The Female-Identifying Porn Directors Redefining Pornography

illustration by Honey Simatupang

“Do you know who makes the porn you watch?” The question stays on the screen for a few seconds before showing a shot of Erika Lust, the Swedish-born porn director, wearing a dark gray t-shirt branded with the word ‘Lust’ – her last name and the name of her growing pornography house. 

Lust is one of a growing number of female porn directors that are redefining not only what is shot in porn but, possibly more importantly, how it’s shot. Her streaming sites XConfessions, Lust Cinema, and Else Cinema are all part of a bigger effort for better porn. 

Introducing: ethical porn. 

First thing’s first: what makes porn “ethical?” To both Lust and Randall ethical porn means similar things. 

“Making sure the models are well cared for and are participating in something they are 100% okay with, and making sure to never push boundaries into a place where they feel uncomfortable or unable to speak up,” Randall writes. “Performers need to feel heard and safe.”

Lust echoes these thoughts. “Ethically produced porn basically means that there’s an understanding of consent between everyone on an adult film’s set, including the whole crew that needs to be aware of the inherent complexities of sex work,” Lust explains. She elaborates on the idea of consent on her website, erikalust.com. 

Consent falls under the ‘no surprises’ of her eights principles for ethical porn production specified on her page. Others include ‘equal pleasure’, ‘diversity,’ and ‘worker standards.’ 

This approach differs from mainstream porn found on most tube sites such as RedTube or the all-famous (infamous?) PornHub. The clips hosted by these porn giants often lack credits and the performers in and crew for them are consistently underpaid and greatly overworked. (Not even touching upon the topic of consent and female pleasure in mainstream pornography.)

Comparing the clips found on these mainstream providers to the clips on Lust’s and Randall’s the difference between the two palpable: men are not just groins and body fluids, women don’t howl like isolated wolves and aren’t contracting their faces in feigned pleasure that reads more like pain. The performers appear to have a genuinely good time; there’s chemistry, connection, and excitement. The porn is never sterile, impersonal, transactional. It’s this excitement and chemistry that are at the core of ethical porn. 

(Sidenote: I have never consumed this much porn in such a short time.)

Lust’s first step into the adult entertainment industry was in 2004 with the short “Good Girl” which was her answer to an assignment for her film school in Barcelona, where she moved after her studies in Sweden. 

While the assignment didn’t necessarily call for a porn film, Lust was eager to explore depictions of female sexuality. “I wanted to create something totally different within the genre, a porn film according to my taste, expressing my own values and showing the importance of female pleasure,” she wrote about this first film. When this short went viral, she realized how she wasn’t alone in her desire for more honest representations of female sexuality and desires in pornography. 

Lust noted that offering this “female gaze” was necessary to challenge the predominantly male-focused space and to offer an alternative point of view. This has been a continuous exploration in her work and seems intimately linked with her gender identity. “When you have women directing and women controlling the camera, the perspective changes. We can create a sex-positive space for women to reclaim their sexuality, pleasure, and desires,” she explained in her email. “When women are in control, we avoid displaying the women as a spectacle or as a passive object of a predatory gaze.”

Holly Randall, erotic photographer, director, producer, and podcast host was practically born into the industry. “My parents have been working in the adult industry since before I was born, so I was drawn to it as a family business,” she wrote in our email exchange. Her first moment working in the industry was when she was transferring from one college to another. What was meant as a temporary stop, grew into a lucrative and genre-defying career. 

When it comes to gender identity, Randall believes it’s important to have diversity behind the camera but doesn’t necessarily think female directors are intrinsically better than their male counterparts. “I do know that a lot of newer female performers can feel more comfortable with a woman behind the camera- things that they might be embarrassed to tell a male director they can be more willing to share with a woman.”

Is ethical porn necessarily a gendered issue? According to a 2008 study ‘A Comparison of male and female directors in popular pornography: what happens when women are at the helm?’ The study found that the gender of the director doesn’t necessarily impact the content that is shot and instead it suggests that trends and consumers impact what is shot. While the study did not look at the production of the flicks, it still fair to conclude that the gender of the director will not automatically make the porn ‘ethical.’ However, it is noteworthy that while male directors are still the standard in the industry, deviations from the porn-norm are mostly explored and pushed by female-identifying creators. 

Creating space and demand for ethical porn come down to two things. The first being education: educating consumers about the porn industry and how the flicks are shot will raise the demand for ethically created porn. In our times, it’s often just as much about dismantling misconceptions and prejudice as it is about general education about the industry. 

Randall believes news publications play a crucial role in this. “If we could shed the stigma of sex work and the mainstream media would allow more articles that actually interviewed sex workers and accounted for the success stories, rather than only look for the slanted "porn is bad" angle that we've been hounded with for decades, that'd be great,” she wrote. She gave the NYT article “The Children of PornHub” as an example of a sensationalized story about the porn industry. “There's nothing people love more than a story that confirms their fears and prejudices about the adult industry.” It’s this upheld prejudice and misinformation that inspired her to start the podcast.

The second standard that needs to be set for more ethical porn to be produced and be readily available is consumers’ willingness to pay. 

In a digital age when porn is freely available and can be accessed with a Google search on your phone, the idea of paying to get off can almost feel silly. However, it pays to pay for porn. Ethical porn is not only about chemistry between the actors. Ethical porn means consent, it means that those working tirelessly on sets and on camera are paid for their time, labor, and contributions. It means combatting racial biases that are still prevalent in the mainstream porn industry and it means less sexualization of minors. 

“When you pay for your porn, you are giving it value,” Lust writes. “You are supporting the people who do it and you are sending the message that you want to watch porn that is made safely, with quality and diversity.”

When you pay for porn, the sex stays just as dirty, hot, and primal (if you’re into that.) In fact, the porn gets even hotter because, with your money, you guarantee that cast and crew have all the facilities, props, and in-between snacks they need to conceive the next steamy scene.