As a quick warning before we start, this article focuses on racism, describes histories of racial violence and stereotyping, and touches on other disturbing topics such as sexual assault. It is also an article about anti-blackness written by a white person. I highly recommend researching this topic further with work made by Black creators. In particular, I recommend F. D. Signifier’s video “Black men are not a fetish” which covers most of what I talk about here and platforms the voices of several Black men who describe their relationship with fetishization, hypersexualization, and stereotypes of hypermasculinity.
Generally speaking, I love porn as an arena of media. However, it’s usually overlooked and not given serious criticism. This combines with the often stripped-down plots in porn to make it a breeding ground for distilled archetypes which, unfortunately, are often very tied to harmful stereotypes. A perfect and disturbing example of this is the way that Black men are often depicted in pornography. Frequently referred to as only “BBC” (or “Big Black Cock”), Black men in the industry can find themselves pigeonholed and fetishized for their race. Black men are assumed to be sexually aggressive, hypermasculine, and exceptionally well-endowed, and porn in particular tends to market and capitalize on these stereotypes. For the uninitiated, this might seem innocuous or even flattering, but unfortunately, this image of Black men is not only limiting and fetishizing but directly linked to a brutally violent past that continues to this day. So, let’s learn more about the history of Black men’s hypersexualization and how it plays out in porn and kink today.
The myth that Black men are voraciously sexual with exceptionally large penises isn’t just a porn thing; it’s extremely common in North American society. There’s the famous phrase “Once you go black you never go back,” countless jokes in movies and television, and popular memes like “Wood Sitting On A Bed.” Like so many things, this concept was created to justify the enslavement of and horrific terrorism against Black people. A central aspect of the institution of chattel slavery was the dehumanization of Black people who were reduced rhetorically to animal status by whites in order to excuse unimaginable violence (Howard). Western ideologies often set up the mind and body as a conflicted duality, with virtues like rationality associated with the mind and sexuality as a base, “lower” bodily function. Because of this, imagining Black people as animalistic inherently tied them to sexuality. Against Black men, this manifested as nonsensical myths about their unnaturally large penises and, even more harmfully, the Rape Myth.
As the institution of chattel slavery neared its end it was defended by racist science that claimed Black men had a “dual nature”(Fredrickson). According to racist race scientists of this period, Black men were docile and harmless while strictly controlled by whites, but afflicted by uncontrollable sexual fits when left to their own devices. This was the beginning of the Rape Myth that gained popularity during the Reconstruction Era and around the turn of the 20th Century (Sommerville). Black men were imagined as bestial sexual predators who were biologically programmed to mindlessly sexually assault white women. Despite being absurd and unfounded, this powerful lie was used to justify not only segregation and discrimination but also the terrorism against Black people and communities that peaked in the early to mid-20th Century and continues to this day. Euphemistically titled “Race Riots,” mass public tortures and lynchings were all blamed on the supposedly predatory sexuality of Black men. Even white figures supposedly opposed to this violence frequently referred to this Rape Myth as unquestionable truth, begging the white public to “consider the provocation” behind lynchings (Fredrickson 273). The imagined horror of these supposed rapes was not the violation of white women’s consent, but the damaging of white men’s property (Katz, 155). Any sex before marriage reduced the value of a white woman, but even consensual sex with a Black man was considered worse than death.
The Rape Myth was and is a disgusting political tool used to justify violence, yet from the beginning, it has also been a source of covert eroticism. The gruesome lies circulated in the early 20th Century about Black men have been referred to as a form of “folk pornography”(Hall 150). They were often salacious and scandalous, as was literature on the subject supposedly created as cautionary tales for white women. Black men’s penises were said to be so large that white women could not physically handle them, with one particularly gruesome story circulated in which the rapist had to cut the victim open in order to penetrate her (Hall 151). Even The Birth Of A Nation (1915), the infamously racist film which served to repopularize the violence of the Ku Klux Klan, echoes this in some ways. The film features a scene in which a young innocent white girl is pursued by a Black would-be rapist. The film language of this scene is noticeably titillating, with long lingering shots that emphasize the white girl’s youth and innocence and give ample time for the viewer to imagine what might happen to her. In fact, the scene is eerily reminiscent of tropes in modern porn.
Today, porn that fetishizes Black masculinity tends to focus less on the rape itself (although this exists too, of course) and more on the concepts of hypermasculinity and defilement of white women. The mythology around Black men as bestial, brutish, and well-endowed has survived and flourished in the age of internet porn as any cursory peek around your favorite tube sites will show you. Black men in porn are often paired with white women who fit the “teen” archetype, harkening back to the Rape Myth’s obsession with youth and eroticizing the concept of a big scary Black man taking the innocence of a cute little white girl. A perfect example of this is the “Piper Perri Surrounded” meme which makes humor out of the fact that the average internet user can not only immediately recognize the picture as coming from porn but will also associate a crowd of Black men around a small blonde girl with sexual danger.
On the kinkier side of things, many genres of BDSM fantasy will utilize men’s blackness as a source of extra taboo or a symbol of extreme masculinity. Possibly most notably, cucking as a kink often involves fetishizing the idea of a white man’s white wife specifically cheating on him with a Black man because of his superior manhood (in more than one sense). This fantasy is so popular that, according to Adrienne Davis’ Black Sexual Economies, there’s a thriving market for Black male sex workers who cater to it. This has intersections with other kinks as well. For example, an unfortunately high amount of sissification and penis humiliation porn uses the mythical “BBC” as a source of comparison. Black men, and especially their penises, are often positioned in these fantasies as inherently more masculine and sexually skilled while simultaneously being reduced to a fetish, symbol, and prop for white people’s sexual fantasies. Not only does this uncritically buy into flattening stereotypes produced to dehumanize Black men, it also presumably cuts Black men out of other roles in these scenarios. Many “bulls” who are Black enjoy cuckolding other men or participating in their humiliation and feminization, but any Black men who want to be submissive in these scenarios are met with a deluge of fetishizing content that positions them as inherently dominant and aggressive.
I don’t want to shame anyone, especially Black men, who enjoy kinks and fantasies that play on the erotic mythology around Black hypermasculinity. At the same time, I think it’s important for all to be aware of where these stereotypes come from and the fact they can be dehumanizing and fetishizing. It’s entirely possible to play with sissification, cuckolding, penis humiliation, and the like without specifically using Blackness as a symbolic stand-in for aggressive sexual masculinity. Similarly, there’s no shame in being attracted to Black people, but if you’re not Black and you find yourself attracted to people entirely because of their Blackness, that deserves serious interrogation. Your sexual partners should be seen as full people to you even if your encounter is casual, so if all you’re looking for is any Black person (or an embodiment of some specific stereotype of Black people) you might unconsciously deny them that necessary humanity and respect.
By Aiden/Estelle Garrett
Additional Resources Used
Fredrickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind; the Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914. (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 276.
Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, Revolt Against Chivalry : Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching, Revised edition. (New York: Columbia University Press), 1993.
Howard, William Lee. “The Negro As A Distinct Ethnic Factor In Civilization.” Medicine (1903): 423-424.
Katz, Jonathan, The Invention of Heterosexuality, University of Chicago Press edition. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)
Rubin. (2011). Deviations a Gayle Rubin reader. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822394068
Sommerville, Diane Miller. Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004) 3.