Sugar Town Girls and the new era of female adult films
I watch porn. Why is it so important? 1/3 of the internet traffic is porn. In 2018, 14 billion videos were watched on YouPorn. And 29% of the clicks were from women. Let’s talk about it! We do watch porn, and we like it!
But 54% of the 24,000 women that were surveyed by YouPorn in 2017 say that they don’t discuss their viewing habits with friends, and 51% of them would feel embarrassed if their friends found out. Despite that, 28% of them watch it daily and another 63% weekly.
Not to mention that nowadays porn is also our sexual education. Where the schools and families fail to provide a sex education, here comes the world wide web with its massive amount of adult content spilling on everyone’s desktop, even the younger ones’. And this is how young people, especially young teenage boys, learn about sex…and that’s a big problem! With the internet full of low quality, fake and degrading videos, this sets their expectations way off.
Raise your hand ir your first time watching porn has been the encounter of a clueless girl and a boy who is expected to perform like a Rocco Siffredi with Sasha Grey. Leaving most parties unsatisfied and, in the worst case, scarred for life.
Porn is such a big part of most of people’s life, the same as sex, clothes, food… And this is what we should really take into consideration: the quality of the porn we watch.
It’s the same as choosing which restaurant to go or which food to buy from the supermarket. We don't just choose sweet or savoury, we base our decision on other factors, such as specific taste, texture, quality, and way of production.
With porn, most people get free MacDonalds everyday, unaware of the other options that are out there!
This is why I think it’s very important to introduce you to… Sugar Town Girls!
Julia Schönstädt and Coco Stuck are a German director-producer team based in London. They founded their production company Sugar Town in 2018 and they specialise in lesbian adult films. They produced three shorts: All Eyez On Me, for Erika Lust’s XConfession series, Pleasure Seekers, self funded and available on their website (www.sugartowngirls.com), and 1953, their recent addition to Erika’s XConfession.
Caroline Flores and Adreena Angela - on set for All Eyez on Me. Stylised room again, important to our work. Adreena Angela first time performer then.
HELLO GIRLS ! COULD YOU INTRODUCE YOURSELVES ?
Coco: Hello! I’m the producer of the duo, and cofounder of Sugar Town. My career started in TV production. Over the years I had other more creative adventures (immersive lighting design, DJ etc.), but I come from a structured administrative background and I have a media degree.
I’m German and I’ve lived in London for 13 years now!
Julia: I’m from Berlin. I’m the other half, the directing side, of Sugar Town, and I’m a photographer by trade. I studied in Berlin and London and my progression into moving images started to happen organically a few years ago. I never learned directing as such, but I picked it up. I started with music videos and now we are here making adult films...
HOW DID YOU MEET AND HOW DID YOU HAVE THE IDEA TO MAKE ADULT CONTENT?
J: We met two years ago, introduced by common friends, and everything else happened really quickly! We went together on a little trip and on the beach we started talking. We had the idea and we put it in action almost immediately. Half a year later we submitted our application to Erika Lust Film and that’s how it all started!
WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO START MAKING ADULT FILMS?
C: Because most of the content available is created for a different audience, we found there was a lack of films we wanted to watch ourselves. Nothing I was seeing really appealed to me.
J: The more we get involved with the genre, the more we discovered how socially relevant it is. Especially for young people, pornography is usually the first point of contact with sex and sexuality. It can have such a tremendous impact in the way it sets up expectations and in the way it influences the way romantic and social relationships develop. We also wanted to give something back to the community. We are both gay and we focus on girl-girl content. For us, it was important to create something for the LGBTQ+ community.
WHICH ARE THE MAIN PROBLEMS OF THE MAINSTREAM GAY CONTENT AVAILABLE?
TAKING INTO CONSIDERATION THAT “LESBIAN” IS THE NUMBER ONE TOPIC SEARCHED ONLINE (FROM BOTH MALE AND FEMALE AUDIENCE)
C: It’s simply not believable. And it’s not produced at high standards.
J: The problem of standards applies to all different types of mainstream contents. Gay and straight mainstream content is just not produced with the quality or ethics that make us and the majority of women feel comfortable. If you show two people having sex, it doesn’t need to be degrading for any party. We want to show something that is respectfully done. Moreover, lesbian content is often produced by straight men, and it’s so blatantly obvious that most of the time there are two straight women putting on a show for the guys.
WHAT’S YOUR MISSION AS A TEAM AND PRODUCTION?
C: We have regular catch-up meetings, especially at the end of the year, to think about where we come from and where we are going as a company. Our mission was to create something ethical, consensual and enjoyable to watch, and we both feel a sense of accomplishment recently.
J: In the grand scheme of things three films are just a drop in the ocean. And we felt we would like to broaden Sugar Town’s mission. Now that we have the structure in place, we don’t want to limit ourselves to adult content and we are working on narrative short film scripts. Ultimately everything we want to do as Sugar Town needs to stay true to our core values, which revolve around female empowerment, and that can take many different shapes and forms. Who knows? We might do another adult film soon. If they commission one to us, we wouldn’t turn it down! We want to stay open while still standing for female empowerment.
