What Genre of Porn Are African Women Into?

Written by Mide Olabanji

Despite the fact that my early years are a blur, some memories remain vivid in my mind. I was in primary school and on my way home with a classmate when, on that particular afternoon in the early 2000s, a woman on the other side of the street called us—more specifically, me—over. A blue paper was originally used to write pornography, low-budget productions of the films resulted in bluish tints defacing the screen, sellers used to wrap them in blue packages, 19^th-century Blue laws that shunned sex, the name of the first adult movie was Blue Movie, are some of the indefinite answers to the question I was innocuously asking my classmate that afternoon. “What is a Blue film?” I asked so loudly that the wind easily dispersed my question. Brows creased in disapprobation and disappointment, without answering my question or allowing me defend myself, the woman warned me never to say that phrase again. Never ever. I only hoped that my classmate would affirm my suspicion that blue films are movies tinted in blue color. My suspicion remained unconfirmed and my question unanswered, but after we continued our journey, the awkwardness in the air between my classmate and I told me that my question was an amoral one.

Like my clueless self, many African women’s introduction to pornography was accidental. “I wouldn’t call it ‘watching,’ but I used to ‘see’ porn on people’s phones when I was younger. I occasionally stumbled upon it and, as a result of my upbringing, would quickly remind myself ‘that’s bad, don’t watch it’,” was Anike’s response when asked of her introduction to porn. Similarly, for Delasi Sanenu, in the ways of bored adolescents, she only requested to see comical videos. “I saw porn for the first time when I was 11 going on 12. I was in boarding school at the time and this older man, who was a labourer on school grounds, apparently freely gave his phone to students who wanted to watch porn. I didn’t ask for porn neither did I suspect I was about to be shown it; I only asked to watch the videos on his phone, fully meaning funny ones because I had seen a few with him before then. Unknown to me, he had a folder on his phone titled ‘videos’ and all you had to do as a student was say that you wanted to watch videos and he’d grant you access to the folder. I was oblivious to all this information but when he interpreted my request to mean that I wanted to see porn, I did not object,” she explains.

For Tamuno and Makena, it was their fathers’ stash. “When I was young, around age 10, I found some CDs that were hidden in my father’s coat. Being the curious child that I was, I inserted it into the DVD and watched it. I must admit – it traumatized me for days because it was some hardcore stuff, but it also tugged at my curiosity,” Tamuno shares. “I’ll say that my first encounter with pornographic media was lewd scenes in movies. This was as far back as 10. I grew up in an extended family so I had older cousins who would replay those movies at night; urged, during the day, my cousin and I (that were a pair) would watch them. Then I moved in with my dad and found out that he had hentai and erotica collections and would sneakily watch them when he was not around,” Makena says.

Although women have made strides in rights, our society remains stubbornly misogynistic. Many feminists, as a result, insist that women’s choices and relations in society are rarely independent of misogyny and must be microscoped under the lens of feminism. When pornography is scrutinized under this lens, many feminists’ declaration of it as oppressive and unfeminist is par for the course. In an interview she shared to Twitter, Mia Khalifa, who has halted her brief career as an adult-film actress, expressed her bewilderment at still being ranked 5 years after leaving the industry. Despite not making another penny after the $12,000 she managed to gather during her run. Getting back into the workforce was “very difficult,” she also shared. The unrelenting fame makes things more difficult. Regular, day-to-day life has become hard for her – “I get hounded. I get harassed,” even when she goes to Disneyland for fun. In 2019, a mother found nearly 60 videos of her 15-year-old who had been missing for a year on explicit websites, including Pornhub; a Twitter user also accused Pornhub of housing 6 videos of her rape at age 14 on their platform for over 6 months and revealed that they only took the videos down when she impersonated a lawyer. To put things in perspective, data from as far back as Pornhub’s 2019 Year in Review exposes an average of 115 million visits per day. 

These shortcomings of the industry have informed Anike’s opinion and subsequent experience: “Growing up, porn was this very sinful thing that I made sure to steer clear of. Then I learned about how horrible the politics of mainstream porn is and that further deterred me. I wasn’t willing to try it at all.” She continues, “But in 2020, I came across a porn video by a couple who are both content creators on Twitter and I was intrigued. My relationship with mainstream porn remains antagonistic but the type of porn done by Black content creators is very healthy.” 

