Andrea Werhun didn't have to wait long to see her influence on the screen.
Because while the Toronto-based artist and former sex worker was watching only the opening scenes of longsShe already saw something so corriente and yet innovative. When the best picture Oscar favorite introduced its main character, Anora, an exotic dancer and sex worker about to be taken on a journey as exciting as it is horrible by a client from hell, we first get a quieter moment.
Sitting in the break room of the strip club where she works, the film shows Anora casually and carefully eating a packed refrigerio from a plastic container. It's a seemingly everyday activity, one that Werhun specifically suggested to director Sean Baker when he hired her as a consultant, advising him on how to almohadilla the film in reality.
It's also a moment one might expect to see from a different type of character, such as an office worker, and perhaps not from someone in Anora's line of work.
But Werhun knew otherwise.
When Añora director Sean Baker wanted to make his film more accurate, he contacted Toronto's Andrea Werhun. Werhun is a former sex worker and author of Trendy Whore. He spoke with CBC's Eli Glasner about his contribution to Anora and his own personal experiences.
“When I saw that on the big screen, I thought, 'Yeah, yeah, because that's current,'” he said. “And that's not something that, as an outsider, as someone who has never spent time in the locker room of a strip club, you are going to notice, think about or consider.”
As small as that action seemed on the surface, for Werhun and others with experience working or studying sex work, it represented so much more. Because, Werhun said, ever since they appeared in film, sex work and sex workers have largely been portrayed as evildoers who need to be vilified or victims who need to be saved.
And that type of perception, he says, has repercussions on life today.
“We are victims, we were villains, we are dead, we have hearts of gold,” he said. “These are such superficial representations that they flatten our humanity and remove nuance and complexity from who we are as human beings, as people.”
Heartbreak, reform or tragedy
The use of sex workers in the media is not new at all: Lauren Kirshner, assistant professor at Metropolitan University of Toronto and author of Sex work in culture in style, noted it as the most common work portrayed by best actress Oscar winners. It is seen in such defining Hollywood classics as Butterfield 8, I want to live! and Madelón's sinahead of the next most common professions of singer and teacher. The tradition dates back even to the first winner, Janet Gaynor, who took home the trophy in 1929 for her work in three films. In two of those films, street angel and seventh heavenshe played a sex worker.
However, most of those roles, he said, also featured shared stories that ended with “implied love and marriage, heartbreak and reform… or tragedy, murder, suicide or accident.” Otherwise, they are often secondary characters used to tempt or simply define the current protagonist, as in long-running collections. MD Housein which the rule-breaking doctor visited sex workers throughout his career to outline his character.
longsKirshner said, it's part of the shift seen in recent years, along with other films like the Oscar-winning film. poor things and the Canadian film Paying for itfilm starring Werhun. longs – which follows its star as he is first offered the chance to save himself from his circumstances before plunging back into the realities of his world – never uses her as a prop and never wavers from his point of view.
“The character of the sex worker is becoming a dynamic character. So we see it more and more. “She is center stage, she is the main character,” Kirshner said. “And I think the fact that the sex worker is finally the main character and not an accessory and not an attempt to show something attractive or dangerous, is a sign of how far pop culture has come.”
The beginnings of that change, he said, can perhaps be seen most famously in pretty womanthe Julia Roberts-directed film about a sex worker who eventually falls in love with a rich lawyer.
Kirshner said that film and others like it, like its spiritual predecessor klute starring Jane Fonda, were actually defining moments in many ways: films that showed sex workers as extremely likable, dynamic, and with an inside life and backstory.
But those films also perpetuated the idea that a happy ending is escaping a lifestyle that is imposed on them. That, Kirshner says, makes it seem like those characters (and verdadero people like them) have little or no agency.
“There is still a lot of ethical judgment associated with the decisions women make. “There are a lot of assumptions that no sex worker could actually choose sex work,” Kirshner said.
“I mean, all workers choose their work within certain limitations, and sex workers are no different. The only difference is that their work is criminalized.”
Tense realities
And they are movies like longssaid, they make the important distinction of what sex workers may actually want to escape. In that film, Anora wants to get out of the workforce in which all workers struggle to survive, rather than out of an inherently shameful profession.
That description is particularly important to the broader perception of sex workers in today's life, said Chandra Ewing, executive director of Maggie's Toronto Sex Workers Action Project. Although the act of selling sexual services is not illegal in Canada, the purchase of sexual services is. While this distinction was intended to protect sex workers while decreasing prostitution, Ewing said it creates a gray area.
Because sex work has some protections as a legitimate business, along with legislation that makes it more underground, she said sex workers are often in a constant state of fear of being “outed.” That could put them at risk of their profession being “a weapon against them” due to preconceptions, and lead them to lose custody of their children, their housing, or their status as residents and be expelled from the country.
“So it's not even really an implicit choice what sex workers do. “It is a very current reality that they have no rights, agency or autonomy over their own lives,” he said. “That is why, unfortunately, sex workers have to exist on the margins.”
Film's changing portrayal of sex workers as more developed characters is important, she said, as it humanizes them and can work to undo the idea that they should be stigmatized. But, she said, that must be done hand in hand with a realistic depiction of the tense realities sex workers face.
In Werhun's view, that can only be achieved by having those with direct experience in the industry tell their own stories, or at least influence the way they are told.
“Because otherwise it's civilians – that's what we call people who don't do sex work – who tell stories for us,” she said. “And that will never be good enough.”
lLJ">Source link