by Lynsey G
But consider that most human beings scrolling through the list very likely already have a hand down their pants. Their brains are not necessarily operating at one hundred percent. Porn consumers, in most cases, are looking not for a heart-to-heart experience with another person, but for a quick orgasm. Simplistic, politically incorrect terms that highlight deviations from what’s considered the norm are the ones that come to mind in such circumstances. And they are the ones that get searched for.
Although, I should probably point out, that this isn’t to say that everyone is looking up the weirdest and grossest search terms imaginable during one-handed typing sessions. Lest ye be convinced that everyone you meet goes home to feverishly search for “big-titted amputee granny gangbang” (not that there is anything wrong with that predilection, mind you) the nineteen most searched terms on Pornhub in 2016 didn’t get a lot further out there than “creampie” (ejaculation inside a performer’s body), “gangbang,” and “squirt.”
Nevertheless, the bluntness of the terminology people turn to when they’re looking for their specific cup of pornographic tea leads us to ponder a troubling fact: What turns people on is almost never politically correct. Far from just the terminology applied to it, human sexual fantasy itself is rife with the kinds of things that make social justice activists cringe, or maybe give up altogether. Sure, people are turned on by sex itself, in flavors from vanilla to rocky road, but people are also—and sometimes exclusively—turned on by things like racial difference, disability, age play, and size fetishization (the fastest-growing search term in the year 2015, according to Pornhub, was “giantess”). Our fellow humans are commonly titillated by themes of incest and coercion. If we’re being honest, what turns people on is sometimes some of the most disturbing stuff in the world.
We cannot police people’s fantasies. We can’t tell somebody that his enjoyment of little people dressed up as maids and submitting to the whims of a demented, sadistic employer is wrong any more than we can look down our noses on someone who prefers classic rock to R&B. So long as nobody is being hurt and everybody’s a consenting adult, it’s a matter of personal taste and consumption. Every human mind is its own weird world with its own axes to grind and its own orgasms to procure, even if those orgasms come from things we’d never condone in “the real world.” So, given that pornography’s job is to create, then market and sell, the fantasies that people want to see, it’s difficult to determine where to draw the line between effective advertising and dastardly fetishization. In some cases, they look awfully similar. Language that would get most of us fired gets thrown around routinely during dirty talk both on and off screen, so why should the people putting labels on videos of sex feel any compunction about printing it on box covers or websites?
The explosion of BDSM into the mainstream with the advent of Fifty Shades of Grey in 2011, and the exploring that many Americans did after reading it, has brought to light many of these “darker” fantasies that, it turns out, turn on lots of people. The biggest kink website in the world, Kink.com, has rocketed to the top of the online porn world as curious newbies seek out content ranging from sex wrestling to electrocution to master/slave relationships. And, although BDSM is most often a safe, consensual, and healthy way for consenting adults to play out their fantasies, those fantasies are usually what most of us would call dark. The words used in many BDSM scenes—meant to humiliate, debase, and objectify the submissive—could come across as derogatory, defamatory, and even abusive. Yet during play, they are the source of deep arousal and a healthy outlet for sexual fantasy.
Another complication to throw onto the pile is the fact that, while pornography sells us fantasies, in adult films the real world is the fantasy world. In the act of manufacturing sexy dreamscapes for the consumption of others, real human beings are paid to act out things that consumers want to watch, but might never actually try. This can include the aforementioned dirty talk and dark, kinky play. It can also include stepping on people’s faces or genitals, acting out scenes of incest, or being literally choked with a penis. And while I would never shame someone for enjoying watching any of these practices, so long as I knew that the people who filmed it were all of age, consenting, and being as safe as possible, I recognize the real-world complications that are involved here. I myself have a penchant for group sex scenes—all those bodies all getting off together is so hot!—but I wouldn’t feel okay physically or emotionally if I tried to have sex with ten men at once. Thankfully, there are porn actors who are more than willing to act out my fantasy for me, and I certainly hope that they feel safe, secure, and excited by gangbangs. But since they are being paid to turn my fantasy into a reality at a comfortable distance from my fragile emotions, I can never be sure.
(A quick note on gangbangs: I watched a film in 2011 called The Fan Bang, in which performer Sabrina Deep had sex with a few dozen [if memory serves] of her fans, who had been tested for STIs prior to the shoot. I was fascinated by it. The logistics involved were staggering, and I kept wondering about the etiquette and interpersonal relationships on set. For instance, was it better to be first in line, or last? Did the guys talk to each other backstage? Were there grooming standards? I was so curious, I booked an interview with Ms. Deep, who told me that she’d done around a hundred and fifty gangbangs in her time, with only about a fifth of them being filmed. She just loved them, so she did them whenever she could. The standard thinking about women who engage in this kind of sexual activity is that they’re lacking in self-respect, so I asked Sabrina about hers. Her answer was well worth recording here: “You can say ‘You disrespected me,’ but how can you say ‘You disrespected yourself’? Self-respect is like personal taste, like your own mood, like your good or bad sight: It can’t be decided by others … Feel free to judge me in relation to your world and being and morals, but leave my own relationship with myself to myself.” Also, an FYI: The stories of “fluffers” we’ve all heard are apocryphal except for on the sets of some gangbangs, where it’s necessary to keep the guys prepped and ready.)
