Pornland (19 page)

Why, then, are girls and women agreeing to have sex under emotionally shallow and at times physically dangerous circumstances? Bogle says it is because there is no clear alternative on college campuses,
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and while I agree with this, I think there is something else going on: in this hypersexualized culture, we are socializing girls into seeing themselves as legitimate sex objects who are deserving of sexual use (and abuse). The person who best explained this to me was not an expert in women’s studies but an incarcerated child rapist. During an interview in a Connecticut prison, John told me how he carefully and strategically groomed his ten-year-old stepdaughter into “consenting” to have sex with him, and then causally mentioned that his job was made easy because “the culture did a lot of the grooming for me.”

As John has been through many years of therapy in prison, he had the lingo down pat, and in his eagerness to show off his knowledge to me, he used the word “groom” many times. This is a term psychologists use to describe the way perpetrators socialize, seduce, and manipulate their victims into accepting and often “agreeing” to sexual abuse. John explained how, in his “conscious desire to desensitize her,” he used the questions she would ask (What is a blow job? What does a penis taste like?) as an entrée to introducing her first to adult porn and then to child porn. John was very clear that the sexualized pop culture images his stepdaughter had been exposed to from an early age, as well as the sexualized conversations that such images generated in her peer group, had developed a precocious sexual curiosity that “made grooming her easy.”

While not all men are a “John,” the insight he had on how the culture facilitates sexual abuse is worth taking seriously as he picked up on a trend in the society that no doubt other men, incarcerated perpetrators and nonincarcerated ones, are exploiting. By inundating girls and women with the message that their most worthy attribute is their sexual hotness and crowding out other messages, pop culture is grooming them just like an individual perpetrator would. It is slowly chipping away at their self-esteem, stripping them of a sense of themselves as whole human beings, and providing them with an identity that emphasizes sex and de-emphasizes every other human attribute.

The American Psychological Association’s study on the sexualization of girls found that there was ample evidence to conclude that sexualizing girls “has negative effects in a variety of domains, including cognitive functioning, physical and mental health, sexuality, and attitudes and beliefs.”
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Some of these effects include more risky sexual behavior, higher rates of eating disorders, depression, and low self-esteem as well as reduced academic performance. These are the same symptoms found in girls and women who have been sexually assaulted; in terms of effect, then, we appear to be turning out a generation of girls who have been “assaulted” by the very culture they live in. And there is no avoiding the culture. The very act of socialization involves internalizing the cultural norms and attitudes. If the culture is now one big collective perpetrator, then we can assume that an ever-increasing number of girls and women are going to develop emotional, cognitive, and sexual problems as they are socialized into seeing themselves as mere sex objects, and not much else.

Where is female sexual agency in all of this? When feminists in the 1960s and ’70s fought for sexual liberation, they fought for the right to want, desire, and enjoy sex—but on their own terms. They argued that their sexuality had been defined by men, and they wanted it back. What they got was not what they expected: a hypersexuality that is generic, formulaic, and plasticized. It is a sexuality that has its roots in porn and is now so mainstream that it is fast becoming normalized. One of the men interviewed by Bogle said he saw hookup culture as a “guy’s paradise.”
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Yes, Pornland is indeed paradise for these men, as it is sex with no strings attached. And for women it is business as usual: men defining our sexuality in ways that serve them, not us. Only now this sexuality is sold to us as empowering. A new twist on an old theme.

Chapter 7. Racy Sex, Sexy Racism

Porn from the Dark Side

The consumer never had it so good. . . . Definitely those niches are being fulfilled, interracial, all black, ethnic.

—James A, owner of West Coast Productions

Just throw it all in a blender and see what comes out.

—Video Team owner Christian Mann on interracial and ethnic porn

In April 2007, radio show legend Don Imus finally overstepped the mark with his vile description of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos.” Following a concerted campaign by the African American community, CBS fired him amid a public outcry and a mass exodus of corporate sponsors from his show. But what barely merited a comment, let alone outcry from the media, was a press release issued three weeks later from the porn company
Kick Ass Pictures
announcing its intention to donate $1 from every sale of its new movie, titled
Nappy Headed Hos,
to the Don Imus retirement fund. And this movie is just one among countless that have “hos” in the title, a shorthand way the porn industry commonly refers to black women.

Over the years, thanks in large part to the civil rights movement, blatant examples of racism that were once commonplace in mainstream media have become less acceptable. The old “Stepin Fetchit”–type movies that depicted black men as imbeciles or
The Birth of a Nation–
type movies that showed black men as violent rapists of white women would not be tolerated today. This does not mean that racist depictions are a thing of the past, just that the media industry has to operate with some restraint since we have, as a society, made some surface attempt at reining in the most vulgar and crass demonstrations of racism. Not so for the porn industry, which gets away with a level of racism that is breathtaking in its contempt and loathing for people of color.

