Porn’s ‘seismic shift': A Q&A with director Shine Louise Houston
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by Lux Alptraum Warning: Some photos featured NSFW. In the mid-2000s, porn was going through a seismic shift. Technological innovations like cheaper cameras and widespread high-speed internet had begun to upend the industry. Suddenly, being a pornographePorn’s ‘seismic shift': A Q&A with director Shine Louise Houston
by Lux Alptraum Warning: Some photos featured NSFW. In the mid-2000s, porn was going through a seismic shift. Technological innovations like cheaper cameras and widespread high-speed internet had begun to upend the industry. Suddenly, being a pornographer was cheaper and easier than ever. Before, you needed a distribution deal (or a whole lot of money) if you wanted to get your film in front of a substantial audience; now all you had to do was grab a camera, post a video on the internet, and wait for the cash to come rolling in. Filmmakers who’d previously felt shut out of the adult industry suddenly had a way in, and a flood of female, queer, POC, and other marginalized voices began to reenvision what porn could look like. One of those voices happened to be Shine Louise Houston. Houston didn’t originally intend to be a pornographer. As a film student at the San Francisco Art Institute, she assumed her career would take her along a more traditional path. But after graduation, she began working at local sex toy boutique Good Vibrations. As she helped customers navigate the store’s selection of porn movies, she realized that her talents as a filmmaker could help more consumers find erotic films they could connect with—particularly consumers who, like Houston, craved erotica from the point of view of someone who wasn’t white, straight, and male. Read more