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Gail Dines | The White Man's Burden: Gonzo Pornography and the Construction of Black Masculinity | Gail Dines
Deep and sick 
. Many dudes here need to read this. It's a fairly long article. You're gonna want to follow the link up top. Pay special attention to what's in RED.
Deep and sick . Many dudes here need to read this. It's a fairly long article. You're gonna want to follow the link up top. Pay special attention to what's in RED.analysis of how pornography mobilizes and assimilates racial discourses in ways that speak to white male viewers, the “assumed spectators,” according to the pornography trade journal Adult Video News (AVN). … ” It is argued in this Article that this white racist construction of black male sexuality is what drives IP and serves to heighten the sexual tension in the pornography while simultaneously making this country an increasingly hostile and dangerous place for people (especially blacks) who fall outside the markers of whiteness. … Pimp themed movies abound in IP, where the black pimp is defined as the “king of the hood” who uses the particular skill that black men “innately” have of combining sex and violence to turn black “bytches” into “hos.” … The pimp, thug/hustler black man of the “hood” with the out-of-control body is not only a favorite of white straight men, but also seems to be a popular object of desire for gay white men. …
Introduction
Much has now been written about the divisive nature of the so called “porn wars” that ripped through the feminist movement in the 1980s and 1990s. n1 What was previously a somewhat agreeable alliance between radical and liberal feminists turned into the full scale battle that continues today, albeit in a somewhat muted form. While there have been some new players added to this debate recently, specifically post-modern feminists, there are still clear divisions between those feminists who argue that pornography is, in its production and consumption, a form of violence against women, and those feminists who see pornography as having subversive and potentially liberatory consequences for women’s sexuality. While I set my arguments within a broadly defined radical feminist paradigm, it is my contention that both sides have tended to assume a gender system which is race-neutral, an assumption that cannot be sustained in a country where “gender has proven to be a powerful means through which racial difference has historically been defined and coded.” n2 Although radical feminists such as Andrea Dworkin did talk about [*284] the sexualization of racism in pornography, n3 there has been limited analysis of how pornography mobilizes and assimilates racial discourses in ways that speak to white male viewers, the “assumed spectators,” n4 according to the pornography trade journal Adult Video News (AVN). n5
There is a long history of racial tension between black and white feminists, with black feminists arguing that much of mainstream (white) feminism excludes an analysis of how race and class mediate the material experiences of “women.” n6 I would argue that this exclusion can also be seen in much of the feminist analysis of pornography, which celebrates the pornographic text as subversive and polysemic – to the point that the preferred reading, which foregrounds women’s sexual subordination, is mocked for being essentialist. n7 Failing to locate the pornographic text in the context of the very real economic and social inequalities, that define the lives of poor whites and people of color, results in an understanding of pornography that is decontextualized from power relations, truncated, and of limited value to those who exist outside the privileged contours of academic intellectual life.
Although radical feminists have explored the links between poverty and recruitment in the pornography industry, they have tended to assume that the pornographic text works to elevate all men in similarly discursive ways. While there is little doubt that most heterosexual pornography categorically defines men as the “fukkers” and women as the “fukkees,” this has very different meanings and consequences for white men and black men. Nowhere is this made clearer than in a cartoon by Eric Decetis, a freelance cartoonist whose work appeared in Hustler in the 1980s. n8 The cartoon depicts a huge, ape-like “black” man with his arm around a small white female with a black eye and a swollen, bright red vagina hanging down to the floor. On his shirt is written “fukker,” on hers is “fukkee.” While all women in Hustler cartoons are constructed as “fukkees” in one way or another, it is the woman with the “black” man who is shown as brutalized, battered, and marked as victim. This cartoon, along with centuries of lynching, forced imprisonment, and media spectacles (such as the Willie Horton controversy, and the O.J. Simpson trial) [*285] make apparent that it is black men, not white men, who carry the legal and social burdens of being the “fukker” of white women. Indeed, black men are fast becoming, in the world of mainstream electronic pornography, the most sought after “fukkers” of white women. These images carry no more liberatory potential than Gus, the would-be rapist in what could be termed one of the first mass distributed interracial pornography movies, namely Birth of a Nation (1915). n9
Recent articles in AVN n10 have called attention to the fact that the fastest growing and most bootlegged internet pornography is “interracial pornography” (IP). While web sites advertise a multicultural mix of males and females, by far the dominant performers are black men and white women. With titles such as Black Poles in White Holes, Huge Black Cock on White p*ssy, and Monster Black Penises and Tight White Holes, the male viewer knows what to expect when he punches in his credit card numbers. Although there are sites that advertise Asian and Latina women, there are very few sites with Latino and Asian men and white women. Indeed, if the heterosexual male wants to gaze at Asian or Latino men, then he has to move into a truly forbidden world for straight pornography, namely gay pornography.
