Erika Lust remembers the exact moment she first saw a porno. She was around 11 or 12, chomping on popcorn at a friend’s sleepover party, when the young host pulled out a VHS she’d swiped from her dad’s private stockpile. Before then, porn was something Lust had only glimpsed in Playboy or simulated with Barbie and Ken. When the sex started, the girls all shuddered. Was porn always this ridiculous, this gross?
It would be years before Lust, now a pioneer in erotic cinema—she writes, directs, and runs her own production company, Erika Lust Films—would view porn under more pleasurable circumstances. Studying political science at Lund University in Sweden, Lust, like many of her female peers, considered herself a liberated young woman, with feminist ideals and an open mind. So when her college boyfriend suggested that they pop in a video to get them in the mood, Lust was eager to give it a try.
She enjoyed what she watching more this time around, but there was something about it that still didn’t sit right. The production design was dreadful, for starters. And where was the feeling, the texture of a real erotic encounter? The sex it depicted was all mechanics, no mood.
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“I felt this disconnection between my body and my brain,” Erika recalled, perched in a swanky Manhattan cafe in early November. “My body did get turned on. I felt it in my guts, you know?” She squinted and gripped her abdomen. “But the women that I saw were not my women. I didn’t identify with them. I didn’t feel that that kind of sexual encounter had anything to do with my sex life, and what I expected of sex.”
Born and raised in Sweden, Lust is currently based in Barcelona, where she lives with her husband (who doubles as her business partner) and two teenage daughters. She produces the majority of her work around Europe, where porn—and sex in general—are less of a taboo, and she doesn’t often find herself in America.
A few days before we spoke, Lust gave a talk at the Wing, a luxurious women’s working space in Dumbo, Brooklyn where the bookshelves are organized by color and a neon-pink female torso hangs in naked contrapposto in lieu of a bathroom sign. A diverse millennial crowd of Wing members gathered for Lust’s event, and they collectively craned their necks as she told her story—how she started out, honed her mission, and continues to produce trailblazing work in what is, probably, the most disdained industry in the world.
In 2004, when Lust was 27, she produced her first short film The Good Girl, a sexy, satirical twist on the pizza delivery man trope. When she made it available online for free, the short saw over two million downloads within a few months. Three years later, Lust released Five Hot Stories for Her, a compilation of erotic, woman-centric vignettes that won festival awards in Barcelona, Berlin, New York, and Toronto. Erika Hallqvist, the hard-working political science major, had officially become Erika Lust, indie erotic film director.
In the years since, Lust launched her own production company, Erika Lust Films, and multiple distribution websites, including her best-known streaming platform, XConfessions. The site allows subscribers (membership is $34.95 per month) to browse and view content, as well as submit descriptions of sexual fantasies, which Lust’s team then adapts and develops into short films. Recent releases include Heidi & The Dough Boys, featuring a ménage à trois of bakers covered in flour, and His Funeral, based on a bereaved submission from a subscriber: “Everything hurt in my body when I lost him,” reads the confession, which is posted with Lust’s comments beside her erotic film adaptation. “And I couldn’t tell anyone that what I needed most in my grief was someone to fuck me.”
“We need to know that sex shouldn’t be about satisfying other people in the first place,” said Lust at the Wing talk, her wide brown eyes gazing around the room. “It should be about ourselves and our pleasure. Knowing how to satisfy our own bodies. That’s the first step.”
Lust, who is statuesque and speaks with the breathy excitement of someone telling a secret, is known worldwide for her “feminist” porn, though she understands the term is a bit of a misnomer. “It’s complex,” she said. “People hear ‘feminist’ and they think of women with strap-ons ready to go out and fuck all the men. And that’s not what this is at all.”
This hairy, man-hating bogeywoman is a familiar feminist stereotype, a staple of second wave yore. But when it comes to sex, there’s another type of tricky feminine cliche at play: the affection-seeker, the relentless cuddler, the damsel who’s only interested in sex that’s snuggly, soft, intimate, tender.
Coming of Age, a Lust film from April 2017, captures this sort of sexual style gracefully. Based on an XConfessions request from “notsosweet16,” the film was designed to serve as an antidote to the way teen girls are typically treated in porn: as fresh and innocent, ready to be pounded and punished. Lust’s version breaks this mold, depicting cherubic teen sweethearts (the performers were actually 22, an intertitle assures) who decide to seal the deal with mutual love and respect.
