In defense of ‘Anora’

In Defense of “Anora”: How We’ve Lost Sight of What the “Male Gaze” Really Means 

Sean Baker’s “Anora” was a shocking Oscar sweeper. In a world of “Green Book” and “Shakespeare in Love”, the story of an abrasive New York sex worker winning cinema’s top prize seems like nothing short of a fairy tale. A gritty, funny, and tragic pitch-black comedy about Ani (Mikey Madison), a Brooklyn stripper who impulsively marries the son of a Russian oligarch, Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), “Anora” was made for a modest $6 million dollars, barely a fraction of 2023’s Best Picture winner “Oppenheimer.” Led by the stunning Mikey Madison, who won her first Oscar for her lead role, the 25-year-old’s beautiful acceptance speech thanked the sex worker community for her performance. For once, a film about sex work was embraced by an often faux-progressive Hollywood. 

I loved the film. I found it moving, sickly hilarious, and a delightful continuation of Sean Baker’s already iconic career. While I believe “Tangerine” and “The Florida Project” to be more successful in their pacing and inventiveness, seeing Baker work with an inflated budget and in the city of New York made my cinephile heart soar. 

As “Anora”’s profile grew after its Palme d’Or win at the 77th Cannes Film Festival and inched closer and closer to a Best Picture lock, I could not help but notice criticism of the film begin to pop up. The New Yorker ran a headline that “‘Anora’ Is More for Show Than for Substance.” Critics claimed the film was exploitative, symptomatic of conservatism’s rise or proof that Hollywood rewards nudity over narrative. Debates over nudity on film, power dynamics, and how to portray sex work on screen erupted. A tweet from @bettenboujee read “my thing with anora is the same thing i had with poor things which is they’re both very clearly male-directed movies about women’s sexuality… the issue is that their male gaze is inextricable from their art.” Is this sentiment productive, or does it erase the agency of a film’s female cast and crew? Are cis men inextricably linked to the male gaze? What the HELL does “male gaze” even mean? 

The Origins of the “Male Gaze” 

Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking 1975 essay titled “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” introduced the concept of the “male gaze,” a theory that came to redefine how audiences understand spectatorship, gender in film and the act of seeing itself. Drawing on Freudian psychoanalysis, Mulvey argued that classical cinema was built around the male viewer. Women became not protagonists but spectacles, to-be-looked-at-ness was their function. The camera mimicked a heterosexual male’s perspective, slicing the female body into fetishized parts, lingering on breasts, legs, lips. Male characters moved the plot along; women stalled it, reduced to erotic obstacles. 

Mulvey’s argument was not simply about sex scenes or the presence of nudity (which rose in the New Hollywood of the 1960s). Rather, she argued that formal cinematic language — framing, lighting, editing, and shot composition — functions to eroticize and objectify female (and, I’d argue, nonbinary) bodies while positioning male characters (and the assumed male viewer) as possessors of agency, power, and narrative control. Mainstream cinema, Mulvey contends, “coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order,” satisfying scopophilic desires (pleasure in looking at others as erotic objects) while also sustaining male ego-identification with powerful male protagonists. 

Mulvey locates the function of woman in film as symbolic within the patriarchal unconscious, prescribed by a male-dominated society. “The function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is two-fold,” she writes. “She first symbolizes the castration threat by her real absence of a penis, and second, thereby raises her child into the symbolic.” In this psychoanalytic schema, women do not exist independently within a film’s narrative structure, they exist to uphold male meaning. “She can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it,” Mulvey concludes. This phallocentric logic casts the female body not as subject, but as absence and spectacle — a beautiful, dangerous void around which men’s power is organized. 

Mulvey, however, does not call for censorship. To resist patriarchal cinematic logic is not to reject pleasure outright, but to “dare to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire.” Feminist cinema must not eliminate sexuality, it must reclaim it from being merely spectacle. In my opinion, the term “male gaze,” coined by legendary feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey, has morphed into a social media buzzword, distorted by the language of social media capitalism and our lack of language around sex and sex work on screen. Just because a woman is nude, because she strips, because she yearns to feel beautiful and be loved and secure, does not make it a male fantasy. 

