Love Lives - Adult filmmaker Vex Ashley on feminist porn, sex work and the female gaze

Episode Date: November 11, 2022

This week on Millennial Love, we chat with adult film director and performer Vex Ashley.Vex is the founder of Four Chambers, an alternative, creative, female-centric porn platform that explores sex away from the mainstream “tube sites” that saturate the industry.Vex challenges the misconception that sex work is exploitative and argues that, through a creative and collaborative process with performers, pornography can be a medium for artistic expression.Check out Millennial Love on all major podcast platforms and Independent TV, and keep up to date @Millennial_Love on Instagram and TikTok.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/millenniallove. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This Giving Tuesday, the Center for Addiction and Mental Health is on a mission to make better mental health care for all a reality, and we've made incredible strides forward, breaking down stigma, improving access to care, and pioneering research breakthroughs. But now is the time to aim even higher. Together, we can create a world where no one is left behind. Donate at CAMH.ca from November 25th to December 3rd and your gift will be doubled for twice the impact. Hello everyone and welcome to Millennial Love, a podcast from The Independent on everything to do with love, sexuality, identity and more. This week I'm so excited to be joined by adult filmmaker and performer Bex Ashley. Bex runs a production company called Four Chambers which is committed to producing

ethical and female-centric pornography. Today she joins me on the show to discuss why we shouldn't really ban porn, we just need to change the way we consume it, the benefits it can offer us when it's produced ethically and correctly, and what it's also like to star in adult films. So, enjoy the show. Hi, Vex, how are you? Hi, I'm good, thank you. Good. So I'm so excited to have you on the show. We haven't really delved into adult

filmmaking that much on Millennial Love before we've interviewed I think it was Erica Lust um a few years ago but that's kind of as far as we've got into the subject so I can't wait to talk to you about it I mentioned before we started recording that I actually wasn't able to access the website myself for Chambers because there's a there's a blocker on the Wi-Fi that I have, obviously, which is a whole other issue that we can talk about. But I guess initially, can you just start us off by introducing Four Chambers and what it's all about? Yeah, of course. So I started Four Chambers basically as a little bit of an experiment. I was at art school. I was kind of experimenting, doing little bits of sex work online to really like give myself a little

bit of extra income. And I was spending a lot of time on a website called tumblr.com, which was really this kind of melting pot of people who were sharing all different elements of their kind of likes and their interests. And some of that included porn, but it was maybe the first time that I was sort of seeing people position porn in a way that was for kind of sharing and for exploring the potential kind of creativity or the aesthetics of it. And even though I was seeing a lot of porn on Tumblr, I think what I wasn't necessarily seeing a lot of was that porn being used as a way to maybe think about sex creatively and the potential of porn as a medium for exploring ideas necessarily being used. There was a lot of porn maybe as more of a kind of functional product. And because I was at art school and I was, you know,

into my pretentious university, I said, maybe I'll just give this a go for one year and kind of see where it takes me. And I've kind of ended up in a situation where the response was just really incredible because I think it just wasn't something that was necessarily being explored at the time so I'm in a position now where it's been kind of my full-time job and my main kind of creative output for for eight years now. Wow and and I guess when you because I'm obviously it's it's not necessarily the most conventional route particularly out of art school um how did your

friends and family respond when you told them what you were doing? I mean, I'm very lucky. I am surrounded by people who, you know, respect me and respect my agency. And, you know, I don't think it was the biggest surprise to my family. I'd been making art using my naked body and using myself as the subject for years and years, like up until that point. So, you know, they're kind of long suffering in that regard. And I'm lucky in that I come from pretty kind of like left wing ex-hippie kind of parents who, yeah, essentially kind of trust me that I'm going to be making the right decision for myself um I don't think it's necessarily the easiest thing for anyone necessarily

uh to to just kind of uh just accept just because of the way that society kind of thinks about sex and about people who use sex um but I think that I've I feel very lucky and that I've always felt like supported and held by the community that's around me and you know hopefully that's because I'm maybe mature enough not to necessarily get myself involved with people who wouldn't do that and so I'm I am pretty lucky and it's not the case for everyone um that they have that kind of support and so tell us about the kind of films that you produce and you know you've mentioned that it's it's a creative process and that's obviously a big distinction between the difference between that and mainstream pornography but talk to me a little bit more in detail about the things that you're trying to do