Analyzing the role of racial representations in pornography is, I argue, key to understanding how pornography works as a discourse, as it explicates taken-for-granted assumptions about what makes pornography pornographic. If, as radical feminists argue, pornography is pleasurable because it sexualizes inequality between women and men, then the more degraded and abused the woman, the greater the sexual tension and thrill for the male viewer. It is hard to conceive of a better way to degrade white women, in a culture with a long and ugly history of racism, than having them penetrated again and again by a body that has been constructed, coded, and demonized as a carrier for all that is sexually debased, namely the black male.
I. Pornography and Masculinity
In order to explore the way that race functions in pornography, it is important to first examine the contemporary world of internet pornography, since the explosion of electronic pornography has had enormous implications for content as well as form. Mainstream pornography today looks nothing like the scrubbed, sanitized world of Playboy. In place of the “girl next door,” smiling suggestively at the camera with her legs partially spread, is the girl that pornography consumers wish lived next door. Mainstream movies today are [*286] populated with what the male performers call “cum buckets,” “sluts,” and “c*nts” who love pounding anal, oral, and vaginal sex, who enjoy being smeared with semen and see their lives’ goals as breaking the record for the greatest number of “gang bangs” within a twenty four-hour period. Threaded throughout all these movies is an overt hatred for women that is evidenced in the dialogue and the fascination with body-punishing sex, such as frequent references to how much the woman can take before she breaks. Paul Little, AKA Max Hardcore, became famous (and rich) for his particular style of pornography that specializes in extremely violent and degrading sex. On his web site, he boasts, “Max wastes no time, gagging girls on his cock and pissing down their throats before he even learns their email addresses.” n11
This type of violent pornography popularized by Max Hardcore helped to define the contours of present-day gonzo pornography. n12 By far the biggest moneymaker for the industry, this type of pornography makes no attempt at a story line, but is just scene after scene of violent penetration, in which the woman’s body is literally stretched to its limit. One of the newer marketing ploys in gonzo is called ATM (ass to mouth), where the male performer anally penetrates a woman and then sticks his penis into her mouth, often joking about her having to eat shyt. In this pornography the code of debasement is most stark. There is no apparent increase in male sexual pleasure by moving directly from the anus to the mouth, outside of the humiliation that the woman must endure. To argue that the pleasure of heterosexual pornography for men is not somehow wrapped up in the degradation of women is to ignore the multiple verbal and image-based cues that form the codes and conventions of mainstream pornography. n13 Moreover, failure to see pornography as a text about the elevation of men and the degradation of women also misses the role that pornography plays in the production of masculinity as both a category of material existence, and an identity that is contested, negotiated, and in need of constant reproduction. n14
It is now a given in much of academic feminism that masculinity and femininity are social constructs that work together to produce a gender system that is fused with inequality, hierarchy and violence. n15 Until recently, much of the analysis of masculinity sought to explain how hegemonic masculinity is defined in opposition to femininity, where hegemonic masculinity is [*287] unproblematically coded as white. However, as many black scholars have argued, n16 white hegemonic masculinity is always in negotiation with black masculinity as the two exist in what James Snead calls “a larger scheme of semiotic valuation,” n17 in that the elevation and mythification of white masculinity relies on the debasement of black men as sexual savages, Uncle Toms, and half-wits such as Stepin Fetchit. Patricia Hill Collins goes further by arguing that black masculinity is so debased by white culture that it becomes a fluid category whereby any man of color can become marked as black should he in any way fail to conform to the strict disciplinary practices of white masculinity. n18
However, what constitutes hegemonic white masculinity is itself a moving target that depends on the socioeconomic dynamics of a given time and place. In the United States, and indeed most of the Western world, there is a general consensus that a real man (read: white) works hard, puts food on the table and an SUV in the driveway, shows some interest in his children’s welfare, and exhibits a somewhat restrained set of sexual practices within state-sanctioned heterosexual marriage. On virtually every level, black men are defined by white culture as failing to meet the standards of white hegemonic masculinity.
Porn is degrading to women?
I must hit a nerve.
Blocked.
