Pornland
Page 18
Whereas Asian women are seen as biologically disposed to being subservient, black women are presented as the very opposite. The idea that black women lack the traditional feminine quality of subservience is not something that porn invented; it has been around for some years and has at times found its way into governmental reports, most notably the Moynihan Report (1965), which blamed black poverty on black women’s emasculation of black men.8 As ridiculous as this is, black women in particular, and the black community in general, have paid a heavy price for the pathologizing of black women as unrestrained “bitches” steamrollering over black men. Now, in porn, these women get their comeuppance.
As they are in the rest of society, black women are unequally treated in the industry, often earning less than their white female counterparts for the same acts and scenes; very few black women actually become well known and are thus denied the added wealth that comes with having a name in the industry. In his book on the black porn industry, Lawrence Ross quotes the well-known black porn actor Lexington Steele as saying: “In a boy/girl scene, one girl one guy, no anal sex, the market dictates a minimum of $800 to $900 per scene for the girl. . . . Now a white girl will start at $800 and go up from there, but a black girl will have to start at $500, and then hit a ceiling of about $800. So the black girl hits a ceiling at the white girl’s minimum.”9
With film names like Juicy Black Butt, Horny Black Pussy, Bad Black Babes, and Black Pussy Stuffed, the race of the woman is clearly transmitted to the potential user. Wading through numerous sites featuring black women, what appears as a common theme is the framing of these women as aggressive and mouthy. They are constantly referred to as having an “attitude,” and the job of porn sex is to train them—domesticate them, if you will—into a subordinate state. They are presented as having a particularly excessive and uncontrollable type of sexuality that takes a real man, be he black or white, to handle.
A whole subgenre of black porn is depicted as taking place in the ghetto, a location that is described as sexually lawless, debauched, and brimming with hos, pimps, and gang-bangers. The black women who populate the porn world become not just sluts and whores, but ghetto sluts and hos, which makes them even more dehumanized than their white counterparts. On some of these sites the women are depicted as unkempt, poorly dressed, and lacking in style. The story here is that they need a pimp to turn them into presentable prostitutes, and not to worry, there is no shortage of pimps, usually black, eager to take on the job.
On Pimp My Black Teen—a spoof of the popular Pimp My Ride MTV series—the headline on the site reads: “We find ordinary black teens from the ghetto and pimp them out extreme-makeover style.” This site, like many other pimp sites, has pictures of so-called before and after makeovers, in which a teenage black woman is shown in sweat pants and jeans for the “before”—and sexy, revealing underwear for the “after.” One caption reads, “We caught up with Reneeka looking like a tattered hood rat. Once we styled her fine brown ass, her wet pussy took a long black cock just fine.”10 Above the text are pictures of “Reneeka” giving oral sex to a black male, her face smeared with ejaculate.
But while “ghetto” black women may try to clean themselves up to look more sexy and hot, there is no escaping their roots, as exemplified in the case of Saxxx: “Saxxx tried to clean herself up, but there was no fooling us, she was still a low down dirty ghetto ho! So I rammed her head into the couch as I worked her snatch like a jack hammer, then proceeded to fire a messy load all over her face.”11 Indeed, it is their so-called ghetto style that seems to make these women more appealing, as one fan, comparing white and black women performers, told Ross that white women “are all fake and shit, fake tits and fake ass on the camera, you know what I am saying? But the black chicks are the real deal. Like you could actually get with them.”12
One image of black women that is common in both mainstream pop culture, especially hip-hop, and porn, is the reduction of them to a “big black booty.” Some sites put booty in their title—like Big Booty Cuties, Black Booty Cam—while others make clear that the black women’s buttocks are the focus of attention—Sweet Chocolate Butt, Black Ass Fucks, Phat Ass Ebony, and Black Ass Fucking. And virtually every black porn site talks about the “booty” in their promo text, promising lots of “big black round asses.” African American writers such as Patricia Hill Collins have explored how this fetishization of black women’s buttocks is rooted in the belief that black women are especially promiscuous and that their “booty” is the only part worthy of notice, thus reducing black women to sexual objects devoid of humanity, individuality, and dignity.13 Instead of a whole person, the black woman becomes an appendage to a big black booty, one that she is willing to shake at any man, no matter what his race.
