While studies on race-specific violent and non-violent pornographic media was not discussed in the text, my interest in Black sexuality has resulted in a mini literature of media on Black sexuality. Of great interest is an article I read, “Worse Than Objects: The Depiction of Black Women and Men and Their Sexual Relationship in Pornography” where the authors reviewed pornographic media featuring Black and White performers to determine how often violent acts are depicted depending on the racial makeup of the performers.
Authors Fritz, Malic, Paul, and Zhou performed a content analysis of over 1,741 porn film clips uploaded to Xvideos.com and Pornhub.com featuring Black and White partners exclusively. Their aim was to determine, via content analysis, whether depictions of sexual aggression are more common depending on the race of the performers. They found that acts of violence were most commonly performed by Black men no matter the race of his co-performer, and that Black women were significantly more likely to be the recipients of violent acts no matter the race of her co-performer (Fritz et al, 2020).
Their results found an underrepresentation of scenes of intimacy (i.e., kissing and eye contact) in performances where both performers were Black to be statistically significant. From the paper I wrote on this topic for my Sociology 409 course, “Inequality in America,” I asked,
“For individuals who regularly consume Black pornography, what kind of understanding, or lack thereof, of intimacy are they internalizing and reinforcing in their own romantic and sexual relationships? Is this lack of intimacy having an outsized impact on relationship satisfaction for Black women? Is this lack of intimacy between Black men and women reinforcing a romantic and sexual preferences toward White women? Or are these multifaceted issues the result of a media machine that prefers lighter skin overall? (Walton, 2021).”
These are all issues that I will continue to investigate as I move forward with my academic endeavors. To the above questions, I would also add, do acts of violence perpetrated on Black women increase the rate of intimate partner violence between Black couples? At this point, media consumption is a ubiquitous genie that can never be put back into the proverbial bottle. My mission is to mitigate the psychological harm that can occur to entire groups of people when the human propensity to transfer what they learn via various media sources, as proposed by cultivation theory, is combined with the fundamental attribution error as we interact with diverse groups throughout our daily lives.
Fritz, N., Malic, V., Paul, B., & Zhou, Y. (2020). Worse Than Objects: The Depiction of Black Women and Men and Their Sexual Relationship in Pornography. Gender Issues, 38(1), 100–120. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12147-020-09255-2
Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. M. (2016). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems (3rd ed.) [E-book]. SAGE Publications, Inc.