Erika Lust

Lust was born Erika Hallqvist in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1977.[5][6] She harboured a passion for film and theatre.[7]

She went to Lund University, where she studied Political Sciences. While there, she came across Linda Williams' 1989 book Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible", which later came to strongly influence her filmmaking. She also cites Jean Jacques Annaud's The Lover as a source of inspiration.[8] She graduated with a BA in 1999, with a specialization in human rights and feminism.[9] She moved to Barcelona in 2000, where she worked in production houses and took night courses in filmmaking.[8]

Lust shot her first film, the explicit short The Good Girl, in 2004. It was released for free on the internet and downloaded over 2 million times in the first month.[10] The film was shown at the Barcelona International Erotic Film Festival the next year and won her a Ninfa Award.

In 2005, after this initial success, she founded her video production company Lust Films.[8] The company has produced erotic short films and compilations steadily from then on. Five Hot Stories For Her, an anthology of five vignettes including The Good Girl, won several international awards in 2007. Since then she has been a regular on the adult cinema festival circuit.

Lust's films are characterized by carefully cast actors and high standards of production in adult film. Lust believes explicit film can be an educational tool besides being pleasurable and can help us better understand our sexuality, to live more freely and naturally. She hopes to influence viewers' conceptions of gender roles in sexuality.[11] She considers pornography to be the "most important discourse on gender and sexuality".[8]

In 2010, Lust opened an online erotic cinema called Lust Cinema, exhibiting her own films and those of other authors of the new wave of explicit films.[8]

Lust started the first crowdsourced project in the history of adult cinema in 2013, calling it XConfessions.[8] It has become her main source of work in recent years.

She runs an online store offering her books and films, as well as sex toys and other erotic wares. Her company Lust Productions now has 12 employees. She also maintains a blog. She has written several books on eroticism and sexuality. Her book Good Porn was published in 2009 by Seal Press.[12] In December 2014, Lust hosted a TED-talk at TEDxVienna.[13] In the talk, entitled "It's Time For Porn To Change", Lust urges people to question the modern state of porn, its messages and role as a sexual educator. The TED talk launched the start of her campaign #changeporn, an online campaign intended to challenge and change the porn norm. The talk has been watched nearly 700,000 times on YouTube.[13]

In 2018, the article "Is 'Feminist' Porn Getting Its #MeToo Moment?" was published by Tracy Clark-Flory for Jezebel.com. Clark-Flory interviewed a performer, Rooster, who claims to have had their sexual boundaries pushed by a director on set of a film being made for Erika Lust's XConfessions series. Erika Lust disputes the claims and responded with a statement on her website. The allegations led to the creation of the "Guest Directors Guide to Working With Performers" and a "Performer's Bill of Rights" by Erika Lust Films.

• 2009: X: a Woman's Guide to Good Porn
• 2010: Erotic Bible to Europe
• 2010: Love Me Like You Hate Me with Venus O'Hara
• 2011: Shooting Sex: How to Make an Outstanding Sex Movie with Your Partner (ebook also available in polish) [19]
• 2011: Six Female Voices with Antia Pagant
• 2013: La Canción de Nora (Nora's Song)
• 2013: Let's Make a Porno

• Official website
• XConfessions website
• Lust Cinema
• Website of the film Five Hot Stories For Her
• Website of the film Barcelona Sex Project
• Website of the film "Life Love Lust"
• Erika Lust on IMDb
• "Sexual Assault Allegation Raises Questions in Feminist Porn"