NOTE FROM DIRTY BOB:
XRCO Co-Chairman Richard Freeman, is a prolific reviewer who possesses such an incredible encyclopedia of porn knowledge lodged firmly in his head that our former XRCO Historian, the late Jim Holliday, often needed to rely upon him for industry facts.
Freeman also publishes a monthly newsletter called BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED. The sample, and quite entertaining, piece below was recently featured in VOL. XV #3 of this publication which, for over 15 years, has been the adult industry's best-kept secret and includes articles written by folks in and out of the industry that you would NEVER find anywhere else - good stuff! I highly recommend sending in a token $3 for a sample printed issue to:
BNI
513 N. Central Ave.
Fairborn, OH 45324
Bon Jour Tristan And Other Observations
by Richard Freeman
Despite many wonderful phone calls asking me for money, I don’t often go back to my alma mater, Antioch College, or even to the Village of Yellow Springs, where I lived from just before the Cuban Missile Crisis to just before 9/11. Instead, I stay here in Fairborn, Ohio, under the protection of the guns at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, where I feel very safe from crazy Jihadists (and moderately safe from UFOnauts looking for the bodies of crashed saucer victims). In times like this, I’d rather feel safe than sorry, which is why I don’t go to Vegas to catch the porn flu at the AVN show.
Anyway, I don’t really think I’m missing all that much by not being in Yellow Springs, as there is no porn allowed in that PC unintentional community, much less a porn reviewer, but you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that my pen pal, Tristan Taormino, was going to pay it a visit, perhaps grab dinner at a sawdust restaurant like Ha Ha Pizza and then speak to the students of Antioch College about the overwhelming question of the joys and sorrows of anal sex.
As a student, back in the ’60s, I was completely unaware that I was part of a sexual revolution, partly because I wasn’t getting any, and partly because speakers like Tristan were not touring the country, enlightening the rubes. Certainly no one clued me in that straight people did anal (we hadn’t even worked out the physical geometry of double penetration). Instead of visitations from traveling sexperts, we saw Jesse Colin Young, whose “Grizzly Bear” and Dave van Ronk, whose “St. Louis Tickle” I still ineptly play on the guitar (I just missed seeing the Fugs, who would, at least, have enlightened me about slum goddesses from the Lower East Side, group gropes, and Coca Cola douches). I also saw Albert Ayler, and admired the white streak in his beard, if not his mariachi banshee music; some electronic musicians who played banjos made from kids swimming pool inner tubes; and I could have seen Timothy Leary, who discussed LSD orgasms, if I wasn’t still angry at pot for not getting me high so I could really hear Mingus. There will no longer be time to see such people.
Anyway, it would have done me little good to know such arcana as back then, Playmates were still hairless and pubeless and I wouldn’t have known what to do with an unabashed view of erotica.
I’ve only been back to my old college twice to hear speakers since I left, without actually graduating, in 1967: Robert Anton Wilson, whose Illuminati trilogy was partly set in Yellow Springs (as well it should have been) and Susie Bright, who helped jump start BNI (do not ask me why I didn’t go to see Richard Pacheco when he was a visiting lecturer at the college—I am not here to talk about the blunders in my life).
Susie Bright appeared in Kelly Hall in 1993, hoping to enlighten the huddled masses longing to be free, only to run smack dab into the infamous “Don’t Ask Don’t Get Any” Antioch College sex policy, which amused and astonished both sex negative and sex positive Americanos back in the day. The idea of having to negotiate titty touching and beyond titillated not only our country, but the rest of the uncivilized world. Instead of being treated as a liberator, with flowers in the dancing streets, Suzie was hatcheted like a saloon by Kansas teetotalers back in the 1893.
I fully expected that Tristan would be treated in the same way. I was wrong.
