I’m not one to shy away from sex in the movies, and yet as the London date of Erika Lust’s C*m With Me cinema tour approached, I felt nervous. Why do I relish the grinding hips of James Spader and Deborah Kara Unger in Cronenberg’s Crash, but watching porn actors enacting similar scenes at the Rio Cinema – itself once an adult cinema known as The Tatler Cinema Club – feels different?
The problem here lies in our societal insistence on a differentiation between erotic cinema and pornography. As long as the sex on screen is simulated it is widely accepted as art. There are a few films featuring unsimulated sex scenes – In the Realm of the Senses, Stranger by the Lake – that we herald as cinema but these are exceptions. Usually, a strict line is drawn defining erotic cinema’s ability to arouse as markedly different from pornographic film with the same intention. But Special Events Curator Tim Stevens and the Rio Team welcomed Lust with open arms: ‘Changing and accepting the perception of sex work is well underway. I think venues such as the much loved and sorely missed Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, and The Rio Cinema help to be a home for a totally normal part of life. And keep it safe.”
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Erika Lust’s vast filmography, over 300 films, commits to blurring those lines, and as a feminist pornography director, female pleasure is at the centre of her work. These are not the limited angles and obtuse storylines that come part and parcel with your average free online porn – in her own words, “pornography is not monolithic”, which she demonstrates by filming the diverse beauty of bodies and fetishes outside of the restraints of the heteronormative patriarchy.
For Lust, celebrating 20 years of her work “is not about me, it’s about the films.” This collaborative mentality has inspired the adult performers who have worked with her. Usually, it’s the director’s vision that determines the film but when Eva Oh stepped on set she discovered that Lust saw her as an integral part: “I was to write the script for the pleasure”. For Heidi Priestess working with Lust has set a standard for any future pornographic project. Erika Lust’s influence spreads further than the work ethic that should be a minimum but is rarely practised. Best exemplified in Ninja Thyberg’s Pleasure, this approach has allowed for more avant-garde pornography to find a platform. One previous star Vex Ashley has gone on to create the porn studio Four Chambers, who created the orgy scene in Infinity Pool and debuted their latest film at the ICA.
The cinema is a space where we go to be moved by film which even when flying solo becomes an unifying experience and pornography on the cinematic stage offers the same opportunity. Sitting shoulder to shoulder with unfamiliar company to watch scenes usually reserved for the privacy of your bedroom is undeniably strange. But the humour central to Lust’s work helped us relax into our seats, such as the stop-motion anal vibrator complaining about its relegation to the nightstand in Sex Toy Story. Erika Lust stressed comic relief’s importance, as it enables us to “feel that we are in good company with people who react similarly to ourselves”.
Above: The Rio Cinema during its time as The Tatler Cinema Club. Photo courtesy of The Rio Cinema.
There is no right way to watch porn at the cinema, which is joyously liberating. We can forgo the cinema etiquette that is being relentlessly insisted upon on X. No one tuts at the couple engaged in constant conversation over each short, or those heckling certain scenes, making it more akin to a screening of Rocky Horror Picture Show than your average cinema experience. In Dirty Martini Sex Party – a vibrant 70s-themed group sex video – when Kali Sudhra finally orgasmed at the relatively tiring (but persistent) hands of Nat Portnoy, the Rio erupted applauding the outburst in much the same way audiences cheer when the shark finally explodes in Jaws. Not all moments of pleasure elicit the same response. In Siren Song, a shipwrecked sailor (Edi Santos) is taken into the depths by a mermaid (Ariana Van X). Thanks to photographer Monica Figueras, whose work focuses on the rippling light falling over the undulating bodies, the crowd was stunned into silence by the cinematography maximising ethereal beauty and orgasmic pleasure.
Unsurprisingly sex work has a complex history on screen, to the point where we are relieved when sex workers are still alive when the credits run – unlike in Vivre Sa Vie and Moulin Rouge – and are even happier when they are more than the dead (The Dead Girl) or imprisoned (Accattone) narrative plot points. Today many films champion sex workers – Zola, Support The Girls, Good Luck to You Leo Grande – while highlighting the misogyny and prejudice they regularly face.
It’s safe to say we are living through a cultural shift. In the last couple of years, sex workers have taken centre stage on the fashion runway, hosted talks at the BFI, and curated exhibitions. The strip club renaissance is thriving despite gentrifying forces and restrictive laws attempting to shut it down. I spoke to Maddie Sexy, co-founder of East London Strippers Collective, who hosts regular stripper-centred life drawing events. Maddie agrees that the climate has changed since she started working in the industry a decade ago, “sex work feels more visible, accepted and spoken about.” But for Maddie the problem is that only the glamorised parts are at the forefront: “the kinds that are seen as ‘cool’ (e.g. stripping, pro-domming) are accepted and talked about [while] full service, and street work especially are highly stigmatised, [leaving] the most marginalised workers bearing the brunt of societal stigma and the law.”
While New Yorkers queue to buy Anora merch, sex workers are still criminalised and oppressed by government laws in both the U.K. and the U.S.A. Maddie is uncertain whether positive representation is enough. Sex workers face daily risks “of arrest just for trying to survive, being denied housing and bank accounts, being detained at borders, or facing endless SWERF campaigns with the funding and contacts to spread their anti-SW rhetoric and shut down their workplaces”. For her “real change for the day-to-day realities of sex workers will only happen with a lot of work by the community (Decrim Now, International Union of Sex Workers and the Sex Workers’ Union) and backing from the general public. We need policy-makers to take us seriously and start actually listening to the wants and needs of sex workers, instead of ignoring our voices as they all too often do.”
In order to keep these rich cinematic and cultural experiences thriving we must see sex workers as people not just fetishise their working lives for our entertainment. For those of us who relish the thrill of seeing pornography at your local cinema or attending sex worker-fronted club nights, we need to recognise that being pro-sex work takes more than giving Sean Baker’s latest five stars on Letterboxd.
