Satire Or Racist Misogyny? Black Payback Testing Limits

A new website coming from the ranks of the makers of Facialabuse, a controversial website for hard gonzo pornography, is likely to fuel two of the most burning issues of our time, at least in the porn industry in the USA. The makers of Black Payback claim a semi-satirical approach. The extremely realistic embedding of so-called »interracial« pornographic content in the context of the murders of blacks by white policemen, shown with real archive material, as well as severe accusations by actress Leigh Raven against the director of the site raise several questions though.

The contents of the websites FacialAbuse, GhettoGaggers and LatinaAbuse, which specialize in tough niche pornography, are currently regularly advertised with announcements in the US industry press. One of the most prominent actors in fetish and BDSM pornography, Steve Holmes, whose work for the well-respected studio Kink.com has brought him worldwide fame, has been shooting scenes for a few months for the websites that have always been dealing with a delicate balancing act between coarse humor and open misogyny. This is where some of the toughest scenes that the industry has produced are created.

Now the influential trade newssite XBIZ is also announcing a new video on a site created by some of the people behind FacialAbuse. The movie appears on a website called Black Payback. The scenes on the website are about the revenge of black men on »White America«. The trailer says »You came for our music. Then you came for our brothas. You even came for our women. Enuff is enuff. We cumin for your white bitches.«

The female performers are treated exceptionally violently, as it is custom with productions of Just Dave and FacialAbuse. Although slaps in the face, spitting, pulling hair, strangling, gangbang scenes with blows and insults and pushing around have long since become standard in mainstream productions, the movies by FacialAbuse also implement the fiction of taking the actress herself beyond her limits and basically punishing her for her participation in the porn film. Real tears and complete overhwelming seem to be the goal.

The visual repertoire of these scenes involves, at least according to the fiction, the mental breakdown of the actress, tapping out and the fixing of the body and making it impossible to retreat.

The blurring of reality and fiction is part of the fetish here, part of the brand. This makes it difficult even for industry experts to evaluate the products. All the more problematic is the situation when some actresses speak up and report on ill-treatment and questionable situations that have not been discussed beforehand. Compared to the number of films these studios put out, this has not happened often, but several times it did happen.

While Facialabuse has been producing for years without the attention of the mainstream media and only rarely gets into the headlines – for example with the Netflix porn documentary »Hot Girls Wanted« and the involuntary outing of an actress by a subscriber of the site  the new offer Black Payback is controversial from the very beginning.

The well-known performer Leigh Raven has produced one of the first scenes for the new label. In the aftermath of the filming, she made serious accusations in a YouTube video, which VAN also reported on. According to her, the shooting was not agreed upon scene by scene in advance, as is customary in the industry, and the wishes for an interruption, which the actress regarded as implicitly expressed, were not met. She perceived the working conditions as a whole as hostile and questionable.

In response to these accusations, Just Dave – has made material from the filming public. The footage shows a relatively normal and carefree, albeit from time to time verbally charged set. But since the actress’s accusations were more complex and very credible, a big question mark remained behind the new porn website, which was still unknown and unpublished at the time. Nevertheless Leigh Raven renounced legal steps.

In the meantime some scenes were released on the new website. The website even offers payment via Paypal which is rarely possible for porn companies as the payment giant is usually hostile towards Adult Entertainment. It remains to be seen whether the producers will be able to serve a niche audience with the same ease as Facialabuse’s offerings have been able to for more than ten years.

At least, it would be desirable to make efforts like the ones of Steve Holmes, who provides behind-the-scenes footage from his work for the fetish sites via his YouTube channel. There he treats consent and mutual respect on set as an important subject, in the best tradition of Kink.com. The owners and producers of the aforementioned gonzo studios remain otherwise mostly in the dark. However, the blurring of reality and fiction is so problematic with this subject that one can only wish that the communication about the working conditions for these sites becomes much clearer. This must also be of great interest from the viewer’s point of view.

In this context, we would also like to draw your attention once again to the fact that VAN always wants to and in fact could be a forum for discussion about working conditions in pornography. If you want to get in touch with us to talk about your own experiences, positive or negative, with the studios mentioned here or other studios, you can do so even anonymously.