Tag Archives: Erika Lust

XConfessions: Interview with Erika Lust

Master
My Master

Format: DVD + download/stream

Release date: Volume 6 released on 28 January 2016

Event: Erika Lust will be in Berlin in February for a special screening of the Director’s Cut of her latest XConfessions short films followed by a Q&A, hosted by the Berlin Film Society at the Babylon Kino. The original event on 10 February is sold out but another screening has been added on 12 February 2016.

XConfessions.com

The Barcelona-based erotic filmmaker on women and pornography, trying to change the adult industry, and her interactive project XConfessions.

Swedish-born, Barcelona-based erotic filmmaker Erika Lust has been challenging the tiresome clichés and uninventive formulas of the porn industry since her 2004 debut, The Good Girl. Following a string of award-winning features including Life Love Lust and Cabaret Desire, she started the interactive web-based XConfessions project: members of the public are encouraged to confess their secrets and fantasies, which Erika Lust then makes into films. The resulting stories range from daily situations, as in the self-explanatory Meet Me in the Workroom or The Couch Surfer (think erotic air b’n’b), to the oneiric as in Spectrophila (an erotic encounter with a ghost lover), bondage reveries as in An Appointment with My Master (an S/M session presented like an appointment at the doctor’s), or flights of fancy inspired by books or TV as in Mad Men Porn. What all have in common is a joyful and tender approach to the diversity of human sexuality supported by a strong artistic vision that gives the films style and sensual beauty.

Virginie Sélavy talked to Erika Lust about women and pornography, trying to change the adult industry and innovating with XConfessions.

Virginie Sélavy: You describe yourself as a feminist porn filmmaker, what does that mean to you?

Erika Lust: I normally describe myself as a filmmaker, and I’m interested in the subject of sexuality, especially female sexuality. I think that the whole concept of feminist pornography can be very confusing for people because it seems that there’s something anti-male in feminism and something anti-female in pornography. I don’t believe that, but I think people have that idea about those two words, even though feminism is a basic idea about human rights. When you consider yourself a feminist it means that you believe women and men should have the same rights. I think it’s very sad that there are so many people who misunderstand the concept and think that feminism is an extremist movement against men.

In your book Good Porn, your friend Audacia Ray says that, for her, feminist porn is not about what is on the screen but about the way the film is produced. Would you agree with that?

I do agree with that part of it. For me the concept of feminist porn has three pillars. First it’s about what you’re showing on the screen; it’s about the sexuality and how the people on the screen are interacting. Then it’s about women in important roles, where they are moving forward, being a character, taking care of their own pleasure, and it’s about seeing their pleasure on the screen. But it’s also how you make the movie, who is behind the movie, and what ideas they have. I think it’s extremely important that women step in and start telling their stories about sexuality. So I mainly have a female crew behind my movies. When I started it was basically me and a few more people, but now I have a crew of around 15 people. In all important creative decision-making roles I have women – director of photography, line producer, assistant director, casting. For pornography to progress it really needs women behind the camera. It’s a genre that is created by 98 or 99% of men. There are still very few women involved today and they are mainly in the independent adult genre.

The Couch Surfer
The Couch Surfer

Throughout your work you challenge clichés about women and porn, one of them being the idea that women are not stimulated visually by explicit sexual material.

I think we are stimulated by all our senses, and one of them is obviously vision. I think it’s extremely erotic to see images. And I think that most women feel the same way. What happened with pornography is that it started as something more attractive back in the 60s and 70s, when there were actual filmmakers behind some of the films being made, they had ideas, visions, they wanted to tell stories. But then the whole genre turned into a money-making factory that was just interested in the penetration and the fluids and the acrobatic positions. It’s not that I don’t find that interesting, but I want something more. If you get into the most visited porn sites of today, like Porn Hub, YouPorn, Red Tube, etc, it’s aesthetically very ugly. And many of those films are basically men punish-fucking women. I feel that most women don’t feel comfortable with that, and I have to add, many men don’t feel comfortable with that. I think it’s a vision that we need to talk about. It’s getting very important to look at what kind of sexual images we are selling because internet has become a power of its own when it comes to pornography – one third of all internet traffic is about porn. When we log into those websites we are after sexual stimulation, we are after trying to figure out who we are and what we like. If the only images you find online when you look for pornography are those kinds of images then your view of sexuality will be affected by that. You will start to believe that the main goal of women in this world is to make men come. Sex-positive feminists believe that the problem is not porn, it’s that there’s too much bad porn, and we have to make it better. That’s what I’m trying to do.