It is impossible to know with any certainty who buys these movies with black women, but articles in Adult Video News and on the XBIZ Web site suggest that when both male and female porn performers are black, then it is mainly geared toward a black audience. Lawrence Ross, in his interviews with the fans of this genre, found the majority to be black, and their reason for buying these movies was that for them, “black porn is the manifestation of a fetish. Black skin is looked at as being a sort of hypersexuality, an explosive combination that is more exciting and hotter than general-market or white sex.”14 If Ross is correct, then the dominant white-produced stereotypes of blacks as having what Cornel West mockingly refers to as “dirty, disgusting, and funky sex”15 would seem to have gained some traction with black men.
Also, black men have been socialized over the years by the increasingly pornographic images in mainstream hip-hop. Highly sexualized images of black women are a staple of these videos, and while, as some black critics argue, these images reinstate black women as sexually desirable in a society where the beauty standard is racist,16 they do so in ways that objectify their bodies and teach boys and young men that they are not equal partners but rather fuck objects who deserve to be treated just like the women in porn videos. Hip-hop helped develop the black porn genre, and Mireille Miller-Young argues that “white pornographers were acutely interested in how black men consumed images of black women—how they fetishized them in popular culture—so that they could expand their market beyond the standard white male consumers who generally purchased adult tapes featuring black sexuality.”17 Hip-hop was the main source of information for porn producers eager to open up the black male market; it would seem, given the growth in the number of black porn movies released, that it successfully provided a blueprint for porn imagery.18
There are now a growing number of sites that depict sex between white men and black women, and if the porn boards are any reflections, the majority of these viewers appear to be white. It seems that when either the male or female porn performer is white, then the audience is mainly white men. This makes sense given how racial conflict is constructed, articulated, and exploited as a way to enhance the sexual debasement of women. On the site White Dicks in Black Chicks—where the banner reads, “White Guys Violate Ebony Babes”—the sex is regular gonzo, but the text constructs a scenario of acute economic deprivation and subsequent sexual exploitation:
What a fuckin’ hot day it was when we found Carmen. She was walking out of the grocery store with her shirt up and her big fat tits hanging out. We had to say something to her. A fine black woman like this. But when we tried to approach her she wasn’t having it. This woman may be the most racist black woman we’ve ever met. She couldn’t stand the white man. Calling them perverts, ingrates, honkeys, even threatening to get her gang members to kick the shit out of them. But we had an angle. See Carmen has two kids and they need milk but Carmen is a little low on cash right now so we made her a proposition. One thousand bucks to fuck a white man. Our final offer. She accepted alright and when we got back to the house she also got a mouthful of white cum to wash down that milk.19
On the site is a large picture of “Carmen” on all fours with a penis entering her anus. The message here is th
at her gender, race, and class locations have visually and viscerally brought her to knees.
