LUST FILMS OF BARCELONA

Never before have pornography and sexualized material been so readily available and pervasive in young people’s everyday life. TV programmes, advertising, and the music industry exploit and play with pornographic codes and scenarios. The sex industry launches and promotes its products via youth channels and websites.
How do young people navigate through this pornographic landscape? Does the omnipresence of pornography breed curiosity or resistance? How does pornography challenge the role of parents and teachers?

Generation P? provides answers to these questions and presents a unique body of new research on youth, gender and pornography. The study shows that the vast majority of young people in the Nordic countries have seen porn. But young people do not swallow the pornographic messages without resistance, and some are very critical of or actively opposed to them.

It is very seldom that the voices of young people are heard in the public debate on pornography. In Generation P? focus is set on the voices, definitions and experiences with pornography of young people themselves.

The book contains contributions from leading researchers from different academic fields: sociology, psychology, media research, social work and public health.

The book is published by the Danish School of Education Press and my good freind Anne Sabo has written really nice words about my last movie FIVE HOT STORIES FOR HER.

Here is what the book says about Erika Lust and about our last movie, FIVE HOT STORIES FOR HER

NEW PORN ON THE HORIZON

The last few years have seen a flurry of activity among a new generation of aspiring independent female porn-makers in Europe and the United States. Erika Lust (b. 1977), a young Swedish woman who now lives and works in Barcelona, deserves particular attention. With a B.A. in Political Science and Feminism and M.A. in Audiovisual Management, Lust launched her own production company (Lust Films) in 2004 and released her first porn short, “The Good Girl”, the same year. In 2007, she released her first full-length DVD, Five Hot Stories for Her, which includes “The Good Girl” as one of five episodes.

Aesthetically, Lust creates an entirely revamped look with cinematic quality not often found in porn. The use of lighting and color gives the digital video the appearance of professionally produced film. Compared to the bare-bones presentation of Span’s porn, Lust presents a very fluid arrangement. The cutting and camera movement are concise and deliberate, matched with an indie-style, pop-rock soundtrack that can swell up in crescendo. In addition, Lust teases us with beautiful pictures. Each shot is composed with careful attention to framing and angles, lighting and color, shapes and forms. The tempo between shots, e.g. of a bare shoulder, wine spilled over a woman’s belly, a tongue licking it, etc., builds tension and heat; she lingers just long enough on one before cutting to the next. Lust’s porn has the look and feel of a music video slash indie-film with explicit sex that can move the viewer visually and viscerally.

As discourse, Lust’s porn reflects the range of real twenty- and thirty-something women and men today across Europe and the westernized world, be their bold and alternative, modern and hip, single and on their own, or married with children; whichever the case, reflecting a fairly sophisticated middle-class generation that has grown up with MTV and, later, “Sex and the City”. The characters are believable in their scenarios, and their sexual desires and pleasures are convincingly portrayed. In a time and culture of increased gender equality and diminishing homophobia (Giddens 1992), the characters demonstrate new freedoms and levels of confidence, but also the continuing constraints and inhibitions among women as well as men (Pedersen 2005). Here Lust points to the tentative vulnerability as well as the empowering excitement of women and men in a time of changing gender arrangement. Thus Lust provides young women and men across the world with a voice as they too maneuver in a “gap between the ideal and the practice of gender” (Hardy 2000, 91). The capacity of porn to illuminate this gap between what is and what can be, as women and men reconfigure their ways of establishing and expressing their gender and sexuality, is one of the most intriguing aspects of re-visioned porn.

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