Regardless, I disagree that this photo was not meant to be arousing. I think the photo was “clearly” posed to be erotic. Even if you’re right about the amputation, you are aware that amputee porn is a thriving fetish? And this girl is beautiful, a fact which has not escaped our photographer.

I put my own “clearly” in quotes to mirror yours, and to highlight that it’s a rhetorical trigger word we typically see in arguments where someone is trying to present opinion as fact.

Thanks for your perspective on the need for racialized porn. If it’s what turns you on, I’d be a hypocrite to speak against that. I’m mildly startled to encounter someone for whom “reflective of themselves” is a porn selection criterion (I myself don’t seek out porn based on whether or not it contains middle-aged white people) but hey, it’s your libido.

But I’m still not going to start categorizing the porn on Erosblog by the skin color of the models. For the reasons expressed in my Not Ignorant, Adamant post, I “remain convinced it’s a bad business.”

I am curious how you conducted a search on my site “for color”, though. Did you page through five years of posts day-by-day? If so, I’m impressed. If not, what did you do, to search for photographs that aren’t labeled with “racial tags or identifiers” that I prefer to avoid? How do you do a text-based search for “color” in a database of text prepared by a willfully colorblind man?

I should point out that two of the three “Similar Sex Blogging” links at the end of this post take you to photographs of what you are calling “color”. (Doesn’t that sound dehumanizing to you? I’d much prefer to say something like “photographs of women”.) So if this post was the only “color” you found on ErosBlog, I submit to you that your search was defective.

Glad you “otherwise” enjoy the site, and sorry I can’t (won’t, prefer not to) help you in your ongoing quest for color-labeled porn.

As a woman of color, I’d like to attempt to put in my two cents about the need for ethnorotica.

Default is the issue.

Being oblivious to what is default does not make it any less so. Nor does it contribute to changing it.

The reason why there is a need for sites like ethnorotica is the same reason I can’t find a band-aid to match my skin.

Narrowing focus so it’s easier for me and other non-defaults to find porn reflective of themselves is not a bad thing.

Specializing in that form is sadly, the only way that I can find variety in any form that is not degrading or stereotyping.

Assuming that one’s one own obliviousness to the absence or presence of diversity is somehow a positive, is an exercise in earplugged “la-la-las”.

Having just done a similar search on your site for color, for example, I found only this article; featuring an African amputee. A photo which is clearly not meant to be sexually arousing.

Love this site, otherwise.

I guess I’ve got a thing or two to learn about marketing “ethnic erotica”.

Oh wait, I forgot to mention they were lesbians too. Doh!

Bacchus (and, by all means, please correct me if I’ve misinterpreted) is espousing the view that beauty is not related to race, and I agree. Beauty is beauty.

I think Lex is addressing the issue that though beauty is not bound by race, the portrayal is. His “race matters” seems to be more about the fact that if beauty/sexuality is only portrayed in limited ways, then there is a problem. And he’s right, most media point to skinny white women as the epitome of beauty, and only portray women of color as stereotypes. Providing an alternative set of “beautiful” options provides variety to those who don’t want to see the same icon over and over. It also provides for people who have preferences that don’t include skinny white women.

If no one addresses the issue, it doesn’t go away. At the moment, you can vote in the US no matter what color your skin is or what the arrangement of your gonads is, but it didn’t get that way without people pushing to let those groups into the “mainstream.”

Ideally, projects like this one, which propone the idea of beautiful women of all colors and ethnicities by demonstrating non-typical examples, will erode the stereotypes that limit the expression of beauty to one race and body type. Eventually race will be as meaningless to the portrayal of beauty as it is to the actual aesthetics.

The way to avoid moronic/bad/evil/stupid porn (whether it’s lily-white cum-soaked-fuckholes or racist/ghetto porn) is to *avoid* it, which I try to do. I strive mightily to avoid posting porn that fails to respect its subjects, and I strive even *harder* to avoid reproducing or linking to the misogynistic or racist or otherwise idiotic sales text that surrounds a lot of otherwise unobjectional porn.

Look, I don’t argue that it’s “not OK” to present alternatives to the stupid/foul/hateful porn out there; I try to do that very thing every day. What I don’t understand is why you would choose to filter that presentation by race. “Color matters” was once the exclusive motto of racists. My own preference is to let them keep it.

I don’t know how anyone can argue that it’s okay to present alternatives to cum-soaked-fuckholes (thus calling attention to gender stereotypes), yet it’s somehow not okay to present alternatives to ghetto porn (thus calling attention to racial stereotypes). Shutting up about a problem doesn’t make it go away.

And yes, the overwhelming whiteness of porn *is* an argument for why color matters. At the very least, we have to ask ourselves why it is — if beauty is beauty as you say — that the beauty presented to us adheres to a very narrow standard in terms of ethnicity. Especially at a time when many other kinds of beauty standards are being challenged.

I have a girlfriend who is only into Asian guys. She won’t even date non-Asian men. She isn’t a racist, and I’m sure she would see beauty in African or Latino men, but she is *into* Asians. A site dedicated only to naked Asian men would be like heaven for her, I’m sure.

I’m almost amused (but a bit horrified too) that your first reason “why color matters” (in your words) is that porn is “overwhelmingly white”. That wouldn’t be an argument for the proposition unless we’d already agreed that the proposition was true, would it?