The condom in Sean Baker’s Anora (2024) haunts me. Early in the Oscar-minted film, the titular adult entertainer presents a golden packet to Vanya, her callow yet absurdly wealthy young client, in advance of sexual intercourse. “You want to put this on? Or do you want me to put it on for you?” she coos, cleverly offering an illusion of choice while communicating that one way or the other, the condom is going on.
Only it doesn’t go on – ever. Not only because a shot of Mark Eydelshteyn’s genitals would bust through the film’s R rating – the MPA’s sexed bias is well documented – the application of the condom is neither mimed nor further referenced. The scene cuts jarringly to the couple mid-coitus, with Vanya on the brink of orgasm and Ani, of course, doing all the work. Then it cuts again to Ani dressing herself, Vanya’s lap coyly hidden beneath the sheets and the condom presumably discarded. That fleeting glimpse of its shimmery wrapper suggests an omnipresence that the film ultimately has no interest in depicting.
The condom is not only Ani’s golden ticket into Vanya’s lavish world, ushering Anora into an ongoing media trend that lampoons the ultra-wealthy’s heartlessness but too often hangs its critique on titillating wealth-porn. It’s also the means by which she protects herself, even as the thin latex sheath cannot shield her fully from the torrent of exploitation and abandonment to come. It’s a very real boundary she enforces in service of her own health and sexual privacy, a momentary inconvenience rupturing Vanya’s – and let’s be honest, the viewer’s – fantasy of unbarred access to the sex worker’s limitlessly porous body.
For this reason, I do not think the condom could have ceased to be a point of contention between Ani and Vanya. The princeling is accustomed to owning, not renting. He has clearly never been denied his immediate wishes, never been asked to consider the feelings or material conditions of the workers his family employs. His artless fucking makes it clear that Ani is no exception. When he purchases her uninterrupted service for a full week, and especially when the unlikely couple weds in a slapdash Vegas ceremony, are we expected to believe the condom stays on? Why was it ever there in the first place, if the film cannot stand to unwrap it?
Director Sean Baker has built his career on sex work, despite never having worked in the industry himself. This form of labor occupies a central premise in his most successful and widely known films: Tangerine (2015), The Florida Project (2017), Red Rocket (2021), and most recently Anora. The latter recently swept the 2025 Oscars, earning Baker accolades for Directing, Film Editing, Original Screenplay, and Best Picture, and Mikey Madison the award for Actress in a Leading Role. Baker is lauded for his humanizing portraits of a struggling underclass, his sensitivity to sex workers’ precarities and multidimensional motivations. Ani snapping back that her boss should give her a 401k is a classic Bakerism, meant to prompt the presumably layman viewer to think, “I guess unregulated industries don’t have many protections. Poor thing!”
Then again, plenty of industries are precarious and unregulated. Baker’s obsessions with sex work turn on the fulcrum of one mythic narrative: the Cinderella story, in which an orphaned domestic slave rises vertiginously to wealth and power through the marriage plot (the same plot, I should mention, that had consigned her to servitude via her father’s remarriage). In Baker’s renderings, Cinderella’s labor is always also sexual. From Tangerine’s black transgender Sin-Dee Rella scouring Los Angeles streets for her adulterous fiancé to The Florida Project’s single mother trawling for johns at the outskirts of Disney World, Baker’s sex workers live on the racialized underside of a fairytale. Anora’s plotline is the most overt replication of Cinderella’s: Ani is swept into Prince Vanya’s castle (his Russian oligarch parents’ mansion in Brooklyn); they impulsively elope; she renounces her career as a stripper in favor of a Disney World honeymoon in the Cinderella suite. But of course, the marriage comes crashing down within days. Its dismal aftermath swallows over half the film’s runtime, supplying Ani’s honeymoon with home invasion, assault, kidnapping, and annulment. Whereas the legal threat of annulment symbolizes the film’s consummate tragedy, the physical threats are played for laughs, as little more than indignities to the half-dressed newlywed. These stylistic differences indicate that violence toward the sex worker’s marriage is more devastating than violence toward the sex worker herself.
