Porn director Erika Lust: ‘Bonnie Blue’s stunts are not about sex’

“I’m going to have an LA fantasy worthy of the movies,” narrates Sally, a young fresh-faced brunette. Roller skating through Venice Beach, she soon collides with Harri, they get talking, hang out on the boardwalk for an afternoon, and then… seven minutes into this 18-minute porn film, they’re undressing on the sofa in Harri’s house. This is just one example of how feminist porn director Erika Lust pushes for the genre’s ethical new future by making it old school again. It’s a cinematically shot story containing a meet-cute, a narrative arc, and characters with… well… character. Lust has been producing porn under Erika Lust Films for more than 20 years. Born Erika Hallqvist in 1977 and raised in Malmö, Sweden, in a household where – contrary to stereotypes about buoyant Swedes going at it in saunas – sex just wasn’t discussed. Shorts She describes a “sexually repressed upbringing that I know more of us have gone through than haven’t” in her new book, Lust: Pleasure, Performance, Power, part-memoir of her own sexual awakening, part reflection on making porn in a patriarchy. All that repression unravelled when she moved to Barcelona in her early twenties to study filmmaking. Rent was cheap, socialising was key, and she found “liberation”. Over video call, she explains how this was all before mobile phones, giving her “that feeling of not being watched that I think helped me to find myself”. She discovered a “sense of self, my creativity and my self-belief”. All requisite tools for swimming upstream against the deluge of male-directed “dick-centric” porn proliferating the internet. To me, the most outrageous part of her story isn’t the gangbangs she’s directed, or the fact her first supposedly feminist porn shoot featured a man ejaculating on a woman’s face. It’s that she barely saw any porn growing up. The first time was when she was 12 at a slumber party. The next time, she was at college. Her exposure was, she writes “nothing like what kids meet on the internet now” , but I explain to her that even I, aged 38, saw porn weekly as a teen. “For me, porn was exciting,” she replies. “I didn’t have access to special images in that sense, so when I found them, I was fascinated by them. At the same time, I had that conflict going on – I felt that my body was turned on but I didn’t like what I was looking at.” Years later, that feeling returned, and this time she could do something about it. Working as a film location manager, she’d rented her apartment to a porn shoot and was aghast at the “chaos” unfolding. In response, she shot The Good Girl, a porn film about a sexually reserved woman who seduces a pizza delivery man. It features introspective narration, humour and sensuality, but none of California’s porn behemoths wanted it. Lust instead uploaded it to her blog, and within weeks it had been downloaded millions of times. Two decades on and more than 100 films later, Lust says her work is about bridging “the shame gap” that women feel between “what we actually want and desire and what actually fulfils us”. “I think we all have two relationships to pornography: a private relationship that we don’t talk to anyone else about, and then what we are actually watching online,” she says. “Then, when we do talk to others, there’s this desire to appear morally superior – ‘Porn is horrible, no I don’t watch it’.” Many activists have decried porn’s harms. A recent report from charity The Naked Truth, titled “Pornography is causing a public health crisis”, details the effects of early exposure to porn and its links to mental health issues, including addictive behaviours, increased sexual risk-taking, and erectile dysfunction. Last month, ErikaLust.com received 1.6 million visits, whereas Pornhub received 3.4 billion visits, according to internet traffic analyst Semrush. Lust is certainly “a bit worried… that the activist part of me is preaching to my own choir all the time. If I want my work to have a bigger effect I need to reach those guys… I need them to click on it and come and watch it and be exposed to the way we show relatable pleasure for women”. According to a 2020 analysis of over 4,000 freeTube porn videos by Indiana University-Bloomington’s Media School and School of Informatics, 45 per cent of Pornhub scenes and 35 per cent of Xvideos scenes included at least one act of physical aggression, and women were the target 97 per cent of the time. That same year, a literature review from the Johnson government found that “there is evidence to show an association between pornography usage and harmful attitudes and behaviours towards women and girls”. I meet Lust shortly after the Government has announced a ban on porn depicting incest, child roleplay and choking. A group of schoolgirls, fed up with sexual harassment, are campaigning for porn to stop featuring school uniforms. Lust says these are “complex subjects that we need to take time to think about”, but wonders: “How would you even prohibit school uniforms? How do we define a school uniform?” Besides, she adds: “The sexualisation of young girls has happened before porn.” As for incest? She points out that “even in this kind of ‘smart’ world” of erotic fiction that is storming the self-published book charts, “lots of people of all different genders are really fantasising about it, and there is a huge difference between a fantasy world and real world”. I point out that according to official UK data, girls aged 16-19 report higher rates of domestic abuse than any other age group. Could free online porn have played a part in radicalising boys and young men to loathe women and girls? “We talk more about it now, but hasn’t it always been there?” I mean, I don’t remember a time where all teenage boys respected all teenage girls, no. But on reflection, I find her attitudes towards porn’s problematic content oddly defeatist – historical precedent is no justification for grim things to continue. See: polio. For what it’s worth, Lust’s work does not feature these tropes, and she wants to improve porn, subverting a genre that tends to only depict scenes “where women are passive and men are aggressive”. She painstakingly plans out her porn films, applying her feminism to “how we produce it, how we distribute it, how we label it, how we put it out there in the world”. Lust says the issue with porn is not necessarily its content, but its form. She laments that in the 1960s and 70s, “porn was cinema: it had cinematic language and storytelling, and characters, and narrative and a vision”. In contrast, now “porn is shot on very easy cameras. It is still being made by companies and producers, but it started to look so real that people didn’t separate it from fantasy anymore. A lot of people are becoming aware that they’re not feeling healthy when looking at these free tube sites. It clashes with their values”. It’s also delivered in, as she writes in her memoir, “short, decontextualised snippets designed to grab attention for a few seconds at a time… cutting out everything that is interesting”. She is similarly disparaging of AI porn, despite entirely generative content (i.e. not deepfakes) offering the assurance that no human will be harmed in its making: “[Porn producers are] not using [AI] in any interesting way, they’re just augmenting the breasts and the penises. It’s not getting any closer to intimacy or a story of desire.” She compares all of this short-form content, not unreasonably, with “junk food” in the book, and tells me: “Porn is definitely not separate from the times we’re living in, and we’re living in a time where technology has taken over our lives. So many people are stuck with their screens.” To my mind, the apex of this screen-forward culture is in Bonnie Blue’s work. The Derbyshire pornographer has become notorious – and rich – from short-form rage-bait and sex stunts – including sleeping with more than 1,000 men in a day. What does Lust think of her? “I understand why she wanted to do it – she found a way of getting the money she wanted to earn – but I would not be proud of putting those kinds of values into the world. “These stunts show she’s a gladiator of our times, like an adult clown. The shock of it makes people go, ‘Whoa! What is this?’ But it’s not about sex, it’s not about having a good time.” To Lust, a good time – like Sally’s fantasy worthy of the movies – rests on the simple notions of women’s pleasure and formats that allow for it to be accurately depicted: “I really believe that sex can be transformational and give a life force. And I think that if women have access to pleasure, that is a tool against patriarchy. It’s a tool for liberating ourselves.” ‘Lust’ by Erika Lust is published by Ithaka at £16.99 on 5th November