As I wrote for AVN:
Yellow Springs, OH - Tristan Taormino appeared, in the flesh, on the evening of November 28th for a college film class lecture. Her audience at Antioch College, where devils fear to tread, was positively angelic, laughing with her as she told stories of shooting anal sex porn films, wanting to know more about making feminist gonzo movies, the better to make some themselves. This was nothing like the outrage that greeted Susie Bright at Antioch some fourteen years ago when she merely tried to explain that women could actually enjoy watching pornography.
It would seem that something has been happening here in the Midwest and that Antioch’s infamous sex code, which years ago received national attention as the liberal university where students were told they had to first ask their partner for permission to kiss or fondle (or more) prior to doing so, has undergone some changes in attitude.
Tristan spoke for about an hour on how she got her start in film, thanking John Stagliano repeatedly for reading her proposal for an instructional film on how to do anal sex and letting her not only direct her Ultimate Guide To Anal Sex For Women, but also organize the final orgy scene the way she wanted to be fucked.
Most of her lecture was about the making of Taormino’s Chemistry series for Vivid, and her desire to create feminist pornography—gonzo with a heart, where the actors and actresses are permitted to do what they want to do, and where they are treated with respect and hot meals. Tristan went on to say that she feels that most gonzo these days has become impalement video, where the only question is how large an object can you shove into an orifice, and how many heads can you shove into a toilet. If you have to shove someone’s head in a toilet, Tristan told the student body, you had better make sure she has an orgasm. Her audience actually seemed to agree.
Of course I left some things out of that account: how I’d gone to see Tristan with my fellow Little Miami River Valley Porn Reviewing Companion, Den, who had also gone to see Susie Bright at Antioch, on his birthday no less; how I safely navigated us in the dark from Fairborn to the half-deserted streets of Antioch College, despite having no sense of direction home whatsoever; how Tristan greeted me warmly and even seemed to know who I was; how I had been one of the first residents of Ohio on earth to review her own anal sex gangbang daisy chain in her first movie, giving her a ***** Volcanic rating; how I felt slightly odd being a geezer in a roomful of pierced young things; how I wouldn’t have wanted to ask, much less touch any of their titties; how I felt like a Stylite down on the ground for the first time in years, out for a night on the town. How I sat there and listened with a bald spot in the middle of my hair. These were things that AVN probably didn’t need to know, even if I dared to tell.
And I didn’t discuss, due to lack of space, any of the questions Tristan was asked by her audience: “Why porn narrative and is there a place for it?” (I’m quoting from Den’s notes as I forgot to bring a pen and paper) “How much are performers paid?” “Why isn’t there a gay version of Chemistry” (Tristan didn’t tell the audience that some of the cast in Chemistry 3 had made gay porn)? “What is the burden of representation” (I wanted to ask what in god’s name that meant, as I am not up on the current semiotics or professorspeak, but I didn’t want to open my mouth to say something unPClike. Curiously enough, Tristan, being a more recent college graduate, actually seemed to know the answer to that question—an answer I also could not understand)? “Are you a secret dork” (I’m a public dork, which is why I stay out of public sight and keep my mouth shut when visiting Antioch College)? “What does a porn star feel empowers them?” And “What about “Feminist Porn - Degrading Porn”?
Tristan answered all of these questions, and did so in a way that charmed her audience, so much so that for all I know, she joined in a cluster fuck after Den and I left early, as we are too old to be cluster fuckable, and besides, we needed our sleep.
But there was one question that Tristan was asked that she did not answer, not that she couldn’t have, as it was a subject she was deeply interested in but just didn’t have the time to fully answer: the question of black porn. And the position of black actors and actresses in porn. It’s a subject that equally interests me, as after all, I am the politic, cautious and meticulous reviewer of black and interracial porn for Adam Black Film World. In my secret reviewing life, I am Superspade.
Happily for me, Lawrence C. Ross Jr. has written an entire book on this subject, Money Shot (“Wild Days And Lonely Nights Inside The Black Porn Industry”), and if I’m ever invited to speak at Antioch College, and if I, Unprufrocklike, dare, here’s what I might say on that touchy yet unfeely subject, after removing my foot from my mouth and using it to cover my ass.
