The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (55 page)

The scene begins. A big, muscular, dark-skinned black man named Nat stands in front of his open locker, mostly naked. Adrianna walks in, presumably looking for the showers. Dressed in short shorts and a thin, see-through t-shirt, her blond hair falls in two braids framing her face. The look she fashions registers as a trope she performs: that of the young white girl with an innocent allure. He smiles, his friendly face open to her. She walks towards him. He calmly looks her up and down, informs her that she is in the men’s locker room while touching and turning her so he can see her body, as if through the clothes. He moves her shorts to reveal her butt. He looks her in the eyes and says he knows that she is “looking for something else.” She meets him with a look that is powerfully
direct and desirously big-eyed. Her whole face opens to express a longing for him too. In this look of mutual desire, they kiss and immediately entangle. He pats her bottom and says she will “be here for a while now.” And she agrees that this is what she “really came in here for.” They have a prolonged exchange on the locker room bench where each stimulates the other. She bends over, he eats her ass. She sits and rides him, smiling. There is an exchange of subjectivity that transpires between them, and it is through their eyes. While she masturbates, her eyes seek his to make a link. Their acts reveal how touch generates pleasure, and their eyes affirm it in their exchanged glances as she becomes wild, most apparent in her face and the disheveled strands of hair. She will continue looking to him even as positions change. Increasingly, they sweat and he is particularly drenched. His face spills with small streams of wetness. When he bends her over in the shower, he pulls her hair, so her face faces him. Then she bends her arm behind her, and turns to share a frenzied look. They both grit their teeth, exposing the force they expend upon each other. The interviews were right: indeed, Adrianna engages them eye-to-eye in what may be the most distinguishing element of the sex scene.

Unlike the exploitative and caricatured representations of black men in pornography discussed by Gail Dines, the sexual interaction between Nat and Adrianna differs significantly.
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They engage each other eye-to-eye and face-to-face in terms of a mutually pleasurable experience. However, we also have a privileging of the black male and white female encounter as the primary sexual relation. It garners the most time and focus, as well as comes first. The white woman and the Asian man enjoy the least time together, revealing that a certain politics of race exists and persists in this work.

While Nat and Arianna are bent over and leaning on the tile barrier to the shower, Keni and Danny walk in, dressed in boxing shorts with gloves in their hands. It is Adrianna’s face, in this naked state, that the two boxers see when they walk into the locker room. The expression on her face can be described as one so uncovered and exposed in its sexually provoked pleasure that its look reaches out to them like an invitation. Nat and Adrianna disentangle and he walks out of the locker room. She lies on the bench alone, as the boxers, two smaller men, stand over her, placing their penises close to her face as they take off their jockstraps.

An interview with the actors cuts into the scene to remind us of its construction as a fantasy. Danny Wylde says, “This would not happen in real life. If I walked in to that, and I did not know her, I would start laughing really hard. I don’t know if I would join in.” Keni Styles says he
“gets off visually.” And the director’s off-camera voice affirms, “you like to watch.” Adrianna says that seeing a man “standing on the side, jerking off is super hot.”

Returning to the scene, Keni pulls Adrianna into the shower and she spends equal time pleasing both actors by holding their cocks in her mouth or with her hands. Danny, the white actor, penetrates her first. He leans her leg up against the wall and spanks her. As they fuck, Keni moves away from the scene while stimulating himself. In the context of a historical representation that centers white men and puts in the periphery Asian men, as I argue in
Straitjacket Sexualities
,
¹⁰
the meaning of Keni’s derivative role in this scene is part of a cinematic tradition much larger and longer than pornography. She looks for him, reaches for him on the side of the screen. The white man expresses a kind of overwhelming by her in his frequent “Oh my god” murmurings. She becomes wild with him as she leans her head back on the ground, and he almost tears at her breasts as she opens her legs. He moves, telling her to sit on his cock as he lies flat on the shower floor.

