Racism in Porn

We live in a world that doesn’t tolerate racism, because we understand too well the profound consequences it has for individuals, for entire communities and racial groups, and for society as a whole.

In spite of this apparent awareness, our society battles against racial prejudice and discrimination. Yet in our fight against these things, we rarely consider how the sex industry promotes racism in its most flagrant, extreme and offensive form. Racism in porn is largely invisible, unnoticed (at least by the white majority) and largely unchallenged.

Typecast

Racism, sexism and misogyny are staples of today’s online porn. Porn turns women into sex objects, which porn sites helpfully sort into categories: women are classified by age, job or social / familial relation – so we have sisters, ‘MILFs’, grannies, schoolgirls, teens and babysitters. Sometimes women are sorted according to their physical characteristics: fat, skinny, big-breasted, small-breasted, blond, red-headed, brunette, old, young, pregnant, disabled. At other times, women are identified by race.

Expressing ‘[n]ot subtle, coded racism” but overt, “old-fashioned racism”, pornography, Professor Robert Jenson argues, “is one media genre in which overt racism is still routine and acceptable”, commonly representing stereotypes such as “the sexually primitive black male stud, the animalistic, black woman, the hot Latina, the Asian geisha.”¹

Racist opportunism

In the days following the terrible, police-perpetrated murder of George Floyd, porn sites were flooded with overt, highly offensive racist content, subgenres sexualising and trivialising the Black Lives Matter movement and “drawing revenue from the exploitation of the protest movement, with recycled racist themes to boot.”²

Why do we tolerate racism in porn in a way we wouldn’t dream of doing in any other media?

Perhaps it’s because we’ve been conditioned into thinking that porn is just fantasy, that our sexual fetishes are beyond ethical scrutiny and have nothing whatsoever to do with “real life”. However, as with any other kinds of media, racism in porn does have consequences – starting with those experienced by BAME performers themselves.

Racial inequality in the porn industry

Black porn actors are routinely treated with mockery and degradation. In a Rolling Stone interview involving almost two dozen black women who work in the porn industry, EJ Dickson observes how many of the actors spoke about “the lack of power, control, and respect, even as their bodies are used to make money for the very people taking advantage of them.”³

“The guy at my first meeting told me, ‘We can’t sell black women. You’re not desirable to our audience. But if you’d like to give me a blowjob behind the desk really quick, that would be cool.'”
Diana DeVoe, black porn actor⁴There’s a Serious Racism Problem in the Porn Industry

People of colour also have fewer employment opportunities that are not tied to their race⁵ Black women are often rejected for roles because they are in effect absolutely typecast, as porn actor Savannah Skye explains: “It can never just be a Black woman in a hot video. There’s often an agenda that stereotypes us and uses our skin as a way to degrade us. We’re not treated like everyone else. We’re treated like props.”⁶There’s a Serious Racism Problem in the Porn Industry

Black porn actors are also paid less than their white counterparts, especially the women who routinely receive half the amount for the same scenes.⁷Even more shocking is the fact that white female actors often demand higher pay for any so-called ‘interracial’ scenes that they perform with black men. The same doesn’t apply the other way around, which creates “a deeply uncomfortable racial economic hierarchy.”⁸

“My boyfriend grew to hate doing porn, because he was constantly told to act more like a thug stereotype. He got passed up many times because he was not dark enough, and because he was uncomfortable being rough with women and calling them racist names. He wasn’t good at playing into the ‘scary black man’ persona, so directors went for the guys that could.”
Vanessa Belmond, biracial actress⁹

Perpetuating racism

Racism exists in every industry – but in the sex industry, performers of colour aren’t merely torn between speaking out about their marginalization and staying quiet for fear of career reprisal : if they want regular work, they’re also forced to take on roles that reflect and perpetuate historical notions of racial supremacism and violence against ethnic minorities. It’s no coincidence that the porn companies that regularly shoot black performers also tend to create the most outrageously offensive racial tropes.

