“You have to check out Erika Lust,” a guy at the bar tells me. “It’s porn with a plot, and real people who are enjoying themselves. I can’t watch anything else now.”

This was my introduction to the work of adult filmmaker Erika Lust; and upon delving into her world, I was surprised to find that the man who first mentioned it to me—unlike most who start conversations with women at bars—did have a point. Lust’s cinematic universe depicts a diversity of erotic contexts rarely found in the aesthetically vacant, fluorescently-lit landscape of mainstream porn—what Lust herself refers to as “big porn,” as opposed to the independently-produced feminist porn films she releases, which often feel more like arthouse cinema than smut. “I call it ‘big porn’ because it’s no different than big pharma or big food. These are not people interested in exploring human sexuality and all its possibilities, in the same way that big food isn’t invested in nutrition; for those companies, it’s about power, and it’s about money,” she says over Zoom from her Barcelona office.

In theory, Erika Lust doesn’t have a problem with mainstream porn—quite the contrary. She envisions a better world: one where mainstream porn is good, and good porn is readily accessible. The problem is that porn, like any other cultural product, reflects the society it comes from: not just our repressed desires, preoccupations, and anxieties, but also the power structures that regulate them. And in the age of the internet, free porn is everywhere—but good porn is hard to find.

It won’t surprise you to hear that, in a lot of clips found on sites like Xtube, Pornhub, and Redtube, women’s pleasure is misrepresented or simply left out of the picture—much like the clitorial stimulation required to bring 81.6% of them to orgasm. The impact this has on young women, according to Lust, is that they view porn and grow up thinking that something is wrong with their bodies, because they can’t achieve orgasm from a few minutes of jackhammer fucking like the girls onscreen; meanwhile, young men who model their behavior off porn are poorly equipped to please their partners, much less negotiate the boundaries required to engage in the more hardcore sex acts that make up porn’s most popular categories. This isn’t porn’s fault, exactly—rather, it’s the lack of realistic representation of sex, coupled with a dearth of pleasure-focused sex education, that tends to result in young people viewing porn to learn about sex, and interpreting a systemic failure as their own individual shortcoming.

“Sex is the source of life—it’s everything to us. So we want to know about it. We go online, and we end up in big porn, and we think that’s how sex is supposed to be,” Lust explains. “That creates—for many young people—big, private traumas: young men thinking that they need to be some kind of penetrative sex machine; young women thinking that sex is only about pleasing men.”

The idea that porn represents an unrealistic depiction of sexuality is not new. So in an era when women’s pleasure, sex positivity, and consent are at the forefront of the conversation surrounding sex, why does so much of the free porn proliferating online depict an outdated set of norms and ideals?

“Sex is the source of life—it’s everything to us. So we want to know about it. We go online, and we end up in big porn, and we think that’s how sex is supposed to be.”

The answer, Lust says, lies in who’s making it. “If you’re a filmmaker, a journalist, a writer, a painter, a photographer—what you are bringing [as an artist] is your vision and your way of understanding the world we live in,” she asserts. The same is true if porn is being made, and financed, for the benefit of corporations—in this case, one corporation. MindGeek owns the vast majority of streaming tube sites, and led the push to make porn (read: pirated, stolen content) free. It’s a business model that has revolutionized the industry, and not in a good way: In the age of online porn, performers have less control over where their content ends up, and benefit little from its popularity. “These big porn sites, they are not really interested in exploring sexuality; that’s not their thing. They are just using it to get traffic, because they want to sell you advertisements: ‘Date a sexy Latina in your neighborhood,’ grow-your-dick pills, scams like that,” Lust says.

In her view, the increasing censorship of sexual language and imagery on social media platforms, coupled with the lack of regulation and social oversight on porn sites, has made porn into a space where people seek to satisfy the desires others deem socially unacceptable—a space that feels seedy and anonymous, but isn’t any more private than anything else you search for online. “I think we should all ask ourselves: If you’re using a service for free, why are you not paying for it?” Lust says. “With big porn, as with free social media platforms, it’s because you are the product.”

