Sex Edition: Don’t fetishize me, bro: Racism still evident in pornography

If I were to star in a porn film, it would probably, despite my wishes, carry a title similar to any of these real film titles: “Hot Black Thug,” “Black Poles in White Holes,” “Long Dong Black Kong,” “Guess Who’s Banging Your Sister.”

I picture a white porn producer, whose first name is an adjective, suavely telling me that it’s nothing personal and that it’s a business of supply and demand. He’d be right.

In perhaps only one way, porn is wholly democratic. If the desire for a particular fetish or “thing” exists, chances are someone will find a way to make a porn movie to suit those desires. What happens, though, when that desire is rooted in the ugliest and most hurtful of racial stereotypes?

While he ruminates on the idea of sex with a porn star in the song “Hell of a Life,” Kanye West delivers a subtle critique on America’s sexual identity: “She said her price will go down if she ever f*ck a black guy,” he raps.

It remains one of West’s most poignant jabs at a huge problem in contemporary American culture: the overall acceptance of fetishized racial stereotypes.

The torrid history of the sexual dehumanization of African-Americans has its roots in the antebellum South, where black men and women were believed to have animalistic sexual habits. Society was structured around the power of white men, making black women an object of experimentation and black men a threat to the sexual purity of white women.

Minstrel shows depicted sex-crazed black men marauding the countryside in search for white women who were supposed to be irresistible to them. The idea that my ancestors possessed an insatiable lust for white women never underwent any scrutiny, and despite being rooted in America’s less-than-decent past ideologies, remains a pervasive (and disgusting) belief in contemporary culture.

Similarly, black women continue to suffer a doubly invective marginalization as their human capital, still gauged by their sexual expedience, somehow remains tied to the early perception of them as “wild rides” for slave owners.

When Don Imus, who is currently on Fox Business TV, called a group of women on the Rutgers basketball team “nappy headed hos” in 2007, the easy reaction to the media outcry would have been to say we were a newly progressive society on the cusp of its first non-white president.

Unfortunately, in the dark, dank bedrooms of America, a porn film with the title “Nappy Headed Hos” became immensely popular.

In her book “Unequal Desires,” Siobhan Brooks points to the drastically lower wages black strippers make in comparison to their white counterparts. She discusses at length the lower erotic capital of black women in the sex economy as being reflective of their lower value in the entire labor economy. This low value is even more apparent in the production of the types of porn films in which black women appear: The plot of black female porn is almost always centered around subjugation.

A white porn actress will never be featured on a website called Ghetto Gaggers, where white men go into destitute neighborhoods and abusively have sex with black women after throwing money at them — all the while using racial slurs. 

It’s easy to ignore this as a phenomenon that exists in a seedy underbelly of X-rated culture, but there’s compelling evidence that our racial biases don’t just stick to the seamy side of our culture.

Online dating is the most reflective of these still-pernicious (and racist) attitudes. In November of last year, National Public Radio reported on a collection of studies indicating that Asian women, who are also the most sought-after demographic in pornography, fare the best in online dating, while black women and Asian men, both of whom have little capital in porn, fare the worst.

More disturbing are the statistics about youth exposure to pornography. It’s estimated by the Young Minds, a British nonprofit organization that promotes mental health for young people, that half of 15-17 year olds and a third of 11-14 year olds have been exposed to pornography. With the advent of tablets and smartphones in the industry, porn’s ubiquity in the formation of a collective sexual consciousness is only beginning, so the statistics about our collective dating habits likely have a genesis in films such as “Oriental Goddesses.”

Finally, it’s not hard to find an anecdote on college campuses. How many times have we heard sexual descriptors focused centrally on race: “I finally had sex with an Asian chick,” or “I went black and never went back.” It’s easy to view our generation, the kids that elected Obama, as impervious to the ills of our parents, but how sure are we?

Write to Jeff at jei10@pitt.edu.