This site is nothing compared to the actual sexual violence that black women in Ghetto Gaggers suffer at the hands of white men. Promoting itself as a site that delivers “Ghetto Fabulous Face Fucked Beyatches,” the home page has many pictures of black women with lots of semen dripping off their faces. Surrounding these images are smaller ones of the women being anally, orally, and vaginally penetrated. Unlike much of gonzo, there is no attempt to even pretend that these women like the sex, as they are shown close to tears, grimacing, and, in many cases, thoroughly disgusted by the semen that is all over their eyes, mouth, and nose. Although the entire site is very disturbing, one of the worst images is of “Vixen,” who looks utterly exhausted. The text accompanying the images reads: “Vixen is a sassy ghetto fabulous beyatch with more attitude than Harlem has crack. She needed a learnin’ by some white cocks to remove the sass from her chicken head bobbin’ back and forth ghetto ass. We did just that. Two cocks in her holes, we ran train on her ass, slapped the taste out of her mouth and dumped two loads all over that sexy beyatch. Ghetto Gaggers, we destroy ghetto hoes, and it be showin’ like a mutha fukka!”20
It’s apparent that these pornographers see sex as a punishment for Vixen’s failure to act like a subservient female. The violence of this site is not lost on fans, who, on the porn discussion board Adult DVD Talk, share their favorite scenes. Hotboy 1999 tells his virtual friends that “i love the hardcore face fucking, the women drooling, the gagging, and the puke scenes” and asks for suggestions for more gagging and puke scenes. Panas answers, “If you like the roughest it could be the Jessica scene, where she is extremely uncomfortable and at a point she stops the scene crying. If you like vomit go for Baby Doll, a scene where she starts vomiting from the very start.”21 Indeed, on the free teaser, anyone can watch “Baby Doll” vomit over and over again as she is gagged. The role of such violence is to feminize her into being a real woman, and who better to deliver this message in a racist society than white men.
Asian women and black women are not the only women to be racially exploited by the porn industry; there is also a market for other ethnic groups, especially Latina women, and lately for Arab women. Irrespective of the ethnic group, the framing of the narrative is exactly the same—the women’s race makes them that bit sluttier than “regular,” white porn women. For men of color, the story is often more complicated.
Racializing the Stud: Men of Color in Porn
While there are literally thousands of images of Asian women on these porn sites, there are very few Asian men as sex partners. This mirrors pop culture, where apart from a few sagely old men dispensing wisdom in broken English or a kung fu–type fighter, Asian men are virtually absent in media, especially as intimate partners of Asian women, or any women, for that matter. The lack of Asian male characters as lovers, husbands, boyfriends, or even porn performers is, according to Darrell Hamamoto, an Asian American professor at the University of California, Davis, and a porn producer, due to the widely held stereotype of Asian men as asexual nerds.22 But if we move over to gay porn, we see plenty of Asian men who are portrayed as anything but asexual. Some of these sites have Asian-on-Asian male sex, but when an Asian male is paired with a white man, he is identified in much the same way as Asian women—cute, petite, innocent. The word that often is used to describe Asian men in porn is “twinks,” a term used in gay slang to mean a young, attractive, slightly built gay male. The stereotypes that make Asian men attractive as feminized gay men are the very ones that make them unappealing in straight porn, since to be a feminized man would undo the strict gender demarcation present in straight porn.
It seems that the hyperfeminization of Asian women in pop culture and porn leaks down to Asian men, whereby the group as a whole becomes feminized as the sexual object of white masculinity. This “de-masculinization” of Asian men in Western culture was the topic of discussion on Adult DVD Talk when a user asked why there were no Asian male porn stars. Mixed in with the predictable racist assumptions—“Asian men tend to have smaller genital size”—there was a range of posts that illustrated ways in which white men view Asian men as lacking masculinity. One user wrote that “even if a white woman might like an asian male, she might not want to sleep with him because of the way people view the masculinity (or lack thereof ),” to which another responded:
But: porn isn’t so much about “real life.” Like any kind of show business, it emphasizes “image” and exaggerates. Since it is about sex, there is a tendency to exaggerate masculinity vs. feminity [sic]. And like it or not, there is a tendency to perceive individuals of certain races and/or “types” as more masculine (or feminine as the case may be) than others. I would say that in the eyes of many, black guys top the list in terms of masculinity (as defined in terms of size, muscularity, physical power, dick size, aggressiveness, and self-confidence), while the common perception of Asian guys . . . would put them lower on that list. White guys would fall, on average, somewhere in between.23
