By Missy Jubilee
For ten years I have been making films about sex.
Films that have screened in Las Vegas, in Prague, in Sydney, in Tokyo, in Washington. Films that have won 38 awards, played at 69 different festivals, and been written about by critics who use words like uncompromising and radical and, occasionally, difficult. Films that put naked bodies on screen for exactly the same reason a war photographer points a camera at a soldier — because the subject is part of what it means to be alive, and somebody has to look directly at it.
For ten years I have also had to argue, almost daily, that what I make is not pornography.
The argument is exhausting because the words are slippery. Erotica. Porn. Erotic art film. Smut. Kinky fuckery. The internet has spent twenty-five years collapsing these terms into one beige blur, and the moment somebody mentions sex on film the audience assumes they already know what you mean.
They don’t. So let me try to draw the lines, one more time, from inside the work.
The simplest definition I have ever found
Erotica is sex made by a person who is in love with form.
Pornography is sex made by a person who is in love with the outcome.
Erotica wants to be looked at. Pornography wants to be used.
That is the difference, and it’s not a moral one. I have nothing against pornography — it is older than cinema, older than the novel, older probably than the wall paintings at Pompeii. It does a job, and the job is fine. Erotica is doing a different job. The two formats overlap visually but diverge completely in intent, in craft, and in what they ask of the viewer.
If a film is sexually explicit and the camera knows nothing about light, that’s porn.
If a film is sexually explicit and the camera knows everything about light, that’s erotica.
I am simplifying — of course I am simplifying — but the simplification is closer to the truth than the academic versions.
Erotica vs pornography: five working tests
When people ask me whether something they have seen is erotica or porn, I give them five tests. The work has to pass at least three to count as erotica:
- The cut. Is the editing rhythmic, expressive, intentional — or is every cut to the next sex act simply the next thing the audience has been promised?
- The face. Whose interiority does the camera care about? Erotica stays on faces; pornography hurries past them.
- The silence. Is there sound design, score, breath, ambient room tone — or is the audio nothing but performance noise on a flat bed?
- The body. Is the body in the frame allowed to be unattractive, strange, real, sometimes ridiculous — or has it been styled until it is interchangeable with every other body in the genre?
- The duration. Does the film hold a shot longer than is comfortable? Erotica almost always does. Pornography almost never does.
A film that passes four of these is unambiguously erotica. A film that passes none is unambiguously pornography. A film that passes two could be either — and that is honestly where most of the interesting work lives.
What about “erotic art film”?
This is the phrase I use for my own work when I am being precise. Erotic art film is the narrower category — explicit sexual imagery inside a narrative or essayistic film whose primary register is artistic.
It’s the lineage that runs through Nagisa Ōshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (1976), Catherine Breillat’s Romance (1999), Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac (2013), Gaspar Noé’s Love (2015). Films that nobody would describe as porn, but which contain unsimulated or near-unsimulated sex, and which would have been banned for that imagery in most of the twentieth century.
When critics call my work uncompromising, I think they mean it sits inside this lineage. I made Pornomatik and Pavlov’s Whore and Masturbativ inside that lineage, not inside the pornography one.
The difference, again, is not about how much skin is shown. The difference is what the skin is for.
“Kinky fuckery” — the Fifty Shades problem
A surprising number of people arrive at my work after searching for the phrase kinky fuckery.
The phrase is from Fifty Shades of Grey — Anastasia Steele’s nervous, half-joking shorthand for the BDSM practices Christian Grey wants to introduce her to. E. L. James needed a euphemism that was light enough for a mainstream romance reader and specific enough to mean consensual erotic experimentation that goes beyond vanilla sex. Kinky fuckery was the phrase she landed on, and it has been doing that work in the culture ever since.
It’s a useful phrase, actually. It captures something the older language doesn’t: the idea that sex can be playful and structured and slightly absurd, all at once. Sex with rules you invent for the night. Sex as a game two adults are choosing to play.
That is closer to what most of my films are actually about than the word erotica on its own. Films like Tied Up and Subsex and Slutomatic are not portraits of desire — they are portraits of arrangement. Of two people deciding the rules of the next hour and then keeping to them.
If you arrived here searching for kinky fuckery and you are looking for a definition: it is consensual, playful, slightly theatrical sex that incorporates elements outside the conventional repertoire. It can involve restraint, role-play, sensory limitation, costume, language, or any combination. It is distinct from BDSM in that it does not require the formal apparatus of dominant/submissive identities — it can simply be a Tuesday night experiment between people who already love each other.
It is also, almost by definition, a subject for erotica rather than pornography. Pornography is too literal a register to hold a game.
Why this matters for an art film project
I am not running a glossary here. The reason these distinctions matter is that the language we use to describe sexual work decides whether it is allowed to be art.
When my films are filed as pornography, the festival circuit declines them, the press treats them as a curiosity, and the audience that would actually love them never finds them. When the same films are filed as erotica or erotic art film, the festival circuit considers them, the press writes about the craft, and the audience that wants this kind of work knows where to look.
The categorisation is not vanity. It is the entire economic and cultural infrastructure of the work.
Calling my films pornography is not an insult. It is just inaccurate, in the same way that calling a documentary a home video is inaccurate. The technique is different. The intent is different. The viewer is different. The room you watch it in is different.
The short version, for anyone who came here from Google
- Erotica is sexually explicit work made primarily as art. Form first, outcome second. Wants to be looked at.
- Pornography is sexually explicit work made primarily as utility. Outcome first, form second. Wants to be used.
- Erotic art film is a narrower category: explicit imagery inside a narrative or essayistic film whose register is artistic. The lineage of Ōshima, Breillat, von Trier, Noé — and, on a much smaller budget, mine.
- Kinky fuckery is the Fifty Shades shorthand for consensual, playful, structured sex that goes beyond the conventional repertoire. It is almost always a subject for erotica rather than for pornography, because pornography doesn’t know how to hold a game.
I have spent ten years making films that sit at the intersection of all four of those terms. If you came here because one of them was on your mind, start with the films and decide for yourself which categories apply.
The categories are mine to argue. The films are yours to watch.
Missy Jubilee is the writer-director of the Missy Jubilee Erotic Film Project. Her work has won 38 festival awards across 69 festivals in 4 countries. The complete filmography is available at missyjubilee.com/films/, with full festival history at missyjubilee.com/awards/.