The Relationship Between Race And Porn
This is not an open letter against pornography.
Nor is it an attempt to demonise sex workers and make their income streams any more unstable. This is not a call to arms to slut shamers everywhere.
This is not written by an expert. I am a cis white woman; the privilege of learning about racism through reading rather than living is not lost on me.
This is an exploration into why you should care that 55% of men said porn was their main source of sex education (BBC 2017). This is a deep (if you pardon) discussion about three of the most prevalent, and arguably most damaging, taboos in porn: Race, Age, and Violence.
First off, Race in porn and the exotification, fetishization, and degradation that comes with it. From colonial origins to the ubiquity of racial categories in online sites, the entrenchment of porn in western society has undoubtedly shaped our cultural conception of race.
A little context; porn is racist.
Porn is racist because the behemoths of the online video industry run racist working environments. A working environment (because that is what porn sets are) is racist when white actors can refuse to film with black actors and that’s the end of the discussion. A working environment is indisputably racist when working with black actors means that a white actor is “tainted”.
But, like I said, this is not an attempt to demonise porn in totality. There is plenty of body positive, queer, diverse, consensual and delightfully filthy porn out there. I wholeheartedly encourage you to explore this kind of porn. The bulk of white-produced mainstream porn, however, is racist.
Pornography is a “blueprint of (a) culture’s anxieties”, and a flashpoint for arguments about social norms (Kipnis, 1998). Porn acts as a microcosm, revealing the racism which underpins western (that is, ex-colonial) society. Stereotypes of gender, race, and sexual diversity become culturally ingrained and are perpetuated by their continued, unchallenged, portrayals within porn. There are clear parallels between the ways in which colonisers talked about non-white bodies and how the same bodies are described and categorised in porn today.
The Exotification of Ebony
Black bodies have a long history of being depicted as more primitive, hypersexualised and at once desirable and undesirable. Early European encounters with African communities led to a falsely intrinsic link being drawn between African cultural attitudes and the idea that African women were sexually aggressive.
This was compounded by European observations of African women with steatopygia – a genetic characteristic where fat builds around the buttocks and thighs. Women like Sarah Baartman were abducted and commodified, displayed to Europeans as dehumanised objects of fascination and titillation.
Large buttocks were linked to sexual promiscuity and taken to be evidence of racial inferiority in Europe for hundreds of years. Military drafting propaganda, designed to persuade young (usually white) virile men to sign up to fight, included postcards with naked African or native women, with exaggeratedly large breasts and buttocks. The message was clear; wish you were here, the local women are ready and waiting for your pleasure.
We may have moved on from overt colonisation (at least under that name), but the message that black women are naturally more sexually available remains evident. Sir Mix-A-Lot’s 1992 banger, ‘Baby Got Back’ has the lyrics:
“She looks like a total prostitute, 'kay? /I mean, her butt, is just so big /I can't believe it's just so round, it's like out there /I mean gross, look/She's just so, black”
In ‘Ass Shot’ Kanye advises us “your girl ain't got no ass, she need to buy one”. Major Lazer topped them all with the immortal lines “Bubble butt, bubble, bubble, bubble butt / Turn around, stick it out, show the world you got it!”.
For the record, my objection is not to these songs. I shake the limited amount I possess to Fergie’s ‘My Hump’ at every opportunity, and I am not the only white woman to do so. What I’m hoping to show is the direct connection between three things:
1) racist colonial understanding of black bodies,
2) the proliferation of the same racial stereotypes in porn today, and
3) how these stereotypes are extrapolated and used to justify systemic racism and exploitation.
In the United States in 2016, every single state where “ebony” made the top three of Pornhub’s search list had anti-miscegenation laws until a Supreme Court ruling in 1967. The anti-miscegenation laws defined mixed-race sexual relations or marriage as a felony. It was literally a crime to get down and dirty with anyone with a different skin colour than you. A judge in the 1963 case, Loving vs Virginia (which is, incidentally, one of the best aptronyms I’ve ever encountered), defended Virginia’s segregation laws, saying:
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red, and placed them on separate continents... The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend the races to mix.”
