Last week our upcoming film Ashley and Kisha got a nice mention on Ethnoerotica and I started to write a post (tentatively titled “Race Riot”) about what we’ve seen in terms of sale for Ashley & Kisha versus our other titles The long and the short of it is that lots and lots of people have preordered Damon & Hunter and Matt & Khym, lot and lots of people have bought Marie & Jack and Xana & Dax. But comparitively few people have pre-ordered A&K. But as I began to speculate on why this might be, I got bogged down and couldn’t pay off the title, so I quit.

Just yesterday, I kvetched at Erika Lust about the men’s porn/women’s porn thing, and haven’t quite found myself satisfied with what I said there either.

Then today I had cause to read an entry I made nearly a year ago, after a wonderful phone visit with Jessica Holter, founder of The Punany Poets: Am I a Punany Poet?

I rather like what I said towards the end it:

In the past few years, sexually explicit material has fractured into an ever-increasing number of what “the industry” (mis)labels “fetishes”. There are segregations by sex act, by race, by age. There are videos that show nothing but young white women getting fucked in the ass by black men, or videos that show nothing but asian women having sex with each other. I don’t suppose there’s anything wrong with people wanting to see what they want to see (a photo I saw at an early age of Sophia Loren has left me easy prey for the word “Latina”) but as this fractured view of sexuality more and more defines pornography, it seems to imply that the way to reach the audience for graphic sex is by focusing on the most objective, quantifiable elements. I don’t think this is so. I think there ways to depict sex that can transcend race, gender, or sexuality, and Jessica, Linda, JAG [people who've said generous things about A&K] and the others are helping to sustain me in my belief that by focusing on the subjective aspects of the sexual experience, I can reach across boundaries of race, or gender, or sexual taste.

Of course our differences still matter – Jessica [Holter] is a African-American woman, raised in the South by old church-going lady who “still had cotton under her fingernails.” I’m second-generation Irish and Jewish, raised the in the white, middle-class suburbs of the West Coast – but those aren’t the only things that matter, and they’re not always the thing that matters the most. You don’t have to be African-American to be inspired by the story of the Tuskegee Airmen; you don’t have to be Jewish to feel the horror of The Holocaust; you don’t have to be young, black, or a lesbian to know when you’re watching Kisha ride Ashley’s face, you’re seeing something that’s as right as rain.

I’m not stupid. I know that when I say race or gender or sexual orientation aren’t always the most important thing, I’m saying it from the point of view of a person who’s never had his race, or his gender, or who or how I fuck held against me in any but the most trivial sort of way. And so I suppose it’s only natural that if I, as a middle-aged, white, straight man make a film about young, black, lesbian women, I’m going to have to prove that I can make the things they and I have in common count for more than our differences.

That’s fine. It’s my privilage and honor to have the chance to try.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 5th, 2006 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Blogging, Erika Lust, Ethnic, Jessica Holter, Punany Poets, Race, Storycraft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.