How did XConfessions come about?

When I was going around doing screenings, especially with my last one, Cabaret Desire, people were coming up to me wanting to share because they felt that porn is pretty much all the same and their stories were quite different. When I was thinking about my next project after Cabaret Desire I couldn’t decide on one idea, so I decided to do ten short films. At that time, it was two years ago, there was a huge shift. DVD sales dropped, the way we were consuming movies changed. It’s not so long ago that we started to use the internet more and more as opposed to the cinema, TV or DVD. And that’s why I saw the opportunity to do a web project where people could interact and send me their confessions and I would make films from those confessions. Sometimes the films have a lot to do with the confessions, but sometimes the confessions are just inspiration for the films.

Do you get ideas sent by more women or men?

It’s 50/50, or at least it’s what the statistics are telling me, because who knows – the confessions are anonymous so because they choose a feminine name I think it’s a woman. But I don’t feel there’s a lot of difference between men and women in their confessions and what they write about. It may also depend on the audience that I have. My feeling is that it’s quite a smart audience, they are very articulate, they know how to write, they have a lot of ideas and fantasies, and even cultural references to books, music, films, a whole cultural world.

Spectrophilia
Spectrophilia

Which fantasy has surprised you the most?

I don’t know what surprised me the most. There are so many of them and they are so different, but there are some tendencies, a lot of things coming back. There are plenty of threesome situations, people love those films. People want to explore, I don’t know if they want to do it in real life or just in the fantasy world, but they love exploring. There are also a lot of confessions around power play, domination, submission, both men and women being both roles. And infidelity comes back quite a lot.

Has there been any confession that you haven’t wanted to make?

I haven’t done any rape fantasies. People ask me for that sometimes, there are confessions around that theme. But I feel that it’s not really something that I can deal with. I don’t know what to do with it. There are a lot of women who have those kinds of fantasies, I’m not saying that it’s the limit, but I don’t really see it. I have to believe in it, there has to be something that I want to go for.

The films are really diverse and they really show how inventive and varied human sexuality is.

That’s exactly what I want to show in the project. I love the idea of gathering all these films together to show that sexuality can be so many different things. It doesn’t have to be the pizza guy, the mafia guy, and the babysitter. Keep on dreaming! And that is one of the biggest problems with the adult industry and the way it’s become. The industry doesn’t have much creativity, or much fun. Imagine if in the film world you only had Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude van Damme. It’d be a very small world, and porn has ended up a little like that. It needs the Woody Allens and the Tarantinos and the Isabel Coixets and the Sofia Coppolas. But I think it will change. Things are happening, there are new people coming in.

On the other hand, porn has seeped into independent film, with films like Gaspar Noé’s Love, Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac or Michael Winterbottom’s Nine Songs. What do you think of that evolution?

When sex gets into independent film, what happens is that it gets very dark and complicated. It’s like in Nymphomaniac, it’s normally only disturbed people who are sexually active and who go beyond the limits. Many of those films are made by men, there are few women. And very few of those films are positive about sex. What I try to do in my work is show a positive vision of sexuality.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Silver Shoes: Interview with Jennifer Lyon Bell

Silver Shoes
Silver Shoes

Format: DVD

Release date: 5 February 2015

Distributor: Blue Artichoke Films

Director: Jennifer Lyon Bell

Writer: Jennifer Lyon Bell

Cast: Joost Smoss, Liandra Dahl, AnnaBelle Lee

Netherlands 2015

73 mins

Good films and good sex don’t have to be mutually exclusive. That should be common sense but how many good films can you think of which have realistic, genuinely erotic sex scenes? And how many erotic films can you think of with artistic or dramatic merit? For Jennifer Lyon Bell, the answer was ‘surprisingly few’, and so she set about making her own. Her latest release, Silver Shoes, is a trilogy of erotic films woven loosely around the theme of clothing. In the first, a girl goes to borrow some shoes from a female acquaintance and, after discovering a wardrobe full of men’s clothes, finds her sexual curiosity is sparked. In the second, a housesitter explores the mixed feelings (both erotic and melancholic) sparked by going through the owner’s clothing. And in the third, a woman and a man end up having sex after a build-up in which the woman believes the man to be gay.

