Violet Blue vs. AVN: The Great IR Porn Smackdown (Part 1)

Nothing like a good smack war to get me through a boring evening…plus this next story actually has some real human interest. Plus, I adore Violet Blue AND, being a progressive Black man who doesn’t discriminate when it comes to his porn tastes (except in quality and desirablilty of the women involved, that is), I have some interest in this.

Basically, the background is all about the ongoing debate over the subgenre of interracial porn (mostly, that sub-sub genre featuring sturdy, hearty Black men packing HUGE wood banging the daylights out of tiny, slutty White girls….usually including lots and lots of hard anal action). Many folk –both progressive and conservative — have come down hard on IR sex as portraying the most racist stereotypes of Black men possible (that is, of sex-obsessed rapists with eternal hard-ons simply waiting to destroy the next pure White virgin vulva or butt with his “third leg”. Gail Dines, as do many other antiporn “feminists”, has made it a staple of her/their fundamental critique of why porn in general should be shunted and censored.

However, it is just as often a fundamental criticism from those on the opposite side of the fence, those who don’t want to censor porn but simply to reform it and bring some decent progressive values into the production process.

Violet Blue is definitely one of the latter. She’d rather make better and more sensual porn rather than wipe it off the face of the earth, but she’s not afraid to lay down the law when it comes to criticizing what she sees as reactionary, racist porn….or simply crappy, sucky porn.

The folk at Adult Video News (AVN), however, represent the industry as a whole, and as such they become rather sensitive to criticism of porn as threats to their freedom of expression….even when it comes from friendly criticism.

Which is how this War on Smack on IR Sex blew up.

It began when AVN decided to dedicate their Feburary 2009 print issue to “Black Humor”…specifically, the use of inflammatory racial stereotypes to market and sell interracial porn in the midst of a recession. (Yes, Clones, porn is suffering as much from the hard economic times as any other commercial endeavor.) Quoting titles such as Oh, No…I Sucked A Negro Today, Big Black Beast, Blackzilla, and the especially daring I Love Jerking Off N—-ers, the story used testimonials from porn producers to justify the…..ummmmm, suggestive titles and themes as a way of appealing to popular (mostly White) fantasies of what interracial sex should be. Never mind, of course, the fact pointed out in the article that 75% of the viewing audience for interracial porn featuring Black men and White women happen to BE Black men, and mostly for the women involved. (The article is available online as a digital publication via MyDigitalPublication.com; it can be seen here, or downloaded here as a PDF file via Adobe.)

Well, then….the gay political blog TheSword.com picked up on AVN’s issue and promptly bashed their heads in for allegedly promoting such vapid racism. Unfortunately, they tended to import their own personal anger at AVN into their facts, as shown here:

Adult industry trade magazine Adult Video News has the answer to porn producers faced with declining sales: more use of the word Negro! In this month’s “Black Humor” issue of AVN, the nortoriously enlightened porn-producing community claims that only a Communist would keep the public from quality product like Oh No! There’s A Negro in My Mom!

“Whatever stereotypes are out there … should be depicted on camera in order for the projects to feel realistic,” says Julius Ceazher, star of Black Cocks, Tiny Teens. “Someone who puts out a racially insensitive title could be viewed as a capitalist.” The public gets what it wants, say the producers: interracial titles are one of the few bright spots in an industry faced with falling DVD sales, competition from tube sites and a terrible economy. Besides: black jokes are just a form of humor, says Ceazar, not racism. “If someone tells a funny black joke, I’m gonna laugh.” See?

AVN says that in the past few years, more porn companies have been picking up on the potent mixture of cinema vérité and cold hard cash, producing increasingly “funny” interracial titles with un-sly references to rapists and gorillas, causing retail stores to stop carrying some of the “funnier” titles. But that’s okay, their market segment has only grown since the election of Obama. Shane Diesel, female star of My Daughter is Fucking a Nigga, tells AVN that some of her biggest fans are neo-Nazis and racist Southerners. “They love it!” she says. While liberal fools were wasting money making it rain for Obama, skinheads were saving up their loot to buy titles with strategically placed asterisks, like I Love Jerking Off N**gers.

