This story is from The Spinoff
For the last two decades, Erika Lust has been a trailblazer in the ethical and feminist porn space. She explains how she got here, why we should be worried about Big Porn and what consumers should know about being better porn users.
Hanging behind Erika Lust’s desk in her Barcelona office is a poster that says “Done is better than perfect” in bold orange font. “One of my problems has always been that I’m too much of a perfectionist,” she laughs. “I learned that I had to become better at delivering just to, you know, make stuff happen.” It’s a slogan that has served her well – in her two decades working as an independent director and producer, Lust has made several critically-acclaimed, award-winning feature films and around 250 short films. Each and every one of them has been pornographic.
From a steamy summer sojourn in The Intern (not the Robert De Niro one) to a sandy, wetsuit-ripping romp in Surf Porn, Lust Cinema “aims to challenge industry standards by promoting the cinematic possibilities of the medium, high-quality storytelling and a realistic representation of human sexuality.” Think glass of wine and a charcuterie platter at a boutique cinema porn, rather than cheap Tuesday at the mall with popcorn and a choc top porn. “This is cinema,” says Lust, “it’s about colour correction, it’s about sound design, it’s about music, it’s about graphics, it’s about the whole presentation of the film.”
Lust’s oeuvre is not only known for the high production values, but for an inclusive and sex-positive approach both behind and in front of the camera. Lust Cinema productions feature on-set intimacy co-ordinators, extensive duty of care processes with performers, female-led crews and an ongoing mission to work with people from a wide range of backgrounds, sexualities, age groups and body types. Many Lust Cinema films also come with dinky novelty bonuses, like behind-the-scenes featurettes and performer interviews, as a treat.
Now known as the “queen of ethical porn”, Lust still remembers her early encounters with the genre. She was studying political science and gender studies at university in Stockholm – Lust was born in Sweden – while also facing “all the usual questions” about her sexuality. It was the 90s, so she turned to porn on VHS and in magazines for answers, but felt confused by the content. “I felt excited by the images but, at the same time, I was fighting with the feeling that there was so much that I couldn’t identify with and that I didn’t feel comfortable with.”
The more she watched, the more she saw the same patterns. The women in the films were all objectified and used as “tools” to please the men, the characters were underdeveloped and the stories never centred around female pleasure. “It didn’t really matter if they were made in Los Angeles, Budapest, Barcelona or in Sydney, it was all the same. Big tits, big asses, cars, cigars.” When she talked to her peers, she noticed how her male friends discussed porn “as if it was part of their sexuality in a very natural way,” while her female friends struggled with it.
Given her academic background in political science and gender studies, Lust hit the books to make sense of what was going on. “I started to ask questions: why is it this way? What is happening with porn? Why is porn not representing my side of the story?” She began to see porn as more than just adult entertainment, but a commentary on power structure, sexuality and gender roles. “The people making porn were mostly heterosexual, middle-aged, white cis men. They had their vision of sex and that was what they were transmitting.”
It was then that Lust realised the only way to change the scope of porn was to get different people making it. “If porn is a medium, and you can tell stories about sex through porn, then obviously, if we have other people telling those stories, we can change the narratives of porn.”
After she graduated from Lund University in Sweden, Lust moved to Barcelona in 2000 to study filmmaking. In 2004 she released her first pornographic film, The Good Girl, which subverted porn’s “pizza guy” trope and placed the power (and the pleasure) with the female protagonist in the film. “From the beginning, I had this feeling that I wanted to see stories about women where they were the main characters, where they were driving the stories, where they had their sexual agency, and they were telling what they wanted,” she says.
Released online for free, the film was downloaded millions of times and went on to win Best Short Film at the International Erotic Film Festival. Following its success, Lust founded Lust Cinema, which would go on to produce award-winning shorts and feature films that would regularly feature on the adult cinema circuit. It was here, travelling around the world and screening her films, that she got her next big idea. “People were always coming up to me saying, ‘Hey Erika, I love the film, I have this great story I want to share with you’. And then I kind of just picked on that concept and I started a site.”
Lust launched XConfessions in 2013, a place for ordinary people to anonymously share their own erotic stories. “The idea of it was just having people sharing their fantasies, things they want to do, things they have done, things they are curious about,” explains Lust. Publishing thousands of stories from all around the world, eventually Lust and her team began selecting their favourite submissions and making them into high quality pornographic short films, rewarding the author with a free subscription to the service. “Together we are changing the rules of pornography,” the website reads.
