I'm not watching 'Anora'

Admitting that you haven’t read/watched/consumed something is usually an argument-terminator. You’re not supposed to continue to assert any opinion after that point; you are supposed to keep your thoughts to yourself. If you don’t, people are at liberty to shout ‘You haven’t even WATCHED it! How do you KNOW!’ until you give up and run away.

I’m never going to watch Anora, the lap-dance/sex-work/Russian oligarch movie that’s just cleaned up at the Oscars. So the fact that I’ve developed some strong opinions about it a) is inconvenient, and b) means this piece is a thoroughgoing breach of the ‘no commentary without consumption’ rule.

I mostly adhere to this rule, but if I’m honest, it’s usually out of a sheer lack of interest. For instance: I’ve never played any video games, and I also never engage in any sort of discourse about gaming: whether it’s is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, whether it’s Art-with-a-capital-A, whether it causes violent behaviour (that’s a call-back for you; nobody seems to worry about this any more)… I’m happy to concede that I don’t know. More relevantly, so far as my lack of commentary goes, I don’t care. The same goes for comic books/graphic novels: I have no opinion because I have no interest. I am perfectly happy to accept that these things can be complex, sophisticated, thoughtful and funny, and bring deep cultural joy and satisfaction to many people. Beyond that, I am just bored and would like to talk about something else now please.

Let’s take another example, though: food. Here, I regularly breach the ‘no commentary without consumption’ rule, because I am a lifelong picky eater. (I am already pre-emptively annoyed with those of you who are now thinking ‘Urgh, I hate picky eaters’. Food is very emotional.) The list of foodstuffs that I have never and will never try is extremely long, and yet I can still say with absolute confidence that I do not like shellfish, sushi or steak tartare, because I already know I loathe foods that are both fleshy and slimy. (I don’t mind slimy vegetables and fruits. Just in case you were thinking about having me round for dinner.) My understanding is grounded in 50 years of tasting things and pushing them away, and neither of us would enjoy it if I spewed on your shoes just to prove my point.

What I’m saying is that pretty much nobody adheres to the ‘no commentary without consumption’ rule all the time. The rule is only sustainable if the topic under discussion a) doesn’t touch on any pre-existing strongly held position, and b) cannot be meaningfully related to your broader experience. I am willing to bet that you, dear reader, have at least one strong opinion about something you haven’t directly or fully experienced: a book you didn’t finish, a political party whose manifesto you haven’t read, a city you’ve never visited.

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So, to return to Anora and why I’ve suddenly developed an opinion on a film I’ll never watch: one of the key points is that I absolutely despise porn. This is despite the fact that I have never watched porn. (Yeah, I know. I’m a fifty-something adult in the year 2025 and I’ve never watched porn. You try telling kids these days that: they’ll never believe you.) And Anora, from everything I’ve read, sounds incredibly porny.

Sean Baker, Anora’s director, has said he is on a mission to humanise sex workers. If you take that in good faith, it’s fair enough. But the point at which I found myself thinking ‘hang on, I absolutely hate this movie’ was when I read an interview in the Times that described the opening sequence:

‘The film’s opening scene is a lascivious reel of lap dances, entirely improvised by Madison [the lead actress] and the men. “I was meeting someone for the first time, walking up to them and giving them a lap dance from start to finish.”

Is this… how we ‘humanise’ sex workers? By getting a hot young actress to strip naked and perform a series of porny fantasies for the camera? Let’s put it this way: is there any possible avenue for humanising sex workers that doesn’t involve making porn and slipping it into mainstream cinema in a way that, frankly, feels a little sexually coercive? I feel sure that the answer to this question must be ‘yes’. Because on the one hand you have people and on the other hand you have a product, and whichever side of the argument you’re on I’d hope we can agree that people are not products and products are not people.

As ever with arguments about porn and sex work, on the one hand you have people — me — who think the market for porn and sex work springs from punters dehumanising sex workers; and on the other you have people — Sean Baker — who think you cannot ‘believe’ in the humanity of sex workers until you learn to enjoy the products of sex work. There’s no reconciling these two things.

And you know: I’m old, and I have many predictable opinions, but I’m not completely ossified. I could have been interested in a pro-sex-work film that had been written and directed by a woman. Just at an absolutely basic level, if you’re looking at a lap dance from the perspective of the person giving it, you will only be seeing the punter; their face, their sweat, the way they’re breathing, the look in their eyes. You wouldn’t the woman’s body. Yeah, I could be interested in a pro-sex-work film that sees sex work through sex workers’ eyes.

But you know whose sexual perspectives I already have more than enough of? Men, for fuck’s sake.

