by Gail Dines
What seems to be blinding Hamamoto to the exploitation of Asian American women in porn is his overwhelming desire to remasculinize the Asian American male. And this is where his project really turns bizarre, for while he critiques the dominant racist image of the emasculated Asian American male, he ultimately uses the dominant sexist image of masculinity—one based on control and dominance of women—as his measure of what a remasculinized Asian man should look like. Within this framework, it makes sense why Hamamoto sees Asian-on-Asian porn as a way to change the image of Asian American men, since Asian men get to play out the ultimate act of masculinity—fucking (over) their own women. This might be, as both Jack Lee and Darrell Hamamato say, a proud statement for Asian American masculinity, but for Asian American women, it is business as usual, with their sexuality still being used in the service of proving the masculinity of the men who are fucking them.
For all the attempts to remasculinize Asian men, it seems that it will take more than a few porn sites to shift the stereotypes of Asian men that have long been part of the collective consciousness of white Americans. As long as Asian men are seen by whites as feminized, it is unlikely that they will ever be of much interest to white male porn users as this muddies the gender demarcation between women and men. If, as argued elsewhere, men go to porn to shore up their masculinity, then they want to see men—real powerful men—fucking women who at the moment of penetration are utterly feminized by their subordinated role. The more masculine the man, the more likely he can subordinate, and the more the user/spectator gets to live out his masculinity vicariously as he watches the scene unfold before him.
If Asian men have occupied the feminized end of the masculinity continuum, then black men have been at the hypermasculinized end. Saddled with ugly stereotyping as violent thugs and rapists, black men are often held up as examples of masculinity run amok, the kind that is uncontained and out of control. In fact, this is the very masculinity that is idealized and glorified in porn, since every male in the porn world is hyperaroused and ready to do what he has to in order to pleasure himself. It would appear that the long-held image of black men as spoilers of white womanhood was in fact tailor-made for porn, so it should be no surprise that the industry has cashed in on these stereotypes in the form of the very successful genre of interracial porn (IP). As one porn retailer puts it: “My customers seem to enjoy black men ‘taking advantage’ of white women; seducing their white daughters and wives. The more ‘wrong’ a title is, the more appealing it is. The Blackzilla line is one of my best selling series. Oh No! There’s a Negro in My Mom is also one that sells as soon as it hits the shelves. My customers don’t want to see a loving interracial couple; they want to see massive black dicks, satisfying or defiling pretty white girls.”29
While the movie Long Dong Black Kong caused a stir for its racism, it was in fact a perfect title for a porn movie featuring black men and white women, just as the original King Kong movie was probably the most dramatic rendering of black masculinity that this country had ever seen when it came out in 1933. Who can forget the image of an out-of-control “black” monster rampaging through the streets of New York, with a defenseless white woman clutched to his chest? No surprise that when the movie was released in Germany in 1934, it was renamed King Kong and the White Woman. Although Kong did not have an identifiable penis, we were primed to imagine just what damage he could do to petite Fay Wray as she lay helpless in his arms.
Porn movies that pair black men with white women are very popular with porn consumers. Although there is little empirical research on the consumers of such porn, AVN articles suggest that IP is being produced, marketed, and distributed mainly to a white audience. This seems strange given that a relatively short time ago, the thought of a black man just looking at a white woman was enough to work white men up into a lynch-mob frenzy. And now they are buying millions of dollars worth of movies that show, in graphic detail, a black man doing just about everything that can be done to a white woman’s body. But it is actually less strange when we realize that in the world of porn, the more a woman—white or of color—is debased, the better the porn experience for the user. And what better way to debase a white woman, in the eyes of white men, than to have her penetrated over and over again by that which has been designated sexually perverse, savage, and debauched? One interracial porn producer says that his most popular movies are those where “the purity of the sacred white women is compromised . . . even if the white girl is as dirty and diseased-riddled as humanly possible.”30 This explains why interracial porn geared toward white men is almost totally dominated by black male porn performers rather than any other ethnic group.
It is not an easy task in gonzo porn to make any one group look more debauched than the next since everyone in porn is depicted as nothing more than walking genitalia looking for penetration and orgasm. But even in this world, black men are more reduced to their penis than any other group of men, because the action centers around “the big black cock” that can’t get enough “white pussy.” Described as “huge,” “enormous,” “monstrous,” “gigantic,” and “unbelievable” with mind-numbing monotony, the black penis is filmed from every angle to give the porn user a clear image of its size and color. The focal point of these movies is the numerous ways in which the huge black penis can do damage to small white orifices, as constant mention is made of her inability to deal with such a large penis. Or, as one fan put it, the best IP movies are those where “he is giving her more than she can handle.” The site White Meat on Black Street, for example, refers to the women as “victims” and promises users “interracial pussy splitting action” because “these horse-hung black dudes are packing so much meat it is a wonder that these tight white pussies don’t recoil at the mere sight!”31
The movies typically begin with the woman expressing shock at the size of the penis, and in some cases she tells the cameraman that she is not sure she can do the scene. Whether fake or real, as the sex begins you watch the women grimace and move away from the penis, only to be dragged back toward it as it penetrates an orifice. In some of the movies there is more than one man, so she might have penises thrust into her vagina, anus, and mouth at the same time. The usual gonzo sex goes on and on, and the viewer gets to see her gag to the point where tears are streaming down her face. While the penis is thrust into her vagina and the anus, and she is squirming, she says, often through gritted teeth, that she loves “big black cock.”