with your storytelling yeah it, it's interesting. I think when I started off, I felt like I was intent on making a really clear distinction between, you know, bad pornography and good pornography. And, you know, it was kind of a reductive argument for me in that, you know, it was a way to make myself feel a little bit better about what I felt like maybe I was doing. And actually, there's maybe not as much of a clear distinction between those things as I maybe originally thought kind of coming into doing this kind of work mostly because actually there's a lot more variety and diversity within

what we would consider to be kind of traditional pornography than before and actually when we think about mainstream pornography especially now, that's maybe not quite as clear cut as it once was, because there was a point where mainstream pornography was all made by these kind of big business, like old fashioned archaic studios, and they controlled all of the content that was being made, and who was getting hired, what kind of films were being produced. And that was all based on their idea of what would sell or not. But recently there's been a real kind of surge of independence, sorry, for independent creators and porn performers to be able to kind of make the work that they want to.

So there's not so much necessarily a mainstream and a kind of make the work that they want to um so there's not so much necessarily a mainstream and a kind of counterculture anymore and when I kind of really got into the industry there's a lot of things kind of going on that are creative and that are um you know maybe trying to do things differently it's just that maybe I think we're kind of saturated with um the the kind of tube site model, which is that we often don't necessarily look much further or search much further past the front page of, you know, the tube site that you're kind of necessarily consuming your porn on. For me, what I think makes my films maybe a little bit different to other stuff that's out there is, yeah,

little bit different to other stuff that's out there is, um, yeah, I really wanted to see if I could kind of, um, push the aesthetics and the concepts that I was kind of putting into the work that I was making. So yeah, for me, um, I want, and I hope that my films may be, you know, even if the people or the sex that's happening isn't maybe the kind of sex that somebody would normally seek out. I hope that there's, you know, enough kind of richness and kind of beauty and interest going on in kind of the way the film is produced and the kind of idea behind it. And not necessarily just the sex that's happening. and the kind of idea behind it and not necessarily just the sex that's happening. I think that like porn that's just good to, you know, masturbate to and then like close your laptop and clear your browser history, that's totally fine and that's important and that's necessary. But for me, porn and sex is, you know, as much a kind of genre as like literature or film or books and I think it's

been kind of sidelined a little bit and I'd love to see maybe more kind of um more expression through porn and more exploration of sex in porn um not necessarily just it being uh maybe like a functional product to be sold um so I think that's maybe what is the kind of most marked difference between me and the stuff that I was maybe seeing when I started the project yeah it's so interesting because I agree with you like when you when you explain it that way and you talk about your art background and the way that you know it is it's a filmmaking process it is an art form that is being made with the same degree of consideration as any other art form it's just not considered that way because like you said because of the way that society thinks about sex so how do you think we change that because you know like I said

to you at the start of the show I wasn't even able to access your website because obviously there are these blockers on these wi-fi things that just see the word adult and they block it immediately you know porn isn't something that can be advertised like like a film like a Hollywood film can be at least not now um is that about changing people's perceptions of sex do you think do you think it really boils down to that kind of root problem yeah I definitely think that that is part of the issue I think that sex and porn is often a scapegoat for a lot of the kind of um difficult and complex uh kind of interpersonal relationships that we have and sex is a very vulnerable thing and sex is something that we you know often feel very strongly about

um so i think that um the kind of recent visibility of pornography and with things like uh you know the only fans generation and you know, the OnlyFans generation. And, you know, it feels a lot more in the cultural consciousness. But unfortunately, what that has done is meant that there's been, you know, a ramp up in the pushback against it. So we're seeing more censorship and, you know, it's become a lot harder for independent people and people kind of trying to maybe do something a little bit different to be able to kind of work independently outside of these very specific kind of porn designated spaces, where kind of, as I mentioned before,

there was a point where I was spending a lot of time on Tumblr sharing and finding a lot of porn but also you know not necessarily even just porn I was kind of able to see people who were just sharing their sex just for the pleasure of sharing it and there isn't really a space that feels like you can do that anymore and I think that's in lots of ways a real, a real loss to us as a kind of society, because we do still have very kind of, um, we treat sex as a very private experience. And I think that unfortunately what that means is that when it's behind closed doors, we don't get the opportunity to really like learn about other people's experiences, maybe kind of explore things that maybe we're into that we wouldn't have discovered before. And I think it's important to be able to access those spaces and more and more

