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Additional design by Tina Tiller

Porn WeekNovember 10, 2022

‘Pleasure is the purpose’: Meet Erika Lust, the queen of ethical and feminist porn

Senior writer
Additional design by Tina Tiller
Additional design by Tina Tiller

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. 

All this week on The Spinoff we’re talking about porn. Click here for more Porn Week stories. 

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. 

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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. 

Erika Lust on set. (Photo: YouTube)

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.” 

Erika Lust in her Barcelona office. (Photo: YouTube)

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. 

Chris & Eli’s Porn Revolution

E01: Understanding our porn past and present

E02: Think of the children

E03: Talking porn at the dinner table

E04: Can porn be a cultural force?

“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. 

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Porn WeekNovember 10, 2022

The man with a PhD in porn addiction

Contributing writer
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Dr Kris Taylor has spent years studying the relationship between men and porn, including those in the NoFap community who’ve sworn off porn and masturbation altogether. He tells Don Rowe what he’s learnt.

All this week on The Spinoff we’re talking about porn. Click here for more Porn Week stories. 

There’s an old (and sadly false) urban legend that Kellogg’s corn flakes were created as the ideal breakfast to prevent masturbatory urges. Less true still are dark prophecies of hairy palms, irreversible blindness and severe mental illnesses on the horizon for the self-pleasurer. For the most part we all know by now that masturbation is a natural part of growing up, totally normal and generally a pretty good time. 

But similarly ominous stories about the consequences of viewing pornography profligate like crusty socks on a bedroom floor: addiction, impotence, sex-crazed teenagers running amok. According to the University of Auckland’s Dr Kris Taylor, though, a lot of the fear is predicated on the same flimsy hypotheses and hysteria that had Mr Kellogg warning of gluttony’s effect on chastity. The evidence, he says, just isn’t there.

“It’s hard to get people to give an honest response when you’re talking about where they get their sexual ideas from,” he says. “But pornography has become a bit of a scapegoat for the larger problem of masculine entitlement, sexism and misogyny.”

Taylor’s PhD examined the concept of pornography addiction in men, surveying more than 200 people across Aotearoa between the ages of 15 and 83. He has since published widely on perceptions of reality in porn more broadly. Much of the more rigorous work in the academic field focuses on women, he says, and there is a lack of complexity in studies of the ways in which men and teenage boys navigate porn. Taylor’s work suggests that while some men struggled with their porn use, actual addiction (in the diagnostic sense) to porn is itself a fiction.

“It’s not recognised by large diagnostic bodies in psychology and mental health classifications,” he says. “What I was really interested in was, if we don’t have an official diagnosis, then how are people using that label?” Taylor says the language of addiction is often used by viewers of pornography to diminish feelings of moral, ethical and even religious conflict. Masturbation can induce a sense of shame, and compulsive sexual behaviours can then be explained away as an addiction.

Dr Kris Taylor appears in Chris and Eli’s Porn Revolution (Photo: Hex Work Productions)

There is also an assumption, Taylor says, that ubiquitous smartphone ownership has opened the floodgates to porn consumption. That behind every door is a teenage boy drinking in the most extreme content on the internet. And that this consumption is creating a generation of dangerous perverts, simultaneously unable to perform in bed and more frequently drawn to high risk sexual behaviour. But a lack of data means researchers struggle to predict the true rate of change, and the chain of behavioural causality goes both ways: a viewer already interested in more extreme sexual acts will likely seek out porn that reflects that. 

“For me, the question of whether pornography is causing [that behaviour] is redundant because the real issue are the underlying questions as to why people don’t seek consent, why they might be more attracted to violence,” says Taylor. “Those are the more sticky questions as opposed to a ‘monkey-see, monkey-do’ hypothesis which is too simple for my liking.” 

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But whether clinically recognised as a harmful habit or not, some viewers of porn gravitate towards online communities that preach abstinence as both desirable and advantageous. NoFap (“fap” being onomatopoeic slang for the act of male masturbating) is something akin to Alcoholics Anonymous, a support group with strikingly similar overtones of mysticism. There are one million members on Reddit’s r/NoFap forum and another 300,000 on NoFap’s standalone website, the vast majority of which Taylor says are men. 

Adherents believe refraining from watching porn is a form of self-mastery and cite a since-retracted study showing spikes in testosterone for the abstinent. There is little evidence to back up many of the group’s claims and some academics believe the movement perpetuates harmful and reductionist views on porn and masturbation. Worrying, too, is a current of chauvinism which flows through the community. 

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Taylor began researching the community in 2016 and says that while members of the community often see the benefits of self-discipline flowing into other areas of their life, the emphasis on pseudoscience and flawed perceptions of human sexuality sets some up for failure. “Instead of saying that they want to abstain because they think that pornography is sexist, one of the main thing that comes through is that they tend to abstain for reasons that tend to do with gaining what they describe as ‘superpowers’.” 

By giving up on masturbation, the theory goes, men will become more attractive to women, more focused, more aggressive. The community has its own vocabulary: the abstinent are “fapstronauts”, refraining is to “reboot”. There is a lot of despair, says Taylor, and an undeniable level of camaraderie in overcoming what the afflicted see as a real problem. The framework is overwhelmingly heterosexual in its presentation and positions pornography as fundamentally unmasculine. Real men, the community seems to think, have dominant, penetrative sex. 

“A lot of it is to do with this fear of real achievement in men coming down to being able to attract partners to have sex with, which is generally the main goal,” says Taylor. “That overlaps quite problematically with incel and other communities online, where the idea is that your life will become better if you have sex with a woman.”

While NoFap is ostensibly secular, the idea of semen retention does have a proud monastic history. Everyone from Buddhists to Gnostics have a tradition of self-denial as a method of self-mastery. But Taylor says that modern solutions like NoFap are a response to a lack of education around pornography and sexuality rather than any sort of ascetic pursuit. “Abstinence itself is a very masculine way to deal with your issues, it’s very cut and dried, as opposed to being a little more introspective and reflective. It puts a massive amount of importance on penises and semen as key factors in how human relations are supposed to operate.” 

The real problem, he says, is much deeper. “We have a very poor understanding generally as a society around things like consent and a reliance on ‘just say no’ language, which doesn’t work.”

Chris & Eli’s Porn Revolution

Episode one: Understanding our porn past and present.

Episode two: Think of the children.

Episode three: Talking porn at the dinner table.