by Lynsey G
An argument that pops up against critiques of racism in porn—aside from the standard, “Oh come on, it’s just porn!”—is that the adult industry isn’t any more whitewashed than its wealthy cousin, Hollywood. This is true. The AVN awards I attended in 2011 were more diverse than that year’s Oscars field by a long shot. But that doesn’t change the fact that while Hollywood has a big role to play in perpetuating racial stereotypes, pornography actively re-creates, markets, and plays those stereotypes for laughs, all while creating an environment in which white models can literally refuse to work with black ones. The discrimination here is blatant and unapologetic. As Lexington Steele, one of the most successful male porn stars in history, told The Root in 2013, “Quite honestly, adult media is the only major business that allows for the practice of exclusion based upon race.”
It boggles the mind to think that interracial sex could be considered taboo enough to earn itself a higher pay rate in the twenty-first century, but the truth is that people who want to see interracial sex are still willing to pay for it, and to ask for it specifically. By name. And in porn, naming is massively important.
Performer Casey Calvert and I spoke about the thorny issue of naming when it comes to interracial porn in 2016. “Interracial as a genre is a purely American construct, based on our country’s history. A white girl with a black man is a genuine fetish for many people, especially in the south,” she told me. “It’s ‘taboo,’ it’s ‘wrong,’ it’s ‘dirty.’ And I shoot it because I don’t want to discriminate against anyone’s arousal pattern. If that’s what they like, that’s what they like. Yes, that sometimes includes derogatory words, but one, all fetishes have their keywords, and two, how many scenes have I shot where I was being called derogatory names? Too many to count. I think real racism is awful, just like real incest, and real rape, but interracial porn is just as much a fantasy as those other genres.”
And it’s a fantasy that sells. So it’s a fantasy that gets turned into porn, again and again. “Mass-market production companies make the porn that they say consumers want; consumers develop viewing habits and a search language based on what is offered and available,” Natasha Lennard wrote in The Nation in 2016. “The feedback loop produces what we have come to see as natural desires. The ‘conservative business model,’ as [performer Mickey] Mod describes it, gives the lie to the suggestion that offensive labels perpetuated in mainstream porn could be somehow subversive, turning political correctness on its head to liberate our innate desires.” Those desires may not be as natural to us as we’ve been led to believe, but it’s pragmatic to categorize people based on their physical characteristics or sexual proclivities even if it’s backward. And, as a consumer, it feels less scary to click on the “BBW interracial anal” link on your favorite site than to go to Google, type in “porn” and hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button. For those who are motivated by fantasies involving racial difference, the “interracial” category provides what they’re looking for without fear of getting the wrong content.
“I haven’t done the research,” said Tee Reel, “but apparently there are a lot of white guys that have that fantasy.” And the interracial category makes it easier for them to find and, hopefully, pay for their porn, which keeps the wheels of the industry spinning so that the actors who made it can get paid for more work. Except some of those actors are getting paid less than their colleagues because of their race.
Sigh.
IT’S IMPORTANT TO NOTE that the porn industry isn’t unaware of its spotty record regarding performers of color. The industry has begun to take stock of the situation and to make changes. There are numerous awards ceremonies besides the AVNs (XBIZ, XRCO, and others) that work hard to celebrate the contributions of pornographers of color. In 2016, the Adult Performers Advocacy Committee (APAC) released a statement on the matter of racial prejudice in the industry. “Although it is common practice to vary scene rates on performer experience and scene content, it is APAC’s position that paying a performer less based on his/her race or charging a higher rate to work with performers of another race is unfair and unethical,” they wrote. “Treating a performer’s race as a determining factor for pay is a violation of performer rights as well as a violation of federal workplace discrimination laws.” And I’m happy to report that AVN no longer gives out awards specifically for each “ethnic” group, as it did in 2011. Though I’m glad to see that performers are being somewhat less pigeonholed by their racial designation, the change is a double-edged sword: It also reduces the number of awards available specifically to people of color.
AVN also took the month of November 2016 to focus on the contributions of black male performers to the industry, conducting interviews with a number of recognized names in the industry. My dear friend Sean Michaels was one of those profiled, and I was thrilled to see that after nearly thirty years in the industry, he had plans to release a book about his experiences—which should be launching at about the same time as this book!
Yet, as I sat at the bar in New Jersey with Seth and knocked back another whiskey ginger, I took in his kind eyes and his snappy suit-and-vest combo and wondered how many times I’d seen his performances on one of the clip sites I frequented, just a disembodied “big black cock” pirated from a movie with an embarrassingly outdated, racially charged title. The chances were very good that I’d seen the part of him that had made him a legend many times, but possibly not recognized him because his face had not been shown. And I pondered how someone with his experience, intelligence, and charm could be struggling to get by when he had brought so much to the industry he chose and worked so hard for. In trying times like these, surely pornography could stand to hear a few new ideas from some untapped minds, but I doubted any of the top brass were going to be tapping Seth for his thoughts on how to move forward anytime soon.
