‘The Fantasy Can Be Dirty, But the Values Must Be Clean’
Can porn be beautiful and ethical? Erika Lust says yes—unequivocally.
There are no scantily-clad women at the Erika Lust headquarters. There’s no BDSM paraphernalia, no harsh camera lights, and none of the trappings one might imagine in a porn production studio.
In fact, the only exotic creature roaming the office is a sweet-faced house cat named Tony.
Housed in an elegant modernist building in Barcelona's Eixample district, Erika Lust Films looks, well, wholesome—even lovely. There is a smattering of dildo-shaped industry awards on a shelf, but other than that, the office has more in common with a boutique design agency than a Boogie Nights fantasy. Charming Spanish mosaic tiles, stained glass windows, and soaring Catalan vault ceilings create a homey atmosphere for the predominantly female staff.
A New Model
This alternative vision of a porn company reflects Erika Lust’s mission of challenging every toxic trope of the $60 billion global adult entertainment industry. And yes, when she says porn, she means it: Lust doesn’t skirt around the language of the industry or hide behind euphemisms; instead she is reclaiming and reframing the very word. She’s doing this by hiring female and queer filmmakers, insisting on beautiful cinematography, caring for performers, employing intimacy coaches, and promoting a healthy office culture. All of these things are among the tenets of her 20-year old independent film studio.
“The fantasy can be dirty but the values must be clean,” says Lust, the company’s founder and creative director. The result? Films designed for an audience of, well, anyone seeking well-produced erotic content—though you must be of legal age in your jurisdiction.
What began as a one-woman operation in 2005, is now a $25 million business with 70 employees. Lust is mostly in the director or the producer’s chair, with business operations overseen by a CEO and COO.
The studio has produced and funded over 400 films ranging from shorts to full-length features and its streaming service has around 60,000 paying subscribers based in Western Europe, the U.K., Latin America, and the U.S., which is Lust’s biggest market. Perusing Erika Lust’s catalog, one finds an abecedarium of desire for all—from amateur, anal, bondage, massage, outdoor, oral, romance, threesomes, to voyeur.
"Women's pleasure matters. Our female characters have their own sex drive and desires, and are not passive objects focused primarily on pleasuring the men,” Lust said.
Many of these themes are captured in XConfessions, Lust’s long-running series based on fantasies submitted anonymously on the studio’s website. Its most ambitious gambit so far is the adult comedy, “The Wedding.” The 2023 production involved 130 cast and crew members and cost $315,000 to produce.
All of Lust’s content is behind a paywall. Eschewing the advertising model that funds the largest and most exploitative porn sites on the internet, a paid streaming service akin to Netflix, gives the company a more stable revenue model and enables them to have full creative control, Lust explains.
Though the studio operates under the banner of the “feminist pornography” Lust underscores that her films are meant for anyone seeking an alternative to low budget internet porn, including men. “If we want to change attitudes and reach bigger audiences, we can definitely not ignore men,” she says. Around 60% of Erika Lust’s current subscribers in fact, identify as male, though some accounts are shared by couples.
This is all part of Lust’s mission to produce sex-positive content, or more specifically “cinematic porn with relatable characters and engaging stories, following safe and respectful standards,” as her website outlines. “There’s not just one type of porn. People see it as one monolithic entity, but it’s not” Lust clarified in a 2022 New York Times profile.
A Look at Lust
Born Erika Hallqvist in Stockholm in 1977, Lust studied political science and majored in human rights and feminism at Lund University, one of northern Europe’s oldest universities. In college, Lust read Linda Williams’ “Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible," considered the first serious historical survey of pornography as a film genre. The book, originally published in 1989, led to her mission and her medium.
Not long after graduation, she moved to Barcelona to study filmmaking and open an “ethical porn” studio. She registered the company under her nom-de-plume (or perhaps, nom de guerre) which was inspired by a female-oriented sex shop in Copenhagen (now called “L is for Love”). “It was the first time where I got into a space that was sexual and beautiful at the same time and I found that quite intriguing,” Lust recalls. Sexuality and beauty, in fact, are the values around which she would build her company.