It’s true that “porn sex isn’t real sex,” as pornographers have been telling me for years. These people are, quite literally, professionals. Smoke and mirrors—and a lot of lube application that gets edited out in the final cut—abound. It’s important to realize that next time you want to try a DP (double penetration, usually of a vagina and anus simultaneously). But the sex is still real. The people who do it are real. And they are doing it for pay. In the sale of sexual labor there is a necessary removal of the subjective human experience from the objective performance they exchange for capital. Once that handoff is made, the performance they turned over becomes subject to the demands of the marketplace, which craves fantasy that rarely lines up with politeness.
And so we end up with categories of porn that draw attention to difference, and with porn studios that specialize in specific differences in order to capitalize on the preferences that each category represents. These niche studios, fewer in number and smaller in size than their vanilla counterparts, obey the demands of the market in which they operate as well as the politics of the industry in which they exist, and offer what they can to both consumers and performers. The tradeoff between politics, politeness, and fantasy often shows its face in titles like Black Tranny Whackers 27.
But this isn’t a rant about the dehumanization inherent in capitalism. It’s an examination of how it comes to pass that human beings with hearts and souls and voices can be distilled into a series of body parts and stereotypes which, all too often, puts them in categories that earn them less than their whiter, thinner, more able-bodied peers.
Over my years as a critic of porn as a product and a hanger-on to the industry that makes it, I found myself gravitating, as I’ve noted, toward feminist pornography that leaned to the far left: queer, indie fare that employed performers who didn’t always fit the white, thin, able-bodied mold that the mainstream industry tended to employ. Predictably, as I was drawn to this smaller world, I bega
n to interview and thus get to know the performers and directors who made it. I felt a kinship with those who chose the less-beaten path, or whose journeys were defined for them by virtue of their inability to fit the expectations of mainstream porn—or the mainstream world at large. I became much closer to many of these people than I’d ever dared to get with porn stars with more recognizable names and more standardized looks.
In a way, getting to know the people who didn’t even bother with red carpets and VIP lists brought me closer to myself. If I’d never branched off into their corners of the industry, I’d have never gotten to where I am politically, personally, or sexually. Their thoughtful answers to interview questions, coupled with their political activism and serious hotness, helped me learn what gender studies in college might have, in a more exciting way than I’d probably have gotten from academia. But as I watched their careers take shape, I was forced to watch them struggle with just how difficult it is to be an “other” in an industry that’s already been “othered” to hell and back by the rest of the world. Most of the people I was getting to know were plus-sized or trans or disabled or fit into any number of other categories that place them neatly into one of porn’s less-public niches—those corners even the proudest of porn viewers rarely admit to peeking into. And the corners I became dedicated to learning about and advocating for.
The viewership for most niche porn is significantly smaller than that of mainstream content. With a smaller customer base to sell to, there are fewer studios that regularly shoot niche content featuring performers of color, trans actors, models of size, performers of different ability levels, and so on. And, whereas there were once dozens of companies in Los Angeles shooting most kinds of niche content, there are now only a handful for each specialty. Most of those studios don’t have a lot of cash to throw around, which is the biggest reason that they often pay lower rates. And although the talent pool in any one of these categories is smaller than the more mainstream ocean of models, there are always more actors than there are scenes to shoot or studios shooting them. With a glut of talent and a paucity of roles, the inevitable occurs: someone is always willing to take lower pay. And, since lower rates can be paid, they are. Once a director has paid a lower rate for one transgender performer, for instance, that director will be loath to up their rate the next time. Other directors will also resist paying more than their competition. And thus the going rate for a transgender scene is lowered across the board.
A troubling caveat is that the amount of money these niches make is often disproportionate to the amount they put into production. The porn industry is infamous for its unwillingness to show the numbers, but it’s been stated repeatedly by industry insiders that niche porn out-earns its mainstream competition by a large margin. Those who want to see high-quality niche pornography, faced with few options, are willing to pay more than those with more “normal” tastes. In an interview in 2011 with the CEO of JuicyAds.com, I was told, “The harder to find or the more obscure the porn is, that’s where people are making money. That’s where the demand is … I mean, how many teen sites are there? How many amateur sites are there? You don’t have any problems finding them because everybody has twenty of them.” But balloon-popping busty giantesses in tutus? If that’s your fantasy, you’ll be happy to pay whomever can provide it.
