A Porn Moment With Ebony Ayes
I’ve been writing the posts at Erosblog for almost twenty years now. That’s long enough for me to have become a different person, with different ideas. I’m no longer the same dude at all as that idiot who started the blog. One of the ways you change over time, if you’re a paying-attention sort of person who keeps your eyes open, is that you see stuff. And, maybe, you learn that the world isn’t as simple as you used to think. Stuff that once seemed obvious now seems hopelessly idealistic. The world we live in is not the world we want, and it’s dumb to pretend different.
For instance, I used to be one of those “color blind” guys. I actually do have color vision problems, but I’m not being literal here. I’m talking about my general aversion to using race (meaning skin color, in this sharply limited context) as an organizing principle for the porn I publish. I’ve posted lots of photos of beautiful women over the years. Some of them had dark skin. But I never posted a photo because the person in it was Black, or Latina, or Asian, or whatever. Indeed, I used to think it was racially pernicious to categorize people by their skin color for purposes of porn selection or marketing.
That got me in trouble. People who ran erotic websites devoted to women of color used to show up in my comments and berate me for it. They had a bunch of arguments, which I’ll leave to them, but it all boiled down to representation and inclusion. Eventually I came around to the understanding that, while it’s probably not something I’m ever gonna do, there’s nothing pernicious about it. It’s perfectly fine to make a website full of beautiful nude black girls.
I still sometimes have my issues with the way that porn dehumanizes people by reducing them to a keyword or hashtag, and then marketing that keyword as a fetish. Porn is objectifying, and I’ve made my peace with that; but I strive not to be any more objectifying than the enterprise demands. This tension lies behind some of my own fetish for naming and crediting. Thus I want you all to know that the first photo in this post is of Ebony Ayes, appearing in 1989’s New Cunts #56 magazine from Color Climax, in a pictorial titled Take All Of Me co-starring Peter North and Tony Montana.
Ebony made close to 200 movies and appeared in countless (as in, nobody counts them, but there are many) magazine shoots. The rest of the photos in this post come from her other work. She’s a stunning woman and during her career she was a hard-working porn superstar. I hope you’ve enjoyed our little visit with her!
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Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=27100
Just want to say that I am in 100% agreement with your position(s) on this issue, including your journey toward a less strident attitude. I’m not gonna use those tags/classifications, but I’m not going to judge anyone who does.
The issue of representation is an abiding concern, and those of us who want to destigmatize porn should welcome participation and representation for everyone, even if that means resorting to objectifying categorization.
I keep an online photo blog in which i use tags. I still don’t mark skin color, “racial”, or ethnic tags because i am conflicted. If i do, then i upset people because i am perpetrating “racial fetishism”, like for example, black women, black men, asian women. If I don’t, then i am not providing adequate representation. Like you, I was “color-blind” presenting as a younger white cis male. My normal response therefore, even though I am no longer color-blind, is to ignore it in tags, while making comments that show I am appreciative of having a diverse array of representation in porn that I can populate my blog and private folders with.
Looking at all of these photos has my pussy so wet right now. I love to see different races together.