In an effort to accommodate female partners in the case of heterosexual sex, there have been increasing efforts to stretch the boundaries of what a round of sex constitutes. If you ask people about what makes up a round of sex, many would say it is the man’s ejaculation. On another hand, terming and viewing every outer sexual action as merely foreplay (to penetration) undermines the complete pleasure of orgasms from head, nipple orgasms, clitoral orgasms, and lesbian sex in general. Since the conditioned act of sex itself is male-focused and heterosexual, the research, discourse, and reenactment of it usually tows the same line. “As a gay woman, I find most porn unpalatable because they are usually straight. The few ones that are lesbian, comme ci comme ça. Yeah, it’s hot but I would rather watch porn that features Black women but the White productions are much better so you see the dilemma? It is either quality or melanin, both rarely come together,” Delasi affirms. Makena, who is also a lesbian, says “I feel like porn with Black people in them is very fetishized, especially the ones with weird names like ‘mandingo’ and ‘ebony goddesses.’ I always find them weird and oftentimes catered to the white gaze especially considering that the ones involving black men usually have white women as the other partner.” Although straight, Tamuno’s thoughts mirror Delasi’s and Makena’s: “Honestly, most of the African or Black porn I come across appears tacky and sometimes downright nasty. So I used to avoid them a lot. But the ones that are not tacky work for me.” Anike, who is bisexual, prioritizes porn by fat and Black creators so, although not as much as people who are heterosexual, she feels represented in that forte.

In our society where early, accurate and adequate sex education is lacking, many people’s uninformed introduction to sex is pornography which, at best, is an act. “When I started actively having sex, porn was the go-to,” Tamuno reveals. “And in porn, everything was rushed and penetration was the goal. It creates ideas around sex that don’t really exist in real life, like men having quick erections, women always having to give blow-jobs, and vulvas always being clean shaved. I now know that it’s not realistic—although it took a while to get there—but not everyone does. A lot of it was rough too, but as I got older, I realized that I personally like a build-up and rushing into penetration doesn’t do it for me,” she expounds. “Straight porn purports a lot of misinformation about female pleasure. The orgasms are visibly fake and there are lots of exaggerated moaning, which is really annoying. It sucks because it really isn’t that hard getting a woman off and considering how long some of these videos are, you’d think she’d get like two or three orgasms in, but no. The women get head for like 45 seconds but for the men, it goes on for like 5 to 10 minutes. All it does is tell these clueless ass men, who get their sex education from porn, that they just need to do the bare minimum to make her cum while he, the man, deserves all the attention. Meanwhile, in reality, it is the other way round – if the wind blows just right and hits his dick, a man would cum,” Delasi details. 

It is not all bad; there are still specific things women look out for in porn. “I like seeing intimacy so I enjoy erotic porns,” Anike says. Porn is more enjoyable to Tamuno when there is a storyline, no matter how ridiculous. “I’m also more focused on how the lady receives pleasure, so her moans and movements, or how the man is giving her pleasure.  Soft porn, if you will. I also like watching milfs,” she adds. When she engages in it at all, Delasi prefers “wanking to erotica” which is “more classy, more arousing and easier to find material suited to [her] tastes.” “One of my partners however likes to watch porn with me and since I enjoy the experience of watching her get aroused by it, I indulge her. Lesbian porn is definitely up there for me, but I’ve recently unexplainably developed a taste for man-on-man porn. It is just so hot; even better if it’s sprinkled with small rope and/or fire kink!” she concludes. Before she could know enough about what tickles her fancy, Makena had to unlearn a lot of shame around watching porn as a woman. “I did this by having sexual conversations with my friends and, as a result, realized that they also watch porn. Together, we learnt that it is not as shameful as we’ve been conditioned to think it is. Moving past the shame opened our eyes to how male-centered porn can sometimes represent pleasure, which in turn opened more room for us to openly and accurately talk about female pleasure.” Now seemingly approaching porn with the what you don’t know cannot kill you mindset, lesbian Makena loves watching heterosexual porn. “I tend to exert so much logic when watching lesbian porn. My train of thought is usually ‘why is she using those long nails to…wait, she just licked her like twice and she had an orgasm? The fuck?’ Heterosexual porn on the other hand appeals to me because I love watching women receiving pleasure. The fact that I’m completely disconnected from it since I don’t know what having sex  with a man looks like also makes it easy for me not to rationalize it,” she explicates. 

Names have been changed and the article condensed for clarity.