LOS ANGELES — Acclaimed director and producer Erika Lust, founder of the Barcelona-based studio that bears her name, brought her new book “Lust: Pleasure, Performance, Power” to a packed Dynasty Typewriter theater in Los Angeles Tuesday night for a spirited reading.
The event opened with the screening of a sizzle reel of Lust’s impressive oeuvre, including highlights from “The Good Girl,” “Barcelona Sex Project,” and “Handcuffs,” among many others.
Lust then took the stage to read from her book. The tome’s general thesis, she explained, is that pornography is a mirror of society’s ills, not the root of them, yet the industry is an easy and frequent scapegoat for social problems. For Lust, this elides and distracts people from communicating effectively and addressing serious issues, something that porn could actually help to facilitate.
“Porn is representative of performance,” said Lust. “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 believes that a new wave of public anti-sex sentiment, coupled with advances in technology that enable large-scale amplification of reactionary rhetoric, is contributing to negative feelings about sex in general throughout the culture.
“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.”
Lust posited that a healthy society requires room for experimentation, a point underscored at the start of her book, where the author recounts her first gangbang scene with Kazumi. She shared how that life-changing experience both widened her view of sexuality and strengthened her belief in her vision of herself and 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.
She explained how the personal exploration kickstarted by that experience eventually led to her learning to better minimize the effect of negative outside opinions, and noted that having more clarity about her own sexual agency helped her define her own limits.
“There was a time when I felt so ashamed of being Erika Lust, and shame is a bitch,” confessed the author.
Lust acknowledged that people have alternately praised her as an industry pioneer and dismissed her as irresponsible. Today, she said, regardless of what label someone else applies to her, what matters is how she feels about herself and the work she and her tight-knit crew put out into the world.
She also delved into the effect that growth has had on her relationship with her family, contrasting her regret about not connecting more fully with her mother with her sense of accomplishment in how she connects with her own children. To elaborate, Lust spoke about navigating the raising of her 19-year-old son, who came out as trans when he was 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.
Still, Lust admitted she has a lot left to figure out, citing as an example the conflict she still feels between her strong belief in a woman’s right to dress however she wants and her reflexive parental worry about some of her 16-year-old daughter’s school outfit choices.
“I don’t know whether to say anything,” she confessed.
Lust said her ability to empathize is instrumental in her decision-making, both in life and in business, even when a choice isn’t always the most immediately profitable. She illustrated her point with two stories about video removal requests she’d received: one from a performer who had since transitioned and one from a once-married performer couple who had since divorced. In both cases, the requests came from the emotional pain of having versions of themselves available for public consumption that no longer represented who they were, a feeling Lust immediately understood; she didn’t hesitate to honor either request.
In the same vein, Lust emphasized communication when collaborating with others to get on the same page and finish a project successfully, pointing to the book, which she wrote over several years with journalist Mary Katharine Tramontana. The two met when Tramontana penned a 2002 New York Times profile on Lust, and have since developed a strong working relationship.
“She lives in Berlin, and I live in Barcelona, but we became friends, and we had meetings together where we went back-and-forth online,” Lust explained. “Because I’m Swedish and English isn’t my first language, I really needed someone who could confront the hard questions and the cultural conversations surrounding feminism and pornography, which are two very relevant conversations that I don’t think are being held in the right way at this moment. So for me, that was one of the motivations to write the book.”
Lust also revealed that the original subtitle of “Lust” was “Porn, Performance, Power,” and recounted how she was urged to change it for the sake of greater marketability. She likened the swap to the Rolling Stones anecdote of Mick Jagger being forced to change the lyrics of the hit song “Let’s Spend the Night Together” to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together” for an appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Famously, Jagger and other band members comically rolled their eyes each time he sang the sanitized chorus, leading to a two-year ban from the show.
“Porn may have been removed from the cover of this book, but it hasn’t been removed from its pages,” Lust defiantly declared.
She also discussed the challenge of exploring uncomfortable aspects of her own personality during the writing process.
“The hardest part of writing this book was having to face myself and my own contradictions. For example, I'm a pornographer, and I'm still pornophobic,” said Lust. “How do I reconcile that?”
That process, however, has led to an ultimately gratifying result, she added, explaining how rewarding it’s been to meet the people who’ve read the book and hearing how much it means to them.
“People have been able to identify with the stories in the book and see themselves in it, and ultimately, it has helped some of them reach a deeper understanding of their own sexuality,” she said, beaming. “That’s the part I love most.”
With that, Lust concluded her solo reading and was joined on stage by Vice writer and former sex worker Gigi Fong for a discussion about the book. Fong then moderated a Q&A session with the industry-heavy crowd, with Lust fielding questions from such notables as Casey Calvrt, Bree Mills, and Nina Hartley.
Lust finished the evening with an hour-long book-signing session, admitting she was psyched to fly home. After the excitement of the launch, it was time, she said, to take a walk in the woods with her dogs and give over her full mental attention to juggling the multiple projects she has in the works.
