Watching Porn

by Lynsey G

  Racism in pornography is an extremely tricky subject, as is racism at large. Porn’s race issues go just as deep as they do anywhere else in American society, but pornography boasts a combination pressure release valve and complication of the subject. In most forms of entertainment, and in society as a whole, racial differences are commonly downplayed in favor of politically correct cover-ups for the very deep prejudices that still exist. But in mainstream porn, those differences are gleefully and unapologetically put on display. Porn is one place where “politically correct” depictions of race are tossed out the window in favor of blatant stereotypes that are believed to help sell the content.

  In a move that was both naïve and cynical, I had double-thought the flagrant displays of prejudice I’d seen in porn into a winking parody of racism in our culture. I gave it the same kind of acknowledgment I’d given to j. vegas’s brutal satirical rips on porn stars. This smirking utilization of race is self-aware, I thought. It must be. A critique. Proof that the industry understands how fucked up the stereotypes it re-creates and sells really are. Gangbanging thugs, sexually predatory Mandingos, hugely endowed bulls, promiscuous women putting out for cash, grossly overdone accents—the porn world was filled to bursting with every ready-made label the dominant culture has tailored for black people. A quick look at one African American actor’s list of credits is a veritable gold mine of groan-worthy names that turn blackness into a fetish: Big Black Dicks in Little White Slits, Black Cock Addiction, Fear of a Black Penis, Jungle Beaver. The people behind these titles seemed to be in on the joke, and to be profiting from it, so I guessed everybody was winning. Right?

  Well, I wasn’t all wrong. Certainly the porn industry is not so backward that it unanimously and seriously believes black men are single-minded monsters who go around despoiling white women and cuckolding their melanin-deficient husbands. The industry as a whole has a dark (for lack of a better word) sense of humor and has long been a hotbed of satirical takes on modern life. The very existence of porn parodies speaks volumes about the genre’s ability to take the piss out of our culture. (I refer you to 2008’s bestselling Who’s Nailin’ Paylin? in which Lisa Ann portrayed Sarah Palin with panache that rocketed her to the top of the industry and mainstream fame. Over two years after her retirement, she was still one of the most popular porn actors in the world, according to Pornhub’s 2016 data.) And yet, for all the laughs its treatment of performers of color may generate behind the scenes, the industry continues to hire black men to play race-related roles. Furthermore, once performers sign their model releases and leave the set, they have no control over the editing and marketing of their work. Thus, even the most progressive of actors may end up in a film like Big Black Beef Stretches Little Pink Meat #7. And they often do, much to their dismay. Compounding this already-gross circumstance is the fact that so much modern porn is consumed via free tube sites on which material is often clipped from longer movies, stripped of all context, and relabeled with even more derogatory terminology than the original product.

  Although I’ve had far fewer conversations about the race situation in the gay industry—which is to say, I don’t in fact know any black men who work primarily in it—I have heard similar things from secondhand sources. Black men in gay porn are often cast as hyper masculine, physically dominant, sexually predatory thugs in interracial scenes—in which they almost always do the penetrating. Jarrett Neal, in his essay on the subject of interracial gay porn in Best Sex Writing of the Year, 2015, wrote that in gay porn he’s familiar with, black actors “had no choice but to be marketed in a way that confined them to essential and often stereotypical characterizations of black masculinity.”

  Given the industry’s reductive treatment of black men, and with the market brimming with titles like Phat Ass Ebony Freakz, it’s not difficult to imagine the kind of climate that African American women face in porn. While a 2013 study of porn demographics revealed that fourteen percent of female porn stars were black—a pretty accurate reflection of American race demographics at large—the number of those women who work regularly and prominently in mainstream porn is tiny.

  Nyomi Banxxx, a friend of WHACK! from our very first convention, was very vocal about the situation in an interview with me in 2012. In the the mainstream industry, she told me, “It only can be three of us at a time … There are so many more beautiful black women out there that are performers that do not get their due.” There was not enough “ethnic” work to keep more than three popular black performers in circulation, she believed.

