In case you haven’t noticed it appears as of yesterday Gammae has removed Next Door Ebony from their portfolio of sites… The links redirect to Next Door Studios but I’m not sure if the affiliate ID is carried through. Usually you can see your ID In the final URL but not with the redirect they placed…
Next Door Ebony’s content is available inside Next Door Studios.
There’s a “black” category on the side that gets members 278 scenes and many of those are still showing NextDoorEbony as the producer, all NextDoorEbony is not clickable or searchable.
Frankly, it’s some terrible form of self-censorship. I don’t see anything wrong with the words ebony or black. I’m very sorry that things are once again escalating in the wrong direction in the states. The problem isn’t how they call people of color, it’s about what the attitude to these people is.
Whenever we post about an update featuring Black models and use those descriptors, we get a lot of shit from our surfers. It’s a hard line to walk in porn because we deal in fetish and fantasy, but at this moment in time the stance at QC is that fetishizing skin colour isn’t a great idea and contributes to unconscious bias if not overt racism.
So, we are listening to our surfers who are POC and adjusting our language accordingly.
In many ways, this is sad to see. I don’t want to see the day come when only vanilla white models are used because that is not a fair representation of our society. What if studios are afraid of backlash any time they produce a scene with a black (or Latin or Asian) performer? Are we going to shove these wonderfully diverse and talented performers into the background and out of jobs or are we going to find a way to keep the balance? I do use the descriptive terms because some surfers are looking for that diversity while others don’t want to see them. My belief is to try to give the surfer an idea of what delights wait. When I was first getting into porn and stories, I would scream and yell any time someone slipped watersports in there without warning me. To me, it is an absolute shut down. Some feel the same way about interracial (any two different races together), or big beefy hair guys.
I dont understand you’re reasoning actually on QueerClick for example there is a entire section called Asian, isn’t that racist by the same measurement as using the word black?
I think it’s absurd not to be “allowed” to use certain words that simply describe how someone looks. It’s ignoring the obvious and not addressing the real issue. It’s also ignoring the fact that performers are hired for their looks whatever type that might be. Sure I understand about fetishizing based on skin colour but I don’t agree that it’s always a bad thing. Some people are into hairy men, others like blonds while others prefer chubby small guys. If I describe someone as being hairy, blond or black it’s not because I’m predigest against them it’s because I think they are beautiful.
The problem isn’t with the word “black” the problem our surfers have is with the fetish words like “ebony” and “chocolate”. But it isn’t my place as a white woman to tell Black people what does and doesn’t or should/shouldn’t offend them. We’ve been asked not to overly fetishize skin colour - which I acknowledge is a hard line to walk in porn, but we are going to try.
QC is an image led blog. It’s obvious when an actor is a person of colour and no one has suggested that we can’t say that a guy is Black. In the same way we don’t say over and over again “big white cock” we’ve been asked not to say over and over again “big black cock”. Once is good, we got it. The cock is black.
In the wonderfully mixed area I grew up in (Los Angeles), the black community themselves would refer to each other using terms to describe how dark or light the skin was. I have never seen the words ebony and chocolate as fetish words but terms to describe the beautiful tones in their skin - different from the cafe au lait or high yella - ebony to chocolate to mocha to cafe au lait or high yella. It’s also kind of boring to be stuck with only using one term. (and yes, I also use the same descriptive type terms for whites – fish belly white, tanned, pale, creamy - and Asians, etc. When I first started doing adult galleries, we were told to not use black as some found it offensive, but to use ebony instead. Now, it is back to being the preferred term for those with lovely darker skins. (Yes, I love the way the light plays off of the darker skin tones) And there are people who do look for the BWC and BBC. Are we not supposed to help guide them to the galleries and/or content they want?