we're losing those spaces, especially online. And the way that people talk about porn tends to always be relatively kind of demonizing when I think it's a lot more of a complex issue than that yeah I agree I think it is often used as a scapegoat a lot and I want to get on to that later when we talk about kind of sexual violence and how porn is often seen as having you know major contributing effect into that conversation but you mentioned OnlyFans I want to ask you about that because I do actually think that's really interesting and that's obviously a rising sector where you know people it's it's much easier for people to do this kind of I mean I get would you call that sex work I don't know but that kind of image-based and video-based I think sex work it's like one-to-one with clients I don't

really understand exactly how it works I know a little bit about it but it's given people a lot more autonomy over what they can do um and I think financially it's been really lucrative as well for the individual people doing it um what do you make of OnlyFans do you think it's a positive change um do you think it's it's a safer way for people to do that kind of work I think with all of these things there's not necessarily a thing that you can say yes this is great you know I'm not standing here going all pornography is amazing um but I think that those things are complex and they can have real time real life benefits for people. And they can also, you know, have negative effects too. So I think that for me, OnlyFans and just in general, the kind of decentralization of porn

making. So, you know, no longer do we have these studios that control who gets hired. Performers have their own fan bases. They were always the people that were bringing the money, that they were bringing the revenue. That's who people were paying to see. And now they get to shoot what they want and they get to make the kind of work that the people who like them want to see and get paid directly for it, or at least more directly than they were being paid before, which is obviously all really good things. I do think it's interesting that you said that it's lucrative because I think for lots of people, it has definitely been and it's definitely put more money in the hands of

performers. But the majority of people on OnlyFans are not making lots of money. You know, there are a lot, a lot of people on there. And for most people, it is incredibly hard work. It is very time consuming. It requires a whole lot of self-promotion, a whole lot of work to kind of get it to the point. I think that there's this idea that everyone on the site is making, you know, millions

or thousands or, you know, and for the majority of people, it is really not the reality of the situation. And for the majority of people, it is really not the reality of the situation. And it's often the only stories that the media maybe is interested in kind of telling are either these kind of crazy success stories or, you know, the idea that people are being exploited. And for the majority of people doing sex work and working in porn, it's kind of neither of those things. It's kind of, you know, it's very hard work. It's, you know, sometimes lucrative, sometimes not. And it's kind of neither of those things. It's kind of, you know, it's very hard work. It's, you know, sometimes lucrative, sometimes not. And it's quite unstable. And I think OnlyFans, as has been proved by the fact that, you know, they were going to

ban porn off the site a couple of months ago, and then they reversed that decision, is also, you know, not a safe place for sex workers. It is a place that is unstable and is a place that will eventually, you know, not a safe place for sex workers. It is a place that is unstable and it is a place that will eventually, you know, we will lose. So you have to kind of always be prepared to unfortunately kind of the house of cards will fall and you're going to have to rebuild. I found that really interesting when they backtracked on the burning porn thing, because it also just reminded me that you know we live in this world where now there are so many jobs that have been created through technology and you forget

that you can build this entire career but the power is never in your hands you know it's it's at the hands of whoever makes OnlyFans or you know Mark Zuckerberg but let's go back to to the work that you do so tell me about the process of actually making your films because the only knowledge I have of actually the process of adult filmmaking is that documentary that came out a while ago the Rashida Jones documentary which was I know like kind of widely derided by people in the adult industry because it was a very specific type of porn we were seeing being made it was incredibly exploitative and it was almost designed to to show us the darkest corners of the industry as possible and painted a really negative view of the adult filmmaking industry so tell me about what it's like on your sets and how you go about creating these films in the most

healthy and safe environment possible yeah I um I think that for me um often people kind of throw around uh words like ethical porn or kind of feminist porn as um kind of markers of you know good porn or bad porn um and I understand why people are kind of keen to use those words. But it's actually something that we haven't chosen for the projects that I'm kind of doing, kind of mostly because I think that for everyone, every individual, A, I would hope that everyone who's kind of making porn thinks they're doing it ethically. But obviously, ethics are subjective, depending on the person and the context, and you know, the framework that they're working within. So just saying, calling your porn ethical, really all that, what that does is, you know, beg the question,

