How Anora Signals the End of Hollywood's #MeToo Era

Why Hollywood’s feminist reckoning couldn’t outlast male desire.

This is a guest post by Joseph Holmes.

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Watching Anora sweep the Oscars was, on the one hand, very expected for me. First, historically almost every single movie that won all the pre-Oscar awards Anora did has also won Best Picture. Secondly, Hollywood historically loves movies about prostitutes. So it seemed like a no-brainer.

But on the other hand, it was kind of unbelievable and surreal. It seemed like only yesterday that the #MeToo movement was in full swing, with the entire culture shaming Hollywood for pressuring women to sexualize themselves for the male gaze.

Yet here was a male director being rewarded with a record-breaking number of Oscar wins for a movie which included seemingly no less than 40 minutes of graphic nudity and sex without the use of an intimacy coordinator (once lauded as a necessary post-#MeToo industry standard) centered around its female lead who won herself the Best Actress for that role. A role she won over Demi Moore, who was nominated for Best Actress in a movie about how Hollywood was obsessed with rewarding young actresses for being young and sexy while ignoring old ones. (Irony so thick you could cut it with a wet noodle.)

Film and culture critic Cap Stewart astutely noted the tragedy of nominating women for highly sexualized roles and the irony of this in a post-#MeToo world.

As more accolades, nominations, and awards are handed out to women who sexualize themselves for the camera, it reinforces industry-wide hypersexualized norms that MeToo was supposed to help dismantle. If Thompson and Stone and Madison are lauded for disrobing and sexually acting out, it sends a clear message to the tens of thousands (at least) of other actresses in the Screen Actors Guild: “If you want to be acknowledged for your acting chops, your clothes and inhibitions need to go on the chopping block. These are the kinds of performances we regard, respect, and reward.

And yet, the cracks have been showing in the #MeToo movement for a long time. Many high-profile women supported Johnny Depp in his defamation lawsuit against Amber Heard, and Hollywood in general was largely silent on the issue despite the #MeToo insistence that people “believe all women” when it comes to allegations of abuse. (Similar female support for a man seems to be repeated in the Blake Lively/Justin Baldoni feud). The Times Up organization, set up to give legal defense of sexual harassment and abuse survivors, dissolved amid its own scandals. Victoria’s Secret Angel show came back after the #MeToo movement shut it down. Carl’s Jr. has returned to using scantily clad female models to advertise their meat. Sidney Sweeney hosted SNL where she embraced her sex appeal, prompting one commenter to argue “Men don't ONLY like Sydney Sweeney for her boobs, they like her bc she's the first starlet in a long time to unrepentantly and cheerfully chase the male gaze. She is clearly giving permission to ogle and enjoying that feminine power.”

Sweeney herself summed up the state of Hollywood feminism in a recent interview: “This entire industry, all people say is ‘Women empowering other women.’ None of it’s happening. All of it is fake and a front for all the other s— that they say behind everyone’s back.”

Why did this happen? How did the movement that seemed like it was taking over the world fizzle out within just a few short years?

Some stand-up comics have joked that the reason is that there are limits to the success of movements led by women. Dave Chappelle quipped in his Netflix special The Closer that the reason for the #MeToo movement’s relative failure is that women ran it and “needs a male leader”. Bill Burr laughed in his Live at Red Rocks special that feminism didn’t bother him “for the simple fact that I know it’s going to fail” because “they still need men’s help to make it happen. I don’t know why they can’t just get together and make s–t happen. They keep coming to us.”

Michelle Wolf was even more pointed about the limits of women’s ability to change culture in their favor.

Women, we should just admit this has never been about equality. You don’t want to be equal, you want to be better than men! Admit it! You want to do to men what men did to us. You want to rule the world. You want to line the streets with tampons and fill the fountains with Chardonnay. You want to repeat what a man said in the meeting and have a boss go, “Good idea, Cheryl.” You want to hold power in your hands, and that’ll never happen because men will knock it away with their strong, strong arms. Just settle for equality, and maybe a place to breastfeed that isn’t a closet.