But Coming of Age is actually an anomaly within Lust’s oeuvre. The vast majority of her films are more dynamic, full of frisky characters performing stunts that range from warm mischief to real roughhousing. The premises are varied and imaginative: an orgy in a bike shop; a voyeuristic threesome in an art museum; an office businesswoman indulging in a series of elaborate fantasies about men in kilts. Every one of them is artistic, as visually arresting and thoughtfully edited as a Sundance indie.
“Porn can be an outlet for things that we wouldn’t do in real life,” said Lust. “There are other things that we can fantasize about, that maybe we don’t want to do in our real life but maybe we enjoy watching. I think that is wonderful.” When a new film featuring two men was released to the site, Lust received an appreciative note from a hetero male subscriber. Before watching, he said, he hadn’t really understood what gay male sex entailed. In this case, the film wasn’t an erotic stimulant; it was an educational service.
Yet despite the value of Lust’s work, the sad (and infuriating) reality of being a creator in the erotic film industry is that you’re fighting an endless battle. So far, Lust has been banned from various newsletter services, YouTube, and Vimeo—the latter two not even for explicit videos, but simply “because I am who I am, so I’m promoting an adult brand,” she explained during the talk. The Vimeo eviction is particularly recent, given on the grounds that one of Lust’s promo videos alluded to “stimulation of bathing suit areas,” she said. “This is the world we live in, really.”
The other, more weaselly enemy lies in Lust’s competitors: the tube sites. Ask any casual porn-watcher and they’ll most likely do their perusing on a tube—places like PornHub, xVideos, RedTube, xHamster, XNXX—each of which rack up daily unique visitors in the millions. In the ’70s and ’80s—the era of “porno chic”—the mainstream pornography industry was a studio system, dominated by stars with major contracts and producers with legitimate deals. But within the last 20 years, what had been a robust, respected business devolved into clips produced by amateurs, each one featuring graphic, hyperreal images engineered to get you off within minutes.
The tube sites, which make up the mainstream porn landscape of today, are what Lust’s indie contingent is fighting. “I want to show how sex feels, not how it looks,” she said. To define her production company, Lust prefers the terms “indie erotic cinema” or “ethical adult cinema.” Her website lists as its mission: foregrounding women’s pleasure, diversity, transparency, fair pay, and safe sex environments. Since fall 2016, Lust has also invited a slew of guest directors to contribute to XConfessions to ensure that artists from all backgrounds receive space for storytelling and representation.
“Her team are a shining example of her vision. Being the change she wishes to see,” Heidi Switch, a performer who has appeared in four Lust films, wrote over email. The sets are “professional and definitely female driven,” Switch added, with an eye toward content designed to “inspire, arouse and trump all the shoddy ‘porn’ that has gone before.”
Switch was a webcam model and subscriber to XConfessions when she decided to cold-email Lust one day and request an audition. Now, she’s a fixture on the site. “My body looks a lot like Heidi’s, so it’s so wonderful to see her being enjoyed by two beautiful other performers,” a user named “brooklyn” wrote in the comments on Heidi & The Dough Boys. Added another, “Heidi is the reason that I signed up for Xconfessions.”
Structured like a chic retail website, XConfessions allows you to search by film or by performer, each of whom has their own page with a short bio (“Heidi is the closest you will get to meeting a Goddess in real life,” Switch’s begins) and a stylishly-produced video interview. In the comments sections for films, viewers will praise the shorts for their sensuality or their aesthetics, and the performers, as well as Lust herself, will often reply back with smiling emojis or recommendations for other titles on the site.
The community Lust has fostered within XConfessions is rare in today’s porn world. In addition to creating work that’s artistic, inclusive, and reputable, Lust has managed to make the erotic landscape a lot less isolating. The stereotype of a pornographic film director is a sleazy scumbag, luring young women into his sordid circle. With her cabal of frequent collaborators and avid viewers, Lust is more like a cool mother hen, making sure everyone is safe and having a good time.
People frequently ask Lust whether “feminist porn” can exist, or whether the term is doomed to forever remain an oxymoron. “Sometimes I say, ‘I’m a feminist. And I make porn,’” she said, shrugging. “How can we make porn that turns us on? That talks about our passions and our adventures and our ideas and our sexuality? Well, we need to start sharing our stories.”
Toward the end of the Wing talk, an aspiring performer in the audience raised her hand. She wanted advice: What do you do if you’re interested in joining the industry but afraid of the stigma? Lust replied without missing a beat. “When I started I was young and fearless,” she said. “Maybe that helped me a little. Just to dare to do it.”
