“Ebony, Interracial, Latino, Ethnic”… Race and Porn

There’s a new blog out there called Ethnorotica and, from what I’ve read so far, it offers an intelligent, fresh persective on the issue of race and ethnicity in porn.

I found myself smiling and nodding along to this paragraph:

“I’m stuck choosing between “Ghetto Hoochies” and “Phat Booty Hoes.” No, I’m not even kidding. When I read that shit I wanna grab the neck of the (prolly white) dude who wrote it, give him my best Samuel L. Jackson stare-down and yell: ‘English, motherfucker! English! Do you speak it?'”

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A while back we had a complaint at For The Girls that we didn’t feature enough black couples in our hardcore section. Unfortunately, the member was right. The majority of our couples were white. But it wasn’t colour blindness that was getting in the way.

The real problem was that finding decent, useable photographs of black couples making love is near impossible. It’s hard enough finding ANY hardcore sets with kissing, foreplay, and the two people looking at each other, let alone an “ebony” set.

All too often, a hardcore scenario featuring African-Americans is set up so that there’s no hint of romance or intimacy. You’re lucky if you can even see the man’s face. It’s all “booty” and “hos”, endless blowjobs and pimp powerplays. The same old cliches.

Since then, we’ve tried hard to feature black and ethnic models and couples, but it’s always a difficult task finding the content

Unfortunately, the majority of porn is stuck in a time warp when it comes to offering multiple perspectives. Most of it reflects the viewpoint of the straight white American male. Anything that differs from that standard is a “niche” or a “fetish”.

Thus, hardcore sex with white people is “hardcore” but hardcore with black people is “ebony” and hardcore with one black person is “interracial”.

While it can be useful to have labels to describe different kinds of porn (people’s fantasies can be very specific), a lot of the language used can be offensive, mainly because it often descend into racist stereotypes. I hope that porn will start to mature in the future so that these labels are no longer applied.

It’s all kind of familiar – I’ve been through similar battles over the label “porn for women”. You can’t really define the porn that all women will enjoy, but in a universe dominated by the male viewpoint, how else are you going to delineate your turf? At the same time, I know a day will come when “porn for women” will be too broad to be useful. When that happens, we’ll see a glorious abundance of viewpoints, sexualities, ethnicities and practices depicted, with more than one type of audience in mind.

Ah, utopia…

* The pic in this post is a rare example of a romantic hardcore scenario featuring a black couple. We liked it so much, it’s now in the “featured couples” section.