If there’s one thing I think even the most intelligent, empathetic man cannot really understand, it’s the total tonnage of male sexual perspective in our culture, and the way it dominates women’s experiences. Everything is shot through with men’s perspectives on sex: men writing about it, men photographing it, men filming it, men making creative decisions because of it, men bringing the conversation around to it when you thought we were talking about the traffic on the A3. Men fantasising about it, men getting aroused by (to us) weird things, men advocating for their right to more of it, men attaching sexual significance to everything from cars to toothpaste, men saying that everything in life is about either sex or death (I hate this one. Are you familiar with the concept of ‘friends’?) Men demanding it, men taking it, men pushing the boundaries until we’re arguing whether it’s OK to get off on a rape scene involving a cartoon kitten. It’s addled. You think we have to watch porn to have an opinion on it? Every time I use a public loo I wonder whether a man has put a camera under the toilet rim. You don’t have to consume porn to have an understanding of it; you just have to be sensate.

I like men, but you can really go off them if you think about this stuff too much.

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Every Brit my age watched snatches (yes, I know) of the Benny Hill Show when they were little kids; it was my first experience of thinking ‘there’s something here that makes me really uncomfortable and miserable, and everyone else is laughing’. You don’t know, when you’re seven, that some of them — mostly the women — are as discomfited as you are. The women around you won’t affirm your perception; they daren’t. They’ve already calculated the costs and benefits. However humiliating and unpleasurable it is, however much it costs them, women go along with this stuff; not only because it’s the price of admission, but because the cost of refusal is even greater. We all know what happens to the women who register their dissent; they are believed to be undesirable (prudish, dry, unloved), stupid (foolish, unimaginative, hysterical) and shrewish (censorious, anxious, angry). They are incapable of spontaneity and envious of joy. They are in the grip of a ‘moral panic’, which is what we call it when women notice something that men were hoping we wouldn’t notice.

And so you grow up realising that this is how it is: men set the rules about sex, about how it’s perceived and framed and performed and consumed, about who and what gets entirely and utterly fucked. And if you don’t like it, you’re on your own. Which is how I’ve been feeling watching film critics — almost all of them men, although not exclusively so — talk about how ‘joyful’ is is to watch Anora.

I hate being angry; I prize rationality. I am a purveyor of mild interrogation in an amused register. I don’t really have the balls to be anything else. But I cannot be careful or amused about this, although I’m really trying. When it comes to men and their revealed sexual preferences — when it comes to the way men dominate sexual culture and frame women’s experiences, and then tell us we’re both over-reacting and making it all up (surely it’s one or the other?) — I become furious at a cellular level, a level deeper than words and conscious cognition.

I don’t like being in this state. I’m not at my best. It’s not very ‘me’. It’s like when you’re at a party and everyone has drunk too much and you realise that a massive row has started on the other side of the room, and someone is suddenly crying and yelling at the same time and snot is sliding into their mouth, and it’s comfortable to think: oh, that person has absolutely lost it, they need to go home and sleep it off. But the person is me, and I’m not drunk, and I can’t sleep it off. I can only try not to think about it, except when I’m dodging porn references on social media or catching sight of The News on any given day or going to the loo in any public place.

Arguments about sex and desire (like arguments about food) are fraught for everyone. I’m not saying I think everyone has to agree with me; they don’t. You don’t. (Let’s face it: I’ve already lost the argument. I lost a long time ago. I just don’t seem to have the common sense to stop being so angry about it.) I’m saying the costs of making this particular argument feel frighteningly high. There's something twisted and painful about it, like burned flesh. It would be so much easier to stick with the ‘no commentary without consumption’ rule. But here we are. (It was this or a 3000-word piece about the Plantagenets.)

What really creeps me out about Anora is that it was written and directed by a man. An absolutely common-or-garden, comfortable, rich, fifty-something boho Western male, who just happens — fancy that! — to have a bunch of fashionable opinions that align with the psychosexual comfort of cosseted liberal guys. And half a century of experience has led me to the opinion that the comfortable, liberal, self-satisfied, almost always left-leaning guys who argue for the wholescale commodification of other people’s bodies: those guys are dipshits. They are the fucking worst.

Women like me are supposed to shut up about porn despite it mediating a large part of our life experience, and yet nobody has said that Sean Baker shouldn’t have written and directed this film unless he had personally taken £25 to go into a room with a horny, unpredictable stranger and rub his naked arsehole up against a cock while hoping that the situation doesn’t turn nasty. So yeah: I have an opinion about Anora, although I haven't seen it. I think it sounds shitty.

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‘Women have very little idea how much men hate them’