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Erika Lust wants to get more women into porn

“I don’t want to get women out of porn, I want to get women into porn!”

That’s the rallying cry of Erika Lust, and she shouted it from the stage of the Royal Theatre this past Wednesday at a screening of her work to kick off the 10th Annual Feminist Porn Awards. Produced by Toronto sex shop Good For Her, the Awards have grown over the past decade from a small event recognizing a few artists to an international three-day, sex-positive extravaganza of talks and screenings. Today, they draw submissions from around the globe and feature a wider range of gender and sexuality than ever before.

This year also marks Lust’s tenth in the industry. Over the years she’s witnessed feminist porn emerge as its own genre, but is the first to admit that it’ll be while before it can rival the behemoth that is the mainstream pornography industry.

“We’re still very much a niche market, but things are changing,” said the bubbly Swede in the lobby of the Royal last Wednesday evening. Lust travelled from her hometown of Barcelona to attend the awards and to host a special screening of her short film series, XConfessions.com. Dressed in jeans, a T-shirt and runners, Lust is hardly cultivating a sexpot image for herself. It’s a look that reflects her ethos in erotic filmmaking — casual, happy and real.

Lust made her first pornographic movie in 2004 as a film school project after noting the dearth of porn that reflected her sexual experiences and desires as a young, feminist woman. She remembers approaching a mainstream studio about the idea of creating porn marketed specifically towards female viewers.

“They laughed,” she recalled. “Women won’t pay to watch sex,” they told her. “Women are paid for sex.”

Lust got to work proving her naysayers wrong. Today, her website Xconfessions.com turns real viewers’ fantasies into short films. It has 50,000 members — 2000 of them paid — and about 60 per cent of those viewers are women. She says that the same studios that once scoffed are now churning out more and more porn that resembles what she is making.

But while the industry grows, it is still widely misunderstood. The label often confuses, as many people see the two constructs — pornography and feminism — as opposites. For Lust, one of the biggest differences between mainstream and feminist porn is the process. She recalls approaching an agency to find actors for her first film. After briefly showing her some photos, the agent asked Lust to choose. When she asked to meet the actors before selecting her stars, the agent scoffed. So Lust walked out.

“I have very close relationships with my performers,” she explained. “We talk about what they like doing, what feels natural to them and who they enjoy performing with.” The result, she says, is more realistic, believable performances, with real women displaying real pleasure.

“Don’t get me wrong,” said Lust on stage at the Royal before the lights went down. “The sex can still be dirty, but the values have to be clean.”

The films that followed lived up to that maxim. There was leather and spanking, steamy three-ways, blindfolds and foot sucking, but there was also foreplay, laughter, cuddling, affection and a fair amount of straight-up comedy. In one film, a man sitting on a park bench gives a spectacular blowjob to an enormous penis-shaped Popsicle, then lights a post-coital cigarette to peals of laughter from the audience.

Lust’s directorial perspective, too, reveals a marked shift from the mainstream. Instead of long, graphic close-ups of thrusting penetration finished off with a facial, we see a woman’s face as she gently moans in pleasure, a man giggle as his girlfriend aggressively grabs his butt, or a couple passed out on their backs post-sex, legs and arms star-fished on the bed, mouths hanging slightly open.

The films were hot — no question — and the audience was squirmy in a good way, but more than just sexy, the shorts offered a realistic and much happier portrayal of sexuality than what is pushed by the mainstream.

“One of the purposes of what I do is education,” says Lust. She points out that a third of web content is pornography, and that young people are viewing porn online before they ever have sex themselves.

“There needs to be a viewpoint represented other than that of a misogynistic male.”

So whose viewpoint is represented by feminist pornography? At the gala at the Capitol Event Theatre on Friday evening, it was clear from the films up for awards that diversity rules. Lesbian, straight and trans sex were on the big screen, as were big bodies and small, and disabled and differently abled people were also represented.

“Within feminist porn there is a lot more on the lesbian and queer side than on the straight side,” said Good For Her founder Carlyle Jansen in Capitol’s lounge before the show. As a producer of the Feminist Porn Awards since 2006, she’s seen the event balloon in size and popularity, yet says the word feminism still confuses some.

“Unfortunately a lot of people when they hear feminist porn, they hear lesbian porn, because they think that feminists don’t like men,” said Jansen. “What we’re always trying to say is that feminism is for everybody, and that our awards are for everybody. We have lots of men and lots of straight couples who love coming year after year because they feel good about watching it.”

Indeed, the awards were a feel-good affair, with almost as much cheering and laughter as there was panting and moaning. Lust took home two awards, and happily summed up the popularity of her chosen genre with an apt-organic farming metaphor:

“When you go to the supermarket, you look on the side of the package of eggs and say, ‘How were these eggs made? By hens in a factory, standing one next to each other, or out on a farm?’ And which eggs do you prefer? The farm eggs. Not only because you like the idea of what happened, but also because they taste better.”

Indeed, there can be little debate: the eggs at the 2015 Feminist Porn Awards were both ethical and delicious.

Video by Jonathan Balazs.

news@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto

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