Anora Can’t Connect

In 2004 Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs wrote ‘Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions’ in Personality and Social Psychology Review. I was assigned that paper in two different undergraduate courses and I remember that both times the class discussion vacillated between natural oozing excitement of 21-22 olds (they were upper level seminars) and the natural awkwardness of nobody getting laid at a nerdy school in repressed sunless everyone-is-always-wearing-layers-upon-layers Pittsburgh. Still, in my senior year, having already practiced the awkward excitement version of it the year before, I went for it—in terms of class participation—and reveled in the comforting environment where we could discuss this really weird human thing that this entire game is based on in utter scientific cause-and-effect.

Apparently, this paper was controversial time and time again since its publication, likely because nerdy academes wanna jump on the rare sexy opportunity at work whenever it arises, but also because Baumeister had the balls to write and publish this. Humans get very animated when the jealously/envy network is activated. I have a friend who has actually published with Vohs and he said “I don’t think Kathleeen wrote any of it. It’s just that people would’ve excoriated Baumeister if there was no female coauthor attached––gender buffer” (Otherwise Baumeister and Vohs have written dozens of papers together). And he also said “I think ultimately he wrote it just to fuck with people. To see how they would react. And, good golly, react they did––for freaking two decades and counting”.

Independent of his mischievous intentions, at this point I swear by this paper. Think about it: what happens when a girlie first notices that merely by existing, just via some of her immutable (and sexually dimorphic) qualities, she has something that half of humanity wants physical access to. This is an interesting design feature: most women get attention by default (whether it is wanted or unwanted being besides the point) and a tiny fraction of men, with their own exaggerated sexually dimorphic features (or traits), get a somewhat comparable type of attention. Few men get hot girl treatment while most men are invisible. And hot women end up feeling commodified (not by society or other men, but even before all that, by evolution) and when the path of least resistance is chosen for survival, they end up with a transactional connection with the world around them revolving around their humps and lumps.

Anora is that type of typical hot girlie who probably starts getting both lauded and punished for her good looks at an early age. Broken home, runaway dad, economic stress––soon enough, you start playing theater in front of men one-on-one on an industrial scale and treat them like an ATM. That tiny scene early on where she keeps saying “You wanna go to an ATM? Let’s go to the ATM” is there for a reason.

And that’s really how they see customers. I had a few sex workers as therapy clients in the past. Two of them actually straight up didn’t even identify as female––they were autistic non-binary people who would get into the telephone booth and transform into the “female” costume for their shifts, They reported feeling a certain amount of fondness for their regulars, but other than that they seemed to have zero respect for their customers and considered them as “stupid” and “gullible”. The invisible hand of the free market pushing these humans into a purely transactional mindset with half the humans out there.

And this mindset is powerful and pervasive. I know this because one of those clients literally couldn’t get herself to pay me (until I had to drop her and send the invoices to collections) because her entire relationship with men involved her receiving money from them and never the other way around. When I had to confront her about her behavior I suggested—and it seemed to check out—that in her brain, doing anything with a man except for lying to receive money did not compute. And the whole thing was extra bizarre because she was a referral from a long-time client that I worked with for about a year and a half. They were supposedly very close friends for several years, and she ruined her own therapy knowing full-well (actually, more like not caring at all) that she was putting her close friend in a very bad situation. That former client had successfully graduated from therapy, as in, they had fixed their issues and they didn’t need it anymore. They were very grateful to me, and in good faith they referred to me two of her closest friends as new clients. And this professional liar for a living literally dissolved one of the very few friendships they had because they couldn’t help themselves but lie out of their teeth for no apparent reason other than a compulsion to self-sabotage. It was definitely about more than money, so before I told her to never contact me or my practice again, I told her to find a female therapist because the moment she sees a Y-chromosome her manipulation brain automatically activates and she ends up performing to a therapist instead of getting help. Really silly stuff.

Any wonder why Anora is not emotionally available? Of course not. But then it boils down to the situation being both a chicken and an egg at the same time. A man lacking emotional empathy snags a hot woman to sire a hot daughter with whom he will abandon after passing his personality traits of lacking empathy––which brings with it a transactional, manipulative, kinda empty and dead-inside brain––and this kind of emotionally void girlie who already probably doesn’t have too many oxytocin or vasopressin receptors in her brain to be able to pair-bond is more likely to see her lady bits as a resource to be peddled. As far as I’ve observed thus far in life, hot women who have adequate amounts of emotional empathy seem mostly unable to see the world in a way that is conducive to selling one’s own body in the first place—at the very least not as a part of the stripper-industrial complex. It is likely that they see something wrong with that. Something unclean and demeaning, something that feels insulting to some kind of core principle somewhere.