But then what could I safely say to an innocent audience of coming and going students who probably wouldn’t be pleased hearing from me about the strange shuddering fits I go through from having to watch Charlie Mac and Mark Anthony soap and oil the cellulite packed butts of 300 pound black women, then asking those women to drop down and shake it.
Is that racist of me?
How to explicate the iconography of tit tats I’ve seen: paw prints and panthers, inexplicable textes?
How to explain the troubles I’ve seen, even to Jesus.
And in short, I was afraid.
If I were Richard Mann, who makes DVDs for Hush Hush Entertainment and has a site on Yahoo where he pounds white women, perhaps I could give them my opinion of black porn actresses, but even then perhaps not. Is it yet PC for Richard Mann (if not Richard Freeman) or even Hillary Clinton to tell a trendy group of green haired girls (and the men who resemble them, physically) such things about black women as:
“They’re just not as nasty as the white chicks. The black male performers are not really fucking the shit out of the chicks because a lot of it has to do with when you’re dealing with guys with length, they can’t take it all. But then again, black chicks can take it, but they’re too prissy to do it. But I have to say that I haven’t worked with a lot of black chicks, but other brothers tell me about it. Even if the black chick will let the guy shoot on her face, there’s the enthusiasm factor. When you see a black chick ready to take a nut, it looks like they’re thinking ‘Hurry up and bust a nut, give me my check and let me go.’ I would say that 80% of the white chicks can at least fake it. When you get with a black chick, they’ll say shit like, ‘You can’t do this, or you can’t do that, because that’s reserved for my man.’ But then they’ll take a dick up their ass! What type of logic is that shit?”
Yes, what kind of shit is that logic, and could I talk such shit to a student body? If I told them, “this isn’t me saying this, this is Lexington Steele—you know, Lex Wrex—” would they even listen, or would they just take me out and lynch me like a Jenaite between the towers of Main Building? I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in on a platter.
“So what happens is that the white girls can check their dignity at the door. These are the girls who are taking the cum in the mouth, or on her face, and swallowing it without reservation. These white girls are taking it in the ass from two guys at one time. They’re allowing themselves to be maximized, and so you can take maximum advantage of the white girl. In a lot of cases, the black adult actress can’t handle that.
“The black girl, and the ethnic women in general, and I don’t say this as a detraction; they do not check 100% of their self-respect at the door. ‘You want me to do what? You want me to swallow your cum?’ They bring limits to the set, and for a director that wants a certain vision for a scene, he’s going to say, ‘You’re different compared to the white Sally, who will come in here and give me everything I’ve asked for.’ And so the black actress then thinks she’s not getting paid equally, but doesn’t know that she isn’t doing the same work.
Not even Tristan could get away talking to students about inequality—and certainly not at little leftist Antioch College. But at least she could talk to those socialists about the economics of black porn, and the different pay structure for blacks and whites. Lex could tell them, but he’d have to dissemble first about once having worked on Wall Street... only capitalist pigs work on Wall Street:
“There’s a definitive, tangible difference in the pay scale between black performers and white performers. And as a point of clarification, Asians fall in line as white performers, and Latinos and Latinas fall in line as black performers. It mirrors society in many ways. In this industry, Asians know that if they appear passive and are only in white films, they’ll get paid like white actors and actresses. Latina women, on the other hand, are looked at as people of color, and have no choice but to be in porn films with blacks, and so they get paid like it.
“In a boy/girl scene, one girl, one guy, no anal sex, the market dictates a minimum of $800 to $900 per scene for the girl, and maybe, depending on the guy, about $400 for him. Now, a white girl will start at $800 and go up from there, but a black girl will have to start at $500, and then hit a ceiling of about $800. So the black girl hits a ceiling at the white girl’s minimum.
“This creates a dilemma for black actresses. If they start commanding more money, the industry then starts to think of them as ‘uppity’ or not worth the money, especially when the industry can go out and get another black actress on the cheap.”
