Behind the Scenes at an Ethical Porn Studio

Erika Lust on the set of the movie Female Pleasure Circle in Barcelona. Photo: Monica Figueras When you think of porn, you probably don’t visualize watching someone brush their teeth. I certainly didn’t—until I found myself sitting on a Zoom call with ethical feminist adult filmmaker Erika Lust and her production team. We were reviewing the erotic fantasies viewers submitted anonymously through Lust’s crowdsourced porn project, XConfessions, to find inspiration for their next movie. The popular platform draws between 20 and 30 submissions a day from people eager to see their fantasies made into a film—and I was invited on a behind-the-scenes look at how Lust uses these ideas as part of her mission to subvert patriarchal norms to create sex-positive pornography from the female gaze.  They dismissed an idea about an orgy in a mountain cabin (it was too similar to something they recently shot), a submission someone with a penis sent about what it might be like to have a vagina for a day (a potential sequel to one of Lust’s most recent films, If Only I Had a Dick, but tabled for now), and a concept about getting steamy in a cruise ship (rejected due to the impracticalities of shooting on a ship). Any conventional porn concepts that stereotype performers or turn sex into an aggressive act that punishes women were never on the table, to begin with—that’s exactly what Lust is working against with her art. But one idea about kissing—“a slow, sensual kiss that gets more demanding every second,” per the submission—now that got the team excited. It sparked a nostalgia-inducing conversation about falling in love as a teenager and being able to kiss for hours on end. Rebecca Stewart, producer and director, was reminded of Lisa Taddeo’s bestselling nonfiction book, Three Women, which covers the pleasures and heartbreaks of three women from different backgrounds in the United States. “In the book, there was a woman who was married for 10 or 20 years, and she ends up having an affair—not for the sex, but just for the fact that she misses being kissed. Her husband will penetrate her, but he never kisses her,” notes Stewart. “She ends up having an affair with a guy who is just such a good kisser.” Stewart quickly pulls up a reference video she thinks could inspire the cinematography for this kiss-focused porn. In the roughly 90-second film, the camera zooms in close on a woman’s face as a man holds her chin and brushes her teeth, toothpaste sudsing into a bubbly white foam all over her lips. The gentle dominance is sexy and undeniably intimate.  What it’s not? Objectifying. Something like this could work for Lust, who has spent the last 20 years proving that porn can carry pro-feminist sexual values, shine a spotlight on women’s pleasure, and adhere to a strict code of ethics. But she wants everything she makes to be original—and the toothbrushing idea has already been done in the reference video we just watched. So the team thought more broadly about morning routines. Shaving, brushing hair, getting dressed—could elements of these daily rituals make a sexy series for Lust’s fall debut? If you asked me several weeks prior, I would have doubted that something this mundane could be enough of a turn-on to make a porn so watchable, viewers would be willing to pay for it (most of Lust’s films are behind a paywall). But things were different once I spent a weekend in Spain with Lust and her team and saw firsthand how she could take the mundane and transform it into a porn…