Heavily considered to be a male saturated industry, the porn industry is starting to reshape its identity. Especially when it comes to its rising female pioneers, who are concentrating around the idea of creating more content that’s for the pleasure of women.
As told to Harpers Bazaar “It’s heterosexual, middle-aged white men who have these fantasies with boobs and ass. You know the ones, they love their cars and their drinks,” says Barcelona-based director Erika Lust. “They cast the same kind of very young women with very slim bodies and large breasts. They might have different hair colours, but more or less it’s the same kind of women, over and over again.”
Erika claimed that mainstream, mass-produced porn is ugly, tacky and horrible.
She’s in the process of gathering other female adult filmmakers who are more concerned with cinematic value and who are driven by films that feature females as the main characters.”These women want to make films where the woman’s pleasure is important; they want to show diversity in casting, and they want to work for an ethical production process,” Erika said.
“Pornography is more important than it was many years ago,” she admits. “It used to be a genre some richer men looked at sometimes, but today it’s mass media, and a lot of young people who don’t have the privilege to live in a place where sex is part of their education, or whose parents won’t teach them about sex, they’re turning to the internet to learn about sex, and they’re ending up in all these horrible mainstream porn sites which show images that are violent and chauvinistic. Many of them are extremely racist and homophobic. That’s not the kind of value I want my daughters to see and to learn about sex from.”
As told to Huffington Post, Candida Royalle, one of the porn industry’s foremost female directors, was one of the first women to make the leap from performer to director, appearing in more than two dozen films in the 1970s.
“On the one hand I thought, ‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with these movies. If consenting adults want to watch them, and consenting adults want to perform in them, I don’t see anything wrong with it — but they leave a lot to be desired,” Royalle said. “I was also involved in the women’s movement at the time, and I could tell women were becoming very curious about erotic movies. But there was nothing out there for them to look at and really enjoy.”
But Royalle’s movies, which had stronger story lines than other adult films at the time, and strove for positive sexual role modelling, found an audience and launched a directorial career that has spanned 30 years.
Olympia de G, a 33-year-old Parisian filmmaker who directed a film for Erika Lust last year hopes this new, creative porn empowers women to feel proud and confident about their bodies and their sexualities. “I want to educate women comprehensively about their anatomy and how to get pleasure from it.” And finally, she hopes porn will come to be treated as she thinks it should be: an artistic expression of an individual point of view on sex. Adds Lust: “Little by little we will build our alternative erotica.”
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that’s good. no more abusive and ridiculous acting.