Lex, however, has a regular rate of $1000 for a scene.
“There are only two guys who can sell movies based on their presence in them. There’s Rocco Siffredi and there’s Lexington Steele. Except for John Holmes, there has never been an American dude that you can put on the box cover until now. With Rocco, you don’t even care who the chick is, because you know the chick is going to get handled and you know how Rocco’s going to perform. The same with me....
“Now, if the producer decides to go with some no-name prop, the consumer is confronted with a choice. They can buy the video with the guy they don’t know, or they can buy the one with the guy they do know and they know how he’s going to perform.”
Lawrence Ross doesn’t disagree with this, though I might quibble, knowing that college guys (but not Antioch guys, of course) who want to get drunk, throw up and bond with sorority girls (Antioch has no Greeks) are probably going to get a film with Ron Jeremy on the box cover.
Lex also owns Mercenary Films, and I don’t know what he pays the talent, or even how much he pays himself to do a scene, but looking at his trophy house, BTS, he’s apparently not skimping, so I don’t know if Lex would be quite as relaxed before those lefty students as he was in front of Lawrence:
I notice—and it’s something I’d seen other male performers do as I did more interviews—that as Lexington talks, he subconsciously rubs his penis, as he would a pet. Nothing lewd, but he strokes it as a man would absentmindedly stroke his beard. Now, most men are always aware of what’s going on in their pants, but it normally doesn’t manifest itself in such an outward display. But Lexington seems unaware. His penis is his moneymaker, and as such, he needs to be in contact with it at all times.
I reluctantly confess to reviewing porn movies with my penis, but that does not mean I handle my organ in public, especially not at my alma mater, you can’t even touch yourself in front of others without first asking permission. Do I dare disturb that universe?
There usually isn’t too large a disconnect between an Ohio reviewer’s private and public lives. Even when we go out for pizza together at La Rosa’s in Beavercreek and talk shop, we look like the dorks we are in our morning coats and collars mounting firmly to the chin, our neckties rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin. This is decidedly not the case with our secret dork actress/director, and I must admit that Tristan dresses a lot more provocatively than we do where it’s winter in America, not covering the top of her very pretty chest in a heavy sweater and her legs in long johns when she sallies out public speaking, and probably not even when she goes out to Wal-Mart to treat herself to a new glass butt plug. But there is a disconnect, and a necessary one, for porn people, which Tristan was asked about.
You see, porn actresses really aren’t, in real life, the way they act like they are in porn. For one thing, most porn actresses seemingly do not have or want to have sex in their regular lives, if they aren’t living with a suitcase pimp or a lesbian girlfriend. And even then, chances are they don’t ask their suitcases to slap and choke them, much less come on their faces. (Porn guys do want sex off the set. They don’t want to be lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows, but what civilian woman wants to fuck a porn guy?) So when an 18 year old girl steps onto a porn set, she finds it necessary to set her other life aside. As Lex says:
“In adult video there’s a certain amount of morality and self-respect that you must leave at the door... When you agree to show up on the set, whoever you are for real, you need to forget that. You cease to be that person. You become the performer you are. There’s a mental transformation and there has to be, because at a certain point, you’re going to submit to having sex on film with a perfect stranger. If you have the wherewithal to do that in your present mind, then there’s something wrong with you. But if you have the ability to do it with your stage presence, then you can do it professionally.”
Lawrence Ross saw living proof of this when he watched Lex do a scene with Carmen Hayes, while his girlfriend at the time, Vanessa Blue, did the camera work.
“Stop!” Vanessa says. She takes out the camera again and begins to take more pictures. Lexington and Carmen are in suspended animation, holding the position for a couple of minutes as the camera clicks. The photos will go on the Web site.
“Let’s move to a reverse cowgirl,” Vanessa instructs.
Without lifting herself completely off Lexington’s dick, Carmen swivels so that she now faces the mirror. Lexington, during all of this maneuvering, has remained rock hard.
It’s time for more jackhammer fucking.