Lisa Williams talks to Jennifer Lyon Bell about clothing as sexual currency, feminist porn and how she likes to craft a film.

Lisa Williams: Clothes have emotional and sexual currency in this collection of films; was that the start point of it all, and what is it about clothing that creates this meaning for you?

Jennifer Lyon Bell: I started thinking a lot about clothing after I took a drag king workshop a few years ago by the brilliant European performance artist Louise Deville. Seeing the ways in which small changes in my outfit made other people treat me so differently was intense. And I enjoyed thinking about what items of clothing, anywhere on the gender spectrum, had come to carry erotic power for me. I was struck that the typical female ‘sexy’ clothes – fishnets, black high heels, bandage dresses – didn’t do much for me and never had. And I wasn’t even sure what men’s ‘sexy’ clothing was supposed to be, though I had certainly gotten an erotic charge from certain men’s clothing items in the context of my own life. It seemed only natural to start exploring these issues through the lens of a film.

There is that running theme but there’s also a nice balance to the collection (one woman and woman story, one woman alone, and one woman and a man story). Did you think of it in these terms or did it come about organically?

I’ve always enjoyed short films, and I liked the idea of creating a filmic kaleidoscope with short films, whereby certain elements change while others stay the same. So portraying a variety of relationships in Silver Shoes definitely was an integral part of that idea. In truth, I also shot a solo male scene because I thought it would make a true balance. But in the final edit, that short film felt so different tonally from the others that it made the film feel unbalanced and harder to understand. I liked it better as a trilogy, so I kept it that way. I decided to include the male solo on the DVD release for those who would like a peek at it anyway. I might also add that I like the idea of offering the viewer all kinds of hot sex without necessarily asking them to connect it to their own sexual orientation or desired real-life practices. People have a very flexible ability to identify with characters and get aroused by seeing things they don’t expect. So the sexual variety is quite intentional too.

Mainstream porn plays with fantasy (narratively and in the bodies depicted), yours seems much more concerned with realism. Are the characters and experiences on screen meant to be relatable to the viewer and do you think these are scenarios happening in real life?

It is so rare to see sexuality presented in a realistic way that I still find it fascinating when it is. Personally I need to feel a lot of sympathy and empathy for the main character, which means that there needs to be a fair amount of emotional realism even if the rest of the story is quite fantastical. Even in a non-erotic context, I’ve always been attracted to movies with an element of realism. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind strikes me as an especially strong sci-fi movie because it’s so realistic in other ways. As far as whether these scenarios happen in real life – well, without giving too much away, I can say that the plot of ‘Mimosa’ [one of the short films in Silver Shoes] is startlingly close to something that’s happened to me… more than once! And I know several women who have had the same happen to them. So I was dying to put it up on the screen.

Were there any mainstream porn conventions you wanted to keep (or send up)?

No, I let the stories develop on their own, rather than wrestling them into a particular statement about sex or porn. In some ways Silver Shoes is like porn – there are orgasms, there are wet and hard body parts, there are people enjoying themselves. But in other ways the film evokes something quite different from porn: there’s a lot of story, there are no pre-choreographed porn-style external ejaculations, there are some challenging emotional moments like when one of the characters gets teary. Nothing was off-limits for us.

I sensed the actors in Silver Shoes were friends; can you describe your casting process and what you look for in an on-screen pairing?

I’m so pleased you thought they were friends, because I pride myself on finding couples who genuinely like each other and have great personal chemistry. But in truth, these people all met in real life for the first time the day before their shoot. Usually, before I do any auditions, I like to meet actors and actresses myself over coffee to get a sense of their personality and reasons for getting involved in erotic film. But, in this case, geographically I was considering actors and actresses from all over the world. So I knew I couldn’t rely on in-person meetings or a long rehearsal process. I narrowed down the actors and actresses I liked best to a shortlist, had them do an acting audition with me by Skype or in person, and then put them in touch with each other by Skype to see who hit it off. The final three who won the roles live really far apart. Joost is from Belgium, Liandra lives in Australia, and AnnaBelle lives in the United States. In each case it worked a little differently. Liandra and I were friends when she lived in Amsterdam. I liked her a lot, felt I had a grasp on her personal style, and had recently auditioned her for a different project, so I knew she’d be great if we could find her a match. Joost contacted me about the project and he had a lot of natural connection to it. We chatted by Skype, and eventually I auditioned him by Skype too – though I went over to Belgium to visit with him personally before officially casting him. And AnnaBelle I simply met with and auditioned by Skype. I loved her and thought she had a nice collaborative mentality. Fortunately, she was so open and forthright that I was able to get a good sense of what she was like. They all Skyped with each other and it was a clear ‘yes’ with these three. I’ll also admit that in the brunch party scene, the party guests are all personal friends of mine, so maybe that friendly vibe comes through. I know we had a lot of fun on the set that day, which maybe makes it fun to watch.