We think Keni Styles is no longer in the scene, but he appears again. This time, he sits on the ground, against the wall, masturbating with his legs splayed out. The scene unfolds like real time, as if to capture how arousal takes time. Danny and Adrianna move from grunts of pleasure to laughter. They share several intense face-to-face encounters that include kissing, laughter, or expressions of abandon. Keni disappears again, and in doing so makes apparent the face-to-face connection that he lacks in his relations with her. Danny kisses Adrianna as they face each other, even as he enters her from behind. Her eyes open super wide. While their speech is meant primarily for each other as the filmmaker does not use a microphone to broadcast their whispers, Danny states that “you deserve my cum in your face” to which she readily acquiesces. After the money shot, the calm is interrupted by Keni Styles, who rushes in to stand over her, showing himself as already erect.

The sex scene with Keni and Adrianna lasts one minute. He lies down on the ground and momentarily fucks her. He straddles her almost like they are a pair of scissors, with both their heads on opposite sides. He then moves her, pulls her hair to expose her face away from him, so she still does not face him. He soon cums all over her face and puts his penis over her mouth to catch his drip as she kneels before him. Notable here is the brevity of the Asian man’s sexual encounter and the lack of a face-to-face connection with the woman while the two other men who precede him, one black and one white, and even the one after, enjoy a much longer encounter with her, with an extended eye-to-eye and face-to-face
connection. We can read this scene of Keni as the “one-minute man” as evidence of the derivative status of Asian men in pornography, in relation to black and white men especially in the context of
Superman Stamina.
But his inability here and now could be for many reasons, including the pressures of performing as
the
Asian heterosexual penis in porn.

The last sexual pairing in this group scene plays differently as well. An actual conversation transpires. After Keni leaves, Adrianna leans back against the shower wall, with cum on her face and hair. The camera pans to reveal Evan under the shower, looking at her. He casually asks a rhetorical question, “Rough day in the gym?” And she retorts, “I’m not done working out,” which serves as an invitation for deepening their encounter to include his cleaning her up and her having more sex. Like the white Danny and the black Nat, this white man Evan connects with the white woman at the level of the face and in conversation. They look at each other and pay attention to what the other says, developing a repartee about the fantasy itself, even as he helps to fulfill it.

In the context of the three other sex scenes in “Jock,” how do we evaluate the work of Keni Styles, especially concerning the brevity of the Asian male/white female sex scene? We can interpret this in many ways including the use of race and the visibility of racial difference as a lens of analysis. And it is an important revelation, for pornography is not a site where racial politics disappear. It reveals how inequalities exist, whether in the form of screen time or in the intensity of the sex scene. Or we can forego a racial reading and say that Keni Styles was just not that into her. In Rough Sex, the female actor chooses her partners and defines the bounds of her scenes. In this context, we may produce the nonracial reading of their lack of chemistry, his lack of attraction, or even hers. This was also essentially the only real group scene in the “Jock” program. A nonracial reading is productive indeed, but such a reader would ignore the intensity of the connection between Adrianna and her sexual partners, except for Keni—whom she did choose! In this way, race functions in such an unwieldy yet revealing manner in understanding what transpires in this scene.

My criteria of the face-to-face in measuring the sex acts, do not intend to contain how feminist porn aims to introduce and widen new pleasures in all of its myriad forms. However, I note the lack of face-to-face as a crucial way to measure the lack of Asian male subjectivity, and not just the penis, in pornography. Adrianna’s face-to-face connection with three of the men ensures an intensity that livens the scene and shows in brief moments the distance occupied by Asian men in relation
to white women. Emmanuel Levinas discusses eros not as “possession and power” of another, but as a kind of communication between selves that is “neither a struggle, nor a fusion, nor a knowledge. One must recognize its exceptional place among relations. It is the relationship with alterity, with mystery, that is, with the future.”
¹¹
Here, Levinas privileges erotic relations as a site where we may understand our relationships with others; even in our most intimate relations, where he argues that we are alone. His is a larger understanding of the self as alone. And in privileging the face as the agent of bare emotion, the lack of face-to-face connotes a kind of disappearance. Does alone then encompass the way in which Keni Styles disappeared from the sex, and when he returns, performs for only one minute, defying his promise of knowing how to last?