what does that mean to you? So for us, we don't use those labels. But what I do do is I have a document, which is a transparency document, which basically kind of goes into what a performer might expect to see on set. Things like how much we pay people, how long our shoots are, you know, that performers are expected to be fed, how performers are prepared before a shoot, testing requirements, that kind of thing, even just down to, you know, how much we're going to pay people to license music generally. So for me, I try and think about what I would want as a performer and just try and be the best producer for my own performer, if that makes sense. and just try and be the best producer for my own performer, if that makes sense. I just try and do things the way that I personally feel like is the most kind of in line with my own kind of like morals and ethics with regards to creating. So we try and prepare people as much as possible before the shoot. So I'll pitch people an idea and I'll try and be as upfront about the kind of thing that I would like from them often I will kind of um I won't necessarily put two people

together that I've chosen I'll liaise with the performers and see if there's anyone that they really like working with anyone that they think would be really good for the shoot anyone that kind of fits with them personally um so that maybe they we get a better chance of kind of having uh chemistry on set and kind of just in general on set vibes being good um and you know I also ask performers to give me a heads up about the kind of things that they are happy to to do on screen and the kind of things that they are happy to do on screen and the kind of things that they don't really want to do. And that can be as kind of specific as, you know, I don't want to, uh, you know, I don't, I don't like my butthole. I don't really want a closeup shot of my butthole.

Um, or it can be, you know, I don't like to have rough sex. So nothing, you know, that, that, you know, that, that kind of includes these particular acts um and that on the day is then kind of we go over what somebody said in the email and we essentially do a thing where we go head to toe so you go do you like having your hair touched or pulled do you want people to mess with your hair is that something that you're up for you know uh do you your face do you like having your face kind of grabbed yeah and then we'll just go through the the whole body and you know re-re-kind of affirm everyone's boundaries and then um so that then obviously if there's anything that's

changed that's something that we can kind of note and I think the most important thing for me weirdly as a performer and as someone who's kind of quite precious about the kind of stuff that I personally want to have out there we give performers the opportunity to review a cut of the film before it's released so if there's any shots that they don't like if there's anything they're unhappy with if they don't like, if there's anything they're unhappy with, if they don't like the way that they've been kind of edited, they have the opportunity to change the film for themselves so that then they're not kind of sat there going, oh, I really hate that shot of me or this is just something that I don't feel very comfortable with. Because for me, the best scenes always happen in collaboration

with performers, you know. They're the people who really are the driving force behind what we're doing. So giving them agency and giving them the ability to kind of have some degree of control as well is a big part of why I think, you know, yeah, that the films for me are successful. This Giving Tuesday, the Center for Addiction and Mental Health is on a mission to make better mental health care for all a reality. And we've made incredible strides forward, breaking down stigma, improving access to care and pioneering research breakthroughs. But now is the time to aim even higher. Together, we can create a world where no one is left behind.

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Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca You mentioned how being a performer yourself influences your approach to that and I'm sure you know that's a really valuable kind of insight that you have as a filmmaker. How often do you still perform now and do you perform in your own films or do you perform for other people's films yeah so I have performed in other people's films before um I probably would do again for the right project and I'm like I'm a little bit of a control freak so I really like to have

um to be kind of involved in something that I feel like really fits with me and the kind of stuff that I'm interested in um so um but I do perform in my own films and I continue to perform in my own films. And I think it's actually a really, really vital part of being a porn director is kind of being in that position of being a performer yourself as well. So not only for my own films, but for other other people as well because I think what we're asking people to do you know regardless of whether or not you think sex should be just like any other job the reality is it isn't and the reality is that it can be something that is very vulnerable and can performing sex is a big ask for people which is why you know it's really important that the conditions on set are good it's important that people are compensated fairly and it's really important that the conditions on set are good. It's important that people are compensated fairly. And it's just important that you as a director are

sensitive and empathetic to the needs of what it, you know, what it feels like to fuck on film, you know, it's something that is something that you, you kind of don't know until you've done it. And I think that if you're going to be making money off of people doing that, it's a fair ask to kind of put yourself in that position as well. You just made me curious about the, I guess, the first experience of doing that. If you're comfortable, when was the first time you did perform in a film and what was that experience like? I mean, did you have reservations afterwards or did you immediately feel comfortable it's interesting because I mean I was um a an annoying child actor so you know I love to perform and I think that for me as a performer