Racism, of course, is not black and white. It’s also Asian and white, Latinx and white, basically any-way-in-which-you-can-categorise-people-based-on-the-colour-of-their-skin-and-their-birthplace vs white.
Yellow Fever & Orientalism
Historian Ronald Hyam wrote that a core part of colonialism was “turning the whole world into the white man’s brothel.” This may not have been the overriding intention (the potential for sexual escapades is less politically convincing than the economic benefits of owning one-third of the world), but suffice to say that plenty of attempts were made by white men to try and rival Genghis Khan’s claim to being the ancestor of millions.
Non-white women were exoticized and viewed as fascinatingly erotic in ways that white European women were not. The romanticism of the 18th and 19th centuries (think the art of the Pre-Raphelites, William Wordsworth’s poems, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) was infused with orientalism; the exotic, unknowable women of the far east were perfectly placed for consumption by western men.
The submissive East Asian woman, delighted to find a superior western man, remains a potent stereotype in western media. The entire plot of the musical South Pacific, Cio-Cio-San’s tragic story in Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly, the Fook twins in Austin Powers, the broken English of the Vietnamese sex worker in Full Metal Jacket (“me so horny… me love you long time”), the list goes on.
This stereotype is reflected in the heavy association in porn categories between size and Asian ethnicity. “Tiny Japanese Teen”, “Small Asian” and “Petite Asian Screaming” were among the titles of the first page of videos tagged as “Asian” on Pornhub in September. According to porn, sexual deviancy and curiosity is a defining trait of East Asian women.
This pervasive stereotypical image has real world repercussions. The US military has never been held to account for their abuse of imported prostitutes in Japanese-controlled brothels. East-Asian mail-order-brides have been in demand since the 1800s; a clear example of Asian women literally being treated as property.
More innocuously, when I lived in China, a distant acquaintance was well-known among the ex-pat community for not realising that the beautiful Chinese women who went out of their way to flirt with him and go home with him were sex workers until they gave him the bill not once, but three times (that we knew of). The dating habits of my white, male co-workers were often predatory, as were their attitudes to our Chinese co-workers. To them, Chinese women were at once more desirable and less deserving of respect than their western counterparts. This belief of white sexual superiority was born in colonialism, but continues to be fostered in modern porn and media.
Even in porn where you’d assume that outdated stereotypes were avoided, the sexual subservience of non-white performers is pretty much standard. Studies have found that videos of “interracial bisexual pornography place the white man at the center or apex of pleasure and power; the woman and the man of color work diligently to please him.” (Bernardi, 2007).
Sexually othering non-white people is not restricted to the bedroom. We cannot draw a line between what we censor and restrict (that is, hardcore porn), and the rest of our culture (that is, music, films & TV etc. etc.) and rest assured that porn is just a fantasy and people don’t really believe the things that are filmed.
In a world where media is increasingly a political tool, critically reflecting on how non-white bodies are depicted is vital. It matters that porn reiterates and reinforces colonial stereotypes of non-white bodies. It matters that a person’s inherent behaviour can still be tied to their physical appearance. It matters that racial differences are used to other and dehumanise non-white people. It matters that the accepted script for intimate interactions is still colonialism in form and execution. Porn is racist, and that matters.
Recommended Reading/Resources:
Kipnis, Bound & Gagged, 1998
Lister, A Curious History of Sex, 2020
Strings, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, 2019
Bernstein, The East, The West, And Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters, 2009
Bernardi in Cinema Journal (2007), Racism and Pornography: Evidence, Paradigms, and Publishing
Greetings From the Colonies: Postcards of a Shameful Past on https://www.messynessychic.com/
The Vagina Museum’s website www.vaginamuseum.co.uk, & Instagram page @vagina_museum
Girls on P*rn Podcast & Instagram page @girlsonprn
Afrosexology https://www.afrosexology.com/
