A new series on Netflix details what it's like to make love, not porn. Turned On, directed by Rashida Jones, profiles two female filmmakers, showcasing what it's like when female fantasies come first.
Working with beautiful models, extravagant sets, and generations of astute photographers, documentary makers like Erika Lust and Holly Randall, daughter of Suze Randall (game-changing female adult photographer), are switching up your typical bed-time stories.
Suze Randall, after shooting for Playboy and Hustler in only the beginning of her career, embodies the portrait of a normal, non overtly feminist, London-born individual, who craved a change in the industry. Sourcing beautiful models, like Lillian Müller, Suze describes the art of porn like "watching a delicate dance." Sound like what you've been getting off on from PornHub?
With magnified attention to detail from a woman's makeup to her attire, Holly Randall makes sure everything on her sets is perfectly executed from pointed feet to flicked eyeliner, and yes, it matters in adult filmography. In comparison to typical porn media, Randall's shoots do not encompass violent, male fantasies -- like swirlies (where a man holds a woman's head in the toilet and fucks her violently from behind for those of you that don't know), as she strives to create fantastical scenes where men and women can find a tastefully exotic escape.
As Randall files her camera equipment into its home, the show flashes a statistic that states that most kids learn more about sex from porn than from school or their parents - a terrifying thought if their first impression of sex stars a girl getting a swirly, especially if that's what a young girl sees. But work like Randall's is changing that perception, not only thinking of the female perspective, but creating films that shape the future of sex.
A shot from Holly Randall's film, Workshop Day 2
And that's where Erika Lust comes in. Flushing all the violence and indecency in her work, Erika produces 'crowdsourced films, that bring female's fantasies to life.' In the first episode of the series, a pianist, completely foreign to porn, willingly casts herself in one of Lust's films in a concert of passion, climaxing as she escapes through the pulse of audience members and a man under the piano pleasures her. And when does he finish? "You can finish yourself at home," Erika, cloaked with her innocent Swedish accent says through her headset as she winks and looks at a male actor, who's, erm, deeply entrenched in the pianist's... music.
Lust's films really do feel like a tender dance between real people, who are having sex -- not making porn. Finally, there are filmmakers - women specifically - who are producing content that deserves a click through.
My (completely unsolicited) advice: this series is worth the heightened Netflix prices. And the next thing you watch to diddle around with should not some girl bent in half wearing a pair of cheap, borrowed stripper heels and lipstick from a magazine sample, not a poorly written E.L. James novel, it should be a goddamn beautifully produced film that shows two people discovering each other, and the woman cums first.
