The Mixed Message of Anora

Screenwriter and director Sean Baker’s Anora won four Oscars at the 2025 Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Motion Picture. Baker has been known to showcase marginalized and outcast communities in his work, and in Anora, he turns his focus to women in strip clubs and prostitution. 

The commercial sex industry is indeed a marginalized group. But its marginalization is the direct consequence of the nature of its trade. Those in the sex industry are often victims of abuse and human trafficking; their express purpose is to become objects for the consumer. And yet, in his acceptance speech for screenwriting, Baker made a point to legitimize “sex work”: “I want to thank the sex worker community. They have shared their stories, they have shared their life experience with me over the years. My deepest respect . . . I share this with you.”

Much of Anora is soft-core porn. The protagonist Anora (or Ani, played by Mikey Madison) works at a strip club called Headquarters, and right off the bat, the film features sexualized imagery of topless women writhing on male buyers. Vanya, the son of a Russian oligarch, becomes enamored by Anora and flies her to Vegas, where they marry. When his family finds out and sends henchmen, including a man named Igor, to New York to force Vanya to annul the marriage, a wild goose chase ensues.  

Given the gratuitous objectification of women, I cannot recommend the movie. But Anora is one of those films with a twist at the end—a twist that almost saves the movie from itself. After Vanya relents to family pressure and abandons Anora, she is alone with Igor, who recognizes all she’s suffered and makes a gesture of unselfish love. She breaks down in tears at the realization that real intimacy is more powerful than lustful sex, and the movie ends. 

As such, Anora delivers a gut-wrenching punch to the using-people-as-objects lifestyle. And yet, it’s a punch that the film director and even the lead actress forget, and it’s a shame that viewers have to endure so much pornographic content to find the kernel of value. Accepting her award for Best Actress, Madison said, “I just want to recognize and honor the sex worker community. Yes. I will continue to support and be an ally. All of the incredible people, the women that I’ve had the privilege of meeting from that community has been one of the highlights of this incredible experience.” 

While Baker and Madison may have been attempting to lift up the outcasts of the sex industry in offering pro-“sex work” comments, true support for those in the sex industry looks different. To do right by those in the sex industry, we should take care to acknowledge the abuse and coercion therein, not participate in the fantasy that it’s a harmless free choice for women to sell sex.

Viewers aren’t privy to what led Anora to the sex industry, but to be in one’s early twenties as a seasoned lap dancer, with no apparent family, there’s a lot going untold. Of the women I’ve spoken with who have left stripping and prostitution, many first make their debut in the commercial sex industry before the age of eighteen, which in the United States constitutes sex trafficking. Many were also lured into it by boyfriends-turned-pimps. These women don’t keep the money they make selling their bodies. And after they’ve left the industry (research shows nearly 90 percent want to get out) and have recovered from the trauma, many don’t appreciate being called sex workers.

As Melissa Farley, head of the research powerhouse Prostitution Research and Education, told me, while “people think it lends dignity to women who do it,” the term “sex worker,” turns “a violation against women . . . into employment.” As Farley puts it, “You don’t have to identify a person by what is done to her.” 

“So much of the thinking around prostitution is marketing driven,” Farley says. “Above all, prostitution and trafficking is about marketing and ‘having a good time’ and making money—this image is all a lie, but it’s good for business.” 

The hard truth: Sexualized media increases demand for sex trafficking. 

Truly honoring the women in the sex industry doesn’t equate to affirming the poorly termed “sex worker community.” If that were the case, we’d be trying to send them more “business,” pushing more sex buyers their way, treating them as endlessly usable objects. But we’re not, and the film doesn’t seem to be advocating for that either. Anora comes close to recognizing the exploitation at the core of the “industry.” It’s a pity its creators do not.