Erika Lust launched her new book, Lust: Pleasure, Performance, Power, at a packed Dynasty Typewriter theater in Los Angeles on Tuesday night. The Barcelona-based director, whose studio carries her name, used the reading to argue that porn reflects society's ills instead of causing them, according to XBIZ.
The evening opened with a sizzle reel of Lust's work, including The Good Girl, Barcelona Sex Project and Handcuffs. Then she took the stage to read.
Her thesis, as XBIZ reports it: the industry is an easy and frequent scapegoat for social problems, which distracts people from talking about serious issues. Porn, she argued, could actually help with that. "It's fantasy that helps people communicate, because most people are pretty bad when it comes to talking about sex and communicating their needs," Lust said.
She also pointed to a new wave of anti-sex sentiment, amplified by technology. "It wasn't like this in 2000, before social media erupted and there were camera phones everywhere," she said. "Today, we live in a surveillance world where everything is being registered, and people are policing themselves from being who they really want to be because there are too many eyes on them."
The book opens with Lust recounting her first gangbang scene, with Kazumi. She said the experience widened her view of sexuality and strengthened her belief in her art. "My camera has always been a way of connecting with my own sexuality and exploring things I'm curious about or interested in, but gangbangs didn't initially fit what I understood women to want sexually," Lust said.
The personal side got just as much airtime. Lust said she once felt deeply ashamed of being Lust. "Shame is a bitch," she said. She acknowledged that people have called her both an industry pioneer and irresponsible, and said what matters now is how she feels about herself and the work she and her crew put out.
She also spoke about parenting, including raising her 19-year-old son, who came out as trans at 15. "It makes me proud of our parenting because we created a safe space for him to make the decision to live his best life," she said. She admitted she is still figuring things out, citing her conflict between believing a woman can dress however she wants and her reflexive worry about some of her 16-year-old daughter's school outfits. "I don't know whether to say anything," she said.
Lust said empathy guides her decisions even when they aren't the most profitable. She described honoring video removal requests from a performer who had since transitioned and from a performer couple who had since divorced, without hesitation.
She wrote the book over several years with journalist Mary Katharine Tramontana, who profiled Lust for The New York Times in 2002. The two work across Berlin and Barcelona. Lust said she wanted a collaborator who could confront hard questions about feminism and pornography.
The original subtitle was Porn, Performance, Power. Lust said she was urged to change it for marketability, and compared the swap to Mick Jagger being made to sing "Let's Spend Some Time Together" on The Ed Sullivan Show in place of "Let's Spend the Night Together." Jagger and his bandmates famously rolled their eyes through the sanitized chorus.
"Porn may have been removed from the cover of this book, but it hasn't been removed from its pages," Lust said.
Writing it meant facing her own contradictions. "I'm a pornographer, and I'm still pornophobic," she said. "How do I reconcile that?"
Lust closed with an hour-long book signing, then said she was heading home for a walk in the woods with her dogs.