Nin­ja Thy­berg: ​‘Porn can be a mir­ror of our society’

Nin­ja Thy­berg has spent years study­ing the pro­duc­tion and impact of the adult film indus­try. After com­plet­ing a short film about the porn indus­try which received acclaim at Sun­dance and Cannes, her auda­cious fea­ture debut Plea­sure pre­miered at Sun­dance 2020. Here she explains how her ori­gins as a teenage anti-porn activist even­tu­al­ly led her to embrac­ing the world and fight­ing for bet­ter depic­tion of sex work on screen.

LWLies: As a teenag­er you were an anti-porn activist – what led you to that movement?

Thy­berg: As a teenag­er I realised the cul­ture of the boys I knew revolved around porn. They were exchang­ing dif­fer­ent porn films, talk­ing about how hot the girls were. I realised how extreme­ly nor­malised it was, and also that the porn was so bru­tal in many dif­fer­ent ways. I knew that porn exist­ed but I didn’t know how com­mon it was, and I real­ly had this image in my head of porn as this Vase­line on the lens, soft­core erot­ic sort of thing.

When I saw these films, they real­ly shocked me and I thought it was so degrad­ing, it was so bru­tal, and like the women were treat­ed just as fuck dolls. It was all for the plea­sure of men. For the young guys were watch­ing it, that was their sex­u­al edu­ca­tion. Women’s sex­u­al edu­ca­tion at the time was watch­ing roman­tic come­dies, or read­ing women’s mag­a­zines, maybe an erot­ic nov­el, where things were super tame.

So when I was with my first boyfriend, we were both vir­gins, but what we expect­ed from each oth­er and the way we thought sex would be was total­ly dif­fer­ent. That made me so sad and angry. I was already a fem­i­nist, but then for a few years I was real­ly engaged in the anti-porn movement.

What changed your view?

After a while I start­ed to feel it was prob­lem­at­ic that we always focused on objec­ti­fi­ca­tion and exploita­tion, and I felt like there was a lack of pos­i­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tion of sex­u­al­i­ty. I want­ed some­thing more, and felt that porn didn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have to be a bad thing. It could be fun and empow­er­ing. I became inter­est­ed in fem­i­nist porn, and start­ed to under­stand that I’m nev­er going to be able to erase all of these images, but what I can do is to try to make oth­er images and make peo­ple open their minds to more perspectives.

It’s been a very long jour­ney – I then stud­ied gen­der at uni­ver­si­ty and wrote my the­sis about porn on the inter­net. By then I had already been to my first film school and I had start­ed mak­ing films myself, and had noticed this prob­lem­at­ic thing with­in the fem­i­nist porn move­ment where the women in main­stream porn were thought of as being vic­tims, and in fem­i­nist porn the women were cool and strong edgy artists.

That was very elit­ist because we were all very priv­i­leged, mid­dle-class artists, who felt that if some­one from our group had sex in front of a cam­era it was healthy but that women in main­stream porn were being tak­en advan­tage of. I became real­ly inter­est­ed in the peo­ple mak­ing main­stream pornog­ra­phy, who they were and what their sto­ries were, and felt there was more to learn from that.

How were you and the cast able to main­tain a pos­i­tive work­ing envi­ron­ment while also main­tain­ing the illu­sion that what we see on screen is real?

We shot in 2019 so didn’t have an inti­ma­cy coor­di­na­tor, because we didn’t know about them, but look­ing back I think it would have been real­ly good! On our set I had to do that job, at the same time as being the direc­tor, and it’s a very full-time job for a film like this. But Sofia was very com­fort­able with all the nudi­ty, and she’s nev­er com­plete­ly naked. There’s always these patch­es, and then in a lot of scenes were she appears to be naked we’re using close-ups. There’s only a few wide shots.

I got a lot of help from the adult film per­form­ers, because they are so com­fort­able with being naked all the time. They were super relaxed, and that made Sofia more relaxed because she was in an envi­ron­ment where nudi­ty is some­thing is total­ly nor­mal. And they shoot a lot of soft­core porn, where you don’t show any pen­e­tra­tion, so they fake-fuck. They know a lot about that and they helped me so much, as did a lot of the pro­duc­tion crew who actu­al­ly came from work­ing in the adult film industry.

