Offensive, opinionated comments.

[elfs]

Opinionated and potentially offensive comments from a white guy commenting on ethnic porn. Two flavors, specifically, sort-of.

My first thought comes from reading the King Magazine swimsuit edition. For those of you unfamiliar with the work, King is the black equivalent of Maxim: music, cars, booze, half-naked women, and acting like, well, guys. It's a lad rag. As lad rags go, it's not bad.

But as I was thumbing through the swimsuit edition, the thing that kept coming back to me is that the women weren't particularly, well, black. Lots and lots of lovely shades of brown, but hardly anyone who qualified as "black". A few of the women lacked even the slightest hints of African ethnicity in their faces and bodies, and I wondered what qualified them for those pages other than a really nice tan.

I thought about Richard Dawkins's recent article about race and identity, which he published recently, as I thumbed through the magazine, my interest having slid from the purely prurient to the more intellectual. As has been discovered, feelings indistinguishable from racism can be generated in people simply by wearing a jersey different from that of another group; Dawkins's thesis is that even subtle ethnic differences serve a similar purpose, kin identification. I wondered if the whole thesis is rapidly becoming irrelevant, given how lovely I found most of the women in the pages through which I was thumbing.

On the other hand, it was really nice to see various shades of brown-skinned women being touted as sex objects without them being depicted as "Hos", as they frequently are in hard-corn porn which is made to be sold to-- how does Pat Califia put it? Oh yeah-- "aging white guys with Catholic sensibilities."

David Brin's comment that "all humans are just different shades of brown" is really starting to make sense to me.

---

The other flavor of porn is soft-core stuff coming out of Japan. There's a lovely photo model named Chiasa Aonuma, whom I have seen in a couple of places. She has one of those lovely big mooney faces too big for the features it holds and a pretty body all the same.

But my goodness, in video, those eyes are as flat as dishware and as intelligent as a cow's. I suppose I shouldn't find that disappointing; it's not as if someone with that sort of face needs more that a few braincells to pose for the camera. In the voice-over, she sounds normal-- chatting about hanging out with friends and going to college and all that-- but if her thinking is even above room temperature, it's sad that the camera doesn't even give the slightest hint of it.

Comments

[quaryn-dk.livejournal.com]

I've long agreed with the "different shades of brown" idea. I mean, I'm pretty bloody pale, but I'm certainly not white -- more of a pinky-beige color really. And the darkest African I ever saw was no darker than the "burnt umber" crayon in my Crayola box -- certainly not black.

Hmm... I just had a thought... what if saying that, instead of seeing things in black or white, vs. shades of gray, we thought of seeing them in terms of shades of brown?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Last year at the University Street Fair, there was a circle of drummers performing on a street corner, just a bunch of guys hanging out, mostly skinny hippies from the University of Washington, white guys in ratty dreadlocks, that kind of thing. And in the middle was this black man-- and he was black. Not brown, but the kind of light-absorbing black one usually sees in construction paper, a dusty black that glowed. He was freaking gorgeous, with big muscles and bright eyes in a handsome face, and he was pounding this pair of big hand-held drums.

It turns out he was here to study nuclear chemistry, but he was original from Senegal and was considered a mid-level musical prodigy there, with his own line of CDs and everything. I don't remember if I bought one or not; he had a bunch in his backpack.

[fallenpegasus]

I bought one. It's great programming music. His name is Thione Diop, and he shows up on Google.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

I met a guy from Zaire who actually appeared a very dark purple under fluorescent lighting, and a guy from Jamaica I dated last year had skin that was the matte black of photography darkroom paint. Then again, a classmate of mine from Malawi was about the same shade as Obama.

Humans have a lot of interesting variety.

Not Horrendous

[featheredfrog.livejournal.com]

http://tinyurl.com/4krzd

Certainly not horrendous, but there's no connection in the gaze. As though she's dissociating. Although that non-connection could be a cultural thing, I guess.

Re: Not Horrendous

[norikos-author.livejournal.com]

That was my first thought. To be honest, much of the asian porn I've seen trends in that direction, which I think is a great tragedy.

Re: Not Horrendous

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Dude, mark that link NSFW or something!

For a long time, there were two kinds of photographic erotica: the original pin-up, in which the subject being photographed knew there was an audience and posed to please and/or entertain, and the second, first introduced by Bob Guccioni (really), in which the subject pretended to be alone or that the camera was invisible, and the viewer was invited to be a voyeur into a private moment.

The thing that bothers me most about the kind of erotica epitomized by Ms. Aonuma is that she seems to be aware that there is a viewer, but doesn't have or isn't permitted to have the will to engage, please, or entertain. And that just creeps me out.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

I used to get the oddest looks in high school (and college, occasionally) when I would comment favorably about a guy who wasn't Caucasian.

Wasn't there some group who insisted that if you mixed all the skin colors together you'd get purple?