It requires a certain audacity — the kind found only among the truly decadent — to spend years weeping into the cameras about the #MeToo movement, promising that the exploitation of women would no longer be tolerated, and then, with a straight face, to hand an Oscar to a film glorifying the sex trade.
Such is the perverse genius of Hollywood: one moment it howls against Harvey Weinstein, and the next it offers up a golden idol to Anora — a film about a young Brooklyn sex worker who is portrayed not as exploited, but empowered by her trade. The movie is praised for its “sex positive and heartfelt depiction” of sexual labor, “emphasizing the dignity of sex workers,” while its director, Sean Baker, accepting his award, solemnly thanked “the sex worker community” — as though saluting heroic nurses or teachers, rather than an industry rooted in coercion, misery, and despair.
One wonders whether there is a single functioning neuron left in the collective Hollywood brain. Is sexual exploitation evil, or is it empowering? Is the degradation, commoditization, and monetization of women to be lamented, or lionized? These are not complicated questions, unless, of course, you have trained yourself — as Hollywood has — to view all human suffering through the lens of fashion, fad, and of course, profit.
The celebration of prostitution as “liberation” is not merely dishonest; it is obscene. No serious person can look at the global sex trade — at the poverty, addiction, and violence that drive it — and call it anything but an organized system of abuse. To raise a glass to it on Oscar night, draped in diamonds and designer gowns, is the moral equivalent of handing out humanitarian awards to gun runners and drug dealers.
But then, moral clarity has never been Hollywood’s strong suit. This is an industry that feasts on the exploitation of the young and vulnerable, that covers its sins with photo ops and hashtag campaigns, and that imagines it can atone for decades of predation with a few preening speeches about “change.” Sex is, after all, Hollywood’s chief export, with violence a close second, and sex work combines them both. Hollywood is the sex industry. So why should we expect the sex industry to be portrayed as exploitative by itself? That would be poor marketing!
Let us state the facts, and the motivations, plainly: the more sexual exploitation is normalized, even celebrated, the more easily women can be commodified. It paves the way for transactional relationships in which men exchange money and power for sexual access. This is, quite literally, sadism—so named for the Marquis de Sade, who believed society’s moral constraints, especially around sex, were the root of human misery. His answer was to abolish those constraints entirely and treat people—especially women—as instruments of pleasure. That’s the endgame: to dismantle the social boundaries that once protected human dignity, in order to grease the wheels of exploitation.
So let us not feign surprise that the same culture, the same industry that once normalized the casting couch now congratulates itself for “raising awareness,” while it quietly rebrands exploitation as empowerment whenever it suits the narrative, the bottom line, and personal perversities.
The reality is very simple and very ugly. Hollywood never cared about the exploitation of women. It merely cared that its excesses had finally become embarrassing. Harvey Weinstein was not the sickness; he was the unsightly gangrenous extremity they could afford to amputate, a severed limb was thrown to circling wolves, so that the body of the industry might limp onward, unrepentant and unchanged.
This was not a reckoning. It was a rebranding.
Selling sex and violence is Hollywood’s oldest and truest business — its original sin, its most reliable export. It was never going to forsake the machinery of lust and degradation that feeds it. Instead, it did what it does best: it improvised a performance. It painted old vices with new colors, clothed exploitation in the language of empowerment, and returned to the work of commodifying human bodies with greater confidence than before.
The Oscar stage, draped in self-congratulation, is merely the most expensive set piece of all. The speeches are lines on a teleprompter. The outrage is part of the costume. The corruption, polished and lit, plays on endless repeat.
No institution built on illusion can ever repent — it can only reinvent its deceits.
And so Hollywood, like a dying star collapsing into itself, continues its descent — and that of our culture — into moral inversion, where vice is virtue, exploitation is emancipation, and the only sin is to notice.