um as soon as uh you know it's like it's go time you kind of switch into a mode which is like right I am here to you know do my best job possible and the kind of thinking part of your brain in some capacity switches off you're focused on the task in hand um so I remember I don't think there was a specific time because I'd kind of been doing webcamming. I'd been kind of doing photo shoots with people. So the kind of, there wasn't a specific point where it tipped over into like, right now you're doing porn. But the first kind of proper sex scene that we shot for Four Chambers, I was performing in and I remember kind of I'd flown to San Francisco and I had met up with this person that I'd been kind of chatting with

a lot on Tumblr. And we went to his house and met his very cute dog and his wife and then kind of shot this scene that was like very intense. But I just came out of it just like so elated. It's just such a huge rush of endorphins. You know, it's like all of the nerves that you have beforehand just get kind of distilled into excited energy. instilled into excited energy. And I just had the best time. And the film came out so well. And the response was so good that, you know, I really, because I think sex is so vulnerable,

often when you kind of get the atmosphere right, shooting sex can be such a kind of transformative experience you know um there's been plenty of times when i've kind of gone into a scene feeling like quite low energy or being a bit like oh i'm really tired or i'm not really sure how this will go but there's kind of something about doing something so intense and vulnerable with somebody maybe who you've only just met that it really connects you both really deeply in that moment you can kind of come out of the end of a scene like feeling like totally elated and really uh kind of high on life and you feel really connected to that person um in a way that you know obviously you maybe didn't previously going into it and so there's a real magic on set sometimes and that's something that

you know once you've experienced it, you, it's, it's something that like I always look for and that I really value when I can find it when I'm performing. God, it's so interesting because I know that there will be people, people listening to this who, you know, cause there's, there's all this, there's all this argument when, you know, when actors have a love scene in a film, have a kissing scene in a film that's particularly steamy,

there's always conversations about that actor's partner. And there are rumors about those actors being together. So, you know, I can't imagine what it's like when you're actually having sex with that person on camera and that person is married. Like you said, you met this guy's wife. Is that a complicated thing to navigate or not really I think it's totally dependent on like the relationship you're in

at the time the relationship that person's in at the time I think that for a lot of people you know functionally it is the same as actors kissing for a scene you know you're you're playing a role often there are kind of clear boundaries with it. I think that all of that stuff can always be messy, again, just because of the reality of kind of what that means. But honestly, everyone that I've been lucky enough to work with, and for the majority of people, it's, you know, everyone just wants to turn up, do a really good job, have a good scene, you know, make sure that everyone's chill and, you know, collect a paycheck and go home. And I think that, you know, actors often get, you know, that same kind of blowback of being like, oh, maybe they're in love. Maybe there's, aren't they jealous? And, and, you know, anyone that has actually been in

that position, you know, there's a huge difference between having sex with somebody, you know, for a film versus having sex with somebody either that you're that you really fancy or that you're really into. And the camera really does change the way that you feel when you are performing. You know, you're always aware of the camera, you're always thinking about where you are, what your body's doing, and you know, how it's kind of coming off to the viewer. I kind of always think about porn as like, it's always like a three-way because it's like you, the person you're performing with, and then the audience as well. So you don't really get lost in it or it's, it's harder to get lost in it in the same way. So there is really like a clear difference. And I think that anyone that's had that experience of

kind of shooting sex can really feel that difference. Can you give us an example of one of the narratives that your films might kind of revolve around and I guess like the storylines because I think you know when people think about porn storylines they think of like really cliched things of like I don't know an older teacher kind of being a character to a young school girl that kind of thing obviously it's whole other um you know kind of problematic dialogue but but tell us about how you come up with these stories and yeah can you give us an example of what one of them might be yeah so um I uh just came back from showing a few films at a film festival. And so one of those films was a, I made it during the pandemic, kind of just coming out the back of lockdown. And I was thinking a lot about the way in which our kind of sexuality has been kind of augmented by screens and the screen of the phone, the screen of your laptop. screens and the screen of the phone the screen of your laptop and the way that you know that's not just about sex that's also you know through lockdown about how we kind of connected in the

first place so we shot this scene that was kind of based on this idea of like how you could like fuck a screen or like fuck through a screen or um you know explore the kind of isolation and connection of the screen so we had a performer in the middle of a whole load of cameras so there was a camera on their eye a camera you know pointing from above cameras come to coming to the side and they were hooked up live to all of these screens that were surrounding them and so you could see them from every angle. And another performer is kind of playing the part of the machine and is kind of focusing in on their eye or kind of talking to them through the screen.