According to Lust, big porn capitalizes not only on a desire for sex, but also on individual insecurity, shame, and loneliness—the same way that fast food offers a quick, affordable solution to hunger in a food desert. “Big porn has become as popular as it is because you cannot express sexuality on other platforms, or in our society at large,” Lust says, describing the way that social media platforms like Instagram ban dissident voices—LGBTQIA+ folks, people with diverse body types, BIPOC people, and those depicting the functions of a woman’s body (such as breastfeeding and menstruation) rather than its sexual appeal—while allowing sexy ads to proliferate with impunity. “We live in a world where we are not allowed sexual expression, if the sexual expression is out of the patriarical male, cis, hetero gaze. It’s very clear to me that this is what has allowed big porn to become sex education for our kids. If the schools and the parents are not answering their questions about sex, and if on social media, they are not allowed to express their sexuality or share sex-positive messages, they’re going to turn to porn.”

Lust experienced this crackdown on sexual expression firsthand, when her Instagram account, with its half a million followers, was deactivated overnight—despite not posting anything in violation of the platform’s rules. (She has now started a new account, which is gaining steam, but rebuilding her platform from scratch in the midst of algorithmic suppression is a steep uphill battle.) It’s a problem familiar to sex workers, who are often shadowbanned (or fully banned) from platforms and payment processors. “Sex work is still something people think is outside of the social and legal commitments of our society—and that only makes it worse, because the people that need to do it are still going to do it, they’re just going to be in a higher-risk situation,” Lust states, referencing the many battles that have been fought on this frontier in recent years—from FOSTA/SESTA to the regulations Mastercard imposed on sex workers in 2021, which require them to hand over all manner of personal information in return for use of their service.

Meanwhile, on TikTok, young people attempt to share information about sex using coded phrases, so as not to trigger the censorship trip wire. The rise of algospeak—code words and phrases adopted by users to avoid content removal or suppression—is becoming the norm. Sex workers on TikTok are “accountants,” porn is “corn,” and monetized content creators say they’re part of the “leg booty” community to signify that they’re LGBTQ without risking algorithmic punishment. The demand for sex positive, educational content on social platforms is there, but the space where people can speak freely is not. “People [on mainstream platforms] want to talk about this stuff, to express their sexuality in social spaces, but they don’t let us,” says Lust. “If we can’t do it there, then at least let us change porn.”

Part of porn’s bad rap is, of course, its unsavory connotations—not just of unrealistic sexual encounters, but also of fetishization, racism, and violence against women. “I go on Pornhub and find taglines like ‘tiny teens getting fucked,’ or ‘big Black cock destroys tiny Asian.’ We’re making huge moves in terms of social progress, yet you still see porn framed this way, because it’s seen as something beyond the boundaries of polite society,” Lust says. To make matters worse, much of the content shown on streaming platforms is stolen; Lust has found her own pirated work there, the context stripped away and marketed under phrases she never would have written. The significance of wording on online platforms goes both ways: While social platforms see viewers attempting to duck censorship by inventing a new vocabulary, categories on porn sites include words and phrases that have all but exited the cultural lexicon—perhaps because these are the terms people are accustomed to searching for to find what they like.

Lust, who studied political science at Lund University, first found her way into porn out of curiosity. “I have had many, many, many discussions with people about pornography—from people who really like and enjoy it, to other people who are very critical. I never really understood what was bad about it, but then [watching porn] made me uncomfortable—especially how I felt that women were relegated to this secondary role as the beautiful object, that’s the tool to male sexuality,” she says. “Back then, it was just an experiment; I was just an aspiring filmmaker who wanted to try something. So many people have told me, ‘Erika, forget about it. Porn is just porn… That’s what it is.’”