How scripted were your films; both in the sense of dialogue and action? Was there any room for improvisation and did much change in the process of bringing it to life?

I’ve worked before in very different modalities, from a full script (Matinée) to total improvisation ((Headshot). This time I decided to try something in between: us all agreeing on a theme and the key plot points, and then letting the actors/actresses improvise the dialogue. While it was a little nerve-racking for me, I think it worked out great. Particularly for performers with no formal acting training, it helps a lot to be able to speak with your own style and rhythm. It also helps a lot that my editor is very talented; he helped me find ways to put the best parts together, so it had a good flow even when we had to cut pieces out.

As far as the sex scenes go, I like to give the performers as much freedom as possible. We do discuss in advance what they would like to do sexually with each other, how the sex fits into the story, and generally what parts of the set we’ll use. After that, I let them take the reins because I think it’s the best way to preserve the real chemistry between them. Usually I’m working with actors and actresses who’ve never been sexual on camera before, so for them it’s especially important not to stop the flow. But now I know that even performers who’ve had sex on camera before do appreciate the freedom to stay in the moment and try out what feels right. Later I can always get a pickup shot if necessary. This method is a heck of a lot more work for the camera people (in this case, the director of photography and me as second camera), the lighting person, and the editor, because we aren’t sure where the best shot or best light will be, and have to stay 100% present during the shoot. But having tried different methods, I think this works well for capturing the kind of spontaneity that I most like to see.

All these films appear to be in ‘real time’. Is this an important convention to you and how long, in reality, did they take to film?

Perhaps it’s just the way my body is built, but I’ve always been attracted to physical continuity in sex scenes. I like to mentally get into the characters’ bodies and then stay there pretty much the whole time. When I see a hard edit between sexual positions, for example, I can feel my body disengage from the characters a little. It’s worthwhile using that effect sparingly: in Matinée I purposely include some distanced shots that force you to imagine yourself as one of the ‘observing’ characters rather than one of the couple; but in general I want to build connection between viewer and performer. The end result is pretty close to real time. But that doesn’t mean the sequences were filmed in real time. Usually I plan for the performers to enjoy the whole sex scene twice, and we use multiple cameras. As a result, we have lots of extra footage which can easily cover the moments that the actor/actress wanted to take a break. You wouldn’t believe the great material I have had to leave on the cutting room floor because there just wasn’t room for it all!

As for the narrative portions of the films, so far I have taken a fairly classical approach in the structure, but I’m very open to playing with nonlinear storytelling. The trade-off is that I need to make sure I don’t confuse the viewer’s understanding of the characters’ interior states too much while trying to create drama. Drama with no erotic connection would be a silly bargain for me.

I was interested to read that you cite films such as The Piano Teacher and Baise-moi among your favourite examples of eroticism. Would you say you are inspired more by sex scenes within a narrative than straightforward porn with little or no plot? Also, these two films arguably show extremely surprising expressions of sexuality; can you describe what you appreciated about each film?

The movies I find sexiest are the ones where I want to emotionally engage with the characters and feel what they’re feeling. Usually those end up being narrative art films that show the characters overcoming a struggle or barrier to get what they want sexually, in a story that I can somehow relate to. In The Piano Teacher, Isabelle Huppert’s character is full of struggle. She has a deep sexual itch that she can’t seem to scratch, which is tragic yet wholly relatable to me. I also find it very relatable that her inner sexual life is so at odds with her conservative ladylike self-presentation. People assume all sorts of things about women’s sexuality, especially about women who present themselves as heteronormatively feminine. Women come up to me all the time to confess that their sexuality is darker or odder than they dare to tell their partner. They have no idea they’re not alone.

