“We want to see everything.”
So writes porn producer and director Erika Lust in Good Porn: A Woman’s Guide.
Not turned on by mainstream porn, Ms. Lust (née Hallquist) decided to make her own: There was Five Hot Stories for Her, which won movie of the year at the 2008 Feminist Porn Awards in Toronto, and Barcelona Sex Project (2008), an experimental documentary that followed locals around the Spanish city and finished with them candidly masturbating.
“We have the same right as men to get ourselves off,” writes the Stockholm native, to “well-made films that include sexually explicit content.”
Ms. Lust’s first book, translated into eight languages and published in North America last month by Seal Press, looks at male- versus female-made porn, its history and lingo, as well as sensual indie art house movies, seventies sexploitation films and Gonzo porn, which involves the participation of the director.
The 33-year-old political science major, who is six months pregnant with her second child, spoke with The Globe and Mail from Barcelona.
You write that women looking at pictures of sex “freaks a lot of men out.” Really?
It is still the case, but it’s changing all the time. From a historical perspective, it’s obvious that porn was created for men, by men. Almost every time you watch a film, you can see that the woman is the vehicle for his orgasm. We haven’t liked it as much because it hasn’t been as attractive to us. But there’s a general idea in society that women like reading erotic novels and having softer sex, that we aren’t as visual as men, that we don’t like to look at people having sex. It’s like soccer: There’s a general assumption that we don’t like it very much.
Maybe women would watch more porn if the actors looked more like soccer players.
That’s a good point. When I look at the actors in porn movies, I don’t find them attractive.
You lay out the types in your book: “Mafia dons, pimps, drug lords, arms dealers, bazillionaires, or sickly muscled sex machines hung like a horse.”
The men behind the camera work with stereotypes – strong, tough guys. But me and my friends would rather have a more simple guy, a neighbour type, the type we meet on a normal night, a man we can speak with.
You write that women want realistic settings, “modern apartments” equipped with Macs – not tacky, opulent mansions and yachts.
Mainstream porn directors’ aesthetic values are not too elaborate. It’s a very kitschy ambience. They don’t work with the interiors. They don’t even care about something so important to us as the bed linens.
So women want ambience? I thought you wrote that women aren’t into candles and flower petals.
We don’t need the fireplace or the champagne and the chocolate and the strawberries. I don’t think that’s what we want, but when we watch a film, many of us want it to look good.
The ratty old couch isn’t doing it for you?
Exactly. What happens to me is that I keep looking at that couch and I don’t concentrate on what is happening: “It’s such an ugly place! Why are they doing it here?”
You also complain about the ridiculous scenarios in mainstream porn, like the girl who comes home to find her boyfriend canoodling with her best friend and happily hops into bed with them.
It’s not like I need a two-hour introduction, but I need some context as to who these people are. In advertising, they create a story in 20 seconds. It just seems like [the mainstream directors] don’t really care.
