The Porn Industry Has A White Supremacy Problem. Meet The Couple Working To Fix It.
King Noire has had a front-row seat to the evolution of the porn industry over 20 years ― or ― as Jet Setting Jasmine, his partner in life and business, puts it, the “not-change,” as it pertains to being more inclusive and less racist.
King and Jasmine are performers, hosts, educators and co-creators of adult film production company Royal Fetish Films. They partnered up 10 years ago, initially hosting “fantasy flight parties,” which, according to Jasmine, helped people “explore fetishes, kinks and different types of sexual experiences.”
They quickly started to notice something about the attendees ― and the parties themselves.
“We realised our clientele were primarily Black and brown women between the ages of 25 and 45,” she said. “There was a resounding experience, where it would start out fun, and by the end of the night there would be these group discussions about how Black and brown people are not represented sexually well in adult entertainment.”
Inspired by those conversations, and cognisant that the adult film industry has long been informed by and promoted the same white supremacy that so many systems, institutions and forms of entertainment have historically operated under, Jasmine and King set out to bring about change.
“We wanted to provide representation of Black and brown people in a way we could all get behind, that didn’t make us feel gross after watching it, that didn’t make us feel limited in our scope,” Jasmine said.
King echoed that sentiment, noting his firsthand experience working in a dehumanising environment.
“The depiction of Black and brown people within porn is a microcosm of how we’re represented ini all forms of media,” he said. “We are the culmination of 500 years of stereotypes, and being that porn is the only industry I can think of where you can go to work and say, ‘I don’t want to work with any Black people today, I don’t want to shoot any Latinx people on film today,’ it lends itself...
