Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [42]
Most porn films have dispensed with the thin fantasy plots of older porn. The raw sex scenes begin almost immediately. And porn is overtly racist. Black men in porn films are primitive animals, brawny and illiterate studs with vast sexual prowess. Black women are filled with raw, animalistic lust. Latina women are hot and racy. Asian women are sexually submissive geishas. In this year’s AVN Awards, nominated movies bore titles such as Get That Black Pussy You Big Dick White Bastard Muttha Fucka, My Daughter Went Black and Never Came Back, and Oh No! There’s a Negro in My Mom! Porn, as Gail Dines writes, is a “new minstrel show.” Porn allows white males, safely removed from the black culture and the inner city, to be voyeurs into a depraved and frightening world of racial and sexual stereotypes. Porn, as Dines writes, functions as
a peep show for whites into what they see as the authentic black life, not on the plantation, but in the “hood” where all the conventions of white civilized society cease to exist. The “hood” in the white racist imagination is a place of pimps, ho’s and generally uncontrolled black bodies, and the white viewer is invited, for a fee, to slum in this world of debauchery. In the “hood,” the white man can dispense with his whiteness by identifying with the black man, and thus can become as sexually skilled and as sexually out-of-control as the black man. Here he does not have to worry about being big enough to satisfy the white woman (or man) nor does he have to concern himself with fears about poor performance or “weak wads” or cages like poor hubby in Blacks on Blondes [an interracial film in which the husband is literally in a cage while watching black men have sex with his wife]. Indeed, the “hood” represents liberation from the cage, and the pay-off is a satiated white woman (or man) who has been completely and utterly feminized by being well and truly turned into a “fuckee.”7
Dines writes that the black body that is celebrated as uncontrolled in interracial pornography is the same body that must be controlled and shackled in the world of white supremacy:
Just as white suburban teenagers love to listen to hip-hop and white adult males gaze longingly at the athletic prowess of black men, the white pornography consumer enjoys his identification with (and from) black males through a safe peephole, in his own home, and in mediated form. The real, breathing, living black man, however, is to be kept as far away as possible from these living rooms, and every major institution in society marshals its forces in the defense of white society. The ideologies that white men take to the pornography text to enhance their sexual pleasure are the very ideologies that they use to legitimize the control of black men: While it may heighten arousal for the white porn users, it makes life intolerable for the real body that is (mis)represented in all forms of white controlled media.8
Male porn stars make about a third of the money paid to the women. They possess the singular talent of keeping an erection for long periods of time while a small audience of actors, directors, and production crew watch. Barrett Blade tells me that many male stars take Viagra or inject Caverject into an open vein in the penis. “Some guy will be waiting to go on and reading a book and their cock up like this,” he says, indicating an erection with his fingers. “These guys who inject keep an open wound at the base of their penis. They bleed on the women. Pretty soon they can’t get it up without it. They need to get a vial from the fridge every time they want to have sex, even when they are home with their girlfriends.”
Jim Powers stands in his booth with a large, glossy poster behind