WHEN THE WHACK! STAFF went back to Exxxotica New Jersey in November of 2010, we saw familiar faces, went to parties, and interviewed plenty of porn stars. But the most memorable part of the weekend, for me, was sitting at the bar one night, talking with a friend I’d made the previous year. We’ll call him Seth. While the after-party raged around us, Seth and I drank whiskey gingers and talked about the industry he’d been working in for nearly twenty years.
At that time, Seth had performed in around fifteen hundred adult films, pseudonymously starred in numerous showcase series from several production companies, directed over two hundred films, won five AVN awards, and been inducted into the AVN, XRCO, and NightMoves halls of fame. Yet, near the close of 2010, he told me that he was contemplating retiring from adult entertainment because he felt undervalued. Sure, five AVN awards sounds impressive, but when I checked them out I discovered that every scene for which he’d won an award had been a group scene. Which is to say that he hadn’t yet been recognized by the industry’s most prestigious award-giving organization for his own performances.
I encouraged him in whatever pursuit he chose and assured him that he had so much to offer that if the porn industry wasn’t giving him the respect he deserved, someone else would. But he was already in his early fifties, and although he’d held jobs prior to porn, he felt he was approaching old-dog-new-tricks territory. But his frustration over a lack of appreciation, it seemed, was only part of what was bothering him; He suspected that he was having a hard time collecting on the “legend” status he so richly deserved because of his race.
I’ll take a moment here to recognize the fact that I have no idea what Seth’s financial background looked like, or what series of events led up to our conversation. But no matter what the details behind the scarcity of financial rewards for his long and distinguished career in adult entertainment, I saw in Seth’s laments a microcosm of a larger trend that cannot be ignored. Earlier that day at the convention we had both seen large, expensive booths representing major studios owned by white men. Many of those men had started out as performers, then moved behind the camera before going on to much profit and acclaim. But Seth and I had seen zero similar booths owned by black men. Or by black women. Or by Latin or Indian or East Asian men or women. You get the idea. While there had been a good number of actors of color signing autographs, we were both aware that the percentages were off.
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.
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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 was 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.
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.
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)