To the non-sex worker community, Oscar night 2025 may have seemed like a triumph for those currently or formerly in the sex worker community.

Anora — an indie flick about a sex worker who marries a Russian oligarch’s son and then is shut out of a promised life of wealth and luxury by the son’s parents — won five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actress and Best Director. Sex workers were also mentioned in two acceptance speeches, first by director Sean Baker and then by Mikey Madison, who played the film’s title character.

On accepting the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, Baker thanked sex workers for sharing their “stories” and “life experiences” with him over the years.

“My deepest respect,” he said. “Thank you. I share this honor with you.”

It was an echo of Baker’s remarks after his film won the Palm d’Or at Cannes, dedicating the award “to all sex workers, past, present and future.”

In her acceptance speech for Best Actress for playing Anora, “Ani” for short, Madison spoke a bit longer to “recognize and honor the sex worker community,” pledging to “continue to support” them and be an “ally” in their cause. She said that meeting sex workers “has been one of the highlights of this entire incredible experience.”

In Baker’s oeuvre, the tribulations of sex workers are a dominant theme, with five films, including the critically-acclaimed films Tangerine and The Florida Project,  offering gritty and arguably sympathetic portrayals of those doing that work (much of which is legal).

For Anora, Baker hired Lindsey Normington, famed for helping to unionize a topless bar in L.A., to play a stripper in the film. The director also drew on the expertise of Canadian writer and former sex worker Andrea Werhun, author of the memoir Modern Whore, as a consultant for the script and  a coach for Madison’s portrayal of Ani.

Werhun recounted her role in the magazine The Kit, and her views of Baker and his movie were mostly positive.

“On film, sex workers are usually depicted as victims, villains, hookers with hearts of gold or, well, dead,” she wrote. “Sean Baker has managed to defy these tired stereotypes by paying sex workers to check his work. The result is a must-see portrayal of sex work that is both rare and riveting.”

Still, Werhun had criticisms of Baker’s final product, particularly the violence Ani encounters when Armenian thugs, in the employ of the oligarch dad of her new spouse, Vanya, are dispatched to convince Ani to annul the marriage and surrender her hold on her cowardly husband. Ani fights back, but she is also bound and gagged in the film.

Werhun told the Daily Mail that she “flagged” the violence in the script and was unhappy at its inclusion.

“I would have preferred to see less violence against Ani,” she said. “As a sex worker, I feel like we’ve seen enough violence against sex workers on screen.”

She added, “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.”

Tucson filmmaker and former sex worker Juliana Piccillo, who worked with Baker as a script consultant for his 2021 comedy Red Rocket, also had concerns about the film.

As one of the co-founders of the Tucson chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) and the director of The Celluloid Bordello, a documentary on the portrayal of sex workers in film, she had praise for Anora, but also could understand why some sex workers would object to it.

“I think Anora does have a lot of positives,” she told FPC. “But it was a hard watch for me. I think what some people in the community are rightfully objecting to are the ways in which they feel it reinforces stigma.”

Piccillo pointed out that “a good chunk of the film is [Ani] getting her ass beat.” She also observed that there were some things about Ani’s character that didn’t ring true to her experiences.

For instance, at the end, Ani, of her own volition, has unprotected sex with one of the toughs hired to intimidate her, a jump-the-shark moment for Piccillo. Additionally, Piccillo said it didn’t quite make sense for Ani to give up her hold on Vanya without a massive payday. Basically, she had a “whale” of a client on the line, said Piccillo, and cut him loose for a pittance.

“Her hustle with this kid is not the hustle of a seasoned sex worker,” Piccillo explained. “She had a lot of leverage. Though I guess it wouldn’t have been a movie if she just rinsed the guy and that was the end of it.”

Other sex workers’ takes on the film were varied.

Some sex workers took the opportunity to lament the collective trauma wrought on their community by the feds’ 2018 takedown of the classified advertising site, Backpage.com, and the near-simultaneous passage of FOSTA/SESTA, which made online platforms liable for anything that could remotely be construed as intending to facilitate  prostitution.

Though federal and state courts consistently ruled that the First Amendment protected Backpage’s publication of adult advertising, regardless of whether some advertisers engaged in prostitution, three former owners of Backpage were convicted in Nov. 2023.

Famed journalist Michael Lacey was sentenced to five years for a money laundering conviction, but an appellate court subsequently ordered Lacey freed while his appeal is pending. He currently is out on bond, confined to his home. His co-defendants, Jed Brunst and Scott Spear, who like Lacey are in their 70s, are serving ten year prison sentences, while appealing their convictions on a variety of federal charges.

As sex worker and writer Marla Cruz explained in a brilliant essay for Angel Food magazine, the result of what some sex workers called the SESTApocalypse was the eradication of “multiple platforms where sex workers advertised and shared industry-related information with each other.” Sex work became demonstrably more dangerous, leading to “[m]any sex workers” being  “abused, exploited and even murdered.”

(A study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the FBI could no longer effectively investigate actual cases of sex trafficking as a result of adult advertising moving from domestic sites, like Backpage.com, to overseas sites beyond the reach of U.S. courts.)

Considering the “bleak reality sex workers face,” Cruz found Baker’s work to be problematic.

“Baker flattens the subject at hand into a cinematic replication of the regressive status quo,” she wrote. “The politics in Anora are a mile wide and an inch deep with repetitive, trite iterations of a sex worker’s suffering where even her ability to love is stifled by how society marginalizes her.”

After the Oscars, sex workers, sex worker rights advocates and others weighed in on X about Baker’s film.

Writer Laura LeMoon, whose December piece in the Wall Street Journal detailed how the SESTApocalypse had endangered her life,  stated that Anora  was “a reminder that Hollywood actresses win awards playing fake sex workers while real sex workers die and no one cares.”

X account @anotherwhore77 posted that “Swers are allowed to dislike Anora but civs are not. Every tweet complaining abt it winning feels very whorephobic.”

Meanwhile, poster @Arielle_Ivy offered the following perspective:

“Even though I have a lot of qualms with Anora, it’s still monumental that it swept the Oscars & the lead actress thanked SWs in her acceptance speech. They had strippers on the stage! That’s huge regardless of Sean Baker being a SW-obsessed weirdo who only portrays us as victims!”

Piccillo called Baker “one of the most interesting and exciting filmmakers out there,” and she said he had helped “move the needle” on how sex workers are portrayed in film. She thinks his support for the decriminalization of sex work, and even his shout outs to sex workers at award shows, assist in broadening the dialogue around sex work.

“It’s explicitly signaling that we should respect the dignity and the lives and rights of sex workers,” she said of his comments, adding that without those statements, Anora would be “even more problematic for sex workers.”

Still, she believes sex workers “deserve more” from all filmmakers, including Baker.

“We want to see a film that has drama and conflict and pathos,” she said. “But not at the expense of sex workers.”

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