In its lengthy comedown from montages of fleeting pleasure – of the sort one finds in a strip club – Anora dwells on the economic abuse and abandonment that so easily follow a fantasy wedding. But it risks reifying marriage as Ani’s once-in-a-lifetime chance at salvation, albeit a futile one, and laments the carelessness with which Vanya tosses it away. There is no sustained critique of marriage, but rather this marriage, whose ceremony bets on Little White Chapel’s faux Ionic pillars and Ani’s off-white corset to secure legitimacy. Like sex work, this wedding exposes too much about the artifice of performed desire. “Fuck, yeah, I do!” professes Ani to seal the union, her profane linguistic excess calling to mind a faked orgasm. (Not inconsequentially, her consent directly follows Vanya’s urgent whisper for her to “say yes.”) Its unreality stages a social threat. For it is the sex worker who takes seriously the sacred economic bond of marriage, at once compatible with and contradictory to selling sex piecemeal. “Three carats,” she answers drily, once Vanya has convinced her his suit is in earnest. She offers her hand to be furnished, not kissed. In other words, Anora’s “fallen woman” ultimately wants what no woman can afford not to want.
To their credit, Anora and its ilk present a counterargument to the culture of risk that particularly young Americans have metabolized out of desperation. With ever diminishing opportunities for upward class mobility, it’s no surprise that harrowing enterprises like sports gambling, social media influencing, and stay-at-home girlfriends “looking for a man in finance” have shot to popularity. I am also not entirely unsympathetic to the film’s desire to chronicle the often harsh conditions of informal economies. Ani’s working-class vulnerability is linked to the unreliability of her occupation, which lasts as long as her body performs but makes few provisions for the future. Under these conditions, the apparent permanence of marriage has its appeal, even as it renders her totally dependent on a dubious benefactor. But there is only a vaguely political sentimentality to Baker’s treatment: it’s unclear whether sex work should be decriminalized, legalized, or regulated in line with other service industries. (Never mind that it’s deregulation that runs rampant these days.) For his part, Baker has conveyed support for decriminalization without regulation, though he’s more often found championing nebulous “destigmatization.” There are key differences among these potential arguments, which require a more careful and deliberate hand. Decriminalization would remove criminal charges but not civil penalties; legalization would remove both; and legalization with regulation could formalize requirements like licenses and health insurance.
Despite failing to hire intimacy coordinators, instead troublingly placing himself and his wife/co-producer in that role, Baker did scout sex worker consultants to advise the film’s production, most publicly Modern Whore (2017) author Andrea Werhun. Interestingly, Werhun’s consultation made inroads for soliciting Baker as the executive producer of her upcoming film adaptation – a pinch of salt to her glowing praise, as she elsewhere appears to report misgivings about the degree of violence depicted against Ani. Werhun’s most tangible contribution, reproduced in several articles, is an early scene in which Ani eats dinner out of Tupperware in the strip club’s back room. It’s a modest tableau, meant to resonate with the viewer’s presumed white-collar experience. In other words, it seeks shared sympathies between these forms of labor: work is work. Ani too is employed at “Headquarters,” the name of her club.
But empathy can only take you so far – indeed, I would argue, can take you in the altogether wrong direction. Baker’s liberal filmmaking humanizes individual sex workers’ grit and pathos, but it seldom vindicates sex work itself. One reviewer gushes that Anora’s final scene movingly unveils “the intrinsic trauma of sex work,” a morality tale that runs counter to efforts to create a safer, more equitable industry. If sex work is always traumatic, then how could anyone ethically support it? Another Guardian headline poses, “[C]an Anora help humanise a degraded profession?” These are different questions, clearly, than What do sex workers say they need in order to continue sex work, not to escape its villainous clutches? Even as Anora attempts to complicate the infantile figure of the much-abused sex worker – Ani is scrappy and full of verve – it remains doggedly and paradoxically attached to showing us her abuse. Some nuance is unsurprisingly lost along the way.
Ironically, Anora engineers its own Cinderella story: an Oscar winner emergent from a meager $6 million budget, now Baker’s most commercially successful film after grossing over $50 million. Thanks to one Variety interview, it is now common knowledge that production company Neon spent $18 million on its Oscars campaign, marketing, and distribution. Such a number is hardly unusual in Hollywood, but a slight nonetheless against its narrativized humble origins. That same interview, by the way, concludes with CEO Tom Quinn speculating over Donald Trump’s reaction to Anora. Quinn’s comment – “He might love it. Who knows?” – betrays a harsh limitation to Sean Baker’s filmography. Capably shot, thoughtfully composed, and relentlessly humanizing, his portfolio nevertheless refuses to speak coherently in the language of politics. Rather than unsettling the horizon of humanity as a suspicious route to social transformation, it reverts to liberal attempts to incorporate the disenfranchised into institutions (like marriage) long denied to them.
