Lust for Change: Is Porn Valley Ready for Erika Lust? (XBIZ)

Read the full article by Gustavo Turner at XBIZ.com 

Try this little experiment: go to any major city in Europe or the U.S. or Latin America and find that neighborhood. You know which one I’m talking about: organic coffee shops, exposed light-colored wood, minimalist design, modern asymmetrical haircuts, most people under 35, college plus some grad school, disposable income.

It could be Silverlake in Los Angeles, or Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin, or Williamsburg in New York or Condesa-Roma in Mexico City. Find one of those organic coffee shops and ask the group of trendy young women sipping the $8 pumpkin spice latte to name their favorite pornographer.

Chances are, they will answer, in unison, “Erika Lust.”

Ever since around 2017, the name Erika Lust has become a synonym for many things, both within and outside the adult entertainment industry. Feminist porn, ethical porn, “porn for women” — these are all concepts that swirl around any mention of Lust in well-educated, middle-class places that would not dare speak many other pornographers’ names.

Though Lust has been making movies of people having sex in Barcelona for 15 years, to commercial and critical success largely in the European arthouse erotica circuit, it was only a couple of years ago that she crossed over into mainstream consciousness.

The key marketing decision Lust and her husband/business partner Pablo Dobner made around 2016-2017, after more than a decade in the art porn business, was to participate in the series “Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On,” on Netflix. As luck would have it, the Erika Lust footage — showing her studio, her operation and discussing her “feminist porn” ethos — was part of the first episode, “Women on Top,” directed by Rashida Jones. All of a sudden, everyone with an interest in sex and a Netflix account, including many members of the U.S.-based adult industry, became aware of Erika Lust and her flagship website at the time, XConfessions.

Fast forward to the summer of 2019, and Lust and Dobner are at a rooftop bar in the heart of Hollywood (literally Hollywood and Vine) surrounded by top U.S. porn talent like Lena Paul, Ana Foxxx, Casey Calvert and many others, gushingly asking to have selfies taken with Erika.

Lust and Dobner have been invited by the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee (APAC) to a fundraiser party they have organized to benefit performer mental health organization Pineapple Support. They came in, as they told me, “to try to meet people, the American ‘porn stars’ we’d hopefully like to work with.”

Instead, it was a shocked Erika who was being treated like the celebrity.

“They know who I am!” she repeated, pinching herself.

They were in town to lay the groundwork for LustCinema, a new venture broadly described as “Erika Lust comes to America.”

But is America, and by America we mean the mainstream adult industry — with its peculiar set of traditions, relationships and customs established over decades of fighting attacks from all sides — ready for this outspoken, change-hungry Swedish-Spanish director and studio owner who will not stop telling the mainstream press that “porn needs to change”?

In other words, is Porn Valley ready for Erika Lust?