BONUS: The Anora zeitgest & Demi Moore losing to Mikey Madison

We need to have a conversation about Sean Baker, modern sexploitation and the ultimate cis het American male fantasy. The male gaze is still the male gaze when it has a pink hat on.

In my GUT REACTIONS series, I contextualize films with their cultural significance. This is a BONUS post now, for paid subscribers; as a thank you for holding it down, y’all get access to the full archive.

Y’all got me hot, because I didn’t even like The Substance for real— and now defending White women and White women problems is the hill I’m getting ready to die on.

I didn’t make this week’s SENSUAL TERRORS dispatch about Demi Moore losing to Mikey Madison because I didn’t want to miss out on my end-of-the-month recap.¹

The Oscars are just one night in a cluster of awards nights, in a year-long cinema cycle. This isn’t my first year as a cinephile, but my first time immersing myself in the digital international cinephile community — esp. as an adult. Word to Bong Joon-Ho: The Oscar wins are a local film metric.

Still, the consensus of the Academy really upset me and my homegirls. We raged for nearly 24 hours straight after the watershed moment. I even journaled about it². And through this week’s conversations — and reflections on previous ones — I came to uncomfortable, inconvenient truths about how Anora really made me feel as a feminist.

And that rich context pissed me off even more thinking about Demi Moore and Coralie Fargeat’s loss.

In the today of things, let me say it plainly: