BLACK TALE: WOMEN OF COLOR IN THE AMERICAN PORN INDUSTRY
Mireille Miller-Young
ISSUE 1.1 (2005)
“You are not supposed to talk about liking sex because you are already assumed to be a whore,” Jeannie Pepper told me following her 2002 recognition ceremony for twenty years in adult entertainment, the longest career for a black actress. I had just begun to do fieldwork for my doctoral research project on women of color in hardcore when I met Jeannie Pepper, one of the first black porn stars of the 1980s. She, along with women of color like Vanessa del Rio, Angel Kelly, Linda Wong, Sahara Knite, Desiree West, and Kitten Natividad, broke down the doors of the adult industry, allowing the young minority women of today to be able to compete as porn stars. I wanted to excavate this history of women of color’s participation in porn, from its beginnings in the age of early photography and film to the global multibillion dollar industry it is today, in order to understand the experiences of hardcore’s most invisible workers. What Jeannie Pepper illuminated was key: the stigma of women of color as always whores in our society has a profound impact on how they negotiate sexuality and sex work.
For many women of color, we have been raised in families and communities that do not speak openly about sexuality. Whether because of religion or social or cultural traditions and taboos, as women of color we grow up being told that sex is wrong, keep your legs closed, and don’t ask questions! Even among women, we have created enduring silences about sex as a mode of protection. Because women of color in America have been so exposed to harsh stigmas about our womanhood and disproportionate sexual violence against us, we have actively produced a culture of silence about sexuality in our own communities, as if such denials would force the dominant society to see our value and humanity. Instead of learning about sex from our mothers, aunts, and grandmothers, many of us find out from friends, lovers, or strangers. As we try to define our own sexual identities, we must always confront the images society and the media industries have manufactured about us—those rampant stereotypes of black ghetto hoes, spicy Latina mamacitas, Asian angels, hustling hookers, and crackhead pregnant inner city minority teens on welfare. Movies, magazines, music videos, and the evening news relentlessly repeat these images again and again, confirming them as truth even in our own minds. Women of color in America battle against these myths everyday. Our survival depends on a kind of guerrilla warfare challenging this ideological terrorism against our souls.
The sex industries are completely complicit. Beliefs about the sexuality of women of color as deviant and dangerous drive the disproportionately higher rates of incarceration for minority women street prostitutes. Because of poverty, discrimination, and social marginalization, black and Latina prostitutes are more likely to work on the street rather than from escort agencies, brothels, or from their homes. Exposed to the dangers of the street—including psychopathic johns, leeching pimps, and corrupt and abusive vice cops—women of color prostitutes are the victims of disproportionate levels of violence. Black women make up nearly 40 percent of arrests for prostitution. They are five times more likely than white women to live in poverty, and three times more likely to be unemployed.
For many women, the hardcore film industry offers the safest and highest status sex work. Aside from the higher pay rates, there are several advantages that sex workers find in the porn business. For instance, women can generally determine whom they want to perform with and what type of sex acts they are willing to do in an environment that is, for the most part, safe, clean, and legal. Although stigmatized, women in this legal terrain of sex work can attain a form of fame, visibility, and legitimacy that is generally impossible for workers in other parts of the sexual economy. Sex workers can gain notoriety in this entertainment-based industry that then helps them gain future exotic dance gigs, charge extremely high rates for private escorting, start their own members-only websites, and access modeling and promotional work for companies.
But women of color are consistently discriminated against in the pornography industry. On average they are paid half to three-quarters of what white actresses are offered. They are not offered nearly as many roles as white performers, and tend to be cornered into the so-called “ethnic market.” As a result, African American, Latina, and Asian women working in the underfinanced ethnic market have fewer opportunities to “crossover” into the mainstream, white-dominated sphere of hardcore, and therefore gain less notoriety, and less pay. Few companies dealing in interracial and all-ethnic porn offer big contracts to women of color, and if they do, they are much less than the $100,000 per year that large corporations like Vivid reserve for white actresses. Historically, Vivid has only offered a handful of women of color contracts in that range. Porn companies rationalize these inequalities by arguing that women of color are not as desired by the mainstream audience (i.e. white men) as they are by urban men of color, and therefore make up a smaller market share of hardcore products. These companies spend less on ethnic video production and marketing budgets and offer smaller salaries for “ethnic talent.”
In addition to discrimination in pay rates, contracts, and opportunities, women of color in hardcore also complain about experiencing prejudice at the workplace, including hostile, indifferent, or unprofessional treatment by production companies, agents, directors, the crew, and white performers. They have reported being sent home because white actors and actresses were uncomfortable having sex with them (viewing it as a risk to their careers), being unfairly criticized or ignored, and receiving less support on set. Unlike mainly white or even some interracial sets, all-ethnic sets often expect performers to do their own makeup, hair, and costumes. They rarely provide decent food for all-day shoots, and while white sets have catering, you’re lucky to find more than sweets (to keep them working) and liquor (to calm them down) on ethnic-market sets.
But one of the starkest contrasts in the labor experiences of women of color sex workers in porn is the issue of roles. Since the development of an all-ethnic fetishized market in hardcore video in the 1980s, one of the most common roles for black and Latina actresses has been the maid. Although there is not very much logic to be found in the plotlines of porn features anyway, it seems that production companies cannot imagine letting women of color play the roles of wife, mother, sister, or daughter alongside whites. Instead, they continually figure women of color in supporting roles such as the servant, a character that lives in sexual servitude for whites. Drawing on a long history of stereotypical roles (remember the mammy in films like Gone With the Wind?), situating women of color as maids reveals that even though the primary role of pornography is to spark the (lustful) imagination of spectators, imagination is, in fact, one of the least significant components of the adult industry.
Pornography works hard to create a fantasy for predominantly male spectators, but because white men dominate the manufacturing of the fantasy, these images tend to reflect their desires and fears of the sexuality of people of color. Hence, women of color are figured as lusty Latinas, submissive Asian girls, and black ghetto hoes. In the political economy of the industry their discriminatory treatment is made invisible, while in the economy of desire, stereotypes of their race and sexuality are made distinctively visible.
These problems are linked to the devaluation of women of color in our society, and the rampant exploitation of our bodies. Measured against Anglo-American standards of beauty and codes of femininity, we are rendered grotesque, animalistic, dominant, and excessive. The ideal of beauty seems to be women who look like Jenna Jameson, Jenny McCarthy, and Pamela Anderson, and the widespread fame and acceptance of these women by the mainstream media underscores the ascendant value of white womanhood. Women of color are pressured to conform to these ideals, and as the miraculous transformations of J. Lo and Beyoncé to a nearly white, mulatta image attest, women of color tend to only be accepted to the extent that their exoticism is situated in a comfortable range of the blonde, white female aesthetic. Darker skinned and more “ethnic-looking” women are often pushed to the lowest status in the sex work economies; from street work to escorting to dancing, they are made doubly invisible.
Photo of Jeannie Pepper, courtesy of Mireille Miller-Young.
In order to keep up with these expectations and compete in the game, we try to force our bodies to conform to these dominant standards. Cosmetic engineering through surgery is popular among women of color in porn, as they attempt to nip, tuck, and suck the voluptuous brownness out of their bodies while inflating their breasts to a marketable DD and beyond. Long, straight hair weaves and color contact lenses complete the look. They are told that an increasingly skinny and plastic image is what sells, that the porn consumers want a chocolate Barbie Doll.
What are we trying to prove? Can we love ourselves and demand that we are valued on our own terms in the sex industries? Jeannie Pepper lasted twenty years without altering her body with surgery. Even Ron Jeremy celebrated her natural body, saying at her recognition ceremony that Jeannie had the best breasts in the business and lamenting that they don’t make them like that anymore. At the same time, however, while Jeannie maintained her own image, she was never completely embraced by the American adult industry. During her long career, Jeannie spent seven years living in Germany with her then husband, photographer John Dragon, because she found that she was more accepted as a black woman in the sexual marketplace of Europe than she was in the United States. While Jeannie found space to thrive in exile, the acceptable image for women of color in the US porn market narrowed.
As a result of the mainstreaming of hip-hop culture, the ethnic market has become more popular. The representations of darker and thicker women’s bodies, especially their butts, have increasingly been deciphered as low class, as “ghetto.” This aesthetic is somewhat celebrated in the new hip-hop pornography, but it remains a way to stigmatize women of color as always whores (and not in the feminist sense of the word). Instead of embracing a range of bodies, sexualities, and looks as part of the diversity of women of color, the industry has labeled some women “ghetto” and others “crossover,” sustaining a hierarchy among women. These divisions have a lot to do with dominant fantasies of women of color as sources of desire and disgust, but they key into real cultural race and body politics between sex workers with different skin tones, body types, and class backgrounds.