C: Our other goal is to create a sense of community. Especially on set. On our last production, filming 1953, there was a very content atmosphere. Everyone was very pleased at how well we all worked together and how nice it felt to have accomplished this in such a smooth way. In most of my broadcasting experiences, I was often the only woman in a crew of a hundred people. Maybe there was a vision mixer, a director, or a presenter who were also female, but that was it. So it’s really nice now to be able to recruit an almost entirely female crew, even for certain departments that are traditionally very male dominated, like lighting. There are highly capable and talented women for any profession. You might have to look a little bit harder to find them, but they are definitely out there!
Adreena Angela as a double role in her and our second film ‘Pleasure Seekers’ self funded and available on Sugar Town Girls.
HOW DOES AN ADULT FILM SET WORK?
C: In the pre-production phase, it is highly important to cast the models or performers in the right way, so that they have a good chemistry. We introduce them to each other in advance for them to arrive on set comfortably. Everything that concerns consent is high priority to us. We apply similar principles to the crew we hire to work with us. We need to know we can trust each of them. We also like our professionals on set not to be coming on board just for the day pay, but that they support our movement and ethics and they share everything we stand for.
J: Because of the nature of the set, it’s so important to have people with the right attitude around. You just can’t work with someone who treats it as any other job. It’s a fine line between having the skills and showing a true and honest interest in the project. Our DOP, Matt, was the only male on set. I worked with him on many projects before and I fully trust him. He is such a gentle guy, and despite us trying to employ women in the key roles, I knew he would be a great choice.
C: As part of our ethical work environment policy, we provide everyone with a good day rate. Of course, at the very beginning we had to call for favours, but now we are running on very respectful budgets. We pride ourselves in having a lot of people supporting us. Especially for our self-funded film, we had the luck of having some angel investors. They are literally our angels! These two amazing women watched our first film and reached out to say they wanted to support us financially. I don’t think we would have being able to be where we are now without their help. This wasn’t something we were looking for, it just happened. I think it’s all about karma: we try to be good with our karma and the karma is coming back.
Julia Schönstädt - director and co-founder of Sugar Town on set of first film for Erika Lust ‘All Eyez on Me’.
HOW DO YOU FIND THE PERFORMERS?
J: We tend not to work with any performer from the agencies. I think we got a good mix of people who have experience in the industry and newcomers. I find it very interesting how many women write to us and say that they want to be part of it, and they ask to be considered as performers. They would never act in a mainstream film, but they love that there is an alternative for women out there.
C: There are a lot of people who play with the idea of becoming performers and these kinds of films encourage them to take that step in a safe and empowering way.
HOW DO PEOPLE REACT TO YOUR JOB?
C: I don’t have any secrets with my immediate environment, but I’m a little bit cautious bringing up the topic with people who might not have an understanding of why we are doing this. I can relate this to my coming out story. At the time, my mom didn’t want me to tell any one else in the village. Not because she didn’t love or accept me, but because of the perception the others would have had of her. Not even of me.
J: My experience is a bit different, because I went into it with my real name. I attached my identity to it. I think it’s different as director. If I hide it, I would feel I wasn't sending the right message. So far I haven’t had any negative feedback. Of course I will never know if someone didn’t select me for a job after having seen these projects on my portfolio, but all the feedback I’ve had were positive. I was a bit nervous when the first film came out, I didn’t know what my parents would think… but they were so amazing! I’m so proud of them. I would have never dreamt how cool, open and laid back about it they would be!
Caroline Flores on set for ‘All Eyez on Me’ // set design important part of work.
Erika Lust, Adult Film Producers and Director based in Barcelona (Spain), is probably the first and most famous woman to enter the porn industry with the mission of changing it to a more fair and consensual business, empowering women through Female Gaze Films.
HOW DID YOUR COLLABORATION WITH ERIKA START? AND HOW HAS IT BEEN WORKING WITH HER?
C: As soon as we decided to enter the industry, we accidentally came across Erika Lust’s website. We contacted their company and they asked us to pitch an idea. We sat together and in ten days we submitted the proposal. We had a Skype conversation and they said they loved it.
J: Working with Erika has been amazing. They are supportive and involved, but they don’t want to constrain you in any way in your artistic vision. And it’s such a beautiful blessing for any creative!
C: They are also super open-minded when it comes to festivals and screenings of the films. They let us go with our own brand, Sugar Town, because they know we are part of their community. We feel the need to produce more of our own content now to stream on our platform, but, we have established a great working relationship with Erika. There is mutual trust and hopefully it will continue.
WHY PEOPLE SHOULD PAY FOR PORN FILMS?
C: It’s a lot of work! We pay everyone a fair wage. There is a lot of preparation to make films to these high standards. We would like invite people to consider, before going to a free streaming website, to come to one like ours and spend the money they would usually spend on a pint at the pub to watch something of quality and participate in our movement.
J: There is the expectation that porn is for free, because people got used to it that way for years and years. People will ask why they should spend money when there is an endless stream of content for free. It’s really the same reasons why we pay for any other service: quality doesn’t come for free. I find it really interesting that a lot of people like what we do, but there is still a gap between morally supporting and actually going and buying it.
C: About people’s viewing behaviours: a lot of people are searching for hours and hours and they get a huge sense of frustration by not finding films they really like. They have to go through horrible content before finding something appealing.
J: There is a solution for this now! Just go to Erika’s or our website!
Front cover photo: Viktoria Vaar and Reed on set for second contribution for XConfessions, ‘1953'. Film showcasing more diversity in body shapes and gender roles
Follow Sugar Town Girls here….
website: www.sugartowngirls.com
instagram: sugartowngirls
FB: @sugartowngirls
