Racism (Again)
I’ve written before about how racist porn is, but in a series where I’m considering how porn may or may not be impacting society that racism means that there is a huge element of society that I’ve been ignoring: non-white people. Why have I been ignoring them? Well, I’ve been following porn’s lead on that one, because porn doesn’t include a lot of people of colour.Excuse me, I stand corrected: There’s a shitload of Asian fetish porn, and a smaller amount of South Asian fetish porn. But I do mean “fetish.” This isn’t porn that just happens to include women who happen to be Asian or South Asian, it’s porn that’s explicitly made around the fact of the actors’ Asian-ness or South-Asian-ness.
Note: If there are any cultural studies students reading this blog – or, for that matter, any Asians! – or, really, just anybody who’s halfway “conscious” – I realize that I should be saying “East Asian” and “South Asian,” instead of shortening “East Asian” to “Asian.” It’s not like Japan and China and Korea are somehow more part of Asia than India or Pakistan. Unfortunately, again, I’m following porn’s lead on this, because any porn which features East Asians is always labeled “Asian Porn,” and any porn featuring South Asians is always labeled “Indian Porn” (which is an even worse, culturally and geographically speaking). So apologies to my Asian readers.
In the porn world, an East Asian girl is an Asian girl, a South Asian girl is an Indian girl (regardless of what country she or her ancestors are actually from), a First Nations girl is also an Indian girl (because we’re fucked up like that), a black girl is a black girl, but a white girl is just a girl.
A white girl can be a funny girl or an aggressive girl or a smart girl or an introspective girl, but a black girl is a black girl who’s also funny, or a black girl who’s also smart, or a black girl who’s also introspective, or a black girl who’s also aggr– well, people assume that all black girls are aggressive, so that one doesn’t apply, right?
A person of colour’s race is an inherent part of their identity in porn – in fact, it’s considered the primary and sometimes only part of their identity – while a white person’s race isn’t considered to be a factor. In other words, porn is just like the rest of society in North America: white is considered “normal,” and anything else is “other.”
Finding People of Colour in Porn
The point being that although there are girls in porn from other ethnicities and cultures they’re only there by virtue of their ethnicity or their culture. And you’ll never find porn that involves, for example, a Japanese girl and a Pakistani girl gettin’ it on, because nobody would have any idea how to label it! Calling it “lesbian porn” wouldn’t do, because people will assume the girls are going to be white, so they’d probably want to call it “lesbian, Indian, Asian porn,” which is a lot of typing, so they just won’t bother to make that movie in the first place. (If they already have, send me a link. I may not get off on the whole cultural fetishization, but still, watching two girls pleasure each other is usually fun.)Anyone who consumes any amount of porn becomes immediately aware of the huge genre of Asian fetish porn that exists – white dudes fucking love East Asian chicks for some reason – but there is also a smaller set of black fetish porn. In the mainstream, however, whenever you see black fetish porn it’s almost always interracial. You hardly ever see a black guy and a black girl, or two black girls, or a black orgy. It’s always a gang of black guys fucking a white chick (and yes, they love to throw the word ‘gang’ in there), or, rarely, a white guy fucking a black chick.
How did the word “chick” suddenly start appearing in this post? It’s not a word I typically use. Is it sneaking in because I’m thinking about girls from other cultures? Even as I’m consciously thinking about racism in porn, am I still changing the way I speak about this subject? And if so, how fucked up is that?
Of course, when I talk about what I see in porn, I’m talking about “mainstream porn,” and when I say “mainstream porn” I mean “porn I can find without having to do any special looking.” Remember that post on addiction where I showed a screenshot of Smutty’s Hot page? Remember how many women of colour were represented on that page? That’s right, none. Zero. (Even as I wrote that post, I was alternately smiling and cringing inwardly as I talked about “variety.”) Which is not atypical: if I log onto Smutty and look through my feed there are days when I won’t see a single person of colour, and when I do see a girl who’s not white she’s almost guaranteed to be East Asian. Rarely will I see a brown girl, and more rarely than that will I see a black girl. There will be the occasional ‘gang’ of black men, but seeing an Asian man (from any part of Asia, East or South) is extremely rare, and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen, say, a First Nations man. Actually, no I can’t, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a First Nations dude in porn – how do you hold up zero fingers? (That’s just a fist, which means something entirely different in porn...)
But I’m lazy, so I’m just letting Smutty give me whatever porn it feels like giving me. What if I was to actually search for something else; is there porn that’s specifically made by black people for black people? By Japanese for Japanese, by Latinos for Latinas, by Pakistani for Pakistani, etc.? I don’t know. I do know that occasionally, very rarely over the span of my adult life, I have come across porn that purported to be by black people for black people. All of the actors were black, and there was a different “feel” to it. But the stuff I have seen along those lines never felt authentic to me. It didn’t feel like it was made by black people for black people, it felt like it was made by white people for white people, but claiming to be by and for black people so that when white people consumed it they could feed their inherent racism (while getting off). It felt like the people who put it together knew nothing about black people or black culture other than what they’d seen in blaxploitation films, and were simply transferring that to porn. As I say, though, I haven’t searched for non-white-produced porn, so it may very well exist.