Having said that, I also enjoy a lighter approach to sex as long as it’s grounded in emotional realism. Especially because I like the idea that sexuality doesn’t have to paired with violence to be appropriate fodder for cinema. John Duigan’s little-discussed film Sirens (with Hugh Grant) is light-hearted, but the individual relationships have enough weight in their power dynamics to make the sex scenes memorable. Or John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, which had some intensely emotional sexual plotlines yet is fundamentally uplifting. (I wish Shortbus had gone even further with its erotic and explicit potential – I’d pay good money to see that darling male threesome played out completely.) As for Baise-moi, I mention that film on my site as a landmark example of the millennial movement incorporating explicit sex into art film, which I totally applaud. And I also liked the aesthetics of the film, pairing a rough punk aesthetic with a feminist revenge narrative. But the film is not an example of eroticism, at least not for me.

How do you position yourself within your feminist porn peers? Would you say there is an industry or a community, and are there any other filmmakers/companies you admire?

Of the handful of us making feminist porn, our styles have turned out to be fairly different. I think that’s an entirely good thing. We’re pretty close-knit and trade tips when we see each other at the erotic/pornographic film festivals that have cropped up in Europe and the USA. I would say I personally like creating narrative context (even if not full narrative storyline), creating an intimate feeling through close-ups, and using sync sound with an emphasis on sex sounds rather than music in the sex scenes. Australian filmmaker Gala Vanting has an entirely different production style, more formal and distanced than mine, but she combines beautiful images with unflinching eroticism (sometimes including kink) in a way I love. Queer French filmmaker Emilie Jouvet is a photographer, and hers might be some of the only pure-sex films that I find hot. Her casting is incredible. Erika Lust is also doing some brilliant casting, and she creates fantastic, creative stories. Tony Comstock was one of the first to pioneer the erotic documentary genre, and his relationship interviews are some of the best I’ve ever seen. Other erotic/pornographic filmmakers I’m inspired by include Sadie Lune, Shine Louise Houston, Courtney Trouble, Ms Naughty, Zahra Stardust, Maria Beatty, Marit Ostberg, Petra Joy, Travis Mathews, Michelle Flynn, Anna Brownfield, and Madison Young. And performer Wolf Hudson’s great collaborations with Aiden Starr.

You say on your website that your reason for making these films has nothing to do with commerce but how does the company fare commercially? Other feminist porn filmmakers we have spoken to have complained of distributors being unwilling to pick their films up. Do you feel you are getting these films out to the people who want to see them?

I have had lots of interest from distributors, but not always the ones I want to work with. The heavy porn consumer who is used to making selections entirely by keyword, and who is accustomed to crap porn quality, apparently does not want to pay a fair price for my genre-crossing erotic movie. In contrast, mainstream outlets like Amazon have been a great place for me to reach people who like good movies and good porn. And as our little community grows, online distribution outlets are cropping up slowly. Pinklabel.tv in San Francisco carries films that you can’t see anywhere else; Erika Lust’s LustCinema has a great selection too. MakeLoveNotPorn.tv offers great amateur films. Little by little the film world is changing. If we can convince the entrepreneurs who make mainstream VOD sites, social media sites, and video hosting sites that it’s worthwhile not to exclude filmmakers who incorporate explicit sex (I’m looking at you, Vimeo), the film world could change a lot – for the better. In any case, almost all independent filmmakers are, as you probably know, getting creative with making their films available directly to interested viewers. Distributors can be very helpful, but since formal theatrical distribution usually isn’t an option for us anyway, we can fill in some of the gap ourselves. We’re an enthusiastically DIY community and a lot of us are enjoying doing it ourselves.

Silver Shoes screened as part of the 12th London Short Film Festival.

Interview by Lisa Williams

La Freak Smut Cinema: Interview with Missy and Messy La Freak

La Freak Smut Cinema
Kiss (La Freak Smut Cinema)

La Freak Smut Cinema

14 May 2014

Looking Glass Cocktail Bar, London

La Freak on Facebook

When you enter the shabbily glamorous Looking Glass cocktail bar on Hackney Road, there is no way of knowing that behind the huge gold-framed mirror next to the bar hides a door to a secret room. As twenty-odd people wait to be let in, sipping on inventive, albeit pricey cocktails, there is a simmering sense of anticipation. When we are finally invited to step behind the looking glass, each guest is given a cheerful welcome spank on the bum by the vivacious Messy La Freak.