Consider the August 2007 release of
Long Dong Black Kong,
which caused quite a stir in the porn industry with charges of racism for using the word Kong to describe the black male performer. Invoking the “only a joke” defense, Peter Reynolds, vice president of Adam and Eve, the movie’s distributor, recommended that “we should all not take ourselves so seriously,” as the “name is totally innocent.”
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Given the overtly racist titles of recent porn movies that feature black men—
Hot Black Thug,
Black Poles in White Holes,
Huge Black Cock on White Pussy,
and
Monster Black Penises—
the
Long Dong Black Kong
title does, at first glance, seem fairly tame by comparison. However, by referring to black men as monsters, this movie came too close for comfort for many porn producers. It exposed what the porn industry would prefer to keep below the surface—that black men are routinely depicted as monstrous in their uncontrolled desire for white women.

The
Long Dong Black Kong
movie belongs to a genre called “interracial” by the industry. According to an article in
Adult Video News,
this is one of the fastest growing and most bootlegged subgenres in gonzo pornography today.
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While the term interracial suggests a grab bag of color, with performers of different races having sex with each other, in reality, interracial porn features mainly black men with white (often blonde) women, with titles such as
Black on Blondes,
White Pussy-Black Cocks,
and
White Sluts on Black Snakes.
If porn users want to see other racial or ethnic mixes, they have to go to categories marked “Black” (which refers to porn with black women performers), “Asian,” “Latin,” or “Ethnic,” all of which are burgeoning genres in porn.

The racial politics of the porn industry today mirror those of pop culture in that the majority of people involved in the production end of the business is white. This white control has led Jake Stead, a well-known black performer, to accuse the industry of “rampant racism” in its failure to provide black producers with the start-up capital, networks, or access to distribution channels that many white producers enjoy.
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Jesse Spencer, aka Mr. Marcus, performer and owner of the production company MSEX, similarly faults the industry for its overrepresentation of white producers and performers and calls for a greater black presence. In an interview for
XBIZ,
he offers a solution to racism in porn: “I think it has to be up to the black performers to create product for our people and our market, because no one is going to do it for us.”
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Who exactly is included in the “us” category is unclear because it’s hard to imagine how black women, or any women of color, would benefit from Mr. Marcus’s proposal.

Black women do not fare well in the porn industry because the “plum” jobs for porn performers—the contract employment with the two major porn-feature studios, Vivid and Wicked—are reserved mainly for white women. These studios, with their chic image, sophisticated marketing practices, and guarantee of regular work, afford their contract women an income and level of visibility that makes them the envy of the industry. (Jenna Jameson, of course, is held up as the quintessential example of just how far a contract porn star can go.) With surgically enhanced bodies, perfectly coiffed hair, and glamorous makeup, these women act as PR agents for the porn industry, showing up regularly on Howard Stern, E! Entertainment, or in the pages of
Maxim.
As the porn industry increasingly wiggles its way into pop culture, it is no surprise that it uses mainly white women as the “acceptable” face of porn; their all-American-girl looks seamlessly mesh with the blonde, blue-eyed images that grace screens, celebrity magazines, and billboards across North America.

In porn, women of color are generally relegated to gonzo, a genre that has little glamour, security, or chic status. Here women have few fan club Web sites, do not make it to pop culture, and have to endure body-punishing sex. But while the sex acts are typical gonzo, the way the written text frames the sex is unique as it racializes the bodies and sexual behavior of the performer. In all-white porn, no one ever refers to the man’s penis as “a white cock” or the woman’s vagina as “white pussy,” but introduce a person of color, and suddenly all players have a racialized sexuality, where the race of the performer(s) is described in ways that make women a little “sluttier” and the men more hypermasculinized.

It is this harnessing of gender to race that makes women of color a particularly useful group to exploit in gonzo porn, since gonzo porn works only to the degree that the women in it are debased and dehumanized. As a woman of color, the porn performer embodies two subordinate categories, such as Asian fuckbucket, black ho, or Latina slut. All past and present racist stereotypes are dredged up and thrown in her face while she is being orally, anally, and vaginally penetrated by any number of men. When men (irrespective of race) ejaculate on her face and body, they often make reference to her skin color, and her debased status as a woman is seamlessly melded with, and reinforced by, her supposed debased status as a person of color. In the process, her race and gender become inseparable and her body carries the status of dual subordination.

Racializing the Slut: Women of Color in Porn

It is no surprise that Asian women are the most popular women of color in porn, given the long-standing stereotypes of them as sexually servile geishas, lotus blossoms, and China dolls. Depicted as perfect sex objects with well-honed sexual skills, Asian women come to porn with a baggage of stereotypes that makes them the idealized women of the porn world. In most sites and movies specializing in Asian women (“Asian” being used in porn as a shorthand for a whole range of ethnicities), we see a mind-numbing replaying of the image of Asian women as sexually exotic, enticing, and submissive in both the text and pictures. Using words such as naive, obedient, petite, cute, and innocent, the Web sites are full of images of Asian women, who, we are told, will do anything to please a man, since this is what they are bred for. It seems from these sites, however, that Asian women are interested in pleasing only white men because Asian men are almost completely absent as sex partners.

