The Waking Vixen on Porn and Race
28 June 06
Alt-porn starlet and newly minted porn director Audacia Ray recently posted a thoughtful essay about pornography and racism:
It is ignorant in that white liberal I-see-no-race-only-people way to assume that race is not an issue for performers and for consumers. It is and will continue to be. But the big question in my mind is how to acknowledge the desire for otherness or the desire to see interracial action – it is a real one – without pandering to that whole fetishization of the other thing (this is of course based on the perhaps faulty assumption that most porn buyers are white, though there is a an ethnic industry). And here’s the thing about “other” – in the world of sexuality but especially in the world of porn (which is much less nuanced than sexuality at large), the line between appreciation of difference and lecherous fetishizing of deviance is very, very thin.
Are interracial and ethnic pornos inherently racist? I’m inclined to say no. But there is certainly a line, one that many directors cross deliberately.
In one of the responses to Audacia’s entry, a commenter reminds us that we’re not just splitting hairs here:
I mean, is it necessary to have a Daphne Rosen type white woman play a part where she drives a car into a “bad” neighborhood, the car breaks down, then out of nowhere comes 3-5 black ghetto gangsta types who then proceed to take her back to their “crib” and work her over? Oh, and how convenient is it that she just happens to dress like a hooker with bad fashion sense?
Audacia concludes her post by posing some tricky questions:
So what’s the answer? Is it not casting mixed races scenes in order to punish viewers who for whatever reason want to see interracial action (and thereby reward those who think interracial action is the worst thing ever)? Is it casting these scenes but not promoting them to people who might be interested in such a thing (again, for whatever reason) with box cover text that indicates interracial action? Or is it promoting the scenes judiciously because that market exists?
I’m not sure how to answer these questions myself, but it does bode well that someone in jizz biz is even asking them.
More: Porn, Stereotypes, Racism
