Try this little experiment: go to any major city in Europe or the U.S. or Latin America and find that neighborhood. You know which one I’m talking about: organic coffee shops, exposed light-colored wood, minimalist design, modern asymmetrical haircuts, most people under 35, college plus some grad school, disposable income.
It could be Silverlake in Los Angeles, or Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin, or Williamsburg in New York or Condesa-Roma in Mexico City. Find one of those organic coffee shops and ask the group of trendy young women sipping the $8 pumpkin spice latte to name their favorite pornographer.
Chances are, they will answer, in unison, “Erika Lust.”
Ever since around 2017, the name Erika Lust has become a synonym for many things, both within and outside the adult entertainment industry. Feminist porn, ethical porn, “porn for women” — these are all concepts that swirl around any mention of Lust in well-educated, middle-class places that would not dare speak many other pornographers’ names.
Though Lust has been making movies of people having sex in Barcelona for 15 years, to commercial and critical success largely in the European arthouse erotica circuit, it was only a couple of years ago that she crossed over into mainstream consciousness.
The key marketing decision Lust and her husband/business partner Pablo Dobner made around 2016-2017, after more than a decade in the art porn business, was to participate in the series “Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On,” on Netflix. As luck would have it, the Erika Lust footage — showing her studio, her operation and discussing her “feminist porn” ethos — was part of the first episode, “Women on Top,” directed by Rashida Jones. All of a sudden, everyone with an interest in sex and a Netflix account, including many members of the U.S.-based adult industry, became aware of Erika Lust and her flagship website at the time, XConfessions.
Fast forward to the summer of 2019, and Lust and Dobner are at a rooftop bar in the heart of Hollywood (literally Hollywood and Vine) surrounded by top U.S. porn talent like Lena Paul, Ana Foxxx, Casey Calvert and many others, gushingly asking to have selfies taken with Erika.
“I just want to tell you how much your work has affected me,” a starstruck Paul tells Lust, grabbing her hands and looking into her eyes.
Lust and Dobner have been invited by the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee (APAC) to a fundraiser party they have organized to benefit performer mental health organization Pineapple Support. They came in, as they told me, “to try to meet people, the American ‘porn stars’ we’d hopefully like to work with.”
Instead, it was a shocked Erika who was being treated like the celebrity.
“They know who I am!” she repeated, pinching herself.
Lust and Dobner rented a spacious home in Silverlake for the summer, and held daily around-the-clock meetings with everyone in the industry — producers, directors, talent, press (mainstream and adult), film and TV people, etc. — using the West Hollywood Soho House private membership club as their temporary Los Angeles office.
They were in town to lay the groundwork for LustCinema, a new venture broadly described as “Erika Lust comes to America.”
But is America, and by America we mean the mainstream adult industry — with its peculiar set of traditions, relationships and customs established over decades of fighting attacks from all sides — ready for this outspoken, change-hungry Swedish-Spanish director and studio owner who will not stop telling the mainstream press that “porn needs to change”?
In other words, is Porn Valley ready for Erika Lust?
The Secret Hiding Place of My Friend’s Father
Before there was Erika Lust, renowned feminist pornographer, there was Erika Hallqvist, born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1977.
“I come from a working middle class family,” she told XBIZ during an exclusive interview for this cover story. “I had a happy childhood and I consider myself very privileged for being born in a country with such a good public education, and in a society with very strong feminist values.”
The first time a young Erika encountered porn, as she retold in a widely disseminated 2014 TEDx Talk in Vienna (entitled, naturally, “It’s time for porn to change”), she had mixed feelings about it. She told the story of her porn awakening to a bourgeois TEDx audience with the slow cadences of a particularly didactic kindergarten teacher:
“My first time [at 15] was at a sleepover party with my best girlfriends. Popcorn, pajamas and … porn! We expected to discover the mystery of sex — the forbidden fruit. And we ended up laughing, we ended up giggling, we ended up feeling… repulsion? Ugh! Then we [put it] back in the secret hiding place of my friend’s father.”
