Porn director Erika Lust reveals most common sexual fantasies

Porn director Erika Lust has revealed the top three most common sexual fantasies - and they’re not what you might expect.

When it comes to what goes on in the nation’s bedrooms (and elsewhere) there are three things porn director Erika Lust says everyone is thinking about.

“Threesomes or group sex in general,” the feminist porn director tells news.com.au.

“Not everybody wants to do it, but everybody is thinking about it or almost everybody would like to experience at least a video situation,” she says.

This is followed closely by BDSM and infidelity, something Lust knows due to her site, X Confessions, through which people can send in their fantasies where cheating always tops the list.

“I really get lots of feedback of what people are thinking about and that is on the top all the time,” she says.

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The founder of Lust Productions is speaking backstage at the BBC 100 women event in London, where she has just been named one of the 100 women to speak on the “female future”.

The Swedish native, 42, who lives in Barcelona, is on a mission to give women a voice in the porn industry and create a generation of “informed masturbators” who can take control of their sexual desires.

She wants to bust open the often-misogynistic porn world and let women find a way to get it “working for them”, as well as spark the conversations that can save sex lives and relationships.

“We are all so afraid that other people will not accept our kinks,” she says. “That we are strange. That we are perverse, that we are different from everyone else and the funny thing is that we are not.

“Most of us we have similar fantasies and ideas and I think that just talking about our own fantasies together with a couple can be a resource on not having to separate.”

Erika Lust said she was initially laughed off by studios who thought there was no market for female porn. Picture: BBC

Porn stars pose for Erika Lust. Picture: Instagram/Erika Lust

With the motto that the “sex can stay dirty but values have to be clean” Lust is changing the course of the porn industry which accounts for around one third of internet traffic but is dominated by a handful of sites who specialise in churning out ever more extreme content in which women are “banged, smashed, nailed or punished”.

The former politics student started out watching porn for herself but while she was turned on by the images, something didn’t sit right. Her first film “The Good Girl” was based on her own experiences about coming to terms with her “kinky” side. Now she specialises in producing films that provide narrative around the sex — but make no mistake, it’s not soft core and being feminist doesn’t mean its “ugly women”.

“When [men] hear me talking about the project and they haven’t watched my films, many of them are thinking maybe it will be very soft. Maybe it will be the kind of porn that will not show explicitness, [but]….stories of princesses on horses and lovemaking in front of the chimney … that’s what they are imagining,” she laughs.

Erika Lust wants men and women to become “informed masturbators”. Picture: Erika Lust

Erika Lust on set. Picture: Erika Lust.

With long hair, scant make up high-waisted trousers, Lust comes across as exactly the kind of feminist at ease with her sexuality that is at odds with the “watermelon breasts”, highlighter-glazed cheeks and extreme pout that has seeped from porn to Instagram and back again.

Indeed, she worries for today’s young women growing up in such an image-conscious society where sex is more performance than experience — something that leads to a bad time for women and men.

“It’s very difficult for young women to imagine what sex can be because most of the images they’ve seen of sex, they’ve been either the beautiful object or some kind of sex tool for men and I think they go out in their own lives and they reproduce what they have seen online,” she said.

“[Young women] go into a sexual encounter as if they were porn stars and everything is about my performance and where I put my hand and I stuck out my breasts and my ass.”

Young men too are expected to behave like “penetrative sex machines” which is unrealistic, she says.

“They are expected to be rough and to be hard and to be strong and to ‘take her’ and imagine as a young man that must be super scary because you must feel like you’re taking on a too big costume,” Lust says.

Instead, Lust advocates a revolutionary approach to sex education which includes not just biology but how to behave in the bedroom.

Now that, as Lust said at a Ted Talk in Vienna “is an idea worth spreading your legs for”.