GODDESS CORI
Age seventeen: I’m wet and my clit is throbbing. I open my laptop to find some porn that will guide my fantasies to a place of climax. I start on Pornhub—the YouTube of porn—and immediately I’m bombarded with titles like “Tiny Flexible Teenager Gets Pounded by Huge Black Stallion” and “Blacked Down Terrified [insert white porn actress] Gets Ripped Open by 10 bbcs.” My hard-on is fading, my vulva is drying up, but I am determined. I search “dyke porn”—it’s a risky move, but I’m optimistic. The titles are immediately disheartening. “Kinky Girl Next Door’s First Time” and “Gay Dyke Hoe Said We Couldn’t Fuck Her but We Showed Her” were among the top listed videos.
I make a decision to switch it up. I had heard of a queer porn site and decide to check it out. I open up the website to find every single preview clip featuring white performers having soft, slow, intimate moments. I search through the performers list and only see hypermasculine images of Black folx. The majority are small white femmes or white dyke daddies. At this point I am bored and frustrated. I try one more site: Shine Louise Houston’s Crash Pad series. I have a debit card, but there is no money in my bank account, and even if there were, my mom would definitely see the charge. I retreat into myself, defeated and frustrated, initially with my lack of orgasm and eventually with the lack of accessible queer of color content.
RACE IS COMMONLY fetishized in pornography: it’s used as a way to separate and categorize bodies so that viewers can search for and consume the types of performers they desire and filter out the types of performers that challenge their desires. This fetishization of race is clearly more acceptable in this form of media than in any other. Pornography provides us with immediate gratification and this immediacy makes fetishization more likely; the viewer’s access to racialized bodies is quick and easy.
While porn itself is easy to access, the violence in porn is far more complex than one might notice upon quick observation. Not only is there sometimes personal violence between performers on-screen but symbolic and structural violence as well—which is much more difficult to spot when you have your dick in your hand. Far too often, we overlook the symbolic violence that occurs in pornography because porn is already outside the realm of “acceptable” sexual behavior, and those who consume it want to do so discreetly and quickly, without thinking too deeply about the racial, cultural, and sexual implications of their media consumption.
Even though mainstream companies are starting to produce pornography that is filled with more positive images (i.e., women being the subjects of their own sexuality as opposed to the objects of others), the overwhelming majority of porn films still support the sexual narratives of white, heterosexual, cisgender men who have been socialized to be aggressive and violent toward femmes, and especially femmes of color. The majority of mainstream pornography is filled with uncontextualized images of forced blow jobs, hardcore penetration (with no lube), and fantasies of unwilling “teenage” girls being coerced into sexual acts with white cisgender men. When we look at Black women in mainstream porn, the picture is even more bleak. Booty Quake #6 is a feature by Pulse (Candy Shop) productions, starring pornographic legend Naomi Banxxx and Julius Ceazher, among others. This film is advertised as a film about ass and it does not disappoint. One scene focuses in on Julius Ceazher, in sagging pants and no shirt, gazing at Banxxx’s butt. The camera spends extensive amounts of time surveying her butt as she is bent over, not showing her face. Julius grabs a hose and begins to squirt water on Banxxx’s backside, as she wiggles and moans under the water. There is no need to focus on Naomi’s face, or even on Julius’s: the pleasure derived from a hose-down is solely the viewer’s. The scene proceeds into intercourse, and like most mainstream pornography, focuses on the cis man’s pleasure and the customer’s gaze. This company produces various racist tropes of Black and Brown bodies: Ba Dunk A Bounce, Bubble Bursting Butts, Alone in the Dark, Once You Go Black You Never Go Back, and Black Ass Attack. All these films fetishize Black bodies and hold the butt as the most attractive feature of the Black woman. It’s no surprise that audiences fetishize Black women’s asses (or Black men’s cocks) when they are the sole focus of mainstream porn featuring Black performers.
While the performers committing these acts may be willing and able to participate in these scenes and personally enjoy these fantasies, these images have the potential to be damaging and leave a lasting effect on the viewer without proper context. The stereotypes that are embedded in these videos and images have the potential to taint public perception of entire genders and races. This is especially true because the American sex education system is failing and the internet introduces most children to sex.
While this may seem like an indictment of porn, it’s not my intention. The industry’s problems actually leave this form of entertainment wide open to innovators interested in changing the sexual narrative. Mainstream porn companies are not always incentivized to do so, but when Black queer folx direct productions and run production companies, the narratives of Black bodies often lack the violence and objectification that is prevalent throughout mainstream pornography and media. Black bodies are allowed the space to express their sexualities freely, without judgment or persecution. Black femme porn becomes a space to bring our own fantasies into fruition, for the gratification of our performers and our communities.