Last year, she told an interviewer for Spanish-language Gatopardo magazine that watching that purloined VHS around 1992, that big-haired era of Vivid Girls and Savannah, she felt aroused. “I liked it,” Lust said, “my body got excited by it, but in what I saw there were so many things blocking me and confusing me, and so at the same time I rejected it.”
She now feels that this origin story launched her ongoing quest for “a kind of horniness that doesn’t clash with my ethical and aesthetic ideas.”
The Education of Erika Lust
The next time Erika Hallqvist saw porn, she was attending Lund University. The 21-year-old Erika went to a boyfriend’s house for a hookup. It was now 1998, the pneumatic era of Jenna Jameson and the pre-millennium Austin Powers fembot.
“My freshman year, at university,” Lust told TEDx, still in her one-woman-show presentational mode, “my boyfriend suggests that we watch a porno. Should I give it another try? Stop! Before we press play. Remember where I came from: Sweden. Probably one of the best places to grow up with a feminist consciousness. One of the first, no, the first country in the world to make sex education mandatory in schools. Meet me: a feminist. A sex-positive feminist. I own my own body. I can have sex just for pleasure, like guys.
“So, back to my dorm room, where my boyfriend is waiting impatiently. We press play. Ahhhh. And what do I see? A woman, blonde, skintight dress, red lips, watermelon breasts … nothing had changed.”
But then Lust, who was majoring in Political Science at Lund, with a special focus on Gender Studies, discovered the works of UC Berkeley’s film scholar Linda Williams, particularly her 1989 book “Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible.”
Reading Williams was a revelatory experience for Lust, making her look at porn in a different light. She realized, as she told TEDx, that “porn is not only porn: it is a discourse about sexuality, about masculinity, about femininity and the roles we play.”
This had potential for young Erika. “That was my Eureka moment,” she said.
Unfortunately, reading Williams’ “Hard Core” provided another, less promising revelation for this progressive Gender Studies student: “The only ones participating in that discourse were men, chauvinistic men, narrow-minded men, men with very little sexual intelligence.”
There was a need for sexual representation beyond “horny housewives, desperate nannies and fuck bunnies,” she told herself. There should be a way to solve the repressive equation that tied arousal to objectification.
An Urban, Modern, Feminist Woman
Shortly after her Linda Williams-inspired epiphany Lust arrived to Barcelona in the year 2000.
“What brought me to Barcelona? The sun, the party…,” she half-jokes. “Now seriously: I came to study Spanish because I wanted to work in international organizations, and I felt that my Swedish and English were not enough and I felt that I needed a third language.”
Lust explains she was originally looking for a job in politics or international development cooperation, but could not find one so she started working in advertising, being a runner in commercial film shootings.
“That’s were I learned how to make films,” she explains.
She decided to switch careers and began studying Film Direction and Production in Barcelona.
Lust has often told the story of being frustrated by the lack of porn for women such as herself. “I wanted to watch something that I would enjoy,” she explains. “Something where I could see myself and other women I knew represented — our sexual agency, our pleasure.”
So, as part of her degree work, Lust decided to flip the script on the porn trope (she would say “cliché”) of the Pizza Delivery Guy. She would take one of the hoariest commonplace scenarios of dick-centric pornography, and show it from a female perspective.
That original 2004 short, “The Good Girl,” was put up on the blog that Erika was writing at the time. She offered it as a free download — these were the pre-YouTube days. The reaction, according to her, was immediate. Millions of downloads later, the middle-class former poli-sci student now calling herself “Erika Lust” was on her way to becoming a feminist pornographer.
All she needed was a way to make her money back, aka distribution. Lust showed “The Good Girl” to Berth Milton Jr., the Barcelona-based heir to Swedish powerhouse brand Private. After taking Lust to Cannes and introducing her as his latest find for Private, Milton pulled out of the deal.
Lust then made a first attempt to come to America with her brand of porn, and even had meetings with Playboy and Larry Flynt Productions. Nothing came of it at the time.
