Ninja Thyberg has spent years studying the production and impact of the adult film industry. After completing a short film about the porn industry which received acclaim at Sundance and Cannes, her audacious feature debut Pleasure premiered at Sundance 2020. Here she explains how her origins as a teenage anti-porn activist eventually led her to embracing the world and fighting for better depiction of sex work on screen.

LWLies: As a teenager you were an anti-porn activist – what led you to that movement?

Ninja Thyberg: As a teenager I realised the culture of the boys I knew revolved around porn. They were exchanging different porn films, talking about how hot the girls were. I realised how extremely normalised it was, and also that the porn was so brutal in many different ways. I knew that porn existed but I didn’t know how common it was, and I really had this image in my head of porn as this Vaseline on the lens, softcore erotic sort of thing. When I saw these films, they really shocked me and I thought it was so degrading, it was so brutal, and like the women were treated just as fuck dolls. It was all for the pleasure of men. For the young guys were watching it, that was their sexual education. Women’s sexual education at the time was watching romantic comedies, or reading women’s magazines, maybe an erotic novel, where things were super tame.

So when I was with my first boyfriend, we were both virgins, but what we expected from each other and the way we thought sex would be was totally different. That made me so sad and angry. I was already a feminist, but then for a few years I was really engaged in the anti-porn movement.

What changed your view?

After a while I started to feel it was problematic that we always focused on objectification and exploitation, and I felt like there was a lack of positive representation of sexuality. I wanted something more, and felt that porn didn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. It could be fun and empowering. I became interested in feminist porn, and started to understand that I’m never going to be able to erase all of these images, but what I can do is to try to make other images and make people open their minds to more perspectives.

It’s been a very long journey – I then studied gender at university and wrote my thesis about porn on the internet. By then I had already been to my first film school and I had started making films myself, and had noticed this problematic thing within the feminist porn movement where the women in mainstream porn were thought of as being victims, and in feminist porn the women were cool and strong edgy artists. That was very elitist because we were all very privileged, middle-class artists, who felt that if someone from our group had sex in front of a camera it was healthy but that women in mainstream porn were being taken advantage of. I became really interested in the people making mainstream pornography, who they were and what their stories were, and felt there was more to learn from that.

How were you and the cast able to maintain a positive working environment while also maintaining the illusion that what we see on screen is real?

We shot in 2019 so didn’t have an intimacy coordinator, because we didn’t know about them, but looking back I think it would have been really good! On our set I had to do that job, at the same time as being the director, and it’s a very full-time job for a film like this. But Sofia was very comfortable with all the nudity, and she’s never completely naked. There’s always these patches, and then in a lot of scenes were she appears to be naked we’re using close-ups. There’s only a few wide shots. I got a lot of help from the adult film performers, because they are so comfortable with being naked all the time. They were super relaxed, and that made Sofia more relaxed because she was in an environment where nudity is something is totally normal. And they shoot a lot of softcore porn, where you don’t show any penetration, so they fake-fuck. They know a lot about that and they helped me so much, as did a lot of the production crew who actually came from working in the adult film industry.

You had quite a long research period for the feature – around four years. Did you notice any changes within the porn industry in that period?

It’s definitely changed a lot over the past few years, and I think it had started already when I was doing the research for Pleasure. Social media really changed the game. It felt like the women who star in porn started to get more control, because with social media, they started to have contact with their fans, and build their brand in different ways. I think it was sometime in 2018 that everyone in porn started to have an OnlyFans account, but when the pandemic came and porn production shut down, that’s when it blew up, and became the place a lot of content was made. Of course that happened just after I’d shot the film so it’s not really part of my story, but there’s definitely been a sort of revolution with women starting to produce their own content. They started to hire the male talent, they got to choose who to work with, it was on their terms, they could hire a director to work for them instead of the other way around. So when they had that sort of control, they didn’t want to go back to how it was before.

There’s also #MeToo, which has had an impact in the porn industry, though they don’t really talk about it publicly that much because they’re very protective of their reputation, and people within porn like to have each other’s back, because the industry is so stigmatised. There’s this taboo about publicly addressing problems within the industry, which is a huge problem. Within the years that I spent there, I heard all of these stories about all of these men who were just like Harvey Weinstein – agents and producers and people who were more or less tricking girls into doing porn and creating these complex systems where the women felt they had no way to get out. People would talk about it and nothing ever happened, but then over the past few years, one by one some of these people have now been shut out and women have come together to report them to the police. It’s definitely changing for the better. 

When it comes to the content, I don’t know when the peak of degradation porn was, but the way porn videos are titles and the language about the women used to be so degrading, but now the fans have a different relationship with the performers and the performers have more agency. When the viewers actually see them as people, they can’t dehumanise them in the same way, which I think has made an impact. But there’s still a long way to go, and there are so many different types of porn. When people talk about porn it’s easy to just picture it as one thing, and there are so many different subcultures within the industry.

How has the porn industry reacted to the film?

There’s been many different types of reactions, I think because there’s so many different perspectives within the industry. Some of the people who acted in the film are very close friends of mine and they’re supportive of my perspective and the story I’m telling, but then there are others who aren’t on the same side as me. We had a screening where some of the men felt that the film was focussing too much on the negative aspects of porn, but then some of the men who initially criticised the film have now changed their mind. I think maybe they were initially shocked to see it from a female perspective – like finally they thought “That are we doing to these women? Are we part of the problem?” I’m not too surprised that the film has been criticised, but others within porn have said it’s very realistic and authentic.

The idea I really wanted to highlight within the film is that the problems Bella faces don’t have anything to do with the fact that people are having sex. It’s power structures. It’s oppression. That’s not happening only in the porn industry, those things happen everywhere. I’m trying to show the ways that porn can be a mirror of our society, or maybe that porn is a mirror of patriarchy and capitalism.