And, recent, small steps toward progress notwithstanding, the fact remains that white actors are still routinely paid more than others. Meanwhile, movies with titles and scenes that portray black men as defilers and black women as oversexed urban derelicts still get made. Since Keni Styles retired from porn, there has been no influx of Asian male talent rushing in to fill the void. The porn industry, in short, continues to play into the centuries of overlooking, devaluing, and commodifying bodies of color that plague our culture.
Performer-turned-agent Tee Reel told me that he tries not to let his personal feelings on racism in the industry affect his judgment as a businessperson. He directed me to always, as they say, follow the money to understand where the discrimination comes from. The trail led us back to the presiding power structure in porn, which looks remarkably like most other power structures in America. That is to say, old, white, and male. These men are businesspeople who don’t have much time or interest to devote to social justice in the films they produce. They’re happy to keep making the same content that has proven lucrative in the past—content that perpetuates what their life experiences have told them people want to see. And their experiences are usually those of older white men who have spent most of their careers surrounded by other white men. When it comes to racial diversity, the results are depressingly predictable. In The Feminist Porn Book, performer Sinnamon Love writes, “One of the biggest mistakes mainstream pornographers make is thinking their market is not interested in any other images of black women except these outrageously stereotyped ones … [A] lack of market research allows directors and producers to remain uninformed, and to cater only to their own sexual likes and dislikes.”
In an interview I conducted with him in 2012, my friend Mr. Marcus and I sat down in his office at his brand-new production studio in Van Nuys and talked about how he hoped to make his company viable. But it was an uphill climb, he told me. “There’s not a lot of black men that run their own businesses in this industry. [Producers] want the biggest black dick, because they can make movies around it. But in the executive offices, they’re not dealing with blacks at a business level … When they go to a meeting, they�
�re sitting around a table with a bunch of white guys. They think, ‘Okay, let’s make another black movie. What do we know about black people? We know they’ve got big dicks.’” When thinking of the people you’re employing as body parts rather than humans with brains, making the decision to pay people less for equal work becomes all too easy.
Tee Reel broke down the economic picture of a contemporary porn film. “Usually there’s a company owner or a corporate owner. They’re giving a budget to a director and saying, ‘Go make me a movie,’ or ‘Make me a bunch of scenes.’” Directors often get paid by keeping whatever is left over after production costs have been divvied up among cast, crew, and incidentals. “So,” says Tee Reele, “if that director has ten thousand dollars or twenty thousand dollars in his pocket, or usually less nowadays, they’re going to try to save a dollar anywhere they can … It’s economics. If they know an ethnic model—whether it be Latin, black, Asian—is not going to have as many opportunities to shoot, they feel as if they can cut down on that scene rate. If I know the average rate for a boy/girl scene is a thousand dollars, and I need four Latin girls for this project, and there are thirteen Latin girls fighting to be in this project, I can probably throw some numbers around and just get the cheapest girl.”
But economic theories about where these outdated prejudices come from can only go so far when it comes to practice. With women of color making an estimated fifty to seventy-five percent of what their white colleagues earn per scene, performer Nikki Darling had some choice words for those in control of the purse strings: “Even if you’re talking about the economics of it all, you are economically disenfranchising people within the industry because of their race. And, in my opinion, that is morally and ethically fucked up,” she said. “People can make excuses and allow it to happen all they want. But when you go down to the ethics of it, that’s disgusting.”
It’s worth noting here that adult entertainment as a legal, legitimate industry has only really existed since the late eighties. Most of the people who made porn before that time were, literally, outlaws. Jeanne Silver, who became the first American amputee porn star in 1976 under the name Long Jeanne Silver, told me in an interview, “When I did it, it was illegal. I got arrested with Annie Sprinkle [and others]. We all were arrested in Rhode Island for doing a porn publication [called Love and Hate magazine]. It was a major sting.” Their group was nicknamed “The Jamestown Eight” and made national news. Jeanne had run away from home as teenager. She made her way to New York City and was taken in by a porn magazine maker and his wife. She liked the culture, so she started doing porn in which she used her amputated leg to penetrate partners—subversive, illegal smut that was widely banned.
She and her desperado compatriots were granted all the rights and privileges that working in a legal industry entails when the Freeman verdict was overturned, but many of the people who founded the industry were not used to operating according to the rules of law or trade organizations. Social justice was a priority for a few of them, as it is in any demographic, but certainly not all. And, since only thirty years have passed since the industry was granted a clean and above-board slate for operations, many of the people who got into the industry early are still in charge. While porn has tried its best, and often succeeded, in keeping up with the pace of technology and rolling with the punches of distribution shifts, its ability to predict consumer trends and to market itself to keep up with the changing demographics of porn consumers’ taboo desires may have fallen by the wayside in important ways.
In lieu of coming up with innovative ideas about what consumers in the twenty-first century might want to see, it’s often easiest to continue doing what has always worked in the hopes that pornography can shape taste, rather than catch up with it. And to some degree, it’s successful. Most of us may not have considered interracial porn, particularly, as a normal fantasy until we saw it on every porn site we visited, and then we summarily normalized in our brains. I know I did.
