Offensive, opinionated comments.
Oct. 19th, 2004 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsOpinionated 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.
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.