This introduction into the dark screening room with its mismatched sofas and tattered vintage chairs is apt: the atmosphere at La Freak Smut Cinema, a midweek female-friendly porn film night run by two young mothers and self-described ‘sex geeks’, is joyfully naughty, risqué but relaxed. The good-natured audience is composed mostly of couples, a few single men, and pairs or groups of female friends.

Set to music throughout, the programme starts with cute animated shorts by Naked Love, and two classy films by Erika Lust about masturbatory bondage and a sexual encounter dreamed up by an obsessive lover, mingled with La Freak’s own compilation videos. As the evening progresses the material becomes heavier, with, among others, a Japanese gay animé that is typically both sentimental and rude, as well as the BDSM-orientated Discipline. The latter is an accomplished example of La Freak’s style: a striking juxtaposition of artistic, beautiful, enigmatic images and saucy, explicit, provocative material that feels fresh, surprising and arousing.

During the show, Missy La Freak and Messy La Freak keep bouncing around, a glass of wine in their hands, charmingly enthusiastic, open, approachable and willing to engage with their audience. The evening is a success: after the films, the room buzzes with collective exhilaration, and people linger on at the bar to chat animatedly. Missy and Messy beam: their job is done.

A week later, I met the cerebral, artistic-minded Missy and the boisterous, spirited Messy La Freak to talk about porn, art and feminism.

Virginie Sélavy: How did La Freak start?

Messy La Freak: I broke up with my long-time partner and I was experiencing a very high level of sex drive. I always had a fantasy of going into a sex cinema. I had that idea of putting on a fur coat, having a little cigarette outside, having a glass of red wine, watching some porn, not doing very much, and then going home and having a massive session. But that is not what happened at all. I turned up at this place on City Road that I’d looked up on the internet. There was a sign that said ‘Women go for free’… I went downstairs and it was the most revolting film ever, with a quite large lady covering herself in cream. I put myself in the back row and before I’d even counted to five every single man – I was obviously the only woman – in the entire room lunged at me like zombies! I ran out, it was ruined. A few weeks later I met Missy. And two years later we were sitting in her house drinking red wine and we were talking about porn.

Missy La Freak: We discussed the story and we talked about how London doesn’t have a sex cinema that women feel comfortable going to. That was the seed. The seed was that women should be able to go out, enjoy something sexual…

Messy: …in a non-threatening environment.

How did you find your current venue?

Missy: They found us. They contacted us on Twitter.

Messy: Our venue hunting has been a big nightmare.

Missy: You’d think London is very liberated. London is not liberated.

Messy: There’s such a taboo about porn. We’ve had lots of problems. Normal places won’t take us. They have to be slightly edgy or slightly underground.

Missy: Advertising was a problem too. For a year it was a truly underground event because we weren’t really listed. We tried flyering for the first night, but it’s difficult to flyer for a porn night. There have been points where we have considered quitting. We were thinking, is London ready for this?

Who comes to your nights?

Missy: In the beginning it was for women, but it’s open to all now. It’s for all sexualities, genders, backgrounds, ages. It’s for people who want a good time and a friendly atmosphere. The first night we chatted to people to get some feedback, and the group of people who were the most interested in La Freak were women in their 40s and 50s. They were so in touch with their sexuality, so ready for a night like La Freak. That was wonderful.

Messy: Normally about half of the room is heterosexual couples, and the other half is pairs and groups of ladies, a few straggler guys, and sometimes we’ve had straggler girls.

It felt geared towards women more than anything else, for instance Wank was all about female masturbation. And He-Man was great because it wasn’t just about sex, it was also about the beauty of the male body.

Missy: We are trying to have a more artistic view of sex. In the beginning, although we were trying to take it away from the mainstream view of sex, there was a lot of cock count, whereas now there’s more artistic erotica. We feel that it makes the real sex more powerful to have it cut up with more artistic films that tease you, that don’t show you everything. Wank was one of our first films, and it was when we were very much thinking about women. Our thought was, when you hear the word ‘wank’, everyone thinks of men, and men talk very openly about it. We wanted to discuss female wanking and celebrate it.

Messy: The reason why we’ve moved away from classifying ourselves as something not necessarily feminist, but female, geared towards women, is that it’s boxing yourself in. You alienate half of the demographic. We are feminists but, unfortunately for our species, there are a lot of women who are fearful of the word.