In person, Lust is warm, gregarious, and exudes a palpable sense of mission. Growing up in Sweden didn’t shape her outlook about sexuality, she tells me when we first met at her office. “People have an idea that Sweden is quite an open-minded society. Naked bodies are very, very, very normalized in Swedish society but then when we're talking about sexuality, more so from a porn perspective, factors like feminism, women's rights, and female bodies come into play,” she explains. She tells me that her own mother still disapproves of her career.
Lust’s breakout directorial debut quickly established her as a feminist filmmaker. “The Good Girl,” a 2004 short about a woman who has a transformational tryst with a strapping pizza delivery guy, is as much a campy parody of porn plot clichés as it is a demonstration of how to reframe sexual desire from the female perspective. The 30-minute film was downloaded over two million times in two months and garnered several industry awards. As in all of Erika Lust Films’ productions since, the woman is cast as the protagonist and the storyteller of her own desire.
Lust runs Erika Lust Films with her husband, Pablo Dobner, who serves as its CEO. “I honestly don't think I would have this company if we didn’t have the partnership we have,” she says. “And when I say that, it's not to undermine my own role in it.”
Lust is, in fact, fully aware of her agency within the industry. By many surveys, her company has become the most known producer of ethical porn, a segment that includes entities like Bellesa, Bright Desire, Lustery, and Sssh. The privilege that comes with running a profitable independent film studio with its own distribution network is not one Lust takes lightly. “I find it difficult to manage power,” she says. “We [women] are so used to being without power and we know how to operate without it. Then suddenly when we have a voice, a company, and influence over people, it becomes tricky.”
The Price of Innovation
Growing an online adult entertainment business has particular complications, no matter how ethical its practices are, explains the company’s COO, Alex Villacé. “Historically, we see all this innovation that began in the adult industry, but we work under a lot of stigma and regulations. We have to apply our creative side and find things to keep working,” says Villacé, who was previously a regional manager of the Spanish food delivery app Glovo. He cites, for instance, that Visa and Mastercard, two of the world’s largest payment processors, are also the greatest gatekeepers of pornography. Mastercard’s rules, for instance, stipulate that they have the right to reject “other material that the Corporation deems unacceptable.” Erika Lust’s perpetual regulatory battles echo the hurdles legal marijuana and abortion clinics providers face.
Despite the hurdles, Lust believes that speaking publicly and plainly about her work will ultimately help encourage healthier attitudes about sexuality in the public discourse. In recent years, she has held screenings in large movie theaters in Europe and created “The House of Erika Lust,” an immersive virtual reality experience in Barcelona. But even if watching soft porn clips via clunky VR headsets fails to get anyone aroused, the point is to get people talking about sex, Villacé explains.
And while the idea of watching pornography with strangers might sound odd—pornography is distinct from an art film, after all—Lust is encouraged by the reaction she gets at big screenings. “You can feel this community created around sex positivity around you,” she says, describing the energy she felt at sold-out Erika Lust events in the U.K. last August where audiences applauded each time a woman reached orgasm. (She explained they produced a “softer” cut of their films for these public screenings and exhibitions.)
Whichever side of the porn debate you fall on, it’s hard to ignore the intent and fervor in Lust’s argument. “This is personal for me on a few different levels,” she says, speaking with some urgency. “I come from a life of women who got pregnant when they were teenagers because of the lack of sex education. The right for women to sex education; I see it as a human right; as a political right.” Perhaps this explains why Lust’s programming now includes a sex ed series and a platform called “Porn Conversations” that offers teachers and educators free resources developed by sexologists. In addition, there’s the company's annual global user research study, which offers a glimpse of sexual proclivities around the world.
“We live in a cruel world,” Lust continues. “We live in a patriarchal, very binary world. I have many queer friends. I have a trans son and I have a huge need to explain to the people in power—mostly white, cis, heterosexual men with money who determine the fate of the world—that there are so many stories from different types of backgrounds that are not taken into account.”
Lucy Webster
Josie Cox
Josie Cox
