Ngāti Tauira On Decolonising Porn
Words by Reni Broughton (she/her; Ngaruahine, Ngāti Tuwharetoa, and Ngāti Ruanui)
Have you ever looked at your porn choices and asked yourself, “What in the caucacity!?”
Like many teen girlies with repressed sexuality and a love of reading, Wattpad and spicy romance novels were my Pornhub. Even though someone else wrote the words, every scene happened in my mind and I controlled the fantasy. I changed details, turning every “honey blonde, button nose, blue-eyed, and milky skinned” heroine into a big nose, curly-haired, pukana eyed, caramello māori girl—it's me, I tried to make myself the heroine. Still, eventually, my version of the character always returned to white. My spicy novels never featured indigenous main characters.
When trying actual Pornhub, I found myself saddled with questions: First, why do straight men not make noise during sex? Is it unsexy to sound like you're enjoying sex? Second (a toxic second), why is there something about porn that makes getting off a little less fun and a little more colonial gaze-y?
Perhaps it's the absence of brown and indigenous bodies in porn? Or maybe it's because porn with non-white people in it seems to indulge in stereotyping and fetishisation (see bbc and hentai) rather than empowerment? Maybe it's exploiting people for gain that gives porn that big fat colonial ick? This industry stinks of caucacity—built on colonial and capitalist frameworks that dictate our bodies are to be exploited, objectified, and neglected. Even though I enjoy my smut and spice, something about these interactions with porn makes me feel… Undesirable? Unsexy? Invisible and disempowered?
As a brown, māori, queer woman actively indigenising my world and affirming my sexiness and sexuality (to myself lol), I want to be able to enjoy porn without feeling like I'm getting off or contributing to the white man's fantasy. Porn can and should be an opportunity to explore sex and sexuality in healthy and empowering ways. As māori explore decolonising sexuality, surely what follows is exploring how we decolonise porn too?
In decolonising our porn, we forge a space to explore sex and sexuality in culturally grounded ways. Our oral histories already talk a lot about sex and sexuality, so what would our porn look like if allowed to flourish? How would our attitudes toward how we have sex change if our porn is grounded in mātauranga? Perhaps, our porn would have richer, more fulfilling storylines (that don't involve the ill-written step-bro trope)? The existence of takatāpui and inclusion of diverse genders and sexualities in Te Ao Māori indicate that decolonised porn would also be made for and enjoyed by all genders—straight men, this means you can have noisy, enjoyable sex now!
I don't have answers to exactly what decolonised porn looks like but there is something wildly sexy in imagining what decolonised porn could look like and how it could make us feel. I genuinely hope a few of us get off to the thought of decolonised porn enough to make it into reality. That's super hot.