So Lust Films was born, by necessity, as an indie operation in 2005. The fledgling director managed to complete four more shorts and bundled them as “Five Hot Stories for Her,” distributing them herself via ErikaLust.com, which was still mostly a blog. But from that seed, the Erika Lust operation continued growing, unstoppably. There was, after all, a market for her vision of “porn for women.”
Fifteen years after “The Good Girl,” Lust can boast of her accomplishments. “I directed four multi award-winning features and 120 short films,” she tells XBIZ. “I wrote an erotic book and during the last five years I created a production company with 30 employees and five business centers. In 2013, I created the XConfessions series. In 2016, I did an open call for female directors and have produced more than 50 guest-directed short films since then.”
She is also still quite proud of the aforementioned TEDxVienna talk in late 2014. Still widely shared on YouTube and on the ErikaLust.com blog, the presentation has been seen by some industry watchers as too generalizing of the status quo Lust wishes to change, now from within.
And yes, it might seem odd that in 2014, that is in the era between the rises of girl-next-door types Sasha Grey and Riley Reid, Lust is seen theatrically railing against “skintight dress, red lips, watermelon breasts.” Asked about it, Lust stands firm by the general spirit of her presentation.
“The TEDx talk speaks about the general structure in the adult industry and not only about individual cases,” she says. “Of course, it’s a broad industry, which is not monolithic, and there have always been different aspects and areas that are more independent. But what I wanted to talk about in the TEDx talk, and also it is my general opinion, is that there is a structure that is very focused on male pleasure and ‘thing-ifying’ women as objects and tools to please men. And to me, one of the most important things I want to change is to put women at the forefront and place their desire as the force of change.”
Erika Lust likes big pronouncements. “The last time women were ‘free’ was before religion,” she recently told an interviewer, explaining that for centuries religious authorities have used sexuality as a form of control, especially over women. Her mission, she said, was to return power to women, and men, through human sexuality.
Lecturing people about sexuality is, by design, 100 percent on brand for her. The in-your-faceness that has ruffled some feathers with status quo industry professionals and would-be-censors is a feature, not a bug.
Her influences are both highbrow or middlebrow — at various times, besides Linda Williams, she has mentioned Marguerite Duras and Anaïs Nin — but also pop — she has also namechecked MTV and “Sex and the City.”
Asked by Gatopardo magazine about radical feminists attacking her for making the porn version of Marie Claire magazine, Lust replied that, to many feminists, “what I make is as sexist as traditional porn made for men. And yes, what I make is commercial porn for women.”
Her “cinema,” she readily admits, is aimed at “an urban, modern, feminist woman who knows who she is and enjoys sex, and takes a chance on pornography.”
Lust also wrote two books targeted to that aspirationally hip demographic: 2008’s “Good Porn: A Woman’s Guide” (Seal Press) and 2010’s “La Biblia Erótica de Europa: De lo Más Kinky a lo Más Chic” (“The Erotic Bible of Europe: From the Most Kink to the Most Chic”), a hardcover coffee table book bound in the most Carrie Bradshaw of pinks.
A decade later, the Lust brand has transformed itself into a darling of the middle-class media, thanks to a press strategy that eschewed the specialized industry press in favor of a relentless presence as “the voice of women’s/ethical/feminist porn” in liberal/progressive (and sometimes anti-porn) publications like The Guardian and many others.
Last year, Lust was invited to talk at Berlinale Talents, the annual summit and networking platform of the Berlin International Film Festival for outstanding creatives from the fields of film and drama. In October 2019, the BBC named Erika Lust one of the 100 Women 2019, who show “versions of the future that will challenge, concern and inspire you.”
“I also had two daughters in the meantime,” Lust adds. “Who are my biggest accomplishments!”
Coming to America
Lust’s calling card at the time she and Dobner decided to disembark in America was her popular XConfessions series.
“XConfessions is the project aimed at erotic art and indie porn lovers which has gained over the years a big amount of recognition among fans and publications from the U.S., U.K. and Germany,” she explains. “We have 200,000 members and have increased our reach in these countries in more than 30 percent in 2019.”