You had quite a long research peri­od for the fea­ture – around four years. Did you notice any changes with­in the porn indus­try in that period?

It’s def­i­nite­ly changed a lot over the past few years, and I think it had start­ed already when I was doing the research for Plea­sure. Social media real­ly changed the game. It felt like the women who star in porn start­ed to get more con­trol, because with social media, they start­ed to have con­tact with their fans, and build their brand in dif­fer­ent ways. I think it was some­time in 2018 that every­one in porn start­ed to have an Only­Fans account, but when the pan­dem­ic came and porn pro­duc­tion shut down, that’s when it blew up, and became the place a lot of con­tent was made. 

Of course, that hap­pened just after I’d shot the film so it’s not real­ly part of my sto­ry, but there’s def­i­nite­ly been a sort of rev­o­lu­tion with women start­ing to pro­duce their own con­tent. They start­ed to hire the male tal­ent, they got to choose who to work with, it was on their terms, they could hire a direc­tor to work for them instead of the oth­er way around. So when they had that sort of con­trol, they didn’t want to go back to how it was before. 

There’s also #MeToo, which has had an impact in the porn indus­try, though they don’t real­ly talk about it pub­licly that much because they’re very pro­tec­tive of their rep­u­ta­tion, and peo­ple with­in porn like to have each other’s back, because the indus­try is so stig­ma­tised. There’s this taboo about pub­licly address­ing prob­lems with­in the indus­try, which is a huge problem. 

With­in the years that I spent there, I heard all of these sto­ries about all of these men who were just like Har­vey Wein­stein – agents and pro­duc­ers and peo­ple who were more or less trick­ing girls into doing porn and cre­at­ing these com­plex sys­tems where the women felt they had no way to get out. Peo­ple would talk about it and noth­ing ever hap­pened, but then over the past few years, one by one some of these peo­ple have now been shut out and women have come togeth­er to report them to the police. It’s def­i­nite­ly chang­ing for the better. 

When it comes to the con­tent, I don’t know when the peak of degra­da­tion porn was, but the way porn videos are titled and the lan­guage about the women used to be so degrad­ing, but now the fans have a dif­fer­ent rela­tion­ship with the per­form­ers and the per­form­ers have more agency. When the view­ers actu­al­ly see them as peo­ple, they can’t dehu­man­ise them in the same way, which I think has made an impact. But there’s still a long way to go, and there are so many dif­fer­ent types of porn. When peo­ple talk about porn it’s easy to just pic­ture it as one thing, and there are so many dif­fer­ent sub­cul­tures with­in the industry. 

How has the porn indus­try react­ed to the film?

There’s been many dif­fer­ent types of reac­tions, I think because there’s so many dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives with­in the indus­try. Some of the peo­ple who act­ed in the film are very close friends of mine and they’re sup­port­ive of my per­spec­tive and the sto­ry I’m telling, but then there are oth­ers who aren’t on the same side as me. We had a screen­ing where some of the men felt that the film was focussing too much on the neg­a­tive aspects of porn, but then some of the men who ini­tial­ly crit­i­cised the film have now changed their mind.

I think maybe they were ini­tial­ly shocked to see it from a female per­spec­tive. [They] final­ly they thought, ​‘What are we doing to these women? Are we part of the prob­lem?’ I’m not too sur­prised that the film has been crit­i­cised, but oth­ers with­in porn have said it’s very real­is­tic and authentic.

The idea I real­ly want­ed to high­light with­in the film is that the prob­lems Bel­la faces don’t have any­thing to do with the fact that peo­ple are hav­ing sex. It’s pow­er struc­tures. It’s oppres­sion. That’s not hap­pen­ing only in the porn indus­try, those things hap­pen every­where. I’m try­ing to show the ways that porn can be a mir­ror of our soci­ety, or maybe that porn is a mir­ror of patri­archy and capitalism.