Since then, I’ve become a little more nuanced!” We were just teenagers trying to do the right thing. Please don’t.’ So we started collecting money to pay the strippers. “But after a while, the women came out and were like, ‘You’re taking away our income.
With a friend, she would also block the entrance of a nearby strip club. “I thought I knew so much, and it turned out I knew nothing… the American ideology is so different from the Swedish.”Īs a 16-year-old, though, Thyberg was an anti-porn activist who got arrested for “sabotaging” shops that sold porn. As there’s no adult industry in Sweden (“It feels like most people in the world watch porn that’s produced in LA”), the director visited sets in LA and befriended industry folk, many of whom appear in Pleasure.
When Pleasure started as a 15-minute short in 2013, its plot also focused on a young woman undertaking double anal to boost her career, which means that Thyberg has been documenting pornography for nearly a decade.