  All-black porn is treated as a “specialty market,” relegated to its own category on websites and filmed by specific companies. The line that producers and directors feed media inquiries and call-outs is that the public just doesn’t want to see much African American porn. It doesn’t make sense to make more of it since nobody would buy it. But this is a chicken-and-egg question that plagues most entertainment industries: Are people just not buying it because it doesn’t exist?

  Maggie Mayhem, a white performer who left mainstream porn to work with indie companies because she was tired of watching people being demeaned, wrote on her website, Meet the Mayhems: “A lot of things are brushed off with people saying, ‘I’m not racist, it just doesn’t sell.’ I think this has something to do with the fact that people who are white own the content and market it. The industry is essentially what sex looks like from the gaze of the cis[gender], het[erosexual], white male, and those who are the most ‘successful’ in the mainstream industry are those who create content through that same lens.”

  Rubbing salt more deeply into the wound is the fact that black actors of all genders are paid less than their white counterparts. Performer Casey Calvert, a white model who has studied pay rates in the industry, revealed to me that if she were to shoot a standard blowbang featuring “random dudes,” as opposed to top-tier male performers, “if I do that with all white guys, those random dudes are making four hundred for that scene. If I do it with black guys, they’re maybe making one fifty, two hundred.”

  In 2007, female African American models were making half to three-quarters the rates of their white counterparts, and in a 2013 interview, actor Misty Stone reported that even after she had raised her rates to allow for her massive popularity, she was still making around three hundred dollars less per scene than white models with similar levels of name recognition.

  • • •

  IT SHOULD COME AS NO surprise that racism doesn’t apply only to African American porn performers. There may be a starker delineation between the treatment of blacks and whites in porn, but that isn’t to say that adult entertainment is kind to actors of other races, either.

  At the end of 2012, Joanna Angel released behind-the-scenes photos from the set of The Walking Dead: A Hardcore Parody, which her company, Burning Angel, was producing. The work done by makeup artist Melissa Makeup was on display in these photos, and for good reason: She had transformed attractive young porn actors into rotting zombies from the hit show The Walking Dead. She had also, the photos revealed, turned white actor Danny Wylde into the Asian American character Glenn … by painting his face yellow, putting him in a wig and baseball cap, and pulling his eyes taught with tape.

  Asian-American performer Kelly Shibari called Joanna Angel to task on Twitter in a very public way, and Korean American magazine KoreAm published an article on the questionable choice. Feminist website Jezebel picked up the story, broadcasting the issue to millions of readers, and soon there was a full-blown Internet frenzy over the issue, with porn insiders and critics taking sides. Danny Wylde, the actor in question, first offered a shrugging pseudo-apology, but later recanted on his blog. “I have spent seven years working a job on which it is okay to be ‘kind of racist,’” he wrote. “In fact, being ‘overtly racist’ has proved for some to be quite lucrative. As a society, we have tolerated racism within pornography to an incredible extent.”

  And he was one of many who pointed out that, while the yellowface debacle wa
s cringe-worthy, it wasn’t the worst of what was going on in porn. In an article for AVN, Peter Warren wrote, “If [critics had] done the briefest Google search, they’d have come up with so many exponentially more demeaning depictions of Asians in porn, it would make this look downright noble. Just have a glimpse at some of the titles that have graced adult retail shelves in the past few months: Shrimp Fried Pussy (Wicked Pictures) … Dim Sum Pussy (Voyeur Media) … Yellow Fever (Exquisite Multimedia) … The list goes on.”

  I hadn’t taken in any of the above jewels myself, but I had witnessed my share of porn in which Asian-descended women used over-the-top accents as they gave out “happy ending” massages with their kimonos hanging open. Almost every Asian-specific adult film in history has relied on stereotypes that simply would not fly in other entertainment.

  But other entertainment is not exempt: American culture still labors under the notion that men of Asian descent are less sexually desirable than those of any other race. A Columbia University study published in 2007 found that non-Asian women were thirty-five percent less likely to respond positively to Asian men than men of other races. This may be due in large part to the fact that Asian men are commonly—if not constantly—portrayed in media as nerdy, shy, faltering, and patently unsexy. As any queer pornographer will gladly tell you, representation in sexual media matters, and for Asian men, that representation is rarely positive, if it exists at all.