There may be some sense to this. The late Dr. Helen Fishcer argued in The Anatomy of Love that a survey of civilizations throughout history shows there’s never truly been a truly “matriarchal” society where women held the majority of the power. As she notes, sociologist Martin Whyte “mined the Human Relations Area File, a modern data bank that records information on over eight hundred societies”, and found that, when you take a multifasciated view into account that incorporates feminist anthropologist more nuanced approaches to what constitutes “power in society”--symbolic, influential, economic, political, etc.--most cultures had men holding the majority of the power in most areas of life and a minority were roughly equal. “Myths of Amazon women, tales of matriarchs who ruled with a velvet fist, were just that: fiction”

Likewise, I noted in my article on Hollywood’s trope of the “female moral gaze” that recent American history also shows severe limits on women’s ability to change society in ways that actually cost anything for powerful men. The first feminist movement in the 20th century tried to reform men and bring them back to the home, and church, and away from promiscuity and alcoholism. But men refused to change, and feminists’ demands completely switched to women being allowed to join men instead. As I wrote, “Women who once demanded to bring men back home and stop sleeping around demanded to be let into the workplace and–aided by birth control and abortion–be allowed to sleep around as well.”

While supposedly for women, many of these arrangements benefitted powerful men a lot more. As Louise Perry points out in her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (and its updated version for young women A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century), men benefit when the stigma against women having casual sex is gone because more women will have casual sex with them. Likewise, men benefit when prostitution is destigmatized because they can exploit sex workers while also gaining praise from society for being “on the side of women”.

But this was bad for women because most don’t like casual sex the way men do, and with it destigmatized, they have to engage in it or men will ignore them for women who will. Likewise destigmatizing sex work necessitates exploitation because there’s always a greater demand from men than there are women who want to supply it. So the industry has to engage in predatory practices to maintain the supply. Men often complain that the feminist era disadvantages men. But even things about feminism that men complain disadvantage them–like women in the workforce–actually still benefit the most powerful men. Women tend to want relationships with men who make as much or more than them. So when there are more rich women and fewer rich men, those rich men have less male competition for mates. Research shows that the fewer rich men there are, the more women engage in sexualizing themselves for attention, like with the “sexy selfie” phenomenon, which is just fine with the men they’re competing for.

What does this all mean? Well, in short, it means that the simple reason that the #MeToo movement didn’t last is that powerful men didn’t want it to. Just like with hookup culture and prostitution and women in the workforce, men embraced the aspects of the #MeToo movement that benefited them (elevating female voices made them a lot of money with Barbie). But they won’t change anything that actually gets in the way of them getting what they want. This makes the Anora win all the more obvious. As Academy voters, they can award a film that advocates for a sexual environment they like while branding themselves as “pro-woman”. They can cheer for Mikey Madison saying she will “continue to support and be an ally” to the sex worker community” because that support means more opportunities for them to use sex workers. And like with hookup culture and the sex industry, women in film–like Mikey Madison–will have to play to those men’s tastes to have a shot in the game at all.

Watching Anora, you can tell the film is deeply at war with itself, just like Hollywood feminism. We are supposed to believe there is nothing wrong with the sex work industry, that it isn’t harmful, that it isn’t hell on earth for the women who are a part of it. We are supposed to believe that the only problems are society’s lack of acceptance of it. And yet, the whole drive of the film is Anora’s desire to leave that life for a life of a traditional exclusive married relationship. The tragedy of the story is that she’s not allowed out of the life that there’s supposedly nothing wrong with. At the end of the film, she finally encounters a man who’s attracted to her, but wants her for more than just her body. And that causes her to lash out, then break down and cry. Because that’s what she’s been denied throughout seemingly her entire adult life.

The Hollywood #MeToo era ended because it could neither take power from men nor change what men wanted. Its legacy for most women–including women like Madison–is the same as for Anora, weeping in a car, unsure why nothing’s really changed.