A note on why I’m here

On writing, curiosity, and shame.

Hello Substack, I’m Erika Lust and I’ve been thinking a lot about writing lately.

I don’t mean this in the abstract. Writing has always been very personal to me. It was an integral part of my expression, before the films (that came much later, and is a fun story you’ll be learning more about very soon), or even before I had the language (or even knew some of the languages I’m now writing in…).

As a girl, I was always reading and writing. Stories, poems, my diary, theatre monologues, articles for the school magazine. I even won a few small awards here and there, which at the time felt huge.

And then, cinema took over.

And I love cinema—it has been my main language for more than twenty years. There are things film can do for me that no other media can, like holding chemistry, tension, glances. I’m fascinated with how desire moves without a single word being spoken.

But lately I’ve felt very clearly that there are things I want to say that images can’t carry on their own. Or that are just too expensive to film.

And that’s why I’m here.

I wanted to have a space to think out loud, to write about what I see, what I react to, and to figure some of it out. A place that would let me stay a little longer with things that, in interviews or panels, are reduced to a sentence or a position.

My new book LUST: Pleasure, Performance, Power (coming soon!) is also part of that process. It’s a very personal journey—from being a shy Swedish “good girl” to building a career in an industry that most people prefer to talk about from a distance, often with judgment or sometimes even contempt.

But the book is not a conclusion. It is more of a starting point of all the questions that I keep returning to. One of those questions is shame.

We often talk about shame as something private, something individual. But I don’t think it is. I think it’s something we learn, something that is passed down, something that shapes us before we even have the words to understand it.

I remember one of my earliest encounters with it. I must have been around nine. I wrote down a sexual word I barely understood—kuk, a word for “cock” in Swedish—trying to be bold in front of other children. When the adults found it, the atmosphere changed completely. No one met my curiosity with calm. It was clear to me that I had crossed a boundary, but no one explained why.

That feeling stays in the body.

And I think many women know exactly what I mean, even if they would describe it differently. It shows up in small ways: in silence, in embarrassment, in the sense that wanting too much—or too openly—might cost you something.

Even today, after everything has supposedly become more “open,” I don’t think we speak honestly about desire. We are surrounded by sexual imagery, but at the same time, so many people still don’t have the language to talk about what they feel.

We are very good at showing sex.

We are not very good at saying what we desire.

And that contradiction is something I live inside of, both as a filmmaker and as a woman.

Because desire, to me, has never been only about sex. It’s tangled up with imagination, with permission and self-knowledge, bundled with the question of who gets to be a subject in their own story rather than an object in someone else’s. It’s about whether we can allow ourselves to be complex without immediately trying to clean it up.

In my work, I’ve seen how much people carry inside them that doesn’t fit the roles they’ve been given. I’ve seen women begin to speak almost apologetically. But when something shifts—when there is permission, when we start unlearning what we’ve been taught—we stop asking for that permission.

I’ve seen these moments happen. They are small, but they are not small.

Because behind them there is always something else: a long history of being told how to be, how to want, how to stay acceptable. That “good girl” voice that so many of us know. The one that edits before we even speak.

I don’t think that disappears just because we live in a more visually explicit culture. If anything, sometimes it makes the tension stronger.

That’s also why I’ve never been interested in simple conversations about porn. Porn is not one thing. It reflects the culture that produces it, with all its contradictions. It can reinforce stereotypes, but it can also challenge them. It can be empty, and it can be meaningful.

What matters to me is whether we are able to talk about it, and about desire more broadly, with honesty and complexity.

And that kind of conversation feels harder and harder to have. Everything speeds up, hardens into certainty, turns moralistic. But desire is not clean. It doesn’t fit easily into categories of right and wrong. And when we try to force it into those shapes, we often end up losing something essential.

So maybe I want to claim this space as a way of resisting that.

A place where I can write more freely. A space to connect what I’m making with what I’m reading, watching or thinking. A virtual room of my own (with you as my guests, of course!), where I can go deeper into certain films and certain questions.

And also a place where you can be part of it. Because I don’t want this to be a monologue. I’m genuinely curious about how these things land for you—what you agree with, what you don’t, what you’ve experienced, what you’ve never had the chance to say out loud. What perspectives I might be missing.

Don’t come here looking for perfection. This is a space that embraces contradiction and curiosity. And welcomes dialogue (comments below!).

I come here as a filmmaker, as a writer, and also, more importantly, as a person who is still trying to understand myself and our world.

Think of this post as a beginning, an opening.

And maybe, a place where we can talk about desire without letting shame have the final word—even if we are all still shaped by it.