Perhaps the biggest money-making niche, particularly given its comparatively diminutive size, is mainstream trans (TS) porn. Though Venus Lux, who won the 2016 AVN award for “Transexual Performer of the Year,” estimates that there are about ten companies or fewer shooting TS now—it’s well-known in the industry that this type of content earns far more per scene than its competition. TS porn features predominantly trans women (trans men are more frequently seen in queer porn) paired with cisgender men, and it is the fourth most popular genre of pornography on the worldwide market. It is searched for more frequently than “butts” or “threesomes,” according to the authors of A Billion Wicked Thoughts.
Fans of TS porn, who are overwhelmingly straight white men, are devoted enough to pay more for what they want to see, too. Evil Angel VP Adam Grayson told International Business Times in 2015 that transsexual porn earns more than standard porn. “Hands down, without a question,” he said. “Nothing even touches it.” His company can charge a full twenty-five percent more per TS movie—at the extremely marked-down wholesale level—than for a typical mainstream film, and fans will pay the increased retail price for the chance to see it. Trans performers, thus, earn more for their producers than their cisgender counterparts, scene for scene. But despite its outsize contributions to the industry, the TS segment of the adult talent pool has long faced discrimination both in pay and representation.
I won’t try to make this book a primer on transgender issues, but I will take a moment to say that trans women—women who were designated male at birth, usually owing to the presence of a penis—are a diverse group. They come from every conceivable background and share virtually nothing aside from a gender identity that isn’t as common as others. But mainstream porn expects that they present themselves, both cosmetically and sexually, in very specific ways. “TS girls,” as they’re often called, are more or less required by most porn companies to be tall, willowy, and traditionally feminine in appearance, with large breasts. They’re expected to wear hyper-feminine clothing and lots of makeup, and to “pass” as cisgender women in their daily lives. But once they take off their clothes for the camera, they must be endowed with penises large enough for porn (which is to say quite large indeed), and those penises must be capable of achieving erection and ejaculation on command, like those of cisgender men in porn. Of course, there are some trans women well suited to these prerequisites, but there are many more who don’t fit into this narrow definition of what a TS girl should be, according to what producers think straight white men want to see.
Tobi Hill-Meyer, a trans activist who has worked behind and in front of the camera in both the mainstream and indie segments of the industry has written, spoken, and even produced a film about her experiences with mainstream production companies who wanted her to conform to their expectations. Hill-Meyer prefers a less traditionally feminine look, but she was asked to shave her legs and wear heels to her first shoot. When the sexy stuff started, she writes in The Feminist Porn Book, “I wasn’t allowed to be sexy the way I would be with my own lovers or partners. I had to fit an entirely different model.” When she was doing a masturbation scene for her first mainstream porn shoot, she says, “After about five minutes the photographer leaned in and said in a somewhat exasperated voice, ‘So, are you going to come now?’ As you can imagine, that kind of pressure only makes things more difficult.” Her inability to ejaculate on command, she writes, is “a pretty common condition among trans women; in fact, the ability to ejaculate is about as common (or uncommon) among cis women as it is among trans women.” But the mainstream companies she was shooting for required it. One even asked her to squirt lube onto her stomach to simulate a money shot.
These expectations, of course, assume that the woman in question is comfortable enough with her genitalia to want to use them in the way the director demands in the first place, but many trans women are not, and choose to use entirely different means to get themselves off. But in TS porn made for straight men, they are expected to have penetrative sex with partners or to masturbate just like a cis man would. And while it’s all well and good for a director to have an idea of what they want to shoot, it’s another to expect all trans women to behave the same way to conform to that ideal. And no matter what, it’s not okay to ignore the contributions of those who have excelled in the genre.
Until 2012, TS performers were largely ignored during awards season, being shunted off the red carpet without getting to the media for interviews and—familiarly—not being given a slot for their awards during the annual AVN Awards show. After decades of this treatment, performers balked, and rightly so. AVN capitulated after some of the TS performers vocally crusade
d against this lesser-than treatment, and the award for “Transsexual Performer of the Year” is now presented onstage during the ceremony, while TS stars are encouraged to strut their gorgeous stuff on the red carpet along with everyone else. Meanwhile, the Transgender Erotica Awards, which were called “The Tranny Awards” from their inception in 2008 until 2013, were renamed in 2014 by event organizer Grooby after performers expressed discomfort with the terminology.
And, while there are still leaps and bounds to be made within the industry about the representation of diversity and the terminology used in reference to trans models, the use of the derogatory “shemale” and “tranny” labels has been on the decrease since outspoken trans women in the industry have begun speaking their minds. But, as Venus Lux told me, “It’s up to the cisgender males to make the decision about literacy” as the genre continues to move forward with a more aware public. “There’s so much of a disconnect between studio owners and performers about terminology,” she said, that the issue is still fraught.