“Oh yeah!” is what Lex yells from time to time. It’s like his catch phrase, and it gets deeper as the sex gets more aggressive. Carmen’s big thighs flex as she arches her back, hands on the bed holding her up. She moans, with feeling.
“Hold it,” Vanessa yells again. Again, the couple freezes. She takes out the camera and shoots more shots.
“That’s good. Now give me long dick,” she says.
Lexington, who’s held a pose with his dick inside Carmen’s pussy, now lifts Carmen slightly so that the full length of his dick is shown while he’s still in the pussy. Vanessa gets up close and personal and takes the shot.
As I watch this, a thought passes through my mind one or a thousand times. No matter what the circumstances, how does a woman watch—no, that would be passive— how does a woman direct her boyfriend in a sex scene with another woman?
It’s the elephant in the room. I remember asking Vanessa in an interview a few years back about how she could fuck some random cat she’s only met a few minutes before. Her answer was simple: “I can fuck you and then see you get run over by a truck, and I wouldn’t feel a damn thing,” she said, without a smile.
But what happens when that person you’re fucking is the same guy you go to the market with, watch the other Hollywood movies with, and bring home to your family? Are you as callous then?
I’ve noticed that there are subtle but effective ways that thoughts of intimacy shared are pushed into the subconscious. One is the terminology used to make sex a commodity rather than an act of affection.
In porn parlance, Lexington doesn’t have sex with Carmen, he’s doing a scene. When Lexington is thrusting his dick rapid-fire into Carmen’s pussy, that’s not sexual intercourse, it’s penetration. Girl/girl, boy/girl, oral, anal, all are terms used to keep intimacy away as much as possible. And as long as Vanessa and Lexington, and other porn actors and actresses, use those terms, then they can not only watch each other’s genitals get sucked and fucked by others, but profit by it, without and feeling or sense of jealousy.
One actress who has bridged the problem between performer self and real self is secret nerd, Diana Devoe, who is not at all afraid of looking dorky in sweatpants and an overlarge sweater, behind the scenes of the films she directs.
Doing scenes wasn’t a problem for Diana, but like a lot of porn actresses, she had a lot of self-esteem and body-image issues. For her, strangely, porn sort of worked them out.
“Doing videos worked for me because I didn’t have anything against it. I just didn’t have a high opinion of my looks. I was always raised that your intellect is important, because your looks will fade. I never thought of myself as being pretty or beautiful or sexy, but I knew I was smart. And I used that. I was like, ‘Okay, you want my body and you want me to be in your movies. Okay, fine. You’re going to shoot me in a scene, and this is my rate, and you’re going to let me shoot camera for a scene, for free.’ That’s how I got my credits together. For three years I did that, working for free.”
These three years were part of a business plan. And Diana was determined to execute it, particularly because she wasn’t enjoying the sex. “Generally, sex on a porn set is not enjoyable for anyone,” she says. “You have these weird positions, you have the lights there, you’re stopping and starting, and the stuff that we do doesn’t necessarily feel good. There are exceptions, obviously. But for the most part, you’re there getting paid, the guy is there to get paid, the camera guy is getting paid, we all want to get out of here with a hot scene. That’s our goal. Our goal is not to make love to each other and get married....
“It’s not like I hated it, hated it, hated it, but how many Booty Talks can you do? How many Baby Got Backs can you do? And I liked doing features. I love to act because I’m a good actress. I would go and audition for the Wicked Pictures roles and the VCA roles, and I would get passed over by girls who didn’t speak English. This is because these productions don’t think of African-American girls as saleable. To them, we’re not marketable....
“A black man with no experience behind the camera, but who has a large penis, can go to a company and get a directing contract, and I can’t! I’ve gotten passed over by people I’ve taught how to shoot,” says an enraged Diana. Then she laughs wryly before adding, “But I’m not bitter.”