Cram Johnson, producer of I Can’t Believe I Sucked a Negro, took a moment to fully explain the distinct charm of the Magic Negro is his ability to make the most used-up old whore seem fresh again! “When the races mix, especially if the purity of the sacred white woman is compromised, it gets a lot of attention — even if the white girl is as dirty and disease-riddled as humanly possible.”

Ahhhhh..one issue, though:  Shane Diesel is an African-American male porn star, not a White female….and his comments were actually about how racist White guys were the most willing at the beginning to purchase his Blackzilla series. Diesel is the producer as well as the main star of that series.

And in their rage at AVN (or, merely, to score a few brownie points against mainstream porn; remember, we are talking about a gay male porn blog here), TheSword.com managed to avoid comments from others that appeared in the original article, such as Black male performer Julius Ceazher who argued that, in his opinion, using stereotyping is not necessarily racist in intention, but is used by consumers to spice up the appeal of interracial sex in porn and to make fun at the stereotypes. They also avoided the comments of such major Black male performers such as Lexington Steele and Jack Napier, whom have both developed their own production lines of IR porn dedicated to debunking the stereotypes, but still on occasion using the usual stereotyping for the purpose of attracting a stable money demographic.

Nevertheless, the article by TheSword.com was inflammatory enough to catch Violet Blue’s interest, and she fired off her own salvo on behalf of the avant garde, sex positive porn lobby both at her Tiny Nibbles blog, and, in much greater detail, at her February 12th “Open Source Sex” column for the San Francisco Chronicle in print and SFGate.com online. Essentially, Violet let AVN have it with double barrels:

And then there’s the interracial porn genre, which remains a vehicle for outmoded and offensive racial, ethnic, and gender stereotypes. Last Thursday TheSword.com’s headline brayed, “‘Negro’ Porn Recession Proof, Claims AVN” (link NSFW). The blog posted about the “Black Humor” issue, where AVN magazine explains how marketing to America’s toxic preoccupation with race differences is the answer to mainstream porn’s declining sales — while framing this “marketing distinction” from run-of-the-mill porn, as funny.

On closer inspection, there’s something more than a little disingenuous about AVN’s sense of humor. We all know that porn is built to part you with your hard-earned cash and proffer fantasies; sometimes certain kinds of fantasy or roleplaying can be sexy: taboos, whether actual or perceived, are always hot, right? The positive ability of porn is that is can show partnering that is charged because it crosses racial boundaries; I believe that damage is not done by the FACT of crossing those taboos, but in the WAY those taboos are crossed. But ultimately, most of us just want to watch different kinds of people coming together without the racist baggage.

[...]

Violet then quotes directly the TheSword.com article, then continues:

Not sure if I should be more offended by the disturbing racial stereotypes or the problematic portrayal of female perfomers, I asked one of the more famous, awarded, and respected young porn stars — local, outspoken feminist Madison Young (madisonbound.com, link NSFW) — how she felt about this, white girl to white girl.

Young responded, “I find AVN’s comments on interracial porn to be highly offensive and serves as a discredit to the entire industry. Porn is a widely consumed medium and can act as a powerful tool to educate, create connection and communication between couples, and archive our sexual culture while providing a reflection of our desires on film. This can be a positive and sexually validating experience for women and men and persons of all genders. AVN is the leading trade magazine for the adult industry, and for them to make statements like ‘Negro Porn Recession Proof’ gives the anti-porn community further fodder for their arguments as opposed to spotlighting sex-positive productions.”

Forgetting that it was TheSword.com, not AVN, that had the suggestive headline of “‘Negro’ Porn Recession Proof”, Ms. Young’s points were certainly dead on regarding the need to resist negative stereotyping. Nevertheless, Madison did manage to confront and deal with what could be a conflict of interest: her own performance in doing such “offensive” IR videos:

But Young’s sex scenes have been marketed with, let us say, racial insensitivity; she falls into the category of Johnson’s “dirty and disease-riddled” white girls. Madison told me:

I have performed in all types of porn, queer, soft core, girl/girl, boy/girl, interracial etc. I prefer to perform in productions that are sex-positive or queer-produced, but it takes a lot of anal scenes to run a feminist art space. And I also feel that it is important to exhibit sex-positive performances and women being aggressive around their sexuality in more mainstream vanilla porn. If we want to create change we can’t just stand within the periphery but need to interject ourselves into their machine. Doing this means that I often end up being surrounded by anti-queer, anti-trans, and racist individuals and productions.