Since its inception, XConfessions has been what Lust calls “a crowdsourced project,” at least in creative terms. Anonymous users “confess” their fantasies, stories and desires on the website. Then Lust chooses a select few to turn into a short film.
“We launch two short films every month,” she says. “The main product is pornography but I like to think about it as an art community, as an erotic creative lab. There is written erotica — the fantasies submitted — erotic art illustrating all confessions, film stills and interviews with all talent who work with us allowing us to know them better.”
The new U.S.-oriented studio, LustCinema, will not be similarly crowdsourced, though several details remain to be implemented.
“The relaunch of LustCinema as a new studio is just at its first stage,” says Lust. “Everything needs to be done! The goal this year is to have an original film, a miniseries or a series episode release every week and get our audience approval.”
But Lust rejects the oversimplification that XConfessions is “indie” and LustCinema, using U.S. talent, will be “mainstream.” She considers both XConfessions and LustCinema as “alternatives” to what she calls “the mainstream.”
“What I identify as ‘mainstream,’” she clarifies, “are mere sex scenes without a story, a particular look and tone of the film and its cinematography, a particular way of shooting the sex on camera with talent posing and staging sex positions for the camera and the same tired tropes that are trotted out again.
“I think XConfessions has a definite ‘indie’ tone to it. People who subscribe to the website want to watch stories where they can see themselves, no sexual stereotypes, and that are more aesthetically and cinematically appealing. On the other hand, on my website LustCinema.com, the most watched films are my short films, but we also feature films that I license. This made me realize that its subscribers like the feature film format and like to watch good stories where sex is part of a wider narrative.”
Lust’s vision for LustCinema is “to do away with pornography that has originally focused on male pleasure and sexual athletics and focus on the potential and eroticism of human sexuality and relationships. Working with American directors, I’d like to promote the cinematic possibilities of the medium and refuse to typecast performers based on their age, race, sexuality or gender, while allowing them to have sex that feels organic and natural to them.”
Ultimately, what will be driving LustCinema is the sense of responsibility that Erika Lust has been addressing since “The Good Girl” in 2004. Her mission: “…to show all of the beauty, fun, passion and intimacy of sex.”
“I want to excite both people’s minds and bodies and inspire them to realize what they lust for and pursue their own pleasures,” she says. “In order to do this I think it’s important to create films with narratives, with intelligent scripts that humanize the characters.
“My aim is to capture every detail of the sexual experience and promote female sexual empowerment and represent female desire and their sexual agency.”
And as “a director who works with people who have sex on camera,” Lust sees as one of her key responsibilities to create safe sex environments on her sets.
“I have always worked on my company protocols based on my experience on set during the last 10 years,” Lust says. “When I started producing other directors, I put them into paper so they would comply with them too,” although her and Dobner admit that it is more difficult for them to supervise sets outside Barcelona, including the new LustCinema productions in the U.S.
One step in the right direction is Lust’s recent Performers Bill of Rights — inspired by similar bills that exist from organizations like APAC and companies like Kink.com — as well as a document known as “Guidelines for Guest Directors to Shoot for Erika Lust.”
She says these were created “to ensure that the production of all films, including those that are directed by other guest directors, follow my values for a new adult cinema. These documents are a mandatory read and sign for directors. My team works with guest directors months in advance so there is a level of trust. We can’t control every single detail of what’s going on, on a set that’s not mine, and not every single problem that could occur on set or in a workplace can be forecasted in a bill of rights or a guide, so we also established a survey that we send performers after all sets to see if everything went accordingly or not and learn from experience.
“I encourage everyone involved in our productions (cast, crew, production team), to email me if anything has gone wrong in any way, and I personally look into the events. The guides and bill are an ongoing effort that is always under development to be better and keep improving.”
Indie Adult Cinema
Lust knows that some industry stalwarts, used to a time-honored way of doing business and creating content, might be skeptical of her. “I have a different style of pornography in terms of cinematic values and representation of sex and I have a different production process when creating adult films,” she admits. “There is a difference in the preproduction, production process and postproduction and I have witnessed this is partly due to a budget issue.”