The introductory text on Hustler’s Web site Asian Fever sums up the way Asian women are caricatured in porn: “Asian Fever features scorching scenes of the sexual excesses these submissive Far East nymphos are famous for. No one knows how to please a man like an Asian slut can, and these exotic beauties prove it.”
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Notice here how Asian women are defined as being super slutty thanks to their assumed sexual excesses, submissiveness, skill, and beauty. Their supposed submissiveness is eroticized as they are presented as completely powerless to resist any sexual demands men may have. Their powerlessness is further enhanced by the ways these women are “childified”—they are presented as naive, innocent, and lacking any adult agency. The more childish the woman seems, the greater the ability of the male to exploit and manipulate.

The bodies of these women are similarly described as immature, and of course, given that this is porn, it is always their vaginas that are constructed as the most childlike. Words like “tiny,” “little,” and “tight” are used as a way to develop an image of a vagina that seems more like a child’s than a woman’s. Many of these sites promise the viewer the pleasure of seeing a “tight Asian cunt filled with a huge cock,” thereby sexualizing female discomfort. In keeping with the gonzo script, these women are depicted as loving rough sex and are happy to take the abuse handed out to them.

For “authenticity,” the Web sites often write the English text in chopstick font, play Asian-sounding music in the background, and have the women speaking in broken English. While all of these sites are deeply racist in the way they caricature Asian cultures, one of the worst offenders is a site called Me Fuck You Long Time
(a spoof of a line borrowed from
Full Metal Jacket
), which offers the viewer movies of “Asian Sluts Getting Fucked by American Cocks.” Referring to the women as “fuckbuckets,” this site has multiple images of women being gagged by so-called American cocks. On the right-hand side of the site is an American flag, a tank, and the Statue of Liberty, and on the left is an Asian woman holding a Chinese flag. Just below her is a streaming video of an Asian woman having ejaculate squirted on her face.
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The not-so-subtle message here is that no matter what really happened in past wars, today the Americans are the real winners as they get to fuck Asian women any way they want. To the winner goes utter and complete access to the losing side’s women, and what better way to represent this than to have a continuous video of the losing side’s woman being degraded in the best way porn knows: a face covered in ejaculate.

Sometimes the industries of trafficking and sex tourism, which supply Western men with cut-rate women and girls, are referenced for an extra thrill. The text promoting the film
Asian Street Hookers
advertises “real Asian freaks from southeast Asia,” and to make really sure that the user knows that they are talking about trafficking in women, they boast: “The Oriental Express flies to Thailand and the Philippines—and once again imports the sexiest dolls around.”
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Indeed, if the pleasure in porn is watching a woman rendered powerless, then trafficked women are about as powerless as you can get. They are in a foreign country with no support systems, their passport is usually confiscated by the pimp, they have no money, often they can’t speak the language, and they are at the mercy of the sex traffickers who would just as soon kill them as let them leave. In this subordinated state, a woman has to submit to any sexual use and abuse brought to bear on her body. In Pornland sex, this state of utter oppression is about as hot as you can get.

Whereas Asian women are seen as biologically disposed to being subservient, black women are presented as the very opposite. The idea that black women lack the traditional feminine quality of subservience is not something that porn invented; it has been around for some years and has at times found its way into governmental reports, most notably the Moynihan Report (1965), which blamed black poverty on black women’s emasculation of black men.
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As ridiculous as this is, black women in particular, and the black community in general, have paid a heavy price for the pathologizing of black women as unrestrained “bitches” steamrollering over black men. Now, in porn, these women get their comeuppance.

As they are in the rest of society, black women are unequally treated in the industry, often earning less than their white female counterparts for the same acts and scenes; very few black women actually become well known and are thus denied the added wealth that comes with having a name in the industry. In his book on the black porn industry, Lawrence Ross quotes the well-known black porn actor Lexington Steele as saying: “In a boy/girl scene, one girl one guy, no anal sex, the market dictates a minimum of $800 to $900 per scene for the girl. . . . Now a white girl will start at $800 and go up from there, but a black girl will have to start at $500, and then hit a ceiling of about $800. So the black girl hits a ceiling at the white girl’s minimum.”
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With film names like
Juicy Black Butt, Horny Black Pussy, Bad Black Babes,
and
Black Pussy Stuffed,
the race of the woman is clearly transmitted to the potential user. Wading through numerous sites featuring black women, what appears as a common theme is the framing of these women as aggressive and mouthy. They are constantly referred to as having an “attitude,” and the job of porn sex is to train them—domesticate them, if you will—into a subordinate state. They are presented as having a particularly excessive and uncontrollable type of sexuality that takes a real man, be he black or white, to handle.