But that isn’t to say that things will stay as racist and uncomfortable for porn consumers who are, as they say, “woke.” A 2016 study by Mic.com and Pornhub took a look at the online porn-consuming habits of millennials and were surprised to discover that five of the top twenty most-searched-for performers were not white, that two of the top twelve search terms were for “ebony” and “black,” and that young people who watch porn seem to be generally more open-minded about matters of diversity than their predecessors. As Kelsey Lawrence of Mic.com wrote, “What we like doesn’t develop in a vacuum. Much like anything else, who we’re attracted to is largely shaped by cultural context.” As a new generation of porn consumers grows up in an ever-more multiethnic, multiracial world, their tastes will develop along with their experiences. The industry still has some way to go to catch up to them, though.
MakeLoveNotPorn.tv founder Cindy Gallop told me in an interview once that “porn as an industry has gotten so big it’s gotten conventional … and it’s tanking. The economic recession has driven massive fear and insecurity, and therefore even more the tendency to revert to what is familiar and therefore supposedly safe, and just keep doing the same thing you’ve always been doing.” I think this nail-on-the-head assessment of many of the evils that plague adult entertainment is particularly true of race relations: Interracial porn has always been a taboo market, so many producers simply keep making it in the hopes that it will continue to be so, whether consumers agree with the assessment or not. Thus, little headway is made in changing the status quo, with the result that, while porn consumers may be less titillated by interracial scenes than they were forty years ago, the money flowing down from the top of the porn industry continues to treat white women like princesses and black men like predators, and consumers continue to see interracial porn marketed as taboo.
The thing is—it’s not difficult to sell it that way.
Being held by the stunning, smart, and very strong Kelly Shibari at Exxxotica New Jersey 2012
(PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)
CHAPTER 15
Other “Isms”
IN AN INDUSTRY WHERE BODIES are on display, it’s not just race that differentiates those bodies in the eyes of their beholders, or in the budgets of those who hire them. Virtually every difference is noted, categorized, and given a price tag. Larger bodies. Smaller bodies. Trans bodies. Disabled bodies.
To put it bluntly, pornography is an industry of objectification. It’s arguable that in a capitalist society, everyone objectifies him or herself by selling their labor, but there are few places where this is more baldly true than in the adult film industry. And I believe that there is nothing wrong with that. As Nina Hartley told me, “Humans objectify. Actually all mammals objectify … So to say that objectification is ‘wrong’ is just biologically stupid.” And, I would argue, it’s particularly silly to pretend that it should not be part of the porn industry.
Most of us have been warned of the evils of sexual objectification, particularly the feminists amongst us, but in the selling of sexual entertainment, objectification sort of comes with the territory. In order to price something in the marketplace, that something must be distilled into an object—even if that something is the image of a human body. Like Mandy Morbid put it to me in 2010, “[Porn] is work, and as a performer you are a commodity.”
Of course, this can be—and frequently is—a source of negativity in porn, but whether you believe that it’s positive or negative, there isn’t a way around the fact that there is an element of objectification in the human arousal process. We see the body of another person and get a thrill from the way it looks, just as much as—and sometimes more than—we appreciate the person living inside that body. And in pornography, when the souls of the people whose bodies we are watching are obscured by the distance and technology between us, that process is made simpler. “At the end of the day,” Ryan Driller told me, “I’m a penis having sex with most people’s crushes … the viewer, the people, the fans, don’t necessarily want to to
tally personify the performers because then they feel a little bad objectifying them.”
In pornography, each objectified body is placed somewhere within a complicated metric of supply, demand, and operating costs. In order to turn a profit in the age of Internet piracy, pornographers must make difficult choices about how much to spend on performers, and on what types of performers to hire in the first place. Producers tend to err on the side of content that has proven lucrative in the past, since their profits are by no means guaranteed. Very often, this means they shoot content that portrays fantasies that fall in line with what mainstream culture has taught us to value sexually—what feels “safe.” Namely, content featuring slender, white, cisgender females with big boobs, juicy butts, and flawless skin. This archetype sells better not because of the objective superiority of those performers, but because they conform to more people’s sexual fantasies—many of which were formed by mainstream porn in the first place. So many more people are willing to buy this mainstream stuff that performers who fall outside of the aforementioned archetype are marginalized, paid less, and categorized into niches.
And so we come back to the difficult yet necessary gremlin of categorization. Though in so doing it risks fetishizing marginalized groups, the porn industry must label human beings in one way or another. Historically, pornographers have been happy to do so—they’ve created dozens, probably hundreds, of categories that break down differences between performers’ bodies into niches, making it exponentially easier for consumers to locate what they want. This may feel demeaning for consumers, especially considering the wording that gets used. As Natasha Lennard wrote for The Nation, “To consume online porn often entails playing a rough and reductive language game. We navigate a discomforting gauntlet of search terms: a jumble of body parts (pussy, cock, ass, tits), body types (tiny, huge, skinny, curvy), sexual and gender identities (gay, bi, lesbian, trans), sex acts (anal, squirting, pissing, gang bang, bukkake, bondage) all woven into a lattice of racist, sexist, transphobic, ageist, and ableist tropes (big black, Asian teen, thug, schoolgirl, MILF, shemale, and so on).” It’s pretty icky.