That’s why Lust prefers the term “alternative pornography” or “indie adult cinema” as more descriptive of what she actually does. “Not only does the pornography I create provide a feminist alternative within a genre that has been appropriated by my men,” she says “it also offers a more aesthetically appealing alternative to mainstream pornography with a lot of attention to detail in the production process.”
She also emphasizes that she works with themes that are “radically different to the trending tropes of the helpless teen, lacking agency and education, who is nevertheless sexualized and in need of an authoritative figure ‘to teach them’, seduce them and take advantage of them — or the incest fantasy.”
In Lust’s utopian vision, sex would be normalized, removing ideas of shame and focusing on enjoyment, particularly if you’re a woman, perhaps going back to her notion of a time “before religion.”
Sex, for Lust, should be “something as natural as food, and pornography like gastronomy.”
Against critics who see her interventions in mainstream culture as the hectoring of someone with a “savior complex” towards an industry that has already made significant strides in terms of female agency (the acclaims bestowed on Bree Mills and Kayden Kross are often brought up), Lust responds that she is fully aware of the long tradition that precedes her.
“I am aware of all those female creators, past and present,” she says. “I have mentioned Candida Royalle and Annie Sprinkle in several occasions throughout my career, especially at the beginning. Through my greatest influence — not an adult film director but a writer — Linda Williams, I discovered Candida Royalle and started watching her films, and I realized that her take was completely different than what we had seen before.”
In Candida Royalle’s movies, Lust explains, “It was the first time I clearly saw what a story could be with a female protagonist, a story that spoke about feminine desire, feminine pleasure and that put women first instead of making them objects or tools for male pleasure. Not women who just satisfied men, but women capable of searching for their own desire.”
Fiercely independent women in the industry who have been important to her are Shine Louise Houston, Madison Young and also performers like Jiz Lee (with whom she has been collaborating on several projects), Sasha Grey, Stoya and Belladonna. “I like women behind the camera, the more we are the more diverse voices we will have. Our sexuality is not one, the female gaze in porn will be diverse. There’s space for many voices.”
For Lust, the most important recent evolution is that women “have started to cover all sides of audiovisual industries, and of the adult industry.”
Which brings us to one of the most common questions those in the mainstream adult industry have for Lust: what exactly does she mean by “feminist porn”?
“I think ‘feminist porn’ is originally born as a label to explain ‘what you can find here in opposition to the male-dominated porn with overrepresentation of male pleasure through excessive depictions of male-dominant sex acts you are used to.’
“In my opinion, feminist porn is female-centric and female-pleasure-centric porn that is done by women behind the camera involved in all the decision-making roles. It focuses on the way it represents women on screen and their pleasure. Male and female characters are treated as equally important sexual collaborators and it attempts to alter sexual scripts surrounding female/male sexuality in favor of honest sexual expression.
“Men and their fantasies are still the norm in pornography and any depiction of female pleasure is a deviation from this norm. Female sexuality is still othered. It’s always about the man’s pleasure and the cumshot is the goal. They call it money shot for a reason.”
Of Ethics and Haters
For Erika Lust, the concept of “ethical” as it relates to adult content production is complex, because ethics are subjective.
“A basic definition would be that an ethical porn set ensures that the work is done under a safe sex environment where performers can explore their sexuality in a health-controlled environment, and under good working and safety conditions and basic labor rights not only for performers but also for the crew. This environment emphasizes safety and mutual respect,” she clarifies.
But ethical porn, Erika Lust-style, also goes beyond that, including “things like talent having catering on set, having their own space to relax, a talent manager that looks after them and anything they need provided.”
This is not to say that Lust is against depictions of controversial subject matter. “In general, elements like tenor and intensity, sex acts being depicted or production value do not preclude content from being ethical,” she says. “Ethical porn only ensures that what you watch was done respecting performer rights, in good working conditions and with their previous consent to everything happening on a scene that day.
“Personally, I think there are a few more elements that should be part of this definition: Performers having a say in who will they be performing with and knowing weeks in advance during the preproduction process, the hire of a talent manager, and the issue of themes and categorization.