This explains why, early in her career, performer Ana Foxx participated in a ‘Cum Bang’ scene giving blowjobs to eight white men while wearing a Confederate flag as her statutory ‘punishment’ for dating a white man. Despite subsequent regrets, Ana has not been able to put the experience behind her: in response to a tweet in which she expressed support for the Black Lives Matter movement, she was targeted with vicious criticism that called out her hypocrisy.¹⁰

But is it possible that we are the hypocrites here? After all, the video received over a million views. The bottom line is that racism sells. “During the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, internet searches for “racist porn” tripled. Although the porn giant Pornhub purported to support the Black Lives Matter movement, ultimately it chose to act with hypocrisy, prioritising profits over principles.

It is not in the porn industry’s financial interest to take a firm moral stand on these issues. Notions of equality are ultimately founded on the assumption that something as superficial as skin colour is utterly irrelevant to someone’s inherent worth. But in porn, the superficial is pretty much all there is. Porn actors’ value lies in what they look like, and how their appearance fits people’s sexual fantasies. Market forces in porn dictate that black and brown bodies are literally worth less than white ones – and the industry simply follows the money.

We can’t question kinks

Camgirl Kitty Agiri recalls how, in response to the “pet-play” fetish she was acting out, she received her first racist comment. A man said to her: “I wanna pull your leash and call you n*****.” Unsurprisingly, she found this shocking, and yet she responded by saying: “I respect people’s kinks, but that is one that I will not participate in” [emphasis added]. Since when should we respect people’s racism? When it’s sexualised, apparently. Like the rest of us, Agiri has been conditioned not to judge or even to query the ethical rightness of people’s sexual kinks. The most we can do is talk about our own personal feelings and what we are comfortable with accommodating.

However, sexual kinks and fetishes don’t come from nowhere. As porn actor Isiah Maxwell observes: “Porn has always been a reflection of American values, so if these are the titles you see, these are the titles people are buying. If you see a title like Fear of a Black Penis 6, that must mean five of them must sell well.”¹¹

Rooted in history

So-called ‘interracial porn’, which normally involves black men and white women, is a fetish that has a long history both in porn and in wider society. It goes back to the days of the slave trade: “IR as a genre is a purely American construct, based on our country’s history,” porn actor Casey Calvert explains.¹²

Dr Gail Dines of the campaign group Culture Reframed cites one producer’s observation that the most popular IR movies involve “the purity of the sacred white woman [being] compromised.”¹³Another pornographer explained to her: “My customers seem to enjoy black men ‘taking advantage’ of white women: seducing their white daughters and wives. The more ‘wrong’ a title is, the more appealing it is.”¹⁴ Such material, she adds, is “produced for, marketed to, and distributed mainly to white men; apparently, they like to see black men degradingly typecast in this way.’¹⁵

“Racism is a popular kink, and women of colour are routinely fetishised: “Because in the kink-is-king world of adult-film production, racism isn’t a terrible injustice or catalyst for a national reckoning. It’s a commodity. And one that’s exploding.”
Hallie Lieberman, Historian and Journalist¹⁶

Porn actor Isiah Maxwell says he tries to separate porn and social activism because it’s “such a murky water”: “Porn is the only industry where you can justify your racism.”

Making money from promoting racism

But although few people would ever consider porn to be the right medium for ‘social activism’, few would contest the fact that the industry should take responsibility for its flagrant promotion and monetizing of harmful racist content. Porn isn’t just a mirror reflecting back to us our sexual tastes and preferences; it also plays a critical role in shaping them. It’s not just something we watch passively; it teaches us about how we see ourselves and other people. What’s it teaching us about race? How does it impact the way we view the sexuality of people of colour? And what kind of impact does it have on the way people of colour perceive their own sexuality?

Porn’s influence is felt in society at large: by individual men and women of colour, and by entire ethnic minority communities, intersecting with other forms of disadvantage to drive discrimination, prejudice, and increasing risk of sexual violence, abuse and exploitation.