Is isolation a choice for Keni Styles who moves in and out of the frame when Adrianna is with the other man? It is important to emphasize the agency of the actor here for he is the one to step away from the scene. In the first instance of their ménage à trois, a kind of equal opportunity sexual exchange transpires, but at the crucial moment, he leaves. He literally steps away from the frame even if he continues to be welcome in the scene. Adrianna would welcome his continued presence as evidenced by her reaching for him to return. In the interviews, Danny discusses the hotness of seeing another man and woman together when he himself steps aside from the group scenes. Sex here can be lonely in the sense of the burden of expectation that Keni Styles may feel as the sole Asian man in the scene and in the larger industry of pornography. Or there may be the fact of having to step aside because the white man penetrates her first so he has to move away. Or once again, it may not seem appealing for him to stay. He does linger, masturbating. Their faces remain focused on the extraction and giving of pleasure. And he reaches for her and stimulates her as she gives Danny oral sex. Does Keni’s stepping aside render him as accepting of a kind of racial hierarchy? I don’t think this is the only option.

If we were to accept the argument, we can see the aloneness of the characters even in the entanglements of sex; we can also interpret his moving away as an indication of his alienation—whether as a European, or an Asian who finds it important not to acknowledge one’s race, even if it is very apparent. What comforts and familiarities are conveyed in the white and black pairings with the white woman? Is Keni not privy to such familiarity? To be clear, there lacks a tradition of representation for the pairing of white women and Asian men in porn. If Nat’s scene differs from the tradition of exploitative sex between black men and white women, is Keni producing tradition every time he performs?
And how about the viewer? Dark-skinned Keni with the British accent and the small, fit body—how does he fit into the repertoire of bodies we are accustomed to seeing? These questions, when raised, validate the continuing dynamics that inform our perceptions of racial difference that still persist today—as evidenced in the singular stature of Keni Styles as the most prominent, if not only, Asian male actor in American heterosexual pornography, who most certainly faces a bind not only of representation, but of expectation. If we were to follow Richard Fung’s method here, we would have more diversity and more representation. More numbers would certainly ease the burden of representing entire groups of people. Keni Styles’s performance in this scene is not the failure of all Asian men, but produces the problem not only of representation but expectation.

In a stylistic nod to cinema’s ability to provide doors and windows to existence, looking at the faces of the actors in the pleasures of sex and throes of orgasm, can we also open the doors and windows to the racial meanings of intimate relations? Ultimately, we can see that feminist porn prioritizes the subjectivity of women. In their relations with multiracial casts of men, how do the meanings of race change? And in the declaration of feminist porn’s commitment to representing diversity, how do they capture ongoing struggles with race and racial difference in sexual relations? Can they help us indicate the racial politics of sexual pleasure? And how can an ethical filmmaking accommodate the dramas not only of gender but also race?

In closing, we discover then that feminist porn is not a utopian site for representations of race. In the process of innovating pornography, which it does through centering the complex subjectivities of women such as in the method of interview in Tristan Taormino’s Rough Sex, feminist pornography shows the limits of racial representation and specifically the burden of expectation that Styles has to bear. We see the racial hierarchies unaddressed in Adriana’s discussion of her fantasy. We see racialized dynamics unfold even if they are unspoken. Verbally, race is not there in her descriptions of the black man’s “nice face, smile, and eyes,” or in his description of how much she “loves sex.” Whether racial difference is discussed or not discussed, meanings can and should be drawn. Studying the work and presence of Keni Styles can make sense of the process of racialization persisting even in feminist porn. In
Superman Stamina
he defines manhood with investments in redefining male power as giving. And in
Rough Sex #3: Adrianna’s Dangerous Mind,
a one-minute performance can reinscribe Asian men into a manhood still so lacking—if we read the scene in a straitjacketed lens. In both, Keni
Styles’s performances exceed the assessments of victimization of racial subjects in antifeminist porn. Each of these examples shows an uneasy relationship to heteronormative manhood. Such a finding challenges us working in feminist porn to continue to find ways to talk about the role of race in pornography. Through examining the work of Keni Styles in both
Superman Stamina
and
Rough Sex #3,
what we actually learn is that he carries an unfair burden of expectation. We also learn that any blanket assessment of racism at work in pornography does not capture the fraught and promising possibilities of seeing racial subjects struggling with the power and politics of sexuality in pornography.