“Porn is fantasy, but also a medium to represent human sexuality, so I believe the messages we send out are equally important and I think we should think more about human sexuality and less about long tail keywords and SEO. An ethical porn production should be a guarantee that your productions are not contributing to wider social inequalities through categorization of performers or scenes based on age, ethnicity or body type.
“No reduction of the performer to their primal feature (that being their size, age, ethnicity etc.). No use of what is termed ‘exploitative language,’ misogynistic or racial slurs, offensive racist categories or any language that creates problematic scenarios of authority figures taking advantage of the helpless teen, lacking agency and too young to legally consent. These trending tropes are too prevalent already.”
One of the logical consequences of taking such a vocal stance on ethics is that Erika Lust and her productions — both the ones in Barcelona and in sets she and Dobner do not supervise as closely— are under special scrutiny.
And that, in her opinion, brings out the haters.
“The more I grow, the more people we reach and that’s great,” she explains. “But with that also comes a very negative side.
“Recently, I have come in contact with a new kind of hate which has been shocking as you are defenseless: the social media mob hatred. They have a victimhood culture with a carte blanche to bully relentlessly; they don’t want to listen, they want to be right.
“During the last months, I have been labeled and called everything in the book. My motto is if you want to change something, get into it. It seems easier for them. Their mantra is ‘demand the others to be the change that you want to see in the world.’
“The insidious scrutiny my company is under is insane. It’s pretty sad that the more one tries, the more they are slammed, while the huge corporations of porn are immune to any criticism. I have understood that me having a public face while conglomerates don’t have one makes me a very easy target and I’m getting used to it now.
“These people excel in dirty slander tactics to control the narrative removing of the nuance. They even make it unacceptable to acknowledge there is a nuance. There is a very dangerous element to this social media mob and their messages: ignorance and trivialization.
“I was recently told I was the biggest corporation in Europe. Mmmm, have you taken a look at Budapest? Because if you are not looking there and just focusing on me, good luck to any performer who actually has a problem!
“Having porn outsiders and porn activists taking advantage of this culture and conflating labor disputes with serious criminal accusations is dangerous and embarrassing and it does a disservice to pornography, its talent, the culture of consent and the possibility to actually address legitimate cases of sexual abuse and violence.”
But social media allegations and “dirty slander tactics” are not the only bitter attacks Lust has weathered in her rise.
“I receive hatred from diverse sides,” she rues. “I am hated by anti-porn campaigners. Their common attack is that I promote rape culture and contribute to the abuse of women with my work. I receive hate from sexual freedom and free-speech activist campaigners who misrepresent me and misconstrue me every chance they have at their convenience.”
Lust declares herself “anti-censorship and pro sexual freedom and sex positivity,” but she also wants to reserve the right “to be able to point out what I think is not working or should be better, get into details, talk about tube economics and consequences, styles of pornography, production processes, consequences of a decentralized industry, revenge porn, performers’ age, why there are so many women that are not liking present pornography — there are so many things to discuss!”
Without criticism, she says, there is no progress. “There is so much hate against the industry, that I think there is a tendency for them to be overprotective of it to compensate and I think that’s a disservice to everyone.”
She is frustrated by “the tireless attacks by male pornographers calling me names and constantly attacking my work on their blogs and social media,” especially because she also suffers the common stigma that working on pornography entails for everyone (social media censorship, stigmatization by family and parents at her kids’ school), herself and the male pornographers who decry her work included.
Something Real
In 2018, Lust and Dobner rented the historic events location at the original Mack Sennett studios in Silver Lake and threw Lust Films a debutante ball, by invitation only, introducing them and a selection of their films to a select audience of industry insiders and mainstream press. Several experienced female directors were courted by the company, serving as the starting point for the couple’s U.S. strategy.
Then in July 2019, soon after arriving to Los Angeles for their networking summer, LustCinema arranged for a cozier event up above the Sunset Strip, at Soho House, to screen more shorts and unveil their VR project.
In attendance was Casey Calvert, the U.S. performer who had been selected by Erika Lust to shoot a LustCinema feature about an American student in Barcelona. By the fall, Calvert had fully come on board LustCinema as a director and brand ambassador.