As a stark departure from the mainstream, Foxy Strikes Back from BEYONDEEP Productions is a retelling of the infamous Blaxploitation film Foxy Brown. In this particular short film featuring Honey G as Foxy and K Rivers as Sapphire, the couple stands out not only because they are truly queer, very Black, and at least one of them is trans or nonbinary but also because they are an actual nonmonogamous couple outside of pornography. The scene begins with some classic Blaxploitation funky music and Foxy tied to a chair, facing away from the camera. The shot reverses and you see Sapphire open the door and taunt, “Right where I left you … my little fox.” Sapphire turns Foxy around and we see that she is blindfolded and gagged. Sapphire takes off the gag and Foxy immediately spits on her and shouts, “Fuck you.” Sapphire takes off her silky robe, takes out a crop and beats Foxy with it. Foxy whimpers and Sapphire takes off Foxy’s blindfold, turns her around and slides her pants down. The camera uses a POV shot for this—that way the ass is not being centered, but still used as a way to entice the viewer. Black people can acknowledge our bodies are beautiful, sexy, and enticing, but Black femmes who have been subjected to the degradation that comes with having a Black femme body can bring that consciousness into their films. Throughout the film, the shots cut between POV and wide shots, but generally always capture the performers’ full bodies.
Both these scenes tell significantly different narratives about Blackness and the way Black bodies operate in a sexual context. It is evident that the master narrative of the Black butt being the prime and most desired aspect of the Black body drives the first scene. Movies that are directed by femmes of color tend to be less focused on racially driven labels, while mainstream queer pornography companies label their pornographic films that star Black bodies as “ebony edition” or include “Black” in the title. This is because categorization is the ultimate tool used by the pornographic industry to separate and sell content.
AGE TWENTY-TWO: I chose to become the change I wanted to see in the industry. However, in my own work, I have experienced a lot of racism, both overt and covert. In the beginning, I didn’t have enough financial stability or social status to define how I was going to do sex work. It was purely dependent upon whoever would pay me and what they wanted to do (to a certain extent). Most of the time, that looked like a lot of older white men asking me to show them my butt or make twerking videos. It looked like being grossly underpaid, or not paid at all, for hours of labor. It looked like expecting me to submit even though they paid me to take the role of Domme. In A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography, Mireille Miller-Young talks about this exact phenomenon: she uses the term “illicit eroticism” to describe how “black women use, manipulate, and deploy their sexualities in the economy.” “Commodifying one’s own sexuality,” Miller-Young writes, “is part of the strategic and tactical labor black women use in advanced economic capitalist economies.” I work within the capitalist system to propel myself into a different place financially. Working within the constraints of capitalism always comes at a price for Black femmes.
I remember at the very beginning of my endeavors in the sex industries, getting at least five private messages from men telling me I was their “slave nigger” and I was to do whatever they told me to do or they would hurt me or expose me to my friends and family. I was eighteen. It’s difficult to determine how much of those threats I internalized and how much of them I believed. But I was scared nevertheless. I’m still scared. Now that I’m more well established, I don’t get these kinds of threats any more, but I know that could change at any time.
I’ve learned how to protect myself, and I understand that I can only do that because of my privilege. When I say “privilege” as a dark-skinned, Black, queer, nonbinary sex worker, it comes nowhere close to any of my non-Black counterparts. I am still underpaid and sometimes not paid at all. I receive far less work. I am seen as a submissive before a Domme. I am seen as not sexually valuable unless I am centering my ass. My privilege is recognizing my own worth and value. It’s having a civilian job that pays me more than minimum wage, even if it’s only part time. It’s having a high school diploma and some higher education. My privilege is my access to community. I have taken those privileges and used them to better my community through restorative BDSM and guiding others in unlearning racism through Black femme worship and sadism. That’s where I’ve found my path, making the change I want to see in the sex industries.
AGE TWENTY-TWO: I give a white cis male client instructions—the furniture in a room must be rearranged to fit specific dimensions. He has never seen the room. He won’t see it for several days. When he arrives, I tell him that he must take all the furniture out and move it according to the specifications I gave him in fifteen minutes or less. This is an impossible task. If he doesn’t complete it, he will sit in a cage for the duration of the session and explain to me how, symbolically and practically, Black folx are forced do this every day of their lives. Before he goes, I carve “cracker” into his skin with a razor and tell him to take a picture of it every day until the carving heals. I save them all and send them back to him sporadically. I love having him say thank you. Not just “Thank you, Goddess” but “Here is the money I have. Your labor has bettered me and I will carry what you have taught me into the rest of my life.”