Conversations about body positivity might be at an all-time high right now, with plus-size women and men talking, writing, and making art about their experiences and challenges. One struggle in particular concerns the ways plus-size people—and women in particular—often have trouble being accepted and accepting themselves as sexual and desirable in a culture that far too often ignores, dismisses, or even ridicules anyone who diverges from the status quo. That’s one reason why pornography that features plus-size performers—and the way it’s treated by its industry—is important: It’s providing visual proof (in an extremely popular form of media, no less) that any size can be sexy for the billions of porn fans around the world.
In the past few years, searches for what’s called “BBW” (that’s Big, Beautiful Women) porn on Pornhub have skyrocketed by nearly 50 percent. Combined with the BBW Performer of the Year award instituted a few years ago from the porn industry’s most prestigious award-granting organization, Adult Video News, visibility for plus-size sexuality seemed secure.
But then, on September 4, 2017, AVN announced that it was removing the BBW Performer of the Year category from the 2018 AVN Awards, considered “the Oscars of porn.” In its place, AVN was introducing an award for “Niche Performer of the Year, to honor men and women who appear primarily in fetish-themed productions, including those in the BBW, BDSM, mature, and other specialized genres.”
Were plus-size performers being discriminated against by the porn powers that be? Or were there more mundane reasons for AVN’s decision?
For their part, many BBW performers felt ignored and angry. Alexxxis Allure tweeted, “#BBW performers are not a fetish. We are valid, successful performers who deserve our own awards category.” Others in the industry joined in with cries of fatphobia, even threatening picket lines, boycotts, and sit-ins to protest the move.
April Flores, a two-time recipient of the award in question, lamented that she was “heartbroken to see that @AVN got rid of the #BBW award. This not only sucks for fat performers who deserve recognition, but also for the women who look like us & positively benefit from representation of a sexual fat woman in media.”
Porn featuring plus-size models has always been a part of the adult entertainment industry. For decades, though, it was considered a fringe element, often relying on derogatory stereotypes. Words like pig and whale were used, along with themes revolving around food. But even with its “niche” status, BBW porn has always attracted a group of loyal fans who are willing to pay for what they want to see.
But despite its apparent popularity, back in the early 2010s, there were just a few porn studios dedicated to BBW content, like the Score Group, and several popular companies, like Zero Tolerance and Red Light District (now defunct), that released only one BBW title a year. There was far more fetish material being produced with plus-size models, featuring nonsex acts like gaining (feeding another person for sexual gratification), sploshing (when someone sits on food), and squashing (when a BBW sits on or “squashes” another person) being made by small companies and individuals. And none of that work was getting the recognition that performers wanted.
So some BBW performers and content makers decided to do something about it. “We went to AVN on our own,” says Kelly Shibari, one of the performers active in the process. “We said, ‘OK, what do you need from us to make this category happen? We will make it.’ We were all told that more DVDs, with more variety, from more studios equals an [AVN award] category. So we said, ‘OK, now that we know that, we’ll do that.’” And they did.
BBW performers like Shibari, April Flores, and others, along with directors, producers, distributors, and marketers, started focusing on creating more mainstream porn that featured plus-size women looking glamorous and having hot sex, as opposed to engaging in nonsex fetish activities.
As they were working toward greater recognition in explicit entertainment, mainstream pop culture was exploring body acceptance too. Melissa McCarthy was killing it in Hollywood blockbusters, Inside Amy Schumer was earning accolades (and criticism) on Comedy Central, plus-size model Tess Holiday was beginning to make waves in the fashion world, and the discussion about size positivity was taking off.
So when AVN announced that it was instituting the BBW Performer of the Year category in 2014, it was welcomed as another feather in the cap of women who weren’t made in the size-zero mold, for whom sexuality had long been a fraught topic.
In the years since, that visibility has only increased. Pornhub declared 2015 “a major year for body positivity” when it revealed that searches for BBW had steadily risen from 2013 to 2015. Alex Hawkins, spokesperson for porn streaming site xHamster, tells me that the United States is currently the top consumer of BBW porn in the world. “XHamster loves its Big, Beautiful Women!” he says. Meanwhile, New York Fashion Week 2017 just concluded, with bodies of all sizes on display across numerous runways.
So then, amid all this forward momentum, why did the most prestigious organization in porn seem to turn its back on its plus-size models?
According to AVN, it wasn’t personal—it was just the rules. “DVD production in the BBW niche has steadily declined,” says Sharan Street, an editor at AVN. And DVDs are important to the nomination and selection process.
In fact, AVN later wrote on its website: “The BBW Performer of the Year category [was eliminated] due to a continuing decline in DVD content featuring BBW performers.” There are more performers now than ever, and more ways for them to release their content. But there are fewer BBW porn companies releasing DVDs—not to mention that most BBW models are now producing their own content online, for membership websites, clip stores, and webcams. That’s a great workaround for a lack of opportunities offered by mainstream porn companies, but it doesn’t make them contenders for AVN’s most prestigious caste of awards.
Furthermore, the material they’re making doesn’t necessarily qualify as porn to AVN. “The majority of BBW content on the Internet right now is fetish content,” says Kelly Shibari. “It’s feeding, it’s gaining, it’s face-sitting, it’s squashing. It’s anything but standard boy-girl sex, which is what AVN considers porn to be.”
Still, the work of BBW porn makers is by no means abandoned. The plus-size genre is recognized by several other award-granting entities in the porn industry, aside from AVN. The Nightmoves Awards have been presented since 1986, and will be awarding its fifth Best BBW Performer on October 8. The Biggie Awards, in conjunction with BBWcon, have been recognizing the work of BBW fans for three years now. And the BBW Awards Show has just been scheduled for the week before the AVN Awards in Las Vegas, organized by BBW performer Eliza Allure, where she promises to be “100 percent transparent with this awards show and give the award [for] whom the fans vote.”
And there’s still that Niche Performer of the Year award that AVN has added. Sharan Street says, “We are sympathetic that some plus-size performers are not pleased that BBW performers’ body of work will now be considered in a category titled Niche Performer of the Year, but the opportunity is still there for their body of work to be recognized in that category,” along with other fetish, BDSM, and specialty performers.
For those who are holding out for their moment to shine with an AVN BBW Performer of the Year award, there’s still hope. “While there might not be a BBW Performer of the Year category this year, that’s not to say it will never return,” says Street. “The adult industry is always changing, as are the performers, the types of content, and the way that content is delivered to consumers. We at AVN will continue to stay on top of trends and ensure the AVN Awards adapt as the industry does.”
But there’s work to be done. The category may be brought back if BBW performers, producers, distributors, marketers, and fans focus on meeting the requirements that AVN sets forth. “If you don’t do certain things, you don’t have a category. That’s all there is to it,” says Kelly Shibari.
In the meantime, AVN has been listening to BBW performers who feel abandoned. On September 14 it announced that, after hearing performers’ complaints, it had decided to institute a Favorite BBW Performer award in 2018. “Such a category,” read the announcement, “would give these performers—who are less active in DVD productions than on clip stores and cam sites—the chance to be celebrated by their fans.”
While a fan award may not be as prestigious as a Performer of the Year, it gives more opportunities for recognition. As does the fact that “scene categories are now open to content from membership sites, which should afford [these performers] a better chance to have their work recognized,” according to Street.
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