On making independent porn for women: An Interview with director Erika Lust

Around this time last year, I was talking about that controversial condom mandate that shed another light of judgement on the American porn industry. The post didn’t lack disappointment in the current state of erotic film. Violent images that reinforce a misogynistic male gaze are often in full effect. And, let’s be honest, if you share any of my feminist sentiments, sexism in mainstream porn can be a bit of turn off.  While female bodies are necessarily in front of the camera for hetero porn, rarely are they uplifted behind the camera. In imaging new directions for porn — films and projects that are more inclusive, more focused on pleasure, more reflective of a broad range of desires, and those that challenge misogyny and the dominant heteronormative male gaze — questioning who is able to produce porn is important.

Enter female erotic film director Erika Lust. She is the creator of XConfessions, a site that takes women’s desires to a whole ‘nother level. Her innovative project is in complete service to creating porn that her viewers, mainly women, want to see. Viewers can confess their fantasies and each month Erika Lust and her will turn two into erotic short films. I was able to ask Erika Lust a few questions about her experiences creating erotic films and here’s what she had to say.

SB: Where are you from, where do you currently live?

EL: I was born in Stockholm, in the cold winter of 1977. I grew up in Sweden before deciding that I needed more sun and a more relaxed lifestyle. So I moved to Barcelona in 2000 to learn Spanish and film direction and decided to stay. I now have two Catalan daughters, my partner Pablo, and a successful company! It has has been an amazing trip!

SB: Erika Lust is such a cool name. How’d you come up with it?

EL My Swedish surname is very difficult to write and pronounce. Plus Lust sounded much better as a name for an erotic film director. But Erika is my real first name!

SB: Have you always been interested in erotica? What sparked that interest?

EL: Growing up in a country like Sweden where sex is a very liberal [openly discussed] subject, it was hard not too! But my interest was really sparked off when I watched a porn film for the first time at a girlfriend’s sleepover. We were all really excited with the anticipation to uncover the mysteries of sex! But we were disappointed and let down by the lack of imagination, story line, and relatable characters. I realized this again when I was studying Political Science at the University of Lund and decided to watch another film with my then-boyfriend. Then I came across Hardcore, a book by Berkeley Professor Linda Williams. That was my Eureka moment! I realized that porn is actually a discourse about sexuality and can be used as a tool to continue the sexual liberation of women. So to do this there needed to be more dominate female voices in the industry so we could make GOOD PORN. Porn led by women, representing our values, kinks and pleasures using performers that could portray roles we could relate too.

SB: Can you describe the process of becoming a filmmaker? What barriers did you encounter?

EL: It all began after I made the decision to study filmmaking in Barcelona as this was when I began to seriously think about working within audiovisual erotica. I started reading articles about the little influence women hves in mass media, and then I suddenly understood that I could potentially have more influence as a feminist in TV or cinema rather than in politics.

I made my first short film “The Good Girl” in 2004 for my final year project, which I then released online for free. This gained an incredible response! It was downloaded over two million times within a few short days before going on to receive several awards at specialized film festivals. That kicked it all off for me as I went on to start my own production company, Erika Lust Films. But of course, I was met with criticism and hostility from the male porn world. They thought I was backward and discriminatory to make films just for women. They claimed that it was a waste of time because they were already making porn for everyone.

Starting my own film company was also expensive and time consuming! Fitting this around two young daughters can be tough as well, but luckily my partner helps me out both at work and at home so we have managed to keep things going.

SB: What sets XConfessions apart from other erotic film production?

EL: First and foremost XConfessions isn’t just an erotic film, it’s an audiovisual project. It’s erotica created by the imagination of real people and then put on screen by an all-female production team. So it already stands alone from anything made in the mainstream, boring, chauvinistic, gynecological porn industry.

All the shorts filmed for XConfessions are always conceived with the female perspective in mind. That means with our values, our desires, and our kinks, creating fantasies from a whole wealth of real imaginations in realistic scenarios with relatable characters enjoying REAL arousal. It doesn’t get more contemporary than that, does it?

SB: In your opinion, how does erotica/porn align with feminism?

EL: Porn and feminism have always had a love-hate relationship. But as a feminist I believe that feminism should tackle all corners of cultural and artistic expression, which includes pornography. In Linda Williams’s book Hardcore I learned that porn has the ability to not only inspire passions and lusts we never knew we had, but also educate, allowing women to explore their sexuality, embrace it, enjoy it, and to demand our right to sexual pleasure. So we need to stop being only models, actresses, make up artists, production assistants and wardrobe managers! We need more women in leadership roles, as directors, scriptwriters, producers… Then we can create the porn that we want, instead of leaving the male mainstream to take over, giving a completely one-sided representation on how they see sex and female sexuality, as it’s usually completely wrong. We need to make porn imaginative, smart, and, above all, equal in its representation of female and male pleasure.

SB: What feminists inspire you?

EL: While growing up I was very influenced by Simone de Beauvoir and Swedish author Nina Björk and her book “Under det rosa täcket.” And later at university, as mentioned before, Linda Williams and her books “Hardcore”  and “Porn Studies”.

Read more about Erika Lust here. Sign up at XConfessions to watch her short films or submit your own confessions and see it come alive!