  Of course, none of the above is sufficient explanation or excuse for employing yellowface for The Walking Dead parody. And neither is the almost unbelievable truth that, as Peter Warren pointed out, there was at that time exactly one feature-film-level, straight, male Asian porn star in the American industry. One. His name was Keni Styles, and his mere existence on the adult playing field was so unprecedented that he had become a porn sensation.

  Keni Styles’s good looks, his muscular body and masculine demeanor, his sexy British accent (he was born in Thailand but grew up mostly in the UK), and his chemistry with women made him the subject of intense scrutiny as well as the longing of thousands of female fans, myself included. And, while there were a few other Asian males in and around the porn industry at the time that the yellowface debacle went down, none had succeeded to the same degree as Mr. Styles. He was, really, the only guy in the industry at the time who might have been considered to step in as Glenn.

  It’s likely that Keni wasn’t available to shoot The Walking Dead parody. It’s also possible that he was sick of getting called for every single movie that was looking for an Asian actor. And it’s entirely probable that, had he been available and willing, Burning Angel may not have been able to afford his rate. Scarcity equals a higher price point in every industry, and porn is no exception.

  There are far more female Asian porn models in America than there are men, which is of course not a very high hurdle to clear. But as of a 2013 study of ten thousand porn stars, the percentage of female American porn performers of Asian descent (5.2) was slightly higher than the percentage of Americans of Asian heritage nationally (4.7, in the 2010 census), which means that the porn industry’s representation of Asian women isn’t too far off numerically. As a matter of fact, some of the top names in adult film are Asian.

  Asa Akira, Kaylani Lei, Venus Lux, and others are all big names in the industry, and there are many other women of Asian descent working in porn at varying levels of fame. But the ways in which most of these women are asked to portray themselves and by extension their race is, to say the least, disturbing. The stereotype of submissive, sexually timid Asian females is overtly employed in these films—a titillating prospect for male consumers who enjoy the idea of having their way with a sex partner who’s both “exotic” and willing to go along with whatever he wants.

  In a recent search for Asian titles on GameLink.com, I came upon the titles Peking Pussy, Szechuan Snatch, and Chocolate Covered Fortune Cookies (you guessed it—the men here are black). It’s a double indictment of the American imagination that so many Asian porn titles center around food: This cuisine-centric titling reveals that Americans are largely ignorant of Asian cultures except for the food, and also that we’re more than willing to place racially different bodies on the same level as cuisine—which is to say, available for our consumption.

  Sadly but perhaps unsurprisingly, Asian women aren’t the only group to be reduced to objects by way of their names. As legendary performer Sinnamon Love wrote in The Feminist Porn Book, “Black and Latina women in porn are very often given the names of food, cars, inanimate objects, countries, and spices: Chocolate, Champagne, Mocha, Mercedes, Toy, Persia, Africa, India, and yes, Sinnamon.”

  For reasons that aren’t clear to me, there is a markedly smaller amount of Latin American–focused porn on the American market. Whereas the percentage of most minorities in pornography closely mirrors the overall percentage of those minorities within the general population, Latino performers make up a far smaller proportion of the whole. In the 2010 census, 16.3 percent of Americans reported as Hispanic and Latino, but in Jon Millward’s 2013 study of ten thousand porn stars, only 9.3 percent were Latin.

  Perhaps the predominantly Catholic demographic is less likely to pursue pornography for religious reasons, but that reasoning feels flimsy to me, since other cultures don’t particularly favor pornography as career paths, either. Or maybe it’s simply that Latin actors in porn are lumped in more easily with white actors. Missy Martinez, for instance, is a popular actress whose name and complexion hint at her Mexican heritage, but she is rarely cast specifically as a Latina.

  The healthy Brazilian porn market may also play into America’s paucity of Latin American content. Many American companies shoot in Brazil, where laws are lax and the local talent is lush. A lot of bareback bisexual and trans content is filmed there, with lucrative results for American producers who can hire performers at lower rates on site, then charge a premium for “niche” content featuring “exotic” foreign nationals.

