"ERIKA LUST WANTS to get more women in porn—in every possible position. Writer. Director. Producer. Star. She broke into the biz herself once and knows what it takes. And, like the growing number of advocates calling for more women behind the camera in Hollywood, she knows that the more inclusive the adult industry becomes, the better—and, OK, sexier—the results.

"Here we are, in a time when feminism and gender issues are in the media more than ever, the conversation around female sexuality is happening all the time, and still, mainstream production companies keep creating the same boring stuff and are managed by the same kind of narrow-minded men," Lust says. "We need another perspective; we definitely need the female gaze." Now she’s just got to prove she’s right."

"When in Doubt, Go Indie

It is, however, what Lust is shilling—and she’s not alone. Even going back to the 1980s, directors like Candida Royalle, one of the first porn stars to move into directing, were making female-focused porn and launching their own efforts to do so. By the 2000s, creators like Anna Span and alt-queer film director Courtney Trouble redoubled efforts to produce and distribute adult films by and for women. And while the Internet has exposed a lot of young people to porn, it also—much like it did for artists of all varieties—provided a distribution channel for a lot of independent producers and performers to release material that doesn’t fall into cliches. (It also, like it did for other industries, caused a lot of problems.) To that end, there are now even sites like Cindy Gallop’s Make Love Not Porn that allow, for lack of a better term, amateur performers to produce and distribute whatever turns them on.

"The beauty of technology is that now anyone can be a pornographer," says Carlyle Jansen, founder of the adult store Good For Her, which produces the Feminist Porn Awards. "But gaining skills in directing and being able to pay performers well (rather than just featuring yourself) and rent interesting sets and pay a full camera and editing crew to make quality interesting films such as Erika's would be an extra service that many could not afford."

Providing those services is, of course, exactly what Lust is trying to do with her new initiative. But she’s also just one person, and porn has a lot of issues of representation that need to change. "Certainly it is fabulous to get more women making porn," Jansen says. "[But] what I feel is almost more important is to fund transwomen, people/women of color, older folks and people/women with disabilities. These are the people still either fetishized or stereotyped in porn or just left out of the picture. There are very few positive images of these folks in film, especially done by their own communities."