She wasn’t convinced. “I wanted to show that I could just pick the most basic story—the pizza guy story—and make something more out of it,” Lust says. That was the premise of her first film, The Good Girl, which saw Lust reimagine a classic porn trope from the female perspective. “It’s a story normally told from the male point of view—[the fantasy of] delivering pizza to a woman who has no money, and then, suddenly, she offers her body as payment. I wanted to tell the same story we’ve all seen, but with the woman as the main character instead of the pizza guy. Why would she do that? What was she thinking about?” Lust says. In the end, the woman still fucks the pizza guy: But it’s a moment of personal development, brought on by her desire to take risks in the name of sexual adventure.

So what does an ethically-made, feminist porn look like? A lot like real life, if Lust is hitting her marks. One of her most popular series, XConfessions, is based on viewers’ real sexual fantasies, which they can submit on her website. Her work isn’t overly sanitized or vanilla: if anything, she takes her cues from the kink scene, integrating conversations around boundaries and consent into her depictions of hardcore activities, much as it would occur in real life. It’s a small detail, like the way her performers often pair self-stimulation with penetrative sex—but if porn is meant to depict the kind of sex you’d like to be having, Lust feels it’s a disservice to skip out on the kinds of conversations required to turn this fantasy into reality.

“We should all ask ourselves: If you’re using a service for free, why are you not paying for it? With big porn, as with free social media platforms, it’s because you are the product.”

At the end of the day, most people watch or have watched porn—but few feel good about it. “Many people feel like they do after eating a bag of potato chips. It’s good while you’re eating it, but then you’re like, ‘Why did I do that?’” Lust says, recalling conversations with friends about that dreaded post-nut clarity. “Some people go to a free porn site and open up window after window, and I think it’s more about quieting anxiety than having a positive sexual experience. Mindful consumption is about changing those patterns, and developing a good sexual connection with yourself.”

This desire to self-soothe with a quick dopamine hit—be it through online shopping, dating apps, or social media—is ubiquitous to the modern, late-capitalist landscape. And, like fast fashion, the move toward ethical porn consumption has an upfront cost—one that, while similar in cost to many other streaming services, may be hard for some to swallow. But the reality with porn, as with any product, is that if you want to ensure the people making it are treated fairly, you’re most likely going to have to pay. Becoming a patron to individual sex workers on sites like OnlyFans is one way; seeking out content from reputable porn companies is another. Erika Lust Films offers access to ethically produced adult content created by herself and other likeminded directors on a variety of streaming sites—but there are other purveyors of independent porn, too: Four Chambers, headed by porn creator and director Vex Ashley, similarly promotes the work of a new wave of creators making contemporary pornographic work from a new perspective.

“I have seen the industry grow since I started, and I have seen how more people outside of it have dared to step into the field,” Lust says. “I want to celebrate that, because there were female porn creators before me: Candy Royal, Annie Sprinkle, Nina Hartley. People who saw and challenged mainstream porn ideas. I didn’t start it, but I wanted to be a part of that movement, and help bring it to wider audiences. We’re starting to talk about this in media—that pornography is just film that shows people having sex. You can do that from many different angles, and explore many different possibilities, visions, and values.”

Lust’s porn stands in stark contrast to the films produced by tech monoliths like MindGeek, which, in pursuit of traffic, churn out a steady stream of content driven by numbers and figures: a statistical approach to desire that both responds to, and perpetuates, the norms of the time. The taboos this kind of porn depicts are rarely subversive in an authentic sense. Rather, they’re a scripted, codified opposition to the norms of dominant culture: stepmoms and stepbros, “amateur” sex tapes produced in studios, or rough sex decontextualized from the intimacy and trust required to execute it.

The violence of porn has been the subject of countless culture wars—but unlike most, Lust’s criticisms are not rooted in a desire to get women and marginalized people out of the industry. Instead, she wants to get more people from diverse backgrounds behind the camera, so that the world porn represents is as complex and dynamic as the one we inhabit. “You have to ask yourself, ‘If I had the opportunity to make a film, what would I imagine?’” she muses. “What is my fantasy? What would I like to see? Because in the end, that’s where you have to start.”