In Pornland: How Pornography is Hijacking Sexuality, feminist and porn expert Dr. Gail Dines spends an entire chapter detailing one of the open secrets of the porn industry: the sexual fetishization of racial stereotypes for monetary gain. As I noted in a column on how the porn industry exploits (and helps to create and sustain) racial animosity back in 2018, porn producers create content that explicitly relies on toxic racial prejudices, such as black men sexually abusing white women or girls and portrayed as “Blackzilla” or “Black Kong,” and white slave owners sexually assaulting black women.
Ugly racial content on PornHub—which boasts 115 million daily users and can count the majority of the male population as its dependents—is nothing new. But in this cultural moment, it should attract renewed attention. The vile traffic in material portraying black men as rapacious predators and eroticizing the rape of black women by slave owners for the sexual pleasure of viewers should be exposed, condemned, and destroyed. PornHub should be treated the way any other company trafficking in rape and racial hatred would be. Specifically, they should be driven out of business. If these videos are not “hate crimes,” nothing is. Only our collective cultural refusal to condemn any sexual fetish, no matter how perverse, is preventing this discussion from taking place. The progressives demanding change won’t touch the porn industry.
