There is a question that has followed every frame of the Future Sex Love Art Projekt for fifteen years: is this pornography?
The short answer is no. The longer answer requires us to think seriously about what pornography actually is — and what it is not.
The Definition Problem
Pornography has never been cleanly defined. The United States Supreme Court famously retreated into subjectivity in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), with Justice Potter Stewart writing the words that have haunted every censorship debate since: “I know it when I see it.”
That is not a definition. It is a confession that no definition exists — that obscenity is determined by the moral anxieties of the person holding the gavel, not by any objective standard.
What we have instead is a cultural consensus, endlessly contested, that separates “pornography” (commercial, mechanised sexual imagery designed for arousal) from “erotic art” (work that uses sexuality as artistic subject matter, embedded in meaning, context, and authorial intent).
What Film Festivals Know That Platforms Don’t
The Future Sex Love Art Projekt has won 363 international film festival awards. It has screened in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Singapore, Tokyo, and Madrid. Festival juries at some of the world’s most respected independent film competitions have watched this work and called it — specifically — experimental cinema, documentary art, and feminist filmmaking.
Film festivals do not give awards to pornography. They give awards to art.
And yet the same work has been removed from Patreon, defunded by Stripe, banned from Vimeo, and flagged by payment processors who categorise any explicit female body as commercial sexual content by default.
The gap between what festival programmers understand and what algorithm-driven platforms enforce is where the distinction between erotic art and pornography becomes most visible — and most consequential.
The Three Tests
The most useful framework for distinguishing erotic art from pornography involves three questions:
1. Who is the author, and what is their intent?
Commercial pornography is produced by a third party (a production company, a director, a platform) using performers as raw material. Erotic art is self-authored: the creator is also the subject, and the work exists to express, explore, or interrogate rather than to produce a standardised sexual transaction.
163 THIS IS NOT MY SKIN, for example, is a film about dissociation — about the experience of existing inside a body that feels like it belongs to someone else. The explicit content in that film is not incidental decoration. It is the argument.
2. Is the work embedded in context?
Pornography is designed to be consumed without context. Each scene is meant to be interchangeable, arousing regardless of what came before or after. Erotic art depends entirely on context — the same body, the same act, means something radically different in film 001 than it does in film 215.
215 OBSCENE EXPOSURE cannot be understood outside the fifteen-year arc of the project it belongs to. Strip away that context, and you lose the work entirely.
3. What is the work asking the viewer to do?
Pornography asks its viewer to consume. Erotic art asks its viewer to think, feel, confront, witness. The most important films in this project — 171 VULVALUTIONARY, 080 POPPORN, 050 ART OF SEX — do not leave the viewer passive. They demand engagement with questions that have no easy answers.
The Double Standard
It is worth noting that male-authored explicit art — from Last Tango in Paris to Blue Is the Warmest Colour to the entire canon of male photographers who built careers on the nude female body — has rarely faced the same categorisation problem.
When a woman authors her own explicit body, using her own sexuality as the material of her work, the presumption is different. The assumption is pornography until proven otherwise. The burden of proof falls on the artist.
The Future Sex Love Art Projekt has spent fifteen years making that proof. 363 times, festival juries have examined the work and returned the same verdict: this is cinema.
Why the Distinction Matters
This is not merely an academic question. The conflation of erotic art with pornography has real consequences: for funding, for distribution, for the ability of artists to sustain their work financially, and for the cultural record of female sexuality as a valid subject for serious artistic inquiry.
When platforms erase erotic art by categorising it as pornography, they are not enforcing community standards. They are making a political decision about whose body counts as art and whose body counts as product.
The line between erotic art film and pornography is not drawn in content. It is drawn in authorship, in context, and in intent. And it matters enormously.
Browse the full Future Sex Love Art Projekt: all 230 films.