Paulita Pappel loves porn. In fact, she grew up wanting to be a porn star.
"It's something I've been trying to figure out with my therapist," Pappel laughs, taking a drag from a cigarette. "I've been super fascinated by porn since I was 13."
Pappel dabbled in adult modeling during college, but these days, you're more likely to find her behind the camera. The Berlin-based director has dedicated her career to improving the experience of porn production for the women who work in the industry.
The pay-for-play site she runs, Ersties (PS: this link is definitely NSFW), is made almost exclusively by female film students and photographers. Ersties specializes in "authentic porn," featuring amateur models and couples engaging in unscripted, "female-friendly" sex.
And by the looks of it, Pappel is succeeding in her mission.
The porn industry has not been the most hospitable environment for women over the years, though it would cease to exist without them. Many former stars have reported physical and psychological abuse, with tales spanning sodomy, assault, transmission of sexually transmitted diseases, and being forced to work without a condom. Those who come forward are slandered or discredited. While the stigma against women watching porn may have fallen, it's no less taboo for them to make it.
When Pappel was first exposed to porn as a teenager, she found it conflicting.
"Porn is not wrong," Pappel explains, sitting in her Berlin home office during a Skype video call with Tech Insider. "But the means of production can be completely wrong."
As she watched women be sexualized through what she could only assume was a male director's gaze, she found herself wondering, "Does that woman on screen really want to be doing that?"
So her site, Erstie, founded in 2010 by two semi-anonymous women — Sara and Nina — seeks to remedy this issue by empowering the models and actresses with creative control.
Why Pappel's porn site is different
When a woman contacts Ersties about appearing in one of its films, Pappel or a cofounder will set up a call and an in-person meet-up with the performer. The team likes the actress to know what she's getting herself into, offering a level of transparency that's rare in Los Angeles.
If the woman wishes to proceed, she receives a contract that allows her to decide where she would like her content to be distributed. A seasoned porn star probably won't mind if Ersties wants to play a trailer from the film on a large aggregation site, such as PornHub or YouPorn, to drive traffic back to the full-length scene. But a first-timer may feel more comfortable if her videos are confined to the members-only, paid area of Ersties.
Of course, there's no guarantee those aggregation sites, called "tube sites," won't torrent the content and play it for free on their web pages. It's the internet. Ersties tries to prevent this from happening by attaching a code to each video, which allows them to track it across the internet. If they find it on a tube site, they contact the site managers to have it removed.
A typical day on set of an Ersties film shoot takes place in a private home. Sometimes, it's Pappel's home; she tells us she's volunteered her apartment "hundreds of times."
And before shooting, there's a long pow-wow with the cast. "If we have a girl-on-girl [scene], we ask [the cast] to tell us what they like," Pappel explains. "We ask 'is there any part of your body where you don't like to be touched?' 'What turns you on?' 'Are you ticklish?' 'Do you like kissing?'"
Before anyone slated to appear in the film even touches, Ersties interviews each woman on camera, asking about their backgrounds, what they're studying in school, how they spend their free time, et cetera. The Q&A usually relaxes people, and will play before the scene when a subscriber downloads the video.
Pappel likens the format to going on a date.
"It's more exciting to see them f-----g" after the subscriber watches the interview, she says, "because they've gotten to know them a little."
By the time the pair actually has sex on set, they know each other intimately. This familiarity, according to Pappel, ensures the actresses will actually take pleasure in filming. They might even orgasm for real.
And if the performer gets cold feet before a video uploads?
She need only raise her concerns to Ersties, and the company will delete it.
She makes what she likes
Earlier this year, I spent the day on set of a high-production porn shoot in the Calabasas hills north of Los Angeles. My experience was different than the one Pappel describes.
A director, lighting and sound technicians, set designers, a costumer, and a hair and makeup artist crammed onto the staging area. The actresses received step by step instructions on how to perform, and paused constantly so the crew could adjust the lighting on their genitals, or clean up lipstick stains.
Neither actress seemed to mind, in fact, the level of professionalism far exceeded my expectations.
But did it look pleasurable? No.
Pappel curates on set what she most prefers to watch. "It's the real thing," she says. She and the camerawoman may toss out suggestions, but otherwise the camera just follows the action — no matter how clumsy it may be.
Pappel says she's not alone in her desire for authenticity.
"I call it 'fur trade porn,'" Pappel says. "Both male and female consumers want to be sure that the porn they're consuming is not denigrating to anyone.
"The people are there because they want to [be]," she adds.
For Pappel, being a feminist and a porn director are not mutually exclusive titles.
By compensating women well — which Pappel says Ersties can do because its production budgets are so low — and providing a safe, comfortable environment to work in, the porn industry can be welcoming.
Toward the end of our video call, the conversation wandered to the first porn she filmed. It was an experience that still inspires the work she does today.
In a grand atelier that belonged to a friend of the director, Pappel shed her clothes and settled onto a mattress resting on the floor. She and two other queer actresses made love in what Pappel calls "one of the best times of my life."
Still, being an adult film model is not for everyone.
"We live in a society where doing porn will stigmatize you," Pappel says. "It's important every model is conscious of this. I always ask, 'Do your parents know? Would you tell your friends? How do you think they would react?'"