The male porn performers are, like most men in gonzo, depicted as lacking empathy and completely uninterested in the pain or discomfort they are causing the women. While this kind of behavior reduces all men in gonzo to robotic fuckers of women’s orifices, for black men it is described as part of their very biological makeup and hence carries the weight of authenticity. And porn users like authenticity. If they suspect they are being fooled, they get upset, as in the case of some fans who are convinced that the penis attached to one of the men in White Meat on Black Street is fake. As the users discuss whether the penis is real, one reader writes that “the dick is clearly fake. Watch how he has to hold it on. It doesn’t cum realistically either. Stupid niggers trying to fake big dicks.”32 Why the outrage? One possible answer could be that if the penis is fake, then maybe the woman’s pain is also fake, and this spoils the thrill of watching the action play out. Also, many of these white men seem somewhat entranced by the black penis, as they seem to be spending a lot of time studying it while masturbating.
In IP movies, the white penis is often held up as inadequate and lacking in potency when compared to black ones. An excellent example of this can be found in one of the most popular series of IP movies, called Blacks on Blondes, which feature white blonde women with multiple black males. As in most IP, the white performer is “applauded” for being able to take a black penis in her mouth, vagina, and anus. In one particular movie with “Liv Wylder,” we see an example of a theme running through IP: the emasculation of the white man by the big black penis. The tex
t on the site reads:
Bring out the cuckold mask again! Time for another white couple to live out their naughtiest fantasy, and thanks to Blacks On Blondes for making it happen! Liv and Hubby have been married for a few years, and she wears her ring proudly. But lately the spark has left the bedroom, if you know what I mean. A few e-mails later, and we’ve got Hubby in a cage while Boz and Mandingo work Liv over. And when I say they work her over, we mean it. She takes so much black dick it amazed even us. The best part of this whole deal was the end: after Liv has about a gallon of cum all over her face and clothes, and grabs a plastic bowl—for Hubby to beat off in. He does, and his wad was weak, and Liv lets him know that.33
The story that the text and images are telling in this movie has deep historical resonance as it is pitting the black male sexuality against white male sexuality, and the loser is without a doubt the latter. The white man’s poor performance in the bedroom (“the spark has left the bedroom”) as well as his ineffectual semen (“his wad was weak”) stand in sharp contrast to the size of the black men’s penises, the skill of their sexual performance (“they work her over, we mean it”), and the amount of semen they produce (“a gallon of cum”). To add to the humiliation, the last line lets us know that Liv is only too happy to ridicule her husband in front of the black men. What we have here is a playing out of a stereotype that demarcates the white man as civilized, and therefore somewhat restrained in his bodily functions, versus the uncivilized, animalistic black man who, unencumbered by social norms and dictates of bodily control, really knows how to please a woman. And when push comes to shove, the white woman really prefers the unrestrained sexuality of black men. No wonder one popular series of IP films is called Once You Go Black . . . You Never Go Back.34
This mocking of white masculinity would seem like an odd thing to do in a porn genre that is mainly targeted to white men. Men generally do not like to be ridiculed for having an ineffectual penis, so we need to consider what possible pleasure white men could get from such movies. One possibility could be that the viewer identifies with the black male, and in so doing, he gets to imagine what life would be like if he were, according to the image, an out-of-control savage black man rather than a penis-challenged white man. This would not be the first time in history that white men have identified with black men as a way to enjoy the pleasures of the (assumed) unconstrained body. The blackface minstrel shows that swept through America in the 1830s and 1840s were very popular with white male audiences. Some scholars suggest that the mask of blackness donned by the white performers conferred a freedom on them such that they could “sing, dance, speak, move, and act in ways that were considered inappropriate for white men.”35 When white men watched the minstrels, they saw not white men in blackface but what they thought was authentic black behavior being played out. The reason for this, argues Mel Watkins, is that whites assumed that the minstrel shows depicted something real and essential about blacks, because the shows were “advertised as the real thing. In fact, one group was called ‘The Real Nigs’ . . . they were advertised as ‘Come to the theatre and get a real look into what plantation life was like.’ . . . It was advertised as a peephole view of what black people were really like.”36
I would suggest here that IP is not so much a peephole as a peepshow into what whites think is real black sexual behavior. White men get a bird’s-eye view of “authentic” black sex at work. The Blacks on Blondes text above perfectly captures, albeit in an extreme form, the image of a white man, sexually caged by his race, peeping at uncaged, uninhibited black men performing sex in a way that really pleases slutty white women. The white man watching this, or indeed any IP movie, gets to shed his whiteness and identify with a group of men who seem to be tailor-made for porn. As the white man unzips, he steps out of the socially constructed cage of whiteness and into a thoroughly debauched world of huge, semen-filled black penises out to rip, tear, pummel, and hammer white women into the utter subordination of becoming a fuckee.
