Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker.

My guest today studied political science and feminism in Sweden and is now a pornographer

based in Barcelona. It is a personal journey which raises many questions, and Erica Lust

is it seems more than ready to answer them. She presents herself and her work as a response to a porn industry, which has for decades

been dominated by exploitative men with little consideration for the well-being of performers,

or indeed the interests of a potential female audience.

She made her first porn movie after a boyfriend

introduced her to the genre. She felt she could create something more human, more sexy, and more

woman-friendly. Now she has a profitable niche in the market sometimes labelled feminist porn,

and the industry as a whole is under close scrutiny after a series of exposés of the massively lucrative online porn industry revealed systematic criminality and abuse.

Is there such a thing as ethical porn?

Well, Erica Lust joins me now from Barcelona. Welcome to Hard Talk. Thank you very much, Stephen.

Erica, let's start with your backstory. You were a Swedish student focused on political science,

specializing in human rights and feminism, I believe. So how did you get from there to be inside the porn industry?

Well, it's kind of a long story.

At the same time, I mean, it's not that a big step in the end,

because I am actually doing what I always wanted to do.

I am working for women's rights.

I'm working to make a new perspective on something that kind of bothered me.

I was a young adult and I was starting to look at porn.

And I think that something became very clear to me at the beginning and it was that most of the porn that I watched was very male-centered. It was always about about the men and about their pleasure and the women were used somehow as some kind of tools or like beautiful objects, but it wasn't really their stories that were being told. And I think

that for me, that was one of the most important reasons why I ended up somehow deciding that I wanted to try this

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