“I am directing for Erika a six-part series called ‘Primary,’” a thrilled Calvert told us. “It’s a story about two couples in open relationships and the way their lives intersect. I pitched it to Erika as having a real world/lo-fi/mumblecore vibe.” Calvert’s serial, stylistically inspired by current Netflix shows like “Easy,” stars major U.S. talent like Ana Foxxx, Derrick Pierce, Kira Noir, Small Hands, Penny Pax, Isiah Maxwell, Serena Blair and Michael Vegas.
Calvert became aware of Lust’s work around 2015. “I saw one of her shorts with a woman flying a plane,” she says. “I emailed Erika and said ‘I would really like to work for you.’” Calvert had a shoot in Spain, so she interviewed, but nothing really came from that.
In May, Calvert finally got her chance to experience Lust’s noted Barcelona set. “Erika runs her sets like a mainstream set,” says Calvert. “There was nothing about that set that was any different from any mainstream set I’ve been in, other than we eventually shot some sex.”
Being familiar with Erika’s work, when Calvert went to Spain she thought, “I might have the most amazing experience of my shooting life or I’m going to fight with her.
“Fortunately, it was the former,” she laughs, “but I was nervous we were going to fight the entire shoot. Erika knew what she wanted and knew how to communicate that to us, but when I had feedback and thought my character would do something different than what she would want me to do, she took my feedback.”
“Erika had a full crew of about 20 people, full G and E [grip and electric] department, and an Assistant Director, makeup department — and catering. There was an actual caterer on set! Also, we were shooting on an Alexa, a very, very, very fancy camera.”
Calvert noticed also a 50/50 gender split in the crew, “and the cinematographer is a woman and most of the camera department was female.”
“When I direct for LustCinema here,” says Calvert about her new role, “we discussed how I wanted to create the same environment for my actors here that she created for me in Spain. I want everyone to feel that we are making something real, and that we’re making a movie. We want something that looks beautiful and ‘doesn’t look like porn.’
“She’s given me a lot of creative freedom,” Calvert adds.
Mentoring young directors like Calvert is a way for Lust to continue expanding the range of storytelling that she thinks porn deserves. Lust hopes for a pornography that is “more diverse on its stories, characters and content,” but is also aware that in order to do that, she has to engage the mainstream adult industry in some way, in order to escape from being seen as “a niche.”
“We are labeled by the media as ‘feminist porn,’ ‘ethical porn’ and ‘porn for women’ partially to explain that we use the medium to put women at the center. But by that, they are reinforcing we are not really ‘porn.’ Female-centric is a niche,” she observes, the adult cinema equivalent of separate-and-unequal women’s soccer or the WNBA. “I hope that changes during the next 10 years,” she adds.
At the SoHo House event, those invited tried VR headsets loaded with the Erika Lust take on the novel technology, which, of course, has a feminist twist. “I just wanted to experiment with VR so I created 360-degree of Lust with hopes that future generations of female directors keep challenging the idea that sex is centered on men and that VR porn must cater to the male gaze.”
Lust thinks that VR immersion can help viewers explore fantasies that could never happen in reality. “People could experiment with new kinky experiences in a controlled and safe way, and enjoy it in the privacy of their own home before trying anything with other people or in new locations,” she says. “Technology also has a lot of potential for educating people about their bodies, their health and interactions with others. It allows you to feel what it would be like in another gender, in another body, with a different ability, in a different relationship style. It creates a space for more empathy and understanding.”
Empathy and understanding? Are we still talking about good old porn?
As the adult industry conceives new forms of monetization, Lust and Dobner are banking on a young, hip, affluent demographic that cares about those things enough to start paying for their content. Their European experiment with indie/art porn, thanks in part to loyal German customers, has been by all accounts a success.
Will they also succeed in finding a paying market for their progressive, female-directed take on mainstream porn? Only time will tell.
“We won’t expect to recoup our investment overnight,” says Dobner.
“We are here for the long haul,” adds Lust.