As Diana talks, her frustration level rises. Despite the backdrop of pornography as the center of her gripes, Diana could be echoing the concerns of working women in a lot of industries. Her technical skill was not enough in porn—actually, it didn’t mean anything—so she was told that she’d have to use her body to get ahead. But that was a shell game because in porn’s misogynistic world, women rarely get a chance to do anything but take a dick from a man....
In this cornucopia of sexual pleasure, it’s very hard to stand out unless you have something to offer that is incredibly different. A lot of producers go for the sexual extreme in order to capture the imagination of their potential customer. Diana goes for a more simple method.
“I actually take the time to put people together that want to have sex. I don’t cookie cutter my people together, so you’re going to have a hot scene together and it actually makes my job easier. Eighty percent of your job is done if the girl actually wants to have sex with the guy. Because once the girl has a bad attitude, that can effect the guy. In a mild example, he can get a little downcast while shooting the scene. And in the most extreme example, he can say, ‘Fuck you, bitch! I’m getting paid to fuck you, and that’s the only reason that I’m here. What the hell are you on your high horse for?’
“But I’m going to tell you the whole secret [for avoiding bad situations]. Ask the girl who she wants to work with. You do that, and you’re straight.”
I’ve watched and reviewed dozens of Diana’s DVDs for The Candy Shop, and I’ve yet to see her have trouble with anyone on the set: from Nat Turnher to Country Pipes to even the insane Wesley Pipes. Between Diana’s low keyed humor and girlfriend Trinity Post’s holding the c-light and showing her tits for the BTS footage, Diana has one of the most mellow sets in Porndom.
She’s also starting to shoot some interracial porn, which is another question that Tristan’s audience asked her in the long Q&A period after her speech. Had Mr. Marcus, who Tristan’s used in her Chemistry series, joined her in visiting Antioch College, he might have told the students what he told Lawrence Ross about interracial sex for Money Shot:
“When I first started, there weren’t a lot of black men out there doing interracial. Interracial was a fetish, and most of it was bought by white men.... To this day, there’s still a taboo around it. But when I first started in 1993, there was one black performer doing interracial, and that was Sean Michaels. He was the first black man to be accepted on a higher level than being another black actor because the white girls thought he was attractive. And the white girls liked to rebel, and fucking a black man was the best way to rebel. And the scenes turned out to be hot. I think what was going on in the girl’s mind was, ‘If I’m going to rebel by fucking a black guy, then I’ll do it well.’ When the white customer saw her reactions, they liked it and wanted more. I do the same thing when I’m fucking a white bitch.
“Sean Michaels taught me one thing, which is to treat every woman the same, no matter what color she is. If you like her and she’s cool, then treat her nice. If she has an attitude, then try to work it out. But don’t discriminate against anybody because the girl is one color or the other....
“For me, it’s actually been a help being black... I have an ‘I don’t give a fuck’ attitude, and I feel like with this skin color comes a certain amount of respect that is commanded. I say that with respect to another person’s color. There are still a lot of racial stereotypes in the industry, and we’ve become marginalized in some ways. But my goal is to make it more of a human thing, not a black or white thing. My scenes should be so that anyone could relate. I think that it takes away the power that tries to put you in a racist state of mind. If you approach it as a human being, you win.”
As for the state of black-owned porn productions, Mr. Marcus has mixed feelings about it. It’s not as black-and-white as it appears. “Yes, I think it could get better. But you’ve got to understand something. A lot of cats aren’t going to want to see the same things that I want to see. For example, if I see some badass black bitch walking down Beverly Boulevard, I may look at her and think she’s fine. But another brother may look at her and say that she’s a skinny bitch.
“Brothers are looking for different types of black women, especially the ones that look like they come from their neighborhoods and a lot of those bitches are ghetto bitches. I mean the brother looking in Miami is looking for a different bitch than the ones in New York. Yeah, you can make ghetto-ass movies and complain about them all day, but there will be some niggas who love them. Me trying to make the whole world of porn like the bitch from Beverly Hills ain’t realistic. You’ve gotta have all types of movies, meaning you’ve gotta have ’hood movies and all that shit. The low end of black porn for somebody may be the high end for somebody else. I came in thinking, ‘Hey, let’s get rid of the stretch marks, bullet and knife wounds.’ But some niggas like that shit. So to each his own.”
