Erika Lust

by Simon Friel

Erika Lust is a Swedish-born Barcelona resident and director of the award-winning feminist porn film The Good Girl. Her collection of five short porn films, Cinco Historias Para Ella, has won awards in Barcelona, New York and Berlin, and was recently awarded Movie of the Year at the feminist porn awards in Toronto. Her next film, Barcelona Sex Project, is soon to be released by Lust Films.

SF: How would Erika Lust introduce herself to the readers of BCN Week?

EL: She’s a very normal person. A guiri living in Barcelona. A good girl with a good education, a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science, and then she turned bad!

SF: Bad is good! How did you turn bad?

EL: Well, in my teenage years I got interested in sexuality, like everybody, you know, the normal evolution. And at the same time I got really interested in feminism, and the political structure of society, and the different situations for men and women. This, together with my interest in sexuality, made me think a lot, it made me feel a lot, and made me kind of fed up about some of the conditions that women actually have today. And what I saw when I started to watch porn films was a world that I couldn’t really identify with. Feelings that I didn’t feel, and things that weren’t expressing sexuality that I felt I had; where women were just objects used by men for the pleasure of men. I didn’t see women looking for their own pleasure; I didn’t see them represented in the way I would like have liked to see them. But somehow the material that I saw did provoke me. A sexual act provokes you - that’s the whole idea with porn. So, some part of me did like what I saw anyway, so I said, “Could it be different?” And I thought, yeah, it could! If I can have sex the way I can I have sex, why can’t I show that?

SF: How did you put that into practice?

EL: I started to work in audiovisual production and I worked my way up.

SF: You had no formal training?

EL: No, but I learned the process from the inside. And I am from the MTV Generation. I grew up with television and so I have the natural education that we all have of watching so much material. So, I learned how to make it and I kept this idea that I would like to see porn made differently, and so some day I decided to do it. I can’t remember exactly why and how. I guess I was pissed off at not finding a great job situation for myself here in Barcelona. It’s very hard when you come here as a guiri to try to get somewhere. It’s very, very hard.

SF: Sure, a lot of people can relate to that.

EL: Definitely. And so from this, I decided to do it by myself - to make just one short film, and that was The Good Girl.

SF: That was the first film?

EL: That was the first film I ever made.

SF: I know that is what you are most well known for, but I expected that to have been the culmination of a longer process, not the first thing you ever did.

EL: Hahaha. Yeah, beginner’s luck!

SF: What were your influences when making The Good Girl? Were they purely personal ones, or were they also coming from the history of porn and erotica?

EL: Both, in a way. Personal in the way it tells the story of a young girl, of a good girl, and the whole idea that a good girl has a bad side that she would like to live out. People told me that if you want to do something for women that you have to think so much about the story, but I don’t think it is so much about the story, but more about making the characters believable. And I think that if you develop a basic story and have the female thinking and aware, that that makes it different. So, I just took the basic story in porn, the pizza guy!

SF: You just subverted the genre.

EL: Yeah, do the pizza guy. I don’t need a fancy story. I could just take the thing that you do all the time, but do it differently, and really show that you can do it differently. I just grabbed the pizza guy and said what would happen in the female world. It’s the girl living out her porn fantasy.

SF: You’re turning the tables, but is there not a fine line between actually reversing the thing and doing...?

EL: Female chauvinism?

SF: Exactly.

EL: When I put together porn and feminism, I do it thinking about the representation. I would like to see women in charge of their representation. Telling their stories about their sexualities, their feelings, and their vision of what sex is and for not only men to have this advantage. Porn is not just porn - porn is a discourse about sexuality, and this is very important because I want access to this discourse. This is the point of feminism also. This is what feminism pushed for: to be able to be equal. But first we need to get our voice heard, because otherwise how are we going to be equal? We need to stand up and say, “Hello, we are here also!” And when we are seen, we have the possibility to be seen as equals. If we are not seen, how the hell are we going to be equal?