And another film we showed at this festival was the film we made after that, which all i wanted to do was you know shoot something that was really kind of warm and soft and squishy and you know skin on skin contact to kind of counteract all of that pandemic isolation so um me and a performer who I've worked with before called Bunny shot a kind of homage to the birth of Venus, the painting. So I got a foam machine. I got a smoke machine. We managed to kind of set up a kind of a silk and, you know, cushiony velvety set in the garden of my friend's house and we shot a

just like in the warmth of the summer sun uh something that was like very sapphic very uh soft um and uh you know kind of to counteract the isolation of what we'd kind of been experiencing before. And so we don't necessarily always have one vibe. We've shot some stuff that's very, you know, by some people's standards would be considered quite extreme. And we shoot some stuff that is, you know, very kind of soft and beautiful and light. And I kind of think that those two things are really important. You know, you don't have to necessarily just do one thing, you know, sex can feel good in a number of different ways and in a number of different contexts. So, you know, I like to kind of try

and explore all facets of it in some capacity. I'm interested in what you said when you said that, you know, we shoot some things that some people would think of as extreme because that kind of brings me to my next question which is you know something I mentioned earlier that one of the one of the biggest arguments that people have against porn is that it contributes to violence and sex and you know rough sex and this whole kind of category of sexuality that is really dangerous and predatory and you know we do see that quite a lot on the tube sites that you mentioned and some other kind of more conventional platforms but talk to me about how you respond to that kind of argument and and I guess how you address it in your own work and like you said in the kind of like more extreme ends of the content you produce yeah i think that porn um like all other kind of forms of media that we create and we consume holds a mirror to the complex ways in which we relate in society and i think porn can

sometimes have especially distilled uh depictions of those things because it has been allowed to for a long time go unchecked by kind of polite discourse you know people don't treat it as worthy or or kind of valuable enough to critique it or to kind of share it. And, you know, that means that when you kind of allow something to exist in the shadows a little bit, it, you know, maybe allows things to kind of go unchecked. And porn has been made primarily for a long, long time for one type of person, like a cis white guy. You know, he's's the person the only person that is presumed to want to pay for porn so the majority of porn is made for him because that's how people are going to get money um so unfortunately that means that there are lots of things that you know for some

people don't align with their values you know there's there's plenty of porn out there that you know i don't particularly like i don't think it's hot and i don't you know i for some people don't align with their values. You know, there's, there's plenty of porn out there that, you know, I don't particularly like, I don't think it's hot and I don't, you know, I'm not going to choose to see it for myself. Um, I think there's, there's a, definitely a difference between, you know, porn that is made, uh, you know, that is rough. Uh, I don't think that porn that is rough is inherently a bad thing. I think that some people really enjoy and want to see rough sex and can engage in that in a way that is healthy, that has good boundaries, and that feels good for them. And I think that's good. And I think that they should be able to see porn that's made in a way that depicts their sexuality.

Sexuality is complex and people like all different kinds of things. What I don't think is that rough sex should be the only kind of sex that we can easily access. I don't think rough sex should be the sex that defines what sex means to us as a society because it's a lot more complex and it's a lot more diverse than that. So I think the problem is that sometimes the vogue in porn is sometimes one particular thing, and that's what the algorithm pushes to the front page of the tube site, and that's as far as most people go. So I actually kind of think at the moment

there's been a little bit of a turnover, even in these mainstream porn sites, that they've kind of moved away from that kind of sex on film. I'm seeing a lot more kind of story-driven sex. I'm seeing a lot more, you know, within more kind of traditional mainstream studios, they're making a lot more work with kind of high budgets that kind of have more of a narrative to them. And I think that the vogue in porn often kind of changes, but I think just not allowing sex to basically be defined by an algorithm and the kind of sex that we can see easily shouldn't just be one type of thing, you know, because it should, if we allow that, then it's going to be very heteronormative. It's going to be essentially

sex for this, you know imagined porn consumer which is you know just a kind of middle-aged straight white guy and that's going to do a disservice to the kind of complexity and the breadth of sexuality and what we should really have is you know more people coming from different perspectives able to make diverse creative content that you know explores their their perception of sexuality the kind of sex that they think is hot and sometimes that sex might be quite extreme and you know sometimes that sex might be very you know soft and and kind of uh almost the opposite to maybe what we see there but having that diversity is what's important because sex is very diverse and sex is very complicated