Missy: We found that the association with the term has put some people off. It’s unfortunate but we want the night to be open to everyone.

Muff felt like a celebration of pubic hair.

Missy: That was a direct ‘fuck you’ to mainstream porn where the muffs are removed so you can see more vagina.

Messy: A lot of men prefer pubic hair, so I think it is just for that reason – so you can see more.

Missy: It’s such a slippery slope, now you have porn stars having their bits lasered off, because once you can see more, then you need to create the perfect vagina. It’s pretty grim.

One of the films was a Japanese gay animé.

Missy: I love it, that’s the one that turns me on the most. The idea of showing animated stuff was really interesting to me. But I looked at hetero Japanese animé and it’s horrific!

Messy: It’s all rape.

Missy: It’s paedophilic. The men are very old and ugly, the girls are really young and pretty and they’re crying. I tried very hard to find something that wasn’t like that and I stumbled across this film. It’s actually made by women.

Missy: We’ve had some funny reactions to it, some men saying, ‘I will never watch anything like that again’. They’d rather have live action, watching an animated version in some way really flips them out. For the most part people like it.

Messy: The reason why La Freak is quite girl-heavy is because 90% of pornography focuses on the female body. And while as females we can appreciate the beauty of the female body, and it’d be completely absurd to not include it and celebrate it, the show has changed. That animé was the first thing that shifted it and became a celebration of the masculine form. From then we got a better balance.

You clearly spend a lot of time sifting through online porn to find the good stuff.

Missy: This was another reason for La Freak. We would go on the computer, try and watch porn, and what we were finding was quite unpleasant. You have to really look hard for something you’ll enjoy. So the other idea of La Freak was to find the gems, cut out the delving through, and say, we guarantee that it’ll all be good. It may not all be to your exact sexual taste, but it will be at the very least interesting. It won’t be what you see on Redtube.

Why do you think it’s important to watch those films collectively?

Messy: I think porn is one of the last taboos. I like doing slightly risqué things and that’s one of the reasons I enjoy it, because it’s naughty. And it seems even naughtier because it’s put on by women.

Missy: And that’s why there’s music and it’s fast-paced. We want to be laughing, greet everyone, dance, so everybody knows you can relax. You don’t have to feel weird or uncomfortable about being here.

Messy: That’s why we move around the room, it’s not to distract people, it’s to chill them out…

Why is the music so important to you?

Messy: There was a show where we changed the format for one night. We got rid of the music so it was just films and blackness. Just as an experiment to see whether people were coming for the vibe or for the films. And what we found was that without the songs the response was really rigid and British.

Missy: Awkward, serious, no one spoke.

Messy: If you watch soft-core 70s porn there is music.

Missy: I find it much more fun to watch. From the 80s onwards it’s silent, and it’s the same sex noises. He’s grunting like a silver-backed gorilla, she’s moaning, and every film is the same. I think there’s a lot of focus on how women are treated in that kind of porn, but I also think the men are given a very robotic role – it’s like a bizarre machine that keeps doing this motion. I think both parties get a raw deal.

What’s the future of La Freak?

Messy: We’ve had this guy audition for us, I got him round the other night. He’d waxed his moustache and put eyeliner on and he was wearing a corset, a top hat, a silver jockstrap, stockings, suspenders and kitten heels, and he looked really masculine, but really feminine too. It was amazing. So I sat down with a glass of wine, and he started monologuing. It was a very touching piece about sexuality and your inner freak, a poem about his sexual discovery, but it definitely had an edge of murderous hysteria. It wasn’t a joyful piece. It culminated with him pretending to shove a massive cucumber up his bum and then poo it out. His act wasn’t the right tone because La Freak is a celebration of sexuality, a liberation and a happiness, his is much more about how our inner freaks are slaves to homogenised sexuality. It’s interesting but it’s too dark. But we’re now going to join in and curate a show where he’ll be the MC for the evening. I think that will add a level of spectacle and professionalism.

Missy: We feel that having someone who is so confident and looks great would be a wonderful addition. We also want to have erotic artists come and showcase their paintings.

Messy: For the next show we’ve got an artist who does erotic drawings. We have big things planned.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

La Freak’s next show is at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club on Thursday 7 August 2014, 8.30 – 11.30pm, £10 early bird £12 standard. For more information and events please visit La Freak on Facebook.