  That’s not to say that American-made Latino content doesn’t exist, however. Or that it’s bucking the trend by being particularly flattering. Latino models are often cast as housekeepers and nannies on the one hand, or as landscapers, pool boys, or cholos on the other. And recent titles like Sancho’s Horny Hinas #5, Maid in Mexico, and Madre Make Me Fuck Her Man turn the stomach and indicate a disregard for cultural sensitivity, all in one go.

  WHEN MATTHEW AND I—the only WHACK! staffers to make it to Vegas in 2011—attended our first (and, to date, only) AVN Awards Show, I steeled myself for uneven representation of race in the industry. But I was still amazed by the four-hour parade of white people with occasional brown folks thrown in for very deliberate-feeling “flavor.” Both of the hosts were white. The “trophy girls” who handed out the statuettes (two golden figures embracing atop an “AVN”-emblazoned base) were white. The “Performer of the Year” and “Best Actor and Actress” awards were handed out to white performers onstage, but the entire section of awards for “ethnic” releases—which was further broken down into the categories of Asian, Black, and Latin—were not even presented during the awards ceremony. I found this appalling.

  I recognize the fact that, if every single AVN Award were to be presented onstage during the ceremony, the event would stretch from a four-hour spectacle into a day-long marathon that would bore attendees to tears. However, the fact that out of the major awards presented that night, only three were given for films or scenes that highlighted the work of non-white actors is telling. As is the fact that there were separate categories for each “type” of “ethnic” release. Granted, these awards provided more opportunities for pornographers of color to win awards, but that night they felt like consolation prizes. The Best Interracial Release is the only award given during the ceremony that rewards the work of black actors, but because “interracial” in the porn industry refers only to a black man with a lighter-skinned woman, the field of play for porn performers of color on the AVN stage is still extremely limited.
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br />   INTERRACIAL PORN—ONE OF THE most long-standing, most popular categories of adult entertainment—is its own bizarre world of tired stereotypes, racially motivated fantasies, and outdated economy. Interracial pairings were once at the top of the tall ladder of sex acts that white female performers were encouraged to climb as their careers progressed. As one of the most taboo acts one could perform on camera, it came with one of the highest payouts. That old ladder has been falling apart in recent years, yet it’s still common for a white female model to hold out on having sex with black men on camera for longer than she waits to have anal sex or group sex. John Millward’s 2013 study showed that only fifty-three percent of white female performers were willing to do interracial scenes. For comparison’s sake, eighty-seven percent were willing to take facial cum shots, and sixty-two percent did anal. This, by the way, confuses me from a logistical standpoint: Whereas there is absolutely nothing making sex with a black man unpleasant so long as you’re both into each other, anal sex can be quite uncomfortable if it’s not undertaken properly. Performer Courtney Cummz told me, of her first-ever anal scene with the extremely well-endowed Peter North, “It hurt like hell! Don’t let anyone tell you different. Your first anal experience is not pleasant.” And let’s not forget the five enemas Madison Young reminded us of back in Chapter 5. So why on earth would anal be lower on the scale of first-time acts than interracial? It’s bizarre.

  To add another level of weirdness to the mix, when an actress decides to take the leap into interracial scenes, she can often charge hundreds or even thousands more for it. Some studios, I was informed by agent Tee Reel, will offer up to five thousand dollars for a first interracial scene—then prohibit the female star from doing any interracial work for a period of time at their discretion, so that they can capitalize on the breaking of this still-profitable taboo.

  It’s so common for agents to tell their clients to “hold out” on doing interracial—or even to avoid it entirely because it might “damage” their careers—that when I asked “The Prince of Queer Porn,” James Darling, who his heroes in adult entertainment were, he told me, “Any performer who risks their job to say no to racist and transphobic agents. The adult industry is a surprisingly very conservative place and it’s hard to stick to your politics and convictions when your job is on the line.” I’ve heard similar sentiments from other performers, sometimes from the other side—those who were talked into toeing the racist line until they realized what they were doing.