Porn’s Impact on POC
But now let’s go back to the original question that prompted this post: How might porn be impacting people of colour? As I am wont to do, I’ll suggest some examples.Suppose I were a young black man, just hitting puberty. I’ve got a tablet with a high speed internet connection and I’m ready to start exploring what this whole sex thing is all about, so I do what everyone else is doing and start looking for porn. What am I going to see? The same thing I see when I go to the movies, or turn on the TV, or open a magazine: a whole hell of alot of white people, and very few people who look like me. I’m a guy so the main reason I’ll be looking at porn is to see naked ladies, but the vast majority of girls I’m going to see are going to be white or East Asian. When I do see a black girl she’s not going to be a “regular” girl, she’s going to be a “sassy black girl with attitude.” As for the guys I see, there won’t be many who look like me, except for the rare occasions when there is a group of them – sorry, a gang of them – fucking a white girl. And for some reason they always look angry. Shouldn’t they be happier, since they’re having sex? As a teenage boy I sure wish I was having sex right now! I’d be happy if I was fucking that white girl! Or any girl! Or... even my hand. Excuse me for a moment...
Or suppose I were a young Japanese American dude, again, just hitting puberty, going to porn to get my rocks off. What am I going to see? Well, if I’m going there looking for naked ladies I’ll have more luck than my black counterpart because there will be lots of Japanese girls in amongst the sea of white girls. (There will also be some Chinese and Korean and Thai girls who are labelled Japanese, even though they’re clearly not, because white people can’t tell us apart.) I probably won’t see a single man that looks like myself, though. All of those Japanese girls will be getting screwed by white guys, or maybe black guys. Apparently nobody wants to hire guys like me to do porn. Sometimes people will allude to Japanese men, but when they do they’ll imply that we all have small penises!
I won’t even bother to pretend what it would be like to be a young girl of colour exploring porn, which is a huge gap, but it’s getting so far out of my experience that I have no idea what it would be like for her.
But people of colour are consuming porn, or at least some of them are. One of my favourite affairs was with a girl who happened to be black, and she very much enjoyed porn. It was a few years ago and she was 23 at the time, so she was of the age that she probably grew up with easily accessible porn. I’ve also got a friend who’s a person of colour (who knows lots of my secrets) and who is my age, and she consumes porn as well. (Frankly, any woman that I can talk to in a realistic way about sex consumes porn; I’ve led a charmed life.) So there are people of colour who are consuming “mainstream porn,” but I couldn’t say if it’s a majority or a minority. For those who do, is porn impacting them differently than it impacts white people? If so, how?
For my white readers, put yourself in the place of one of these kids: You turn on your computer fap-ready, start downloading porn, and what message are you going to receive about yourself?
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If you’re an Asian girl (East or South): We can’t tell any of you apart, other than barely being able to tell an East Asian girl from a South Asian girl, but we think you’re all very sexy. (And submissive – that’s an important part of the sexiness.) We don’t know or care about any aspect of your personality, we just like the fact that you’re Asian.
- For the East Asians, we seem to like it any time you dress like Sailor Moon, so you might want to think about getting some outfits.
- For the South Asians, please make sure you have a bindi, regardless of your religion.
- If you’re black (male or female): You don’t talk much, and when you do you talk like a character in a 70s movie (made by white people). For some reason you never have sex with other black folks, only with white people and occasionally East Asians. Oh, and your sex is always aggressive, like an animal.
- If you’re a black dude and you’re gay: Sorry, you don’t exist.
- If you’re a First Nations girl: you’re a lot like the Asian girls in terms of demeanour, but you tend to go even further with the submission, always keeping your eyes down. In fact docile is probably a better word than submissive. You only ever wear your hair in two long braids on either side of your head, and tend to dress in animal skins and moccasins, and wear beads at all times. You also probably talk like a character from a cowboys & indians movie from the 1950s: “Me wantum cock. Me wantum make cum.”
- If you’re an Asian dude: Sorry, you don’t exist.
- If you’re a First Nations dude: Sorry, you definitely don’t exist.
- If you’re Latina: You’re practically a pornstar in real life; you don’t really care about anything but sex. Frankly, if you’re not having sex at this very moment and crying out “Aye papi!” at the top of your lungs white people around the world will be shocked.
The Reasons
If you’re reading between the lines, I’ve been implying in this post that the reason for the lack of people of colour in porn is probably because the mainstream porn industry is run by white people, who A) don’t know, B) don’t care, or C) don’t know or care what people of colour want to see in porn. There may be additional reasons, however.For example, it’s quite possible we don’t see more people of colour in porn simply because there aren’t as many people of colour who are willing to become pornstars. If I may overgeneralize, people of colour typically have stronger family ties and more close-knit communities than white people do, which translates to more of a worry about the shame that would come from being discovered. If you’re a woman of colour you’re less likely to want to get into porn because Uncle So-and-so might see it, which would be gross. And, on the other side, a more closely knit community would also provide more of a safety net for you; the cliche is that people get into porn because they need the money, but there is less need to get into porn for those reasons when you can rely on your community to help.
Again, sweeping generalizations. People of colour do go into porn, so these rules don’t apply equally to everyone. I fully recognize it.
As a side note, I know that when white people hear generalizations like this they often react against it. “Of course I love my family! How could you imply I don’t?” they think. It’s how I reacted, too. And then I moved to a city where I interacted with more people from more cultures, and I started to realize that it’s actually true. We may think we value our families, but not like people from other cultures do. (Yes, almost all of them.) We may think we have close-knit communities, but we’re fooling ourselves. We’re very individualistic in North America, in the white world. It’s much easier for a white person in North America to lose ties with their family, to have a falling out, to disregard their parents, than it is in other cultures.
I can say this because I have a white friend, and he said it’s true.
So there may be reasons why people of colour aren’t going into porn. For all I know, porn producers are just dying for more people of colour to get into porn.
But that’s not the reason for this post; in this post I’m just thinking about the effects porn has on people of colour, in its current state, regardless for the reason it’s in that state.
Really, I’m just asking questions. I don’t have any answers.
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