Beyond Mulvey: The Oppositional Gaze and Modernizing “The Male Gaze” 

While Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was foundational to feminist film theory, it is not without its limitations. One of the most enduring critiques comes from cultural theorist bell hooks, whose concept of the “oppositional gaze” addresses the racial exclusions inherent in Mulvey’s framework. In her 1992 essay “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” hooks notes that Mulvey assumes a universal spectator that is implicitly white, male and heterosexual, ignoring the ways Black women and other marginalized viewers engage with film through resistance and critique. “There is power in looking,” hooks writes, and Black women have historically been punished for that look, whether as spectators or subjects. Where Mulvey theorized spectatorship as monolithic, hooks introduced the idea that gaze itself is conditioned by race, class and history.

Beyond race, Mulvey’s theory has also been critiqued for its binary assumptions about gender and power. The framework too often presumes a strict split between active/male and passive/female, leaving little room for ambiguity, subversion or queer desire. Her essay centers male filmmakers like Hitchcock and Sternberg while ignoring the contributions of female filmmakers active during the same era — Barbara Loden, Agnès Varda, Chantal Akerman — whose work often directly confronted or dismantled patriarchal visual codes. Even as Mulvey advocates for an avant-garde cinema, her canon remains rooted in the Western, Euro-American tradition, often overlooking how non-Western filmmakers interrogate power and representation in culturally distinct ways.

I am not against the evolution of the term “male gaze.” In fact, I welcome its modernization. Feminist theory should grow, adapt, and be challenged. My skepticism lies not in Mulvey’s radicalism, but in the way her ideas have calcified into internet cliché. Today, the phrase “male gaze” has been stripped of its analytic rigor, repurposed into a moralistic branding tool or fashion trend. Mulvey’s reliance on Freud, too, while productive for structural analysis, can feel outdated, even silly in light of contemporary gender theory. But at its core, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” still offers an urgent political question: Who holds power over images?

Rethinking Auteur Theory and Power 

To label “Anora” as a male gaze film because it is a film about a stripper directed by a man is to misunderstand both the theory itself and the collaborative nature of filmmaking. The persistent conflation of male authorship with patriarchal gaze reveals how popular discourse has flattened Mulvey’s nuanced theory into a gender-essentialist tool. A man inextricable from his manhood? A bizarre and unproductive take, if you ask me. While “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” articulates the ways mainstream cinema reflects patriarchal structures, it never claims that all male-directed films are inherently objectifying. And yet, in contemporary criticism, particularly online, there’s a prevailing assumption that the male gaze is inextricable from male filmmakers, even Baker who has committed his career thus far to humanizing sex workers through intense research and street-casting, as if gender alone dictates the ethical and aesthetic qualities of a film. 

This perspective falls victim not only to gender essentialism, but to an exaggerated form of auteurism, a critical tradition that elevates the director as the sole creative voice, ignoring the contribution of actors, cinematographers, editors, and other collaborators. To suggest “Anora” is an exploitative male fantasy because it depicts a female sex worker (working at her job) who makes a very bad decision (marrying rashly) and was directed by Sean Baker not only reinforces patriarchy by centering a presumed male authority figure, but also erases the agency of lead actress Mikey Madison (who chose the role) and other female collaborators, like Baker’s producing partner Samantha Quan, costume designer Jocelyn Pierce, and real-life sex workers Luna Sofía Miranda, Lindsey Normington, and Sophia Carnabuci who all lent their acting talents to the film. Madison, a 25-year-old performer making her first major awards run this past season, was instrumental in developing Ani’s emotional complexity. She trained with real dancers, conducted interviews with sex workers, and brought specificity to a role that transcends stereotypes formed by films like “Pretty Woman” and “Trading Places.” To deny that labor, or to collapse it under the rubric of “male gaze,” is to misunderstand how creative agency operates on set. 

Why “Anora” Does Not Reflect the Male Gaze 

Judged by the formal and ideological criteria laid out by Mulvey, “Anora” resists the male gaze at nearly every turn. Many have even labeled the film the anti-”Pretty Woman,” a film that sugarcoated the realities of sex work and sees its female heroine (Julia Roberts’s Vivian, a sex worker) saved by the rich and caring Edward (Richard Gere). “Pretty Woman” introduces Roberts’ Vivian through slow panning shots of her bare abdomen, her reaching arm, her unzipped boots. 

