What 'Interracial' Cuckold Porn Reveals About White Male Insecurity

Each time, Moe says he refused.

Yet, in a video eventually uploaded to porn site Dogfart.com, Conner—who Moe alleges was present during both conversations—can be heard during the money shot (the ejaculation scene) saying: “Give me that n----- load. Give me all of that n----- cum.”

In May, Moe sued Camp and DF Productions Inc., the company behind the production and publishing of the video, for fraud, negligence, and racial harassment. "I've shot over 50 scenes for this company,” Moe told the New York Daily News. "For a long time, I was one of their top guys. And I'm always publicly talking about racism. For them to even ask me was an insult, then to do it against my will, it hurts. It feels like it was a set-up."

DF Productions’ Dogfart Network specializes in “interracial” porn, which, by industry definition, specifically entails sex between a Black man and a white woman—and which often deliberately portrays Black men as racial stereotypes. In the lawsuit, Moe characterizes DF Productions as a company that "targets racist viewers and entices them into paying DFI money in exchange for the right to view racist adult films.”

Neither DF Productions nor Conner responded to requests for comment, and James Camp could not be reached for comment.

If Moe’s allegations are accurate, his account does not simply represent a violation of his sexual consent. It is also a vivid example of the ways in which porn has been instrumentalized as a socially acceptable space for racist white fantasies to be projected onto and enacted upon Black bodies—and the very real implications of that.

Porn exists in an X-rated realm that isn’t policed by typical notions of decency. There, given they are consensual, behaviors otherwise considered “unacceptable” (e.g. sadomasochism and other kinks, use of the N-word, and so on) are allowed to exist—justified in the name of sex positivity and the mysteriously perverse nature of desire and sexual attraction. Because kinks sometimes emerge from our deepest insecurities, fears, and even traumas, there’s necessarily and usefully a no-judgment logic that means nothing is off limits for creators, performers, and consumers alike.

The alleged violation of Moe’s consent reveals the danger of creating any vacuum-like space beyond politicization or reproach. It shows how easily the space between fantastical sexual performance and “real life” racist aggression is collapsed. That collapse is a reminder that porn cannot be considered distinct from broader cultural production or our overall racial imaginary—rather, these spaces are actually intimately linked, constantly informing one another.

In porn, “cuckold” describes a genre in which men watch their partners have sex with other men. Interracial cuckolding à la Dogfart takes on something of a more sinister, rape-adjacent sexual projection, though, with scenes typically containing multiple Black men and a single white woman. The sex itself happens in a number of ways, and the white women involved come in many different characters. Some of them are taunting and caricatural “snow bunny” white women whose appetite for Black men seems insatiable. Others are classic sexual stock characters, doe-eyed and virginal girls-next-door types, and others still are somewhere in between.

In one Cuckold Sessions video, the white male partner of an apprehensive and innocent-looking blonde, Lily Rader, offers her to a Black man in order to get into his good graces. When it comes time to hand her over, a garage door opens, revealing four masked Black men menacingly waiting inside. Her partner’s “friend” drags her backwards by the hair, still under the watchful auspices of and with some encouraging words from her partner, and into a gangbang with all five Black men. In many similar videos, the camera pans over to the white partner who is often either masturbating by himself and enjoying the encounter or observing miserably—decentered, but still ultimately the dictator of the sexual gaze.

The interracial cuckolding genre breathes life into the truism that some kind of sexual attraction, openly acknowledged or not, is often a component of racial contempt. And the genre’s Black thug–filled storylines make clear that this attraction is not simply sexual desire, but an evocation and fetishism of historically racist tropes that allow for a contained witnessing of Black male sexual prowess that white men simultaneously loathe, fear, and envy.

Noted indie porn actress Stoya told me that, as a white woman, she refuses to participate in any “interracial” videos because of how “patently absurd” it is for pornography to reinforce binary (and oppositional) racial categories of Black and white. She also objects to the fact that production companies, as opposed to performers themselves, get to create the context for sexual interaction in these scenes.

Recalling one filming experience with a non-white male partner, she said: “[The company] presented the other performer more as a demographic than a human, and I felt dirty for having been complicit in it. It was all comparatively subtle, but the box cover featured me in a passive position with him looming over me…I’m well aware that scenes get shot that are far more problematic, but it still wasn't how I like to do things. So I only work with performers of color when the company agrees to eschew the label—which means almost never outside of my own stuff.”

My email interview with Tyler Knight, a Black male ex-porn actor and author of Burn My Shadow: A Selective Memory of an X-Rated Life, confirmed that Black male performers in mainstream porn are often trapped within these rigid racial dynamics. Knight says that 95 percent of his approximately 1,000 career scenes have been “interracial” and that he’s gone “upwards of a year without seeing another black person on a set.” For Knight, the blurring of on- and off-screen racism comes partially from knowing that some non-Black female performers charge “above and beyond their typical quote to work with a Black male”—a premium known as an “interracial rate.”

“It’s easiest to think of the interracial rate practice as hazardous duty pay without any hazardous duty to the worker,” Knight wrote to me. “It’s extra pay simply because your coworker is Black.”

