“I think a better question to ask would be: what do you get out of it?” she added. “Because I would never ask someone who works at a supermarket or a pharmacy, ‘Why would you work there?’ But as soon as there’s sex involved or especially toward women, when they’re using their bodies – they’re objectifying themselves rather than giving that power to men – you want to ask why. “What I realized very quickly was that the question ‘Why?’ is so problematic,” she said. “I realized that it was so obvious that it was work,” she said. Shadowing adult film sets and building relationships with performers changed her mind. “When I got to the US, I had a lot of prejudice toward the sex industry and especially toward women in the sex industry,” she said.
Kappel described the months spent researching her character as a similar evolution. Photograph: Loïc Venance/AFP/Getty Images Sofia Kappel and Ninja Thyberg, the lead actor and director respectively. “I became so aware of how we look down on women, and how much that is part of reproducing a male gaze,” she said. “They know so much more about patriarchy than I do, and they are super aware of everything.” The realization changed Thyberg’s understanding of feminism and her approach to the film. “I started to understand how it’s the complete opposite,” she added. “I was on a high horse … I had a very good intention, but I was coming from a. Thyberg said she arrived in LA nervous to talk to female performers, and with somewhat of a “victim perspective” – “I thought that they were taking part in this very patriarchal system and playing along with these super stereotypical gender roles because they don’t have the theoretical perspective that I have,” she explained. The research checked many of her existing biases. So Thyberg traveled to Los Angeles and, starting in 2014, spent five years researching for the film – getting to know adult film performers, befriending producers, observing sets, networking through Mark Spiegler, one of the industry’s top agents, who plays himself in the film (as do numerous real-life performers). For the feature, Thyberg knew she needed first-hand experience – “I wanted to challenge people’s prejudices, so I felt I had to this properly and get to know and then build a story, not decide beforehand what the story would be,” she said. The short took a much more critical view of the industry, based on research conducted via the internet. Pleasure is a nearly decade-long journey for Thyberg, a former anti-porn activist who developed the feature from her 2013 short film of the same name. We live in a patriarchy, and the porn industry is also that.” We’re a sexist society, and the porn industry is also sexist. “We are a racist society, and the porn industry is also racist.
“Everything that would be present in our society will also be shown in the porn industry,” said Kappel of the film. Porn, as Pleasure implicitly argues, is less a seedy corner of society than a mirror. We act like it doesn’t exist,” she said.Īnd yet it is nearly ubiquitous various international studies have put porn consumption rates at 50% to 99% percent among men, and 30% to 86% among women, according to the American Psychological Association. “I think the porn industry as a subject is very interesting since it’s very present in our lives but we don’t talk about it.
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But she was looking for challenging, uncomfortable experiences – there is, unsurprisingly, a lot of nudity in Pleasure, though lack of clothing is so perfunctory as to become unremarkable – and was sold on Thyberg’s vision of a film about porn as a professional business and microcosm of society. “My initial thought was: absolutely not,” Kappel told the Guardian. The 24-year-old first met Thyberg through a mutual friend, who recommended her based on an early character description for Bella. Another act of ambition: this is Kappel’s first-ever acting role.