Quinn does not seriously believe Trump loves Anora. Rather, he cynically fancies the president’s “stamp of disapproval” as a valuable playing card in the film’s wider ad campaign, hoping to replicate Trump’s disdain for Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019). Holding the line against the far right’s sex-negativity and misogyny is not a driving motivation. Capitalizing on these controversies is evidently more attractive. But on a near-hourly basis, such “culture war” issues animate the administration’s attempts to enshrine spine-chilling policies, including severe restrictions on reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare, and the continued accumulation of corporate excess at the expense of the working and middle classes. These policies unquestionably affect sex workers, the apparent object of Anora’s sympathies. I certainly do not think the film comes anywhere near the hateful and deadly rhetoric of the Trump administration, nor is it responsible for the consequences of this rhetoric. However, its call to empathy – an empathy that never quite manages to detach from its subject’s fuckability – is an ultimately insufficient route to erecting material improvements to a stigmatized industry. If its sexual politics aren’t in direct opposition to the proud fascists running the federal government, I’m not sure I want anything to do with them. It’s probably clear that I’m not too fond of Anora myself. The sum of its parts is another kind of gendered fantasy: not a prince, but a fellow underling who offers Ani redemption. In the final scene, audience – and Baker-surrogate Igor – whose refusal to rape gives Baker license to glibly write “authentic” homophobic slurs into the mouth of the working class – presents the wedding ring that Vanya bought, now purloined as a sentimental keepsake. The romantic-sexual-marital bond is resignified away from the economic, rather than demolished in order to build more collective and redistributive forms of care. In response, Ani clambers onto his lap, apparently too broken to distinguish between generosity and sexual transaction.
The conclusion of Anora is an astoundingly sex-work-negative one, indicating that its participants are either too stupid or too disturbed to distinguish sex for money from sex writ large. The film further depicts Ani’s coworkers as naively swooning over her ascent to obviously perilous heights – with the exception of catty Diamond, another sexist stereotype as the “bad” sex worker to Ani’s “good” counterpoint. (As far as I can tell, their personalities are identical.) Anora introduces itself by panning across several dancers’ bodies gyrating in slow motion, before anchoring onto a close shot on Ani’s face as the opening credits roll. Her isolation, later reproduced in Vanya’s bids to privatize access to his favorite sex worker, is part of the film’s affliction. Baker’s work blithely visualizes Ani wedged between men who threaten and assault her, then later forging a tenuous alliance with one of them because all are ultimately workers crushed beneath the same oligarch’s heel. But beyond a few early scenes of workplace gossip, it falls short of exploring feminist practices within the club and among other sex workers, who do not need to learn that sex workers are people because they themselves are both.
The club in which Ani works is no bastion of security, but it doesn’t have to be. It offers no absolutes that she will never suffer again, no diamond ring that ensures her eternal reward. All labor movements have been earned with blood and sweat, none shed alone. When Ani speaks out on behalf of other dancers to dispute the DJ’s sexual harassment, or when she insists on inviting her coworker to Vanya’s New Year’s Eve Party for no reason aside from her own comfort and companionship, we discern relationships already functioning beyond the transactional. Something must be risked, but not for any fairy tale that does us more harm than good. The risks we take should be calculated for our collective good – for a love that can actually last.
Ultimately, the condom packet’s shiny foil is illusory fool’s gold, as is the material excess it momentarily buys. But beneath its flashy surface, the unseen condom remains an unglamorous but essential component of the labor force’s toolkit. When the industry’s underbelly looks too dark, or worse, bereft of sexual gratification – when rape is more than jeeringly invoked, when a dancer can’t request worker’s comp after a disastrous injury, even when a client needs to don the damned condom – the film turns away. But we don’t have to do the same. It’s easy to feel cynical about Anora’s success, but there is a growing appetite for more honest and sex-worker-led depictions of the profession. It’s essential to put our weight behind sex-work-positive feminism and better working conditions for all, rather than hanging our hopes on a prince who isn’t coming, or who turns out to be a monster in disguise.
There is no winning lottery ticket to a gold-plated tower; too many have already made that gamble. But there is and always has been strength to be found in (even losing) numbers.
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First posted at Blind Field: a journal of cultural enquiry.