and to limit it i think you know limits just doesn't does and says one thing yeah I agree with you I think it's so interesting hearing you talk about it like that because you're right you know everyone has different preferences and predilections and the pornographic content that we're watching needs to reflect that as long as it's you know like you said in a healthy way promoting boundaries and promoting consent um I guess because we're running out of time but I guess before we we come to an end I want to ask you what do you hope for the future of porn do you hope that we get to this point where you know like like I said earlier seeing an ad for a porn film is the same as you know we see it the same as we would see a trailer for a Hollywood film is it about that kind of like

widening that accessibility and just taking away the taboo of it so that it becomes more readily consumed and then by dint of that we have a more sexually I guess coherent and sexually educated nation in society because you know we like you know like we like we said we live in this world where people don't talk about sex and it's hidden and it's private and there are consequences to that yeah I think the most important thing is that porn should not be the primary source of people's sex education. You know, in the same way that we wouldn't expect that like a Marvel film or, you know, The Fast and the Furious is a good kind of way to learn about how to drive a car. how to drive a car um i think that you know some porn is made with the explicit kind of purpose of entertaining people and i think that's fine and there's a lot of stuff in society that exists like that but unfortunately because we're not having these conversations with people

and we don't have these spaces to talk about sex day-to-day sex in a really upfront and honest and explicit way porn kind of gets lumped in as the only way that we can really learn about sex um and i think that does a huge disservice to us as a society you know um i i definitely know that if my uh if my upbringing you know i'd i'd been able to learn about sex in a way that wasn't just from porn, um, you know, there would have been significant benefits to me too. Um, and so I think allowing porn to be kind of pointed out as the reason is actually a way of turning the finger away from ourselves in that we are still too scared and too, um, you know, uh, reserved to really kind of broach this issue with the kind of tenacity

that it requires, um, in the, you know, teaching people about the ways in which you can enjoy porn, but put it in the correct context, which is that it's entertainment, that it's fantasy, that it's fictionalized, that it, you know, doesn't necessarily depict sex in a way that, you know, you, that would be considered to be best practice on a day-to-day level. Um, so I think that getting that separation and getting that education out there is really important because you know for me I don't try and make really authentic porn I make kind of creative I make fantastical porn and I want to see more of that and but I also want to see more porn that depicts kind of um authentic pleasure or more kind of day-to-day sex or sex that feels more

naturalistic or sex that kind of explores sex from a perspective that maybe I am not able to kind of even consider all of that stuff I really feel like deserves to exist and hopefully in the future um people will be able to kind of consider it for what it is which is a a medium like any other that has things in it that you're going to agree with and things in it that you're going to go that's not for me but I don't necessarily think it means that that is that it shouldn't exist yeah I agree with you I just got so distracted by your adorable cat jumping up behind you he was gonna come along hello so cute just stared at the camera as if to be like hello i'm right attention so he's just very happy to be considered

before we come to an end it's time for our lessons in love segment so this is the part of the show where i ask every guest to share something that they have learned from their previous relationship experiences. But I guess with your background in mind, it would be really interesting to hear about the kind of key takeaway that you hope listeners can have from this conversation, I guess, just from the work that you do. work that you do yeah I mean I would definitely say that you know my my relationship lesson that I found it hardest to learn for myself um is that how to how to really like listen to what it is that you want and that what it is that you're feeling about a situation and try to separate that from how you feel like other people are going to want to see you. You know, how to switch off that part of you that just wants to kind of please everyone and to make everyone like you and to not maybe hurt the other person so you're not going to say the difficult thing. For me, it's been a very hard and long thought lesson

to get to the point where I can go, I need to step back and I need to really consider what it is that I want in this situation, rather than necessarily pleasing other people. And that kind of translates over to porn as well, because I think, you know, boundaries in sex are really important and boundaries aren't necessarily set in stone and they're not fluid and they can change by a context but really thinking and identifying what it is you feel comfortable with um you know outside of necessarily trying to do something just to please somebody else is something that is really hard i think especially for for women

or people who are socialized as women uh to to really learn how to do but it's something that pays dividends if you can really put the work in to do the difficult thing you know speak up yourself say no uh and say yes uh with a degree of kind of intentionality and those things are you know not easy to learn but really pay off that's such great advice to end on thank you so so much vax it's been so great to talk to you um sadly that's all we've got time for for today everyone thank you so much for listening if you are a new listener to millennial love please do subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Acast, or wherever else is that you get your podcasts.

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