Pornography is inherently transgressive. It always has been. Breaking the rules makes people horny, and leads to better sex. Smart pornographers never lose sight of that fact, which is probably why the hottest porn in 2019 is “faux-incest” content featuring an implausible array of stepbrothers and stepmothers.
In the USA at least, where race relations are fucked up worse than in most other countries of the world due to our history of slavery, there was a time when no sexual rule was taken more seriously than “a black man shall not fuck a white girl.” Black men who transgressed this rule in real life were in serious danger of physical violence. Lynchings happened sometimes based on the mere rumor than a pretty white pussy had been desecrated by black cock. It was ugly, and nobody ought to glamorize that time or those retrograde attitudes.
But I am a historian of vintage porn. And there is a lot of vintage porn that plays with interracial tropes. I can’t ignore it; I don’t even want to. The trouble is, pornographers in the 1970s and 1980s were, by modern standards, pretty racist themselves. And even if they weren’t, they used a lot of racists tropes as marketing copy, to amp up the forbidden and transgressive aura around the porn they were trying to sell.
That makes it really hard to look back at the interracial porn of the mid-twentieth century and show samples of it in any modern forum. “Political correctness” in 2019 expresses itself by asserting that incorrect stuff should not be mentioned, quoted, displayed, or viewed. Needless to say, I am hostile to this point of view. To understand the past, we need to experience its artifacts. This is as true in the world of porn as it is in any other context.
Racist tropes about black men included the false belief that they had unusually long or large dicks. You can see this trope on display in the images (covers for 8mm porn loops, and back-cover advertising copy) that accompany this post. Black men and women alike were asserted to be more animal-like, more feral, more passionate, more bestial. It’s an ugly mix of stereotypes.
Words cannot express how happy I am that it’s no longer acceptable to promote those stereotypes in art (including the art of making pornography). But I don’t agree with the prevailing view that we shouldn’t acknowledge or engage with the racist art of the past. On the contrary, I think we need to view it, appreciate its virtues, and acknowledge its faults. Those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it, right? Pretending that the interracial porn of forty and fifty years ago never happened strikes me as insane. Worse yet, it locks us away from some pretty hot porn!
