When it comes to porn, the offerings are seemingly endless, varied, and evolving. Shouldn't the keywords we use to find it be, too? Fiona Duncan makes her case.
Sometimes, when two people love each other very much but have no physical relationship (different cities, different proclivities), they will join thumbs to screens to lay bare their individual sexual queerying in an ongoing iMessage conversation.
This article was conceived in cellular.
Chris Randle started it. The NSA knows how the exchange began. My mammal memory only preserved this one thrust: Chris and I were going back and forth, as is common, on the specifics of desire, when he, less generic in his gaze than me, expressed hurt at how bigoted the tags that blanketed streaming porn sites were. Labels like “ebony” and “shemale” (his preferences, in other words). Such terms, Chris remarked, aren’t just isolated insults, but product and proof of a pervasive racism and transphobia within porn, and media, at large.
Words mean different things in different contexts. Pornography is a context—an industry, communications technology, and culture. A set of private and public experiences. Chris’ sensitivity to tags I’d always glossed over in my search for teenage, redhead, natural, etc., triggered a new POV in me: I couldn’t not see the words around the stream. Turned on to the tags framing my fapping stimuli, online pornography, which once seemed infinite in its offerings, started to feel limited.
Alerted to these words, more questions came. Like: What falls between the cracks of common porn hub categories like BBW, MILF, Asian, Japanese, Twink, and Creampie? Why these words? Does anyone self-identify with them? Might new terms breed new desires?
To the last question, porn star and writer Stoya (self-described on Twitter as “Incendiary. Quixotic. Sassy.”) would say yes. Stoya advocates for “all words. ALL THE WORDS.” She believes we need specificity. “At the doctor,” she told me, “we should be able to distinguish between our vagina, the clit, inner and outer labia.” Copulating, we must communicate: talk to avoid trigger words; talk to inspire desire, to open up and explore. “I’ve even argued for the use of the word kitten,” she said. “Because if you are the kind of person that is going to say, 'Yes, fuck my kitten,' you should—it’s an indicator of what kind of sex the other person is in for.”
Context, Stoya stated, is paramount. She’s not going to run her dirty mouth at the grocery store like she will at work. And, if a familiar calls her a “whore” in a consensual sexual setting, that’s very different than an anonymous on the internet blasting the same.
Many of the words I asked Stoya about are, she said, standard in her trade. For instance, "creampie" (also known as “breeding” or “seeding” in a homosexual context) is often used on porn sets, “as much as 'DP,' because both determine what a talent will get booked for; these are acts which require specific consent.”
Christopher Zeischegg, aka Danny Wylde (whom you may recall from the Lindsay Lohan and James Deen threeway scene in The Canyons), echoed Stoya on this: words like "creampie," he hears all the time, “as they define what needs to be accomplished in the scene.” Labels like "ebony,"
Sometimes, when two people love each other very much but have no physical relationship (different cities, different proclivities), they will join thumbs to screens to lay bare their individual sexual queerying in an ongoing iMessage conversation.
This article was conceived in cellular.
Chris Randle started it. The NSA knows how the exchange began. My mammal memory only preserved this one thrust: Chris and I were going back and forth, as is common, on the specifics of desire, when he, less generic in his gaze than me, expressed hurt at how bigoted the tags that blanketed streaming porn sites were. Labels like “ebony” and “shemale” (his preferences, in other words). Such terms, Chris remarked, aren’t just isolated insults, but product and proof of a pervasive racism and transphobia within porn, and media, at large.
Words mean different things in different contexts. Pornography is a context—an industry, communications technology, and culture. A set of private and public experiences. Chris’ sensitivity to tags I’d always glossed over in my search for teenage, redhead, natural, etc., triggered a new POV in me: I couldn’t not see the words around the stream. Turned on to the tags framing my fapping stimuli, online pornography, which once seemed infinite in its offerings, started to feel limited.
Alerted to these words, more questions came. Like: What falls between the cracks of common porn hub categories like BBW, MILF, Asian, Japanese, Twink, and Creampie? Why these words? Does anyone self-identify with them? Might new terms breed new desires?
To the last question, porn star and writer Stoya (self-described on Twitter as “Incendiary. Quixotic. Sassy.”) would say yes. Stoya advocates for “all words. ALL THE WORDS.” She believes we need specificity. “At the doctor,” she told me, “we should be able to distinguish between our vagina, the clit, inner and outer labia.” Copulating, we must communicate: talk to avoid trigger words; talk to inspire desire, to open up and explore. “I’ve even argued for the use of the word kitten,” she said. “Because if you are the kind of person that is going to say, 'Yes, fuck my kitten,' you should—it’s an indicator of what kind of sex the other person is in for.”
Context, Stoya stated, is paramount. She’s not going to run her dirty mouth at the grocery store like she will at work. And, if a familiar calls her a “whore” in a consensual sexual setting, that’s very different than an anonymous on the internet blasting the same.
Many of the words I asked Stoya about are, she said, standard in her trade. For instance, "creampie" (also known as “breeding” or “seeding” in a homosexual context) is often used on porn sets, “as much as 'DP,' because both determine what a talent will get booked for; these are acts which require specific consent.”
Christopher Zeischegg, aka Danny Wylde (whom you may recall from the Lindsay Lohan and James Deen threeway scene in The Canyons), echoed Stoya on this: words like "creampie," he hears all the time, “as they define what needs to be accomplished in the scene.” Labels like "ebony,"