What is remarkable about this post is the way the writer (Eduardo911) so neatly sums up how race is gendered to the degree that one group represents masculinity (blacks), one group femininity (Asians), and one group (whites) floats somewhere in the middle of the continuum. When this racial landscape is disrupted, porn users become somewhat uneasy, as in the case of the porn site Asian Man, which advertises itself as being about the “sexual adventures of an Asian man and beautiful girls from all over the world.” The readers’ reviews on the Sir Rodney site (a porn-review site) are very mixed, with many reviewers unsure as to how Asian the site owner and performer, Rick, really is. Some insist he is Asian, while others, such as Anonymous, argue that “Asian-man is a ripped off [sic]. This asshole who owns the site is not even Asian or Chinese.”24
For those who believe that Rick is indeed Asian, there is a lot of support for having an Asian man as the lead male performer, or, as Anonymous puts it, “the site’s unique feature is that it features an asian in the male role.”25 But for all the hype about this site featuring an Asian man, the male porn performer goes to great lengths to conceal his racial identity. In every still image on the site he hides his face, sometimes to the point of chopping off the top of a picture, or even blacking out his head. In the movies, his face is buried in the body of the woman he is penetrating or the camera is held at an angle that conceals his face. Although it is the norm in heterosexual porn to minimize the images of the male performer, perhaps for fear that the sight will make the viewer uncomfortable while watching (and possibly enjoying) another male become aroused, this site takes it to an extreme. It would seem that Rick, or whoever the owner is, feels unsure about how well an Asian man would be received by consumers, so he makes him everyman by blocking out distinguishing racial characteristics.
One other site that promotes Asian men as heterosexual porn performers is Phuck Fu Masters, owned by Asian American porn producer Jack Lee. The story told on the site is that two amateurs from Hong Kong come to America for instruction from a porn master in how to become the first-ever Asian male porn stars, and the viewers get to see them honing their skills on, mainly, white women. The text on the site both pokes fun at and reinforces traditional stereotypes of Chinese people, with constant references to Chinese food delivery, kung fu, and chi. Interestingly, the site also emphasizes just how new to porn sex these men are. Rarely in porn is reference made to the inexperience of the male performers since their masculinity is tied to their sexual prowess, but here on a site with Asian men, the theme is that the male performers need to be taught by a master. And who, in Pornland sex, is the master best suited to teach Asian men how to have sex? A black man, of course, in the form of Santino Lee, veteran porn performer and producer. So on this site, run by an Asian man, there is still a replaying of the hypermasculine black male and the feminized Asian dichotomy by making the former the “master” of the latter.
Jack Lee has been quoted
as saying that he started this Web site because “there’s a demand from many Asian men to see guys like themselves portrayed as sex symbols,” and that for him and his Asian viewers, it “is an Asian Pride thing.”26 These are almost the exact same sentiments expressed by professor and pornographer Darrell Hamamoto, although Hamamoto uses somewhat more scholarly language to justify his entry into the porn world. Creator of Skin on Skin, a porn movie using only Asian American performers, Hamamoto sees his porn movie as “a proudly erect statement on Asian American male sexuality.” How he gets to this somewhat twisted position is through a very reasonable assessment of how Asian American sexuality has been “warped by White supremacist thought/behavior, the history of anti-Asian exterminationism, colonialism, removal and relocation, deportation, and anti-miscegenation laws.”27 There is no doubt that such overtly racist practices would have a major impact on every facet of life, including sexuality, and Hamamoto’s outrage is well justified, given the racism that Asian Americans continue to experience in this country.
But Hamamoto is really only outraged on behalf of Asian American men and demonstrates utter contempt for Asian American women in his willful failure to adopt any critical analysis of how porn negatively affects the lives of Asian American women. No stranger to sophisticated thinking on how images construct reality, media scholar Hamamoto suddenly sounds like an average porn consumer when he comments, in an interview, that finding Asian American women to appear in porn is easy: “There are tons of Yella womenz who want to appear on camera doing the Wild Thang.”28 Well, certainly, if you surf the Asian porn sites, you will find “tons” of Asian women. But to conclude from this, as Hamamoto does, that Asian American porn is about Asian American women’s desire to do the “wild thang,” rather than a racist marketing ploy developed by primarily white men to make a profit off long-held racist stereotypes, is simply absurd.