Sex workers are having a moment. The film Anora, which won five awards at the recent Oscars including Best Picture, tells the story of a strip club Cinderella who becomes embroiled with a Russian sugar daddy in modern day New York; capers and larks ensue.
Twenty-five-year-old Mikey Madison scooped the Best Actress award for her portrayal of Anora – known as Ani, pictured – and took a moment to praise real life sex workers in her acceptance speech. ‘I want to recognise and honour the sex worker community. I will continue to support and be an ally,’ she said, clutching her Oscar and looking beautiful in haute couture Dior.
These words echoed a similar statement she made at the Baftas in London last month, where she again won in the Best Actress category. ‘I just want to say that I see you,’ she said to the sex community and the ‘incredible’ sex workers who starred alongside her in the film.
‘You deserve respect and human decency. I will always be a friend and an ally, and I implore others to do the same.’
Look, I absolutely loved Anora. Both the film and Madison’s performance in it are full of nuance and pain and even joy – but it still makes me feel uneasy.
Not just because I watched it on a plane, slightly a-cringe about the excruciating volume of sex, naked boobage and bouncing buttocks being broadcast publicly on my little screen. It was more that not since Pretty Woman in 1990 has Hollywood presented being a prostitute as an everyday, unremarkable career option for a smart young woman, perhaps even a desirable choice.
And shouldn’t we be worried about that?
Mikey Madison stars in the Oscar-winning film Anora, in which she plays a sex worker
For over a decade now, society has been encouraged to use the ever-so politesse term ‘sex worker’ instead of stigmatising words such as ‘prostitute’ or ‘hooker’ to describe those who toil in the world’s oldest profession.
In addition, we must all – like Mikey – super-respect their vocation and pretend that street work and soliciting are somehow quite marvellous; just like being a nurse really, only with less emphasis on patient assessment and checking vital signs.
Yet isn’t there a danger that doing so sanitises and normalises one of the most abusive and exploitative industries on the planet? One that is controlled by men and abuses marginalised women, who often work in dangerous and unsanitary conditions. There is nothing wrong with an actress playing a sex worker praising sex workers. God knows, these poor women – and they are mostly women – need all the help and support they can get.
But how much more admirable it would have been if Mikey had issued a cautionary warning to young women instead – alerted girls to the clammy horror of the daily grind while urging them to do anything to avoid this terrible fate.
It doesn’t help anyone that it is also considered unsupportive and censorious to think of sex work as ‘sleazy’ but let’s be honest – if stripping naked for the delectation of strangers and then, just like Anora, pleasuring them in a private cubicle while telling them to sit on their hands isn’t the very essence of sleaze, then what is? Films such as Pretty Woman and Anora can’t help but perpetuate the beautiful hooker with a heart of gold myth, but becoming a sex worker isn’t brave or admirable or heroic.
In the high-rise tower of female ambition, it is the bargain basement of career options.
One that makes you part of the problem, not – in the typical Hollywood fantasy – some plucky heroine putting food on the table for your ever-increasing brood of fatherless children.
Mikey giving a shout-out to sex workers – despite her character Ani being appalled and upset at being called a ‘hooker’ in the film – and Anora being laden with Oscars without a whisper of moral disquietude is surely part of the ongoing pornification of public life.
Look at Stella McCartney, who hired pole dancers to perform at her Paris fashion show this week. This was to launch a collection of ‘sexy’ office clothes, including tailored suits with nothing underneath and thigh-high stripper boots.
Films such as Pretty Woman and Anora can’t help but perpetuate the beautiful hooker with a heart of gold myth, writes Jan Moir
You’d think sexual harassment in the workplace was just a mirage, a blip.
I don’t get it! Stella never stops keening about the exploitation of animals for their fur but has little to say about the exploitation of women for their bodies. Meanwhile pop star Sabrina Carpenter received hundreds of complaints following her performance at the Brits on Saturday, in a show that was broadcast on BBC before the watershed.
Alongside male dancers dressed as guardsmen, the 25-year-old performed a stripper routine on a bed, showing off her spangled crotch to the cameras and ending by pretending to commence performing oral sex on a soldier.
And Emily Davison threw herself under a horse for this?