While Lust’s ethical empire was blossoming from Barcelona in the early 2010s, it was against a bleak landscape of what she calls “Big Porn” behemoths. As she was launching XConfessions in 2013, Montreal-based company ManWin (soon to be renamed MindGeek) acquired RedTube, adding it to the company’s enormous suite of porn streaming sites alongside YouPorn, Pornhub and Xtube. A spokesperson from the company said at the time that MindGeek was one of the top five bandwidth consumption companies in the world, with Pornhub alone getting 50 million visitors per day, even back in 2014.
These days, Pornhub gets over 120 million views a day and Lust says that “Big Porn” companies like MindGeek have completely reshaped the entire industry, as well as our attitudes to pornography and sex. “It’s not that different from Big Pharma or Big Data or Big Food – these are big, big companies that are only interested in earning money and concentrating their power,” she says. “Their mission is not representing human sexuality in the best possible way – they only want your time and your clicks because they want to sell ‘grow your dick’ pills to you.”
She has seen her own films pirated, edited down to the most explicit parts, and uploaded on the likes of Pornhub with attention-grabbing and often aggressive and misrepresentative language. “I find it very sad when I go to the tube sites and I see all these titles: ‘tiny teenagers getting destroyed’, ‘stepsister punish-fucked during lunchtime’,” she says. “They use all these taglines for the algorithms. They are not really interested in the artistic part of the content, or the idea that the director had with that film, because they don’t value the content themselves.”
It’s Big Porn’s emphasis on both brevity and extremity that concerns Lust. “Online porn has convinced us that sex is four minutes of hard penetration,” she says. “It’s also so focused on smashing, choking, punish-fucking the women, there’s so much hate towards women in it and that is really painful to see.” She has also observed the way these sites enforce a rigid sexual routine, despite there being endless options and variations in reality. “Sex can be two minutes or it can be a whole night,” she explains. “I think it’s also very important to remind ourselves – especially younger generations – that porn is not the same as sex.”
Despite being critical of the wider industry, Lust believes porn can be an “absolutely wonderful” space. She has published several books on the subject, curated an online educational guide for young people and has released a new Ted talk just this week. “I think that porn can really help people to understand themselves and their own sexuality,” she says. “Cinema in general has this wonderful way of helping us empathise with other people by understanding other stories. And I think that porn can really be a great inspiration.” The key is to make sure you are using it correctly. “Some people are using porn like a bag of chips: they go through it quick, and then their stomach hurts and they feel bad about themselves and they go ‘why did I do that?’”
As consumers are becoming more conscious of where their food and clothing comes from, Lust says the same attitudes should be applied to porn. “I would really like to ask people to be more conscious when they are surfing for porn online: see if there’s an about page, can you learn anything about who are the owners of that company? Are there owners, or is it just some company postbox somewhere in Las Vegas? Who’s working there? What are the values? How do they make their films? Can you watch interviews with the performers?”
Her final piece of advice is that, if you are in a position to do so, you should pay for your porn to ensure that the performers onscreen are being adequately remunerated for their time. “I think that one of the most important things is workers rights. If you enjoy porn, please support the people in the industry, don’t support the biggest of the corporations who don’t really care about about sex workers or porn,” she says. “These are real people – they have kids and they go to school, and they need to pay for their apartments and their food. That’s the reality.”
Despite the fact that Pornhub is now topping 120 million views a day, Lust remains optimistic that there is a porn paradise on the horizon. “We can take out all of those bad values and we can clean our porn – we can put it in the washing machine and we can hang it out in the sun and we can make porn that makes people feel great about themselves.” Along with her office mantra “done is better than perfect”, she also offers up another slogan that has informed much of her work: pleasure is the purpose.
“We deserve better porn,” she says. “We cannot put our heads in the sand and pretend that it doesn’t exist. It’s necessary to talk about it, it’s good to complain about it, but what we really need to do is take action. If we want our porn to be different, then we have to make it different. We need all these different perspectives and we need them from different parts of the world, otherwise we’re gonna see the same stories time after time after time: the mafia guy, the stepsister and pizza guy.”
Original interview conducted by Chris Parker and Eli Matthewson as a part of Chris and Eli’s Porn Revolution, additional reporting by Alex Casey.
