Woman pass. Ani is largely isolated from her community – other dancers, other women. This is at odds with most dancers I know’s realities and it’s at odds with the empathetic and authentic portrayal of marginalised communities that Sean Baker is praised for. So much so that I almost felt like I was missing something. I wasn’t alone.
Strip Reviews Gone Wild is an Instagram account with 27.3k followers founded in 2018, providing comedic relief to dancers in the form of strip club reviews, as well as work resources and tips. Following the film’s release the account posted ‘If you’ve watched it, what do you think of it?’ on their stories, inviting dancers to respond.
Reviews were mixed:
Trash. The whole plot was giving “captain save a hoe”
Very fun, sad, not enough showing just casual stripper life things
Loved it. I think Sean baker handles sw respectfully.
Sean baker is a closeted misogynist who just so happens to love swers that he decided to speak for us rather than offering us to share our voices. The first act was great and he has a knack for writing romcoms but he loses the plot with the shift in genres and fails to give Anora distinctive traits. Also the ending was terrible. Baker leaves the audience to feel “sorry for her” rather than to relate to her
AMAZING
TRASH ENDING!!! Baker is a misogynist who wants to exploit SWer stories for personal gain
Loved it. Mikey Madison was great
On the 3rd March Anora took home an astonishing four Oscars, best picture, best actress, best director and best original screenplay. Netizens dubbed the 2025 ceremony ‘the Anora awards’. More dancers and communities spoke out. @feminist.fatale.media (5.3k followers) made a post titled ‘Problems with Anora’, listing issues such as zero calorie activism, exploitation, the messaging that strippers are damaged, furthering stigma and rumours of plagiarising a dancer.
‘Throughout his films, Baker has a pattern of portraying sexworkers in harsh light, wallowing in their suffering and downfall. Multiple of his movies have scenes of sexworkers thrashing about and screaming. Anora is no exception, with its final scene being a lingering shot of Anora sobbing inconsolably. Baker makes it obvious he sees sexworkers as victims’.
At the time of writing, the post as almost 1.5k likes. @equitablecarecertification (3.5k followers), an organisation providing certification and training for therapists working with sex workers, as well as support for therapists who moonlight as sex workers themselves, made a post about the sex work in film representation of Anora.
‘The Bechdel Test is a way to measure how women are portrayed in media. At @equitablecarecertification, we created ‘The Red Light Rules’ to assess portrayals of sex work in film. There are 4 questions in The Red Light Rules:
1. Does the film show an understanding of choice, circumstance, or coercion?
2. Does the SWer interact with another person in a positive manner,unrelated to SW?
3. Does the SWer have a storyline, hobby or interest outside of SW?
4. Does the film have a happy and/or non-traumatic ending for the SWer? [..] Anora scored 1/4 in The Red Light Rules.’
This post has received 1.1k likes at the time of writing. I can’t say that Anora is a bad film or completely unrepresentative. It’s objectively good. It feels raw and authentic because of the collaboration Baker had with his actors, with real people in Brighton Beach, and with real dancers. The opening scenes are plucked right out of a strip club, panning across dimly lit dance booths and customers sat on chairs waiting for dancers to approach. Watching it play out felt like I was at work on a busy night in London – minus the grinding on laps, there’s no touching allowed here. Ani approaches customers the same way a lot of us do, with a specific, lilting tone.
However, Baker’s empathetic lens is focused on Igor, not Ani, and not strippers as a community. We’re led to believe that he’s the only one who’s treated her with humanity and in a non-transactional way. We’re led to believe that Ani’s tough facade is a bluff, she still believes in fairy tales, that she’d take as much money as she can get from Vanya but still hopes it could be love. Ani has little financial literacy, demonstrated by her assertion that she’d gain half of Vanya’s money in a divorce case. All we know about her life is that she’s a stripper and so it follows that this is what she wants saving from. While Baker has said that this movie is telling the story of one stripper, not all strippers, this narrative is myopic and feeds into harmful tropes about women in the industry.
I’ve been working as an exotic dancer in London for almost two years now. My family and friends predating stripping all know what I do and don’t care. My university knows and doesn’t care. The men I date know and don’t care. I have community both inside and outside of the industry that I can rely on. I’m not ashamed, living on the fringes of society, or looking to get rich quick and escape my job. At least once a week a man comes in and asks if I want to meet outside. He’s usually young and relatively attractive, aware of this, he makes a calculated gamble I’ll say yes. When I say no, sometimes it’s, How much? Two thousand. Three thousand. .Five thousand, c’mon it can’t be more than five. I’ve never thought the risk of losing my job as a dancer, of harm, of bad sex, was worth saying yes or going full service. Many strippers feel the same. Anora misses the mark on how dancers weigh up the dilemma of actually liking a customer – a measuring of pros and cons that usually happens in conversation with friends.
At least once a week a man comes in and asks if I like working at my club. Are the girls nice. When I reply honestly, that I enjoy it and that the girls are lovely, they raise an eyebrow. They press further. Really? They say. I bet there must be one girl you hate. I bet it must get bitchy. One man went as far as to whisper in camp, hushed and conspiratorial tones, You must fucking hate all the girls that work here, I would hate all the girls that work here if I were you. There’s a grand misconception at play when it comes to how women interact with each other at strip clubs. A fixation on infighting that perhaps says more about how men view women-centred environments than those environments themselves. Sean Baker’s Anora, too, falls victim to that.
Stripping is a high-turnover, transitory industry; with many dancers moving from club to club, city to city, and doing stints abroad. We are not employees and don’t get paid a salary by clubs, in fact, we pay strip clubs to work there in the form of a house fee and/or percentage taken off of dances. We can get let go at any point and are most at risk when we start somewhere new. It’s the other dancers who’ll talk us through the club’s do’s and don’ts, pricing, and personalities. It’s other dancers who’ll teach us new moves for the stage show, lend us deodorant and hair ties and glue for our perspex heels, help us make sales. It’s other dancers who’ll rally behind us when a customer is being rude or handsy or refusing to pay for the stage show or trying to record us against club rules or without consent. It’s other dancers who we’ll share work stories and club recommendations with, who we’ll turn to for the most intimate advice. Vanya types come and go and we roll our eyes and laugh.
One day at work I came down into the changing rooms to a colleague, B, in crisis. The man she was casually seeing, whom she met outside of work, wanted more. He wanted more of her time and to be taken more seriously and he was willing to pay for it. He was young and attractive and well off. He was telling her he’d buy her a house in an expensive neighbourhood in London and he had the means to live up to that promise. The only problem was, he wanted her to quit dancing, though he’d pay her full salary of course. It didn’t matter to him if it only lasted a year. The girls were excited for her but B continued frowning in consternation. She didn’t want a relationship and wasn’t sure how she felt about him, though they really got on. More importantly, she didn’t want to quit dancing. She loved the job. She, like a lot of women, didn’t want saving from doing work she enjoyed.
Anora ultimately tells the story of a lonely stripper who’s powerless against men’s aspirations for her, despite her best attempts to fight back. I’m yet to meet a lonely stripper myself and in my experience working in strip clubs, I’ve only ever weaponised men’s aspirations for me against them. I’ve turned a profit by pretending to be who men want me to be but haven’t always explicitly said. Sometimes that’s someone they want to save and sometimes that’s someone who’d be fun to date and sometimes it’s just a hot woman who consensually bullies them and takes their money. As strippers our trade is fantasy and I, like most dancers, know better than to buy into a fantasy like I myself peddle.
