Erika Lust: The Director on a Mission to Get More Women Into Porn

The Swedish filmmaker is spending her own profits to bring more of the female gaze to the adult biz.

Erika Lust wants to get more women in porn—in every possible position. Writer. Director. Producer. Star. She broke into the biz herself once and knows what it takes. And, like the growing number of advocates calling for more women behind the camera in Hollywood, she knows that the more inclusive the adult industry becomes, the better—and, OK, sexier—the results.

“Here we are, in a time when feminism and gender issues are in the media more than ever, the conversation around female sexuality is happening all the time, and still, mainstream production companies keep creating the same boring stuff and are managed by the same kind of narrow-minded men,” Lust says. “We need another perspective; we definitely need the female gaze.” Now she’s just got to prove she’s right.

Last October, the Swedish producer put an open call on her website: She was going to be taking €250,000 (about $272,000) of the budget of her porn operation XConfessions and funding 10 films by women filmmakers in 2017. The plan was simple: If you were a female filmmaker, porn or otherwise, and had an idea for an adult short film that women would like and didn’t succumb to the cliches of mainstream porn, Lust would finance and produce it. Within a few weeks she had nearly 100 applications (aspiring directors had to send her their vision and budget for the short films they wanted to make), and they came from everywhere: Spain, France, the US, India. Lust is still accepting proposals, but she should have no problem finding new pornographers who want to spend her money.

A Decade Coming

Erika Lust discovered porn the way many young people do: sneaking around with her friends. In her case, it was at a sleepover; she and her friends were repulsed. She tried again in college with her boyfriend, but still wasn’t stoked about what she saw—it just didn’t turn her on. Not the way she wanted it to, at least.

In 2004, shortly after she’d finished grad school and moved to Barcelona, she made her first porn. She uploaded The Good Girl, a 22-minute twist on the “pizza delivery guy” cliché, and gave it away for free under a Creative Commons license—it was downloaded 2 million times in two months. She’d found her purpose. Lust continued to make films, and in 2013 she launched XConfessions, an online porn site where the films are based on anonymous secrets submitted by fans. And after nearly a decade in the industry, she realized something. “Everywhere the role of women is under debate—everywhere, except in the porn industry,” Lust told a TEDxVienna crowd in 2014. “It’s time for porn to change, and for that we need women.”

Porn, like all movies and television, has always had a dearth of women in charge. The difference with the adult film industry, Lust points out, is that the objectification of women on screen is frequently much more gratuitous. “The influence pornography has on our views on sex…and gender roles is huge,” she says. “Mainstream porn consistently shows sex as a thing that men do to women, or that women do for men, which means misogynistic porn that objectifies women and places unrealistic expectations on both sexes.”

Changing porn from the inside isn’t just an idea; it’s already proven successful, says Lily Campbell, a producer for Yanks.com who says that since she made the transition from model to producer she’s been sought out by male producers who want her input. “I’ve encountered the sexist boys-club attitude,” she says, “but am happy to say there’s a lot more room for women to stake their claim in the industry too.” The difference comes when more people like Lust help get other women involved.

“Whoever is behind the scenes on a production will inevitably sway the attitude of the end product itself. Porn is all about the perspective of the folks who make it,” Campbell says. “[Having women involved] is very important, lest we see a sea of predominantly white women with fake boobs having fake orgasms to continue to be the ‘norm’ for our porn choices.”

Lust believes that an influx of women creators can help present more realistic expectations about sex for all genders. As Peggy Orenstein pointed out in her book Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape, many young people, like Lust did, are exposed to porn in their teenage years (87 percent of college-age men and 31 percent of women in that age group, according to one study) and it becomes one of their first indications of what sex can and should look like. And “even if what kids watch is utterly vanilla, they’re still learning that women’s sexuality exists for the benefit of men,” Orenstein writes, adding that while porn that resembles consensual, pleasurable sex might be a good idea, it’s “not what the $97 billion global porn industry is shilling.”

When in Doubt, Go Indie

It is, however, what Lust is shilling—and she’s not alone. Even going back to the 1980s, directors like Candida Royalle, one of the first porn stars to move into directing, were making female-focused porn and launching their own efforts to do so. By the 2000s, creators like Anna Span and alt-queer film director Courtney Trouble redoubled efforts to produce and distribute adult films by and for women. And while the Internet has exposed a lot of young people to porn, it also—much like it did for artists of all varieties—provided a distribution channel for a lot of independent producers and performers to release material that doesn’t fall into cliches. (It also, like it did for other industries, caused a lot of problems.) To that end, there are now even sites like Cindy Gallop’s Make Love Not Porn that allow, for lack of a better term, amateur performers to produce and distribute whatever turns them on.

“The beauty of technology is that now anyone can be a pornographer,” says Carlyle Jansen, founder of the adult store Good For Her, which produces the Feminist Porn Awards. “But gaining skills in directing and being able to pay performers well (rather than just featuring yourself) and rent interesting sets and pay a full camera and editing crew to make quality interesting films such as Erika’s would be an extra service that many could not afford.”

Providing those services is, of course, exactly what Lust is trying to do with her new initiative. But she’s also just one person, and porn has a lot of issues of representation that need to change. “Certainly it is fabulous to get more women making porn,” Jansen says. “[But] what I feel is almost more important is to fund transwomen, people/women of color, older folks and people/women with disabilities. These are the people still either fetishized or stereotyped in porn or just left out of the picture. There are very few positive images of these folks in film, especially done by their own communities.”

Just the Beginning

Much like in Hollywood, where less than 10 percent of the top-grossing films of 2015 were directed by women and minorities held a fraction of the speaking roles, porn also has its own inclusion issues. Because of porn’s various venues and forums, the industry’s diversity is harder to track, but as Lust and Jansen point out, it ain’t good. So, like Stacy Smith at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism suggested Hollywood, porn needs to allow a lot more voices into the conversation. Hollywood has been making strides to be more inclusive in the last few years, but change has been slow. Just because Kathryn Bigelow has an Oscar doesn’t mean things are magically fixed—and the same goes for female porn director Mason winning an AVN Award.

“This is the same in every industry,” says Make Love Not Porn’s Gallop. “For example, I get called up by journalists who will want to interview me and they’ll say something like, ‘So Cindy, do you feel that porn objectifies women?’ And I’ll go, ‘I think that any industry dominated by men at the top inevitably produces output that is offensive and objectifying to women and then I will point them to the commercial advertising breaks in the Super Bowl. It’s exactly the same deal across the whole of popular culture. When you have a closed loop of white guys talking to white guys about other white guys, what you get is Batman v Superman. When you invite women and people of color into the room where it happens, what you get is Hamilton.”

Which brings us back to Erika Lust. She may not be the first to put the call out for more women to get involved with porn, but when it comes to shaking up a multi-billion-dollar industry, every €250,000 helps. Her hand-picked directors will start shooting their movies next year—and when they do, there’s a good chance they’ll prove there’s a market for smut made by and for people who aren’t predominantly straight white guys.

Lust knows this because she’s already seen a lot of demand for her work. Since she launched XConfessions three years ago, she’s had to more than triple her staff—from five people to 18— and watched her revenue triple as well. To Lust, that’s proof that she wasn’t the only woman who looked at her college boyfriend’s sexy movie selection and thought This could be better. “There’s a growing educated and demanding audience that is tired of Pornhub or Brazzers,” she says. “They want adult cinema that’s smart, sex-positive, and respectful towards women.” And Lust wants to help give it to them.

This article originally appeared on Wired