One can admire Mikey Madison and her fabulous Anora while still feeling that the Oscar-winning film ogles when pretending not to and titillates while claiming to sympathise.
And that Anora’s endless undress shades into Stella’s pole dancers and Sabrina’s legs-akimbo gyrations.
The point is that they are all admirable women but each of them, in different ways, fails to realise that just because you are aware of the objectification doesn’t mean you rise above it, as any sex worker will tell you.
And yes, praise a prostitute to the sky if you must but please point out the pitfalls of her terrible and corroding life, too.
Someone else as James Bond? Norton your nelly
Hollywood actress Diane Keaton this week suggested McMafia and Happy Valley star James Norton should take on the role of Bond
Tom Hardy, Idris Elba, Tom Hiddleston, Aidan Turner, Paul Mescal, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Eamonn Holmes. The odds on who might be the next James Bond grow bigger and more fantastical by the hour but I am solidly in agreement with Diane Keaton.
The Hollywood actress said this week that it had to be James Norton. ‘He’s got everything that you need. First of all, he’s extremely attractive, very smart, he’s well educated and he’s a fantastic actor. And he’s sexy, right? I’m not wrong. I mean, women are gonna love him.’
Correct on all counts, Miss Diane. It has to be James! No one else even comes close.
The 39-year-old star of McMafia and Happy Valley was simply born to be Bond; to wear a tuxedo, break hearts and biff baddies without spilling a drop of his martini while managing to keep one eyebrow ironically aloft at all times. Yet the way ahead for James as James is perilous and fraught with danger.
Bond diehards were stunned last month when it was revealed that US-based Amazon MGM Studios had taken over creative control of the spy franchise. And that the next 007 could even be American, if they have their way. Buddy, if that happens, I’ll never watch another Bond again. In the meantime, for those of us who still mourn the departure of Daniel Craig (stifled sob), all roads lead to Norton.
Scottie going way of another terrier
Scotties have fallen far since the 1930s heyday of their fame when they were Britain’s third most popular pooch
Oh no. Those darling little Scottie dogs are going out of fashion, surely a victim of the ubiquitous popularity of nice-but-dim doodles.
Scotties have fallen far since the 1930s heyday of their fame when they were Britain’s third most popular pooch. Yet last year only 387 puppies were registered in the UK.
The breed is known to be feisty, independent and sometimes excitable, although they are also difficult to train, have a dislike of small children and are known to involuntary urinate at moments of stress.
No wonder they are also known by their Latin name of Canis Lupus Nicola Sturgeonis – another hairy wee terrier that’s fallen out of favour.
Proctor prime example of two-tier justice
Harvey Proctor made an announcement on Tuesday, pointing out that it is ten years since he was falsely accused of child murder and sexual abuse. His life was ruined as a result, although there wasn’t a shred of truth in the lurid accusations made by a fantasist called Carl Beech.
They were part of the botched Operation Midland, an insane police witch-hunt which was politically motivated and fuelled by the blinkered obsessions of Labour MP Tom Watson, who has since been made a peer.
Back then, Proctor was forced to declare in front of the world’s media: ‘I am a homosexual. I am not a murderer. I am not a paedophile.’ He was vilified, threatened and forced into exile.
Many years later he and his fellow accused Lord Brittan, Lord Bramall and Sir Edward Heath were finally exonerated – yet as he points out this week, exoneration is not justice. Far from.
He said: ‘I still think about 4th March 2015 to this day – every day. Those responsible have been promoted, honoured or enriched. Not a single officer has been held to account. Operation Midland remains an open wound.
‘Until justice is served, it will continue to fester at the heart of British policing.’
Is there a more egregious example of two-tier justice than this? If Mr Proctor had been, say, a non-Caucasian member of a marginalised minority who claimed mental health issues, victimhood and poverty – well he probably would never have been accused in the first place. As a former Conservative MP, he got no sympathy, scant apology and a £900,000 victim compensation package that could never heal the hurt.
Please think of Harvey at this time when new rules for the justice system make the ethnicity or faith of an offender a factor in the sentencing process and – critics say – reduce the chance of them going to jail.
What should matter is what you have or have not done – not who and what you are. Otherwise it is simply not justice.