In a 2016 interview, porn scholar Mireille Miller Young described the premium as pay “to counter any possible devaluing [white women performers] may experience due to their involvement in the interracial porn market, [or] because they say that black men have penis sizes that require much more labor-intensive work on their part.” And a white female acquaintance of mine with experience in the industry told me that while she was performing, she could have charged twice her normal rate per sex act simply if her scene partner were a Black man, and even more if she was willing to do anal. She also noted a double standard: “Black female performers obviously can’t charge more for working with white men.”

It’s difficult to say exactly how pervasive the use of a general “interracial rate” is, but it’s an open secret that at the very least, it’s common in mainstream porn for white women performers to wait until later in their careers to do “interracial” then charge a premium for their first scene. Both practices are mentioned in a lengthy 2017 Glamour report on race in the porn industry, which further notes that they contribute to vast pay disparities between white and non-white women in the industry.

Once again, on-screen anti-Blackness in pornography bleeds into the material world: Allowing the production of content aimed to fulfill racist white sexual fantasies not only contributes to the creation and recycling of anti-Black imagery, but it actually works to structure the porn industry in a way that robs Black performers of opportunities for equal pay. Here, we see the latticed intersections of whiteness’ moral economy of racial purity, a material economy of race and gender pay disparity, and a sexual economy of violence and racial production—wherein the creation and maintenance of race has historically been enacted through the sexualized violence and humiliation of Black people, and white men’s continual assertions of dominance.

If we consider that kinks often play on our greatest insecurities, it’s easy to explain the existence of the “interracial” cuckoldry genre. Using white logics of racial purity, a cuckoldry scenario between a Black man and white woman represents one of the greatest threats posed to whiteness—the ultimate neutralization of white manhood. It is a visual rendering of white men as helpless and ineffectual while their white women are being defiled (though with the implied approval of their oversight). We know this white fear is nothing new: a gangbang of this racial composition is the kind of dark fantasy—for instance, the mythology of animalistic Black men preying on and assembling to rape innocent white women—that has historically justified lynching.

A 2016 piece by scholar Jimmy Johnson (which, full disclosure, I gave feedback on) posits an inherent anti-blackness within the “interracial” porn category by juxtaposing the “one-drop rule” with the idea that, through this tabooed and fetishized sexual interaction, Black men are “blackening” the white women they share scenes with and penetrate, voiding their racial purity through this act of miscegenation. In reference to the highly stylized “interracial” site Blacked.com, he writes: “The name, Blacked, invokes Blackness as a corruption, as an action. ‘Blacked’ is not sex between equals, it is something that is done to someone, specifically to white women. It is white purity that is being ‘Blacked’. 'You, white woman, have been Blacked.’”

Given how deeply racist pathologies saturate both the content and production of the genre, you might expect it to be a relatively niche or outdated market. But it appears that it may have had a relatively recent increase in popularity. In 2016, the editor-in-chief of the porn industry magazine AVN, Sharan Street, told Alternet.com that "interracial" porn has "always been popular, but sales have really heated up.” The article also notes that an "interracial" cuckolding video by Blacked Studios was one of the most popular videos that summer. And as of publishing, two of the current top four porn rentals are "interracial" videos, according to AVN's popularity chart.

In 2017, per Pornhub’s 2017 Year in Review, "cuckold,” as a genre/category (with varying racial compositions), increased in views by 72 percent. That might be unsurprising, considering the recent rise of the alt-right, who brought the 13th-century word "cuck”—used originally to describe how cuckoo birds deceptively lay their eggs in other birds’ nests—back into mainstream usage by hurling it at conservatives (or “cuckservatives”) and other white men they perceive as being “emasculated” or “selling out.” The alt-right’s usage of the term also sheds light on the more psychic reasoning behind the genre’s recent popularity surge: the perceived increasing disempowerment and marginalization of white manhood and masculinity.

It is these threats to their standing—these imagined threats by Black manhood—that have historically been employed to justify retaliatory violences against and terrorization of Black communities. This interracial cuckolding is the psychosexual projection of the fears of a mythological white genocide and falling white birthrates also present in white nationalist chants such as "You will not replace us!” (heard in the torch-bearing alt-right march in Charlottesville in August 2017) and in the white supremacist slogan known as The 14 Words: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

As Knight wrote to me: “If racism is woven into the fabric of American society, then it is the very warp and weft of threads which constitutes porn.”

Stoya similarly described pornography as "one side of a feedback loop, with the other being the consumers,” noting that our reactions to porn are a "reflection of our collective sexuality” and a “manifestation of a larger social issue.”

The entire specialty market for racist cuckolding videos exists because of hungry production companies eager to exploit any manner of consumer demand—even that which is not neutral (or that which could be actively harmful). Indeed, demand is often far from neutral. Rather, it is a reflection of value-laden socializations of what we find to be desirable, which in this case includes racial “preferences” and racist sexualizations as well as our understanding of sex as the site where aspirations for power—whether confined to fetish and sexual roleplay or existing beyond that—can be actualized. Because of that, the racist undertones (and explicit themes) present in parts of the porn industry are dismally inevitable.

Anti-blackness is not only pervasive, it is one of the linchpins of our American social, political, and economic order. Without properly addressing this anti-Black order, there can never be a mainstream porn industry—or any industry—that does not deliberately reproduce this violence.

Editors note: An earlier version of this piece included the legal names of actors in the adult film industry. They have since been removed to protect their privacy.