In contrast, Ani is not a passive erotic object but the active agent in the narrative. While her life is derailed by the charismatic, wealthy Vanya (Mark Eydehlstein), and she is lulled into a marriage with him, Ani is not a brainless idiot as some on the internet have claimed, but instead a girl who gave herself a few moments to dream of a better life, one of security and young love. She is not a “perfect woman,” and surely is not a “hooker with a heart of gold”; Ani is brash and naive, and engages in interpersonal fights with her coworkers. 

However, she manages to reclaim her voice and power across her chaotic, two-part odyssey in small but important ways. She initiates the romance in her own self-interest, negotiates terms for her marriage (“5 karats?”) and her job (demanding health insurance and a 401k), and her athleticism and talent is displayed through her dancing, not just her sexuality. Her body is never atomized by the camera. Ani is not a leg or a breast, but a fully embodied woman. The strip club is not a site of erotic spectacle, but one of labor, camaraderie, and class tension. Baker strips back the veil of romanticized womanhood as viewers see Ani and her coworkers bicker and laugh in the breakroom. Scenes with Ani’s peers, like when Ani and fellow sex worker Diamond have a spat in the greenroom, reveal workplace dynamics that humanize rather than objectify. 

Baker and cinematographer Drew Daniels build Ani’s world with intimate realism and dreamlike lyricism. In the opening moments of the film, we track Ani as she tries to score a customer in a long tracking shot through the club, shot entirely from her perspective. For the shot, the club set was fully functioning and Madison was in character for thirty minutes as she walked around the club looking for her customer, all to show the mechanics of the club and an average night for our heroine. 

When she dances for Vanya in his mansion’s sun-drenched living room, we see her performance not as seduction, but as hard work — skillful, vulnerable, and beautiful, if not a bit funny as Vanya watches on and giggles childishly. The camera holds on her body, but does not fracture it. When violence erupts as the henchman (Yura Borisov as Igor, Karren Karagulian as Toroes, and Vache Tovmasyan as Garnik) of Vanya’s parents arrive to annul their ill-fated marriage, Ani fights like hell. She is neither infantilized nor glamorized, Baker having her bite, kick and scream with full-bodied rage, a far cry from the “frozen” eroticized woman Mulvey describes, or the damsel in distress of Pretty Woman. Rather than stalling the narrative, she drives it through her steadfast resistance. Rather than simply existing as spectacle, she becomes the story. 

In short: not every film that depicts a nude woman, a sex worker, or even a sexually assaulted woman is a “male gaze” film. To argue otherwise is to collapse representation into morality, and to overlook the radical empathy Anora extends to its heroine. 

The Male Gaze as Meme: From Theory to Trend

What’s most concerning about current discourse around the male gaze is how it has been severed from its theoretical roots and repackaged as internet shorthand. In popular usage, the term now applies indiscriminately to anything sexual, glamorous or directed by a man. Trends like “Dressing for the Male Gaze vs. The Female Gaze” means the term has become more about branding than it has about power. In this new lexicon, feminism is aestheticized into consumable bits of identity, tailored for virality rather than analysis. While I am all for us gals dressing for comfort, to appeal to each other instead of to the heteronormative gaze, co-opting the term “male gaze” serves only capitalism, and produces only new trend cycles. This flattening not only betrays Mulvey’s original critique, and all but ignores work from other feminist scholars like bell hooks, it commodifies feminism. 

This version of the male gaze still enforces a gender binary and adheres to trend whims rather than structural critique. A sex worker on screen becomes automatically suspect, when we should really be encouraging more nuanced works about sex workers on our screens, of all genders and races. This flippant use of the term “male gaze” not only flattens representation, it pathologizes female sexuality, returning, ironically, to a kind of puritanism that denies women complexity and choice. Anora is not immune to criticism, and neither should it be. The “male gaze” should be situated in a modern filmmaking context, and films like Bombshell and The Winter Soldier’s poster fiasco underscore that.  But the impulse to declare Anora a product of the male gaze because it features sex, stripping and a male director is intellectually lazy. Feminist theory must be more precise than this. If we are serious about dismantling power, we must also dismantle simplistic binaries — male/female, gaze/gazed at, good/bad -– that dominate cultural criticism today.