If you think Americans are no longer racist, you must have never watched porn. Even the most mainstream, “vanilla” porn sites are full of racist representations. A search on Pornhub.com (in the name of investigative journalism, of course) yields the following video titles: “Interracial cuckold slave is humiliated and dominated,” “Dirty Latina whore swallows cum after hot anal sex,” “Asian housewife serves her two guests,” “Mocha.”

Feminists often discuss how pornography implicates gender. This is important, but prejudice in porn goes beyond gender. Porn produces pleasure by capitalizing on all kinds of power relationships: gender, age, class, occupation and race. Despite priding itself on filling every niche of desire, most porn reenacts racist tropes that build and represent a racist mentality. Black men threaten white men by having sex with white women. Asian women are docile and subservient. Latina women are fierce and exotic. Black women are “ebony.”

Porn is obscene—a word derived from the Latin “obscaena,” meaning offstage. Literally, it is a network of media that exists underground, outside of more publicly-acknowledged media outlets. And yet the Internet has made it easier than ever for us to access pornography. If you want, you can watch porn in a car, in a bathroom stall or during class. Such ubiquity deserves serious attention.

When some adolescents spend hours every day consuming porn, what are they learning about the world? As backstage media, porn masquerades as a glimpse into adult reality. Of course, the bodies are exaggerated, the plots contrived, and the acting often banal. But the irony is that, by fulfilling consumer desires, porn plays out racial tensions that exist in our collective mind. And racist images shape how media consumers see the world. I’m sure you’ve heard young men claim “I’m just not into black girls,” or “I have an Asian fetish.” Porn trains an entire generation of people to associate sex with race, to objectify and compartmentalize their sexual partners.

A few semesters ago, Professor Peter Coviello (who is unfortunately no longer at Bowdoin) gave a talk where he argued that feminists shouldn’t see porn as a problem to be solved, but as a positive space where people can acknowledge their desires. But should porn recognize and satisfy all desires equally? Porn is regulated enough to keep images of children out of the pornographic mainstream. Children cannot consent to depicting their own naked bodies. But what about race? Do we not care if black men consent to be depicted as savages, Asian women as slaves and Latina women as whores?

The racist depictions in porn suggest a world where the white man is a viewer whose desires must be fulfilled at just about any cost. For pornography, people aren’t people as much as they are symbols. In “The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography,” Angela Carter says that, “Pornography involves an abstraction of human intercourse in which the self is reduced to its formal elements.” Porn is form. Carter suggests that a “moral pornographer” could combat the injustices of porn by using pornographic forms to empower degraded people. But would the process of empowerment and humanization be truly pornographic? Should morality ever be obscene?

I’m not telling you to stop watching porn. Puritanical censorship and regulation is exactly what allows pornography to get away with rampant prejudice. By labeling sexual content as “obscene,” mainstream media can claim their moral superiority, while engendering a space that permits the reenactment of all kinds of injustice. Sex is not bad, and pictures of sex are not bad. But a mindless pursuit of pleasure will only perpetuate longstanding relationships of power.