Entrenched racism continually marginalizes women of color in this industry, while sexism facilitates the control of the production, distribution, and retail sectors of adult entertainment to remain in the hands of men. Because the industry is always searching for the next fresh face, tits, and ass of the eighteen-year-old girl next door, women workers are pitted against one another to compete for the scraps of opportunities left. And because white women easily benefit from the subordination of women of color in the porn market, they tend to embrace their race and class privilege in order to compete and ignore the struggles of minorities. Nina Hartley is one of the few white women who has publicly condemned racism and sexism in the industry, and has advocated for cooperation on the part of all women, who are the backbone of the porn business. Women of color actresses like Jeannie Pepper, India, Dee, Honney Bunny, and Sinnamon Love have also urged for unity, across race and class lines, for all women in the industry. What would such a coalition look like?
The recent HIV/AIDS crisis that hit the adult entertainment industry in the spring of 2004 sparked an important conversation among sex workers. Performers called industry-wide meetings to discuss the implications of the disease spreading to at least three sex workers who worked without condoms. Unlike the brave efforts of many street sex workers and escort services to normalize the use of condoms, the porn industry has largely resisted institutionalizing condoms, arguing that their fans believe that condoms make the scenes less erotic. Companies tend to allow workers to decide whether or not they want to use condoms, but performers who are condom-only often complain that they are offered less work than those who are willing to work without protection. This urgent issue drew a firestorm of complaints from performers who gathered together as the crisis hit. They began to talk about their frustration with companies not looking out for their best interests—in attempting to sell fantasies, these production companies neglected the harsh realities of sex workers’ lives in the age of HIV/AIDS. As performers came together to work out their concerns about the porn business (a meeting largely sparked by black male actors in the industry), they were formulating a nascent sex labor politics in opposition to the status quo. Feeling their lives were at stake, they articulated concerns as sex workers, rather than as porn stars. Significantly, this mobilization was the blueprint for what is needed now in the industry, among not only women of color but all workers in the porn business.
The only way to improve the conditions for all women and men in porn is to demand improvement of and equality in industry standards. Because of the decentralized nature of the hardcore industry and the lack of a common workplace, it is difficult for porn workers to imagine forming a labor union like the Exotic Dancers Alliance (EDA) in San Francisco. Yet, professional performers need to follow the example of COYOTE (Call Off Your Tired Ethics) and PONY (Prostitutes of New York) to form networks with one another and mentor young workers coming into the industry. Such efforts have tended to be undermined by the nature of the industry in drawing mainly casual workers who do not remain long and lack an investment in forcing change, and young women who are ignorant of the acceptable rates for their work.
Perhaps these challenges could be overcome by forcing companies and agents to distribute information designed by a sex worker labor collective that informs new workers about industry standards and their rights. Another tactic might be to initiate an online database that all workers would be expected to consult, which would hold guidelines for workers and be used to coordinate meetings with others. Some forms of these efforts have already begun with Protecting Adult Welfare (PAW), directed by Bill Margold, and Adult Industry Medical Health Care (AIM), founded by former porn star Sharon Mitchell. Mitchell and Nina Hartley have joined forces to create Porn 101, an instruction video for sex workers in hardcore that explains how they can navigate the exploitative terrain of the industry.
More initiatives like this need to occur, and they need to be sure to have a sustained analysis of how both racism and sexism inform the labor experiences of porn workers. And any network that does form needs to connect porn sex workers to the broader community of sex workers in other arenas of the sexual economy, in the United States and beyond. As the adult industry is increasingly part of the globalization of capitalism and a mainstay of many national economies, all sex workers need to exchange information and strategies for resistance. Just as the re-election of the right-wing administration in the White House teaches us, we need to gain our resolve, collectivize, and mobilize to make a change. It will not be easy, but the survival of all of us and our rights to use our bodies as we choose with dignity is at stake.
MIREILLE MILLER-YOUNG is associate professor of feminist studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research explores race, gender, and sexuality in visual culture and the sex industries. Her book, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work, and Pornography examines the history of African American women’s representations, performances, and labors in pornographic media. She is a coeditor of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, with Constance Penley, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, and Tristan Taormino.