Allison Janney’s ‘Family Guy’ Cameo Is at the Center of A Puritanical Anti-Oscars Campaign
The road to Oscars glory runs through the Griffin family — or it walks Chris Griffin on a leash.
Immediately following Anora star Mikey Madison’s win in the Best Actress category at the 97th Academy Awards this past weekend, a massive backlash movement sprung up on Twitter to protest the success of the comedy/romance movie about a sex worker and her rich Russian husband while criticizing Hollywood’s obsession with the “sex sells” principle. According to a growing number of incensed film buffs, every single actress who has ever won an Oscar has, at some point, played a sex worker on a screen big or small, and interest in the theory has driven attention and traffic toward the derogatorily titled website that originated the rumor, OscarHookers.com, on which the unnamed author figuratively stamps a scarlet A on one entry from every such celebrated artist’s IMDb page.
If the sweeping declaration that every single Oscar-worthy actress has at some point performed a “hooker role” (as “Oscar Hookers” puts it) sounds comically hyperbolic and completely untrue, that’s because it is. Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of Twitter users apparently believe that the only way for a woman to win an Oscar is to sell sex onscreen, the entries for even the most widely known recent winners are massive reaches that strain the definitions of the terms “sex work,” “hooker” and “role.”
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For instance, remember that barely-10-second Family Guy joke where Chris comes into the house with a new girlfriend who’s a dominatrix and who knows Peter’s name? Well, congrats Oscar-winning actress Allison Janney, Puritan Twitter says you’re a prostitute for that one.
The above scene comes from the 2015 Family Guy episode “Encyclopedia Griffin,” in which Peter and Lois discover that Chris has built himself a creepy, woman-shaped companion doll out of garbage and named it Heather. In a plot line that vaguely resembles the premise of the movie Lars and the Real Girl, the Griffins come to find that Chris and Heather’s relationship isn’t strictly sexual in nature, and he’s actually touchingly romantic toward his inanimate trash girlfriend.
Then, in the third act of “Encyclopedia Griffin,” Lois removes Heather from the house and hides her in the woods before urging a heartbroken Chris to find a real human woman to treat as wonderfully as he did Heather. In the final scene of the episode, Chris reveals that he’s found her as he introduces Mistress Vieda, played by Janney, who speaks all of four words before exiting off-screen.
In the “Oscar Hookers” entry for Janney that — I shit you not — is copy-pasted word-for-word from Mistress Vieda's page on the Family Guy wiki, the author “writes,” “Mistress Vieda is a dominatrix that becomes Chris’ new girlfriend after meeting her on Craigslist in ‘Encyclopedia Griffin.’ As she escorts Chris to his room, she says ‘hi’ to Peter, much to Lois’ surprise and annoyance that she knows his name. Peter refuses to answer about how they know each other, trying to take a knee as in football to run out the episode.”
Critically, however, Family Guy never specifies that Vieda, one of numerous one-off characters whom Janney has voiced throughout the series, is getting paid for her relationship with Chris, nor does the canon explicitly state that whatever history she has with Peter was gainful. The character could very well just be a woman who is into BDSM and finds her partners on Craigslist. But, really, even if Veida was a sex worker, so what?
Why would voicing a sex worker, playing a sex worker or delivering two lines in an animated comedy that could maybe be considered sex-work-adjacent denigrate any woman's achievements as an artist? Why is half of Film Twitter trying to throw every accomplished actress in the movie business into a social media Magdalene Laundry?
Those questions could only be answered by the misogynists on OscarHookers.com and in the massively viral threads where the demonization of sex workers and the character assassination of accomplished women have combined into a shit-storm of sexism that could have been quelled by some basic fact-checking and common decency. Hilariously, Janney’s OscarHookers page isn’t even the most hilarious offender in this bad-faith argument over sex work in fiction — that award goes to the pre-Poor Things entry for Emma Stone and her performance in Easy A:
