When we talk about porn's relationship to #MeToo, we tend to focus on the negative. But one woman is using porn as an opportunity to address the cultural issues at the heart of every #MeToo story.
Indie adult filmmaker Erika Lust has been hosting public screenings of her popular erotica series XConfessions at theaters and festivals around the world for years now. From Berlin to Buenos Aires and most recently Los Angeles, her work showcases exactly how sexy consent can be, while lengthy Q&A sessions with audiences spark powerful conversations.
"Sexually explicit films help us construct our visions of pleasure and desire," Lust says. "Porn is a discourse about how we interact sexually, about gender roles, masculinity, femininity."
The screenings are only one facet of the porn revolution Lust is leading, though. Her erotic films are part of a feminist movement reclaiming the male-dominated porn industry by embedding it with the female gaze, instituting ethical production practices, empowering female adult filmmakers, and putting women's pleasure at the forefront of it all.
Emphasizing the distinction between mainstream "tube site" porn and the indie adult cinema scene, Lust says that, "When we talk about pornography, we're usually only talking about a small group of heterosexual, white, middle-aged man's vision of sex.
"But the time has come: Now, it's our turn to provide an alternative showing other people's ideas of sexuality. That's what I'm working toward."
In 2013, Lust did something radical. She asked people on the internet to anonymously submit confessions of their deepest, darkest, most thrilling sexual fantasies. Then, she made them real.
Described as "the erotica you’ve always wished you could watch, but nobody has ever made," XConfessions skyrocketed to success. From the beginning, she was inundated with an unbelievable amount of diverse requests (just look at this catalog). Now, Lust picks two confessions every month to turn into gorgeous, high-production-value erotic short films that she releases to her subscribers.
The popularity of XConfessions showed just how hungry people -- but particularly women -- were for a different kind of porn. And when the conversations around #MeToo started expanding to broader, greyer areas beyond just sexual harassment and assault, XConfessions proved itself to be a prescient piece of feminist filmmaking.
"In mainstream pornography, it's obvious that men are the main characters, and that the role of women is to satisfy them," Lust says. But, she cautions, that isn't just a porn problem. The notion that women must provide and satisfy others is pervasive in every industry, and just life overall.
Feminist porn flips this deeply rooted gender role on its head, challenging what both men and women are taught to believe about their sexuality.
The radical act of not needing a man to cum
Lust's work gives women permission to exercise their fundamental "right to have a sexuality. It's saying that your only role is not to satisfy men -- and that, actually, you can satisfy yourself... And I think there's a lot of men who are afraid of how that kind of revolution sets them aside a little."
She relates this current wave of feminist porn back to the famous Masters and Johnson sex studies from the '60s, which outraged men by stating the scientific fact that a majority of women weren't orgasming from penetration, but rather clitoral stimulation.
"To this day, society makes us feel like men should make us cum -- that we should cum from penetration because that's what we see in porn," she says.
One of the most typical emails Lust gets are from young women worried that something's wrong with them because they can't orgasm from sex or mainstream porn. "But there's nothing wrong with us -- it's men who are using the wrong methods!"
After years of reading women's sexual confessions, Lust discovered that, "Most of us are not just ashamed, but afraid of being different or 'perverts.' Because many times, the feminist part of our brain doesn't like the things that turn us on -- and it's very confusing."
At its core, Lust wants her work to make women feel OK about watching and enjoying porn -- freeing them up to not only explore, but understand all their "perversions."
Because the power of porn like XConfessions is that it allows women (particularly young women) to explore their sexuality when men aren't in the room, or even part of the equation. Too often, mainstream porn has started to replace sex education, teaching women to mimic porn stars.
"It's hard to listen to ourselves sometimes, or maybe we don't know ourselves enough yet. So we try to roleplay porn to find out what we like and how to turn other people on. But it becomes so easy to forget about yourself, and your own satisfaction. So suddenly, your own satisfaction is when you're alone with your vibrator -- and sex with a man is just a performance for him," Lust says.
Porn as a dialogue
The question of women's pleasure is not only embedded into the format of XConfessions, but also in the performances and behind-the-scenes practices.
The safety and enjoyment of the performers is always of utmost importance. You will find no fake orgasms here, or what Lust described as the "punish fucking of women" that dominates tube sites. Unlike with nearly every other porn shoot, her entire film crew is made up of women. Every film ends with a roundtable discussion between Lust, the performers, other sex experts, and everyday women.
This emphasis on dialogue is the key difference between Lust's films and mainstream porn. She imbues conversation into every single script, shot, and production process.
"I don't only want to show sex. I want people to experience what sex feels like in my films," she says. "And there's so much more to sex than the act: It's about how the subjects connect with each other, how they react to the pleasure another person is giving them. So shooting real sex is almost like shooting a dialogue between two people."
Or at least it should be.
Beyond adding realism, showing sex as a form of communication in porn is crucial to establishing a universal understanding of consent. Sincere conversations about consent are full of confused people (usually men) wondering if what they're doing is OK. Or, if its backlash to #MeToo, it's indignant men asking angrily if they should start signing contracts before having sex.
"Sexual narratives in film can show sexuality in a way that helps people have these dialogues, and steer them toward asking the right questions," Lust explains. Her work intentionally integrates situations people consider awkward -- like asking to use a condom -- into the sexual fantasy itself.
"It empowers lot of people after because they feel like: Well, if I've seen it done on film, I can bring that into my life and just do what they did," she says. "For example, showing men who are interested in a woman's sexuality and pleasure -- who ask her during sex if she's OK, if she likes it, wants it at a different rhythm, speed, intensity -- that helps us understand what two people communicating consent looks like."
Porn for the #MeToo era
Porn's role in establishing sexual norms might've played a huge part in reinforcing the harmful power dynamics that lead to coercive rape culture at the heart of so many #MeToo stories. But we shouldn't be too eager to scapegoat the medium itself as the whole disease, rather than just a symptom.
Instead, maybe we should think about how such a powerful tool can be used to make things better.
While Lust's work helped popularize this wave of feminist porn, she knows the revolution needs a lot more voices. So she started an open call for other female filmmakers wanting to change porn culture. The recently released XConfessions Vol. 11 features four films by guest filmmakers, and the series' first trans performer in a pansexual orgy titled We Are the Fucking World.
"The future is about diversity: People from different ethnicities, different backgrounds, different sensations sharing their visions of sexuality," she says.
According to Lust, #MeToo and the XConfessions project share one fundamental aspect that give both the ability to fundamentally change our sexual culture: "There's so much power in sharing. And social media has made sharing so impactful."
We collectively shared our traumas under the #MeToo banner, and it finally made our voices too loud to ignore. Perhaps, Lust suggests, the next phase is, "sharing stories about our sexualities, fantasies, turn-ons. Because we need to talk about what we don't want, and what we do want."
You can buy tickets here for the XConfessions events in Los Angeles show on Saturday, March 24 -- or check the Facebook page for tickets. Or visit the XConfessions website to submit a confession, gain access to the series online, or sign up for the newsletter to watch one for free and get updates on future screenings.
Topics Activism Porn Sex & Relationships