I know this because I interviewed hundreds of people with narcissistic traits at this point and when pressed about it, they almost always divulge feeling––and always having felt––disgusting on the inside. They all seem to see themselves as a worthless piece of crap that is worthy of the self-hatred they exercise––and much of their unusual and irrational behavior comes from frantic efforts to compensate for that unending awful feeling that they, unfortunately, seem to be born with. In short, hot girlies with emotional depth are significantly less likely to do sex work, while the ones who lack an emotional substance are readily interested in opportunities that can reinforce the awfulness they likely feel on the inside. Every shift where men treat them the way they believe they deserve to be treated, something just clicks and fits oh so snugly.

It is established in the movie that there was no father figure around for Anora. It is, of course, textbook behavior (and also life-path) for women who don’t get healthy amounts of parental male attention. And when a drugged out drunk loser wants to marry her to piss off his parents, she is so immediately able to delude herself that this is love. During the middle portion of the movie she has so many lines to the effect of how they ‘“love each other” and that “no one can break them apart”. The disconnect between what she’s living though and what a recognizable form of “love” is for most humans is almost shocking. There is a freaking chasm.

It is so sad that she has literally absolutely unequivocally no idea what love is or what it looks like. But she stumbled upon a situation, namely “marriage”, that she knows from observations that has something to do with “love”. So she clings onto it with tooth, nail, and fang, frantically flailing around blindly and ignorantly claiming that this is love and she has it. She’s pretending to be fully human, trying to convince herself that she too is capable of what everyone around her seems to be capable of. Only to slowly realize that she “married” a silly little child who cares about her as much as he cares about the next stripper who would be his girlfriend for the week.

Woof, out of nowhere I remembered the client who grew up (and was still) affluent but had slept with ~200 men in two years off sugar daddy websites at $500 a pop to afford costumes for the concerts she was going to. But of course, she couldn’t wear the same costume twice since there are pictures of it all over her social media, so she was still penniless to get the expensive tooth laminating she desperately wanted to clean up her imperfect smile. The men, of course, wouldn’t always pay. And she apparently had been sexually assaulted twice I believe, simply in the neighborhood of their affluent east coast community. Ditzy parents, who presented more like rich children who had themselves a few more children to be children with together more than anything. And she took benzodiazepines every night to fall asleep because when it’s quiet she was apparently replaying in her head all the awful stuff, much of which she willingly put herself through, since she likely believes, deep down inside, that she deserves all of it because she’s dirty and gross inside—or something like that.

And she had lady bits and genitals and that was one way she knew for certain that she could “connect” with others, so connect she did. She min-maxed some sort of female specific affective gooning. She put all her stats into that, created an imbalanced build, and maxed out physical sex and told herself it was “love”.

Anora realizes this in the very last scene. She is still resentfully liking the male attention she’s getting from the Russian henchman, who actually seems like a thoughtful dude and not half-bad at expressing his affection. Anora finally decides to connect with him, so of course she straddles him. But soon after, she realizes the lie she had been selling herself all this time. It dawns on her, with its full might, the lie she peddled to herself for most of the movie, that she had found love, was her complete ignorance as to what love actually was, making her realize that she actually, probably, in all likelihood never even encountered or received love her whole life. When she realizes that she has never been loved by anyone, and god forbid, she might very well not be capable of it having inherited his abandoner of a dad’s callous and unemotional traits, never practicing it as a child, and having chosen a profession of peddling to gullible men pretend Hallmark versions of it.

That breaks her down. The walls come down, and she faces herself. This is what she is right now, what she has been thus far, and maybe what she always will be. That’s the kind of understanding that is too difficult for these types of brains, which is usually only overcome by their incredible abilities to lie to themselves. It’s unclear to me how much self-awareness Anora has. She definitely has some in that last scene. And if the path-of-least-resistance is to forget all of this go back to the lie, she’s more likely than not to do exactly that.

Or maybe she’ll connect with the henchman, who knows. I don’t care for formulaic Hollywood endings. And I’ll be flayed alive if I ever finish an article that way.