BBW alarmists: lighten up

Something about this week made me long for the rich taste of a Wendy’s Baconator, and I have been passed out atop a pile of their wrappers for the last several days.

In an AVN story about how BBW (Big, Beautiful Women) titles are catching on with consumers, writer Nelson X wrote a hilarious but, considering the time, politically insensitive story that referred to plus-sized porn actresses as “heifers” and their fans as “losers.”

I know both the joy and the trials of being big and beautiful; no retail store can sell me a pair of pants that fits. So I was inundated (well, three letters and a phone call) by people who found the AVN article offensive.

Weight is a real battleground. On the one hand, you’ve got legitimate concerns about childhood obesity and the increasing weight of the average American. On the other you’ve got curvy women who have a legitimate beef (sorry) about emaciated, Holocaustal models tottering through the pages of fashion magazines and setting impossible and dangerous standards of beauty for girls.

On yet another hand (I won’t tell you where I keep it), there has been in the last year a backlash by women who are not curvy and who just happen to be skinny against a pervasive and politically correct “Curvy women are real women” campaign.

That porn traffics in stereotypes – racial ones, mostly, but also those of class, breast size, and hair color – is what makes it a safe place to explore fantasies without taking the darker ones out on anyone. White wife raped by black men? Submissive Asian schoolgirls who’ll do anything? Bisexuality? All of these horrors can be safely explored by our nation’s pornographers.

AVN has a history of colorful writing. It is the personalities of the writers that make the magazine. In this way it is less the Variety of the porn world than it is the early Rolling Stone. Under intense pressure from the BBW lobby (a registered 501c organization), AVN president Paul Fishbein threw Nelson under the bus by indicating that no one else read Nelson’s article before printing it.

“After some research I agree with you. This was in bad taste. We are changing (stronger) an already announced policy and making it enforcable so this won’t happen again. We have plenty of plus-sized employees and, ironically, the write ris anything but a thin person. We are ensuring that this type of shoddy, distasteful “journalism”does not happen again.”

The delightful April Flores lashed out at AVN (not mentioning it by name) on her blog, and AVN will do right by the powerful zaftig community with the sort of positive coverage it ends up giving to most people who complain. Flores gets the benefit of this forthcoming compensatory coverage even though she was not mentioned in the article.

Of course, to expect an industry that created “Dirtpipe Milkshakes,” “Black Dicks in White Chicks,” and “Miso Horny” to be in the business of glorifying women (or men) is wrongheaded, though Flores points out that the AVN article goes out of its way to put weighty beauties down.

And she’s right. The article was too jokey for its own good, especially considering it was aimed at retailers and advertisers. Far worse was that it faulted consumers who like BBW material; you don’t insult your customers.

And AVN is an advertiser-supported trade magazine, hence why Fishbein’s ironic quoting of the word “journalism” said more about the tradition he created than it did about Nelson’s writing.

But as a porn reviewer who happens to like the “roomy” titles, I was not offended by the fact that the performers were characterized as cows any more than their girth-challenged counterparts were called “skinny bitches.” That would mean that the characters inhabited by the performers were indistinguishable from the people who created them.

Sad to say, but porn ruins everyone equally; don’t seek any empowerment here. To co-opt a line from Steve Martin, the only reason women are put on a pedestal in porn is to look up their dresses.

Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Does Cyberskin April Flores dream of electric sheep?; April Flores in “Voluptuous Life”; Microsoft unveils “My First Porn Article” software; Chubby twats – an important film; The Lighter side of the Load
See also: Heifers, Bovines And Baconators; AVN digital edition

About Gram the Man 4399 Articles
Gram Ponante is America's Beloved Porn Journalist

2 Comments

  1. Ah, chill out & have a cheeseburger, April. When one seeks the public limelight one should not be so … ah, thin-skinned …

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