While this debasing of white women might well intensify the sexual thrill for the white user, it has real-world implications for the black community. All forms of oppression, be they gender-, race-, or class-based, require a system of beliefs that justify why one group has power over another. This justification process often comes in the form of negative images of the targeted group as somehow less human than the group in power, and it is this less-than-human status that makes them especially deserving of exploitation, abuse, and degradation. In porn, all people are seen as less than human because everyone is reduced to genitalia. But for whites, this is not presented as a condition of their whiteness, since in our society, whiteness is colorless and hence invisible by virtue of its power status. For people of color, however, it is their very color that constantly makes them visible as a racialized group as they carry the marker of “difference” on their skin. This is why it is impossible in porn for a person of color to have just a vagina or a penis, as their genitalia are always going to be racially visible as “Asian Pussy” or “Black Cock.”
The pornographic images that meld the racial with the sexual may make the sex racier, but they also serve to breathe new life into old stereotypes that circulate in mainstream society. While these stereotypes are often a product of the past, they are cemented in the present every time a user masturbates to them. This is a powerful way to deliver racist ideology, as it not only makes visible the supposed sexual debauchery of the targeted group, but also sexualizes the racism in ways that make the actual racism invisible in the mind of most consumers and nonconsumers alike. This is why Don Imus got fired, and why the pornographers get rich.
Chapter 8. Children
The Final Taboo
I believe that most men here will never want to accept the possibility that the young teen trend is grotesque because it will say so much about them. If you know that something is harmful and wrong and you still become aroused then what does it mean about who you really are as a man?
—Miss DeRay, porn performer, director, photographer, Adult DVD Talk
In the March 2006 special edition of Vanity Fair, thirty-year-old Reese Witherspoon is photographed looking wide-eyed and innocent in a girl’s party dress. In her left hand she is holding a little girl’s doll. Also in the magazine is a photo of then twelve-year-old Dakota Fanning wearing makeup, an off-the shoulder evening gown, and a “bed head” hairdo. Three years later, Vanity Fair carries pictures of a scantily clad fifteen-year-old Miley Cyrus with a “fuck me” look on her face. One year after that, in July 2009, Elle has a picture of Cyrus in a short black dress and thigh-high black boots. She is spread across a table with her legs apart as she looks seductively into the camera. These four images exemplify a visual landscape that has become so ubiquitous that we hardly glance twice when we see sexualized childified women and sexualized adultified children.
As we become more desensitized to images of hypersexualized young women, the fashion industry has tried to capture our attention by sexualizing young girls. A pioneer of this type of advertising was Calvin Klein, who, in the early 1980s, used the fifteen-year-old Brooke Shields in ads for his jeans with the famous tagline “Do you wanna know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” In the mid-1990s Klein ratcheted up the imagery by using mostly underage teenagers in poses that looked so much like actual child pornography that the Justice Department started to investigate him for possible violation of the law. Klein escaped prosecution, only to come back a few years later with ads for his children’s underwear line that featured prepubescent boys and girls wearing only underwear. This time Klein was forced to pull his ads almost overnight due to public outcry.
As pop culture begins to look more and more pornographic, the actual porn industry has had to become more hard-core as a way to distinguish its products from those images found on MTV, in Cosmopolitan, and on billboards. The problem for pornographers is that they are quickly running out of new ways to keep users interested. So one of the big questions they have to grapp
le with today is how to keep maximizing their profits in an already glutted market where consumers are becoming increasingly desensitized to their products. The solutions for them are the same as for all capitalists: find innovative ways to expand both market shares and revenues in existing markets, bring in new customers, and find new market segments and distribution channels. Thus the major task for the porn industry is to keep looking for new niche markets and consumer bases to open up and exploit while staying within the law, or alternatively, working to change the law—an option that the now-mainstream pornography industry increasingly employs.
The main body charged with lobbying lawmakers on behalf of the porn industry is the Free Speech Coalition, an organization that, although founded in 1991, had to wait till 2002 for its first big legal victory, the case of Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition. Here the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the coalition when it declared the 1996 Child Porn Prevention Act unconstitutional because its definition of child pornography (any visual depiction that appears to be of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct) was ruled to be overly broad. The law was narrowed to cover only those images in which an actual person under the age of eighteen (rather than one that simply appears to be) is involved in the making of the porn, thus opening the way for the porn industry to use either computer-generated images of children or real porn performers who, although eighteen or over, are childified to look much younger.