I know, in my own mind, that someone has to be buying the black porn I review, savoring the cellulite and getting off on the somnambulate women, listening to the mermaids sing rap, each to each—otherwise no one would ever make such movies. Porn is not supposed to be socialism—a money losing proposition. Only BNI is socialistic, in that unhappy sense.
Happily, I do not know anyone who actually likes to watch some of the movies I review...or do I? It’s a dirty little secret, but we do sell black porn DVDs here at BNI as our ridiculous attempt at being a capitalist enterprise. Still, I am not yet ready to quit reviewing black porn, much less consider what my life will be like after porn, when I spit out the butt-ends of my days and ways.
Thirteen years in the game, and Mr. Marcus is starting to look at life after being a performer. Like other performers, he wants to direct and has directed some films. And even though he’s still acting, he’s starting to reject scenes he would have done as a younger man.
“I don’t want to do any scenes with guys anymore... I was in a scene last week with Lex and this girl, and I kind of hated it. I could tell that she had this thing about touching guys’ dicks together. I didn’t say anything until we had a break, but when we did break, I told her to stop doing that shit. Stop trying to touch our dicks together. I’ve been in orgy scenes where there have been too many guys and too few women, and I don’t like that. I think I just want to focus on the girl.”
Interracial sex for black women can be a somewhat different proposition. It’s not just that ordinary usual “Fuck me with that big black cock,” porn. Today, with the edgier material that’s saturating the market, porn is more likely to be degrading instead of the feminist porn Tristan produces. Let’s end this piece with Lawrence Ross’ description of a Melodee Bliss movie:
When I first met Melodee, she’d proudly given me a copy of her latest movie. I turn it on and as the movie starts, the camera is still as Melodee sits on a dingy white leather couch wearing nothing but a white half tee with the words Boy Toy printed in blue. The color matches her blue mascara...
An unseen white male voice suddenly breaks the silence.
“Hey, we’re here with Melodee Bliss... What’s going on, you little whore?”
“Nothing much,” she says softly. She still has a smile on her face.
“Jesus, what brings you here?”
“To get fucked, sucked, choked, spit on, slapped, and just degraded.”
“Because you’re a fucking piece-of-shit whore?”
“Yes!” she answers, matter of factly.
“I love a girl who can admit that she’s a fucking whore.”
Porn has millions of subgenres to fit whatever you fancy when it comes to seeing people have sex. White men overtly degrading black women are some of the most popular. Racism manifested as sexual domination is as American as apple pie.
At the beginning of this scene, Melodee laughs easily as she answers the questions from the voice. We find out that she first had sex at thirteen, and that she can’t remember the first time she gave head.
The voice constantly tells her that she’s dumb, at one time saying that she has the IQ points of a statue. Melodee doesn’t protest.
To save the sanity of my unindicted co-conspirator, and the idealism of Tristan Taormino, I won’t describe the rest of the scene: the gagging, choking, and disturbing language. Lawrence Ross says, “This isn’t sex, it’s violence disguised as sex. If the Ku Klux Klan had put out the tape (and who knows if they didn’t make it), there would be an outrage. But in reality, it’s just another subgenre of porn.”
Sadly, in porn these days, there’s always something available to upset almost anyone—and to interest the inspectors over at OSHA. Black porn, white porn, it’s allasame these days. But I know very well that Antioch College students wouldn’t applaud the way they did for Tristan at the end of her lecture if they also had to watch the black porn she didn’t have time to talk about. And I know as well that Tristan wouldn’t applaud most black porn either. I don’t know what the “Burden of Representation” might be, but sometimes it’s a burden for me to represent what goes on out there in our splendid little industry, and reviewing black porn can sometimes seem to be this white man’s burden of representation.