It’s difficult to leave the safety of our San Francisco bubble for the San Fernando Valley but I’m aware that when I do this I’m stepping out of my comfort zone and given a chance to educate both on set and in the films. I enjoy sharing erotic experiences with people of all gender identities and sexual orientations as well as people of all ethnic and racial backgrounds. As a performer in LA, I can only control the way in which I connect with my screen partner, which for me, is looking them in the eyes, connecting with them, sharing energetic eroticism with my partners and communicating with them around the sex that we are having. I recall in one of the interracial films in which I was featured I actually got the director to allow me to teach a bit of a tantric lesson in the scene.

The LA porn world has gotten to the point where the majority of the material that they are producing is something that I would call ‘fast food porn.’ It’s junk food. Offensive and artery-clogging porn. I’m trying to change what’s in the happy meal one sex-positive veggie burger at a time — but I can’t control the marketing around their product. It’s one of the reasons that several years ago I started directing my own product, so that I could have more control over the product and create porn that couples can watch together and that encourages women to try new things sexually in a safe and sane environment.

Of course, this is the dilemma that far too many porn performers face, especially those who want to use the sexual media to promote a more progressive, sensual, and egalitarian approach to making porn that also makes a profit; to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, they have to dance in the porn world that exists rather than the porn world they’d like to see.

Then, Violet points out the fact that many Black performers and progressive female sex artists are rebelling against the negative stereotyping with their own content:

Young isn’t the only one who feels this way, and while technology eats DVD porn for lunch and the dated stereotypes get even older, more and more porn performers and directors of all shades have been steadily increasing their visibility outside this narrow lens — with much success. Female director Candida Royalle’s “Afrodite Superstar” boasted an African American female director (and ironically garnered seven AVN award nominations), and in the DVD extras one of the actresses, Revay, made solid points about being more aware of which companies she works with so that her porn work won’t show up in films with racially insensitive titles. Well known African American male performer Mr. Marcus also commented that he was excited to be involved in such a black-positive production.

Sex educator Thomas Roche reminds me, “Several male African-American performers own their own production companies: Lexington Steele, Mr. Marcus and Sean Michaels, and I’m sure there are others by now. If ‘big black c–k’ is what gets a consumer hot, I would encourage them to actually put their money where the big black c–k is. Those guys are talented and from my experience their hearts are very much in the right place. They’ve frankly got the deck stacked against them in an industry that would like to fetishize them for being African American, but allow them no other agency or expression. Sound familiar? This is an old story: racial minorities put in a box and asked to stay there. As consumers and as creators, let’s not just keep telling the same story over and over again.”

The pixellization of “cock”, incidentially, is out of respect for the Chronicle’s stylebook rules, since this was originally a newspaper column.

Violet does also mention the work of queer porn artists such as Jizz Lee and Shine Nelson in using indie and alt.porn as a means of reversing the noxious stereotypes as well. And then, she concludes with this positive note:

It may be that some porn producers cling to the extremes of the “interracial” umbrella to survive the economic storm. Lee thinks that the exact opposite of marketing “funny” racial slurs is the recipe for success and survival saying, “Personally I see porn as a medium for social change, and diverse casting more adequately reflects my own identity and community. Perhaps this authenticity is one of the reasons indie porn is also ‘recession proof.’”

Madison Young not only agreed, but nailed the notion of rehashing racial stereotypes as a business model to a tree, saying, “As far as interracial porn being ‘recession proof?’ I think that the only way for the adult video industry to survive is to start producing high-quality production and to start caring about their content instead of following a formula for a product that is failing. There are new markets of porn consumers and audiences developing for women, couples, LGBT, and Gen-X. Porn isn’t just for a demographic of a white 50-year-old man. And these new demographics are willing to buy — and are loyal to the studios — that produce content that they enjoy.”

As always, gentle and fair-minded reader (and porn consumer), I’ll leave the final opinion up to you.

Sounds fair enough, doesn’t it??

Except when Violet’s article hit the usual porn gossip sites and AVN, all hell broke loose…especially with AVN.

And that in itself deserves it’s own blog entry….that’s coming anon, Clones.

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