An Introduction to PAWG Politics
Tracking the rise of the term "PAWG," its role in Twitter discourse and how race and ethnicity shape pornography.
I grew up in the Great Ass Era. I think maybe the last dregs of the “does this dress make my butt look big?” cliche wherein a woman wants to be assured that her ass doesn’t look big were burnt off in my toddler years.
It’s almost funny how Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” was once a somewhat radical defiance of Eurocentric beauty standards, the sentiments of which have long since been devoured and reincorporated into the norms of today. There’s nothing subversive about loving fat asses, so “Baby Got Back” is practically horny parody.
Without much background in the history of body politics or even a solid memory of life between 2000-2010, I struggle to properly trace how our current PAWG moment began. I have Google Trends to offer some guidance: There was little interest in the term at all until January 2010, when something must have started churning in the brains of the American public. Between then and summer 2014, that interest would grow several dozen times over. In the last seven years, PAWG searches have remained consistently high, peaking in December 2019 and sitting only a few percentage points beneath that high today.
Kim Kardashian seems like an obvious source of PAWG love. The general tendency for Black aesthetics to become appropriated by white people is another. The former of these possibilities is surely linked to the latter. Last week, a few people were engaged in a Twitter (I’m so sorry, as navel-gazey as it is, I must bring Twitter into this) debate about PAWGs. As some argued, the term emphasizes the idea that white women are superior, and that fat asses are therefore superior when attached to white women. Absolutely, many of those who worship at the temple of the PAWG are indeed displaying preference for whiteness, whether that be conscious or otherwise.
In porn, race and ethnicity are often laid flat. There is little nuance to either subject, but the themes of race and ethnicity dominate porn viewing habits. PornHub’s 2019 Year in Review (speaking of which, does anyone know what happened to 2020’s Year in review? Did they forego it?) cites 7 racial and ethnic search terms among their 25 most popular for the year, with “Japanese” in the top spot.
Much of the interest in PAWGs has obviously been centered in porn, too, though it was not among PornHub’s 2019 top results. All of the related searches Google Trends yields for the term are centered on it — “pawg porn,” “pawg ass” “big pawg” “bbc pawg” and “pawg anal” are among the top few. As I wrote previously, these trends are mirrored on Reddit, too. r/PAWG is the 430th largest subreddit by subscriber count overall, and 27th largest among NSFW subreddits. This status has only somewhat recently been achieved, too, with the number of subscribers nearly doubling from the beginning of 2020 to now. Most other NSFW subreddits experienced similar growth over this period, too, as did porn more broadly. Still, r/PAWG ranks higher than such classics as r/Amateur, r/Blowjobs and r/Lesbians, all categories that have dominated online porn since its inception, and notably, it’s the highest ranking NSFW category with a racial identifier.
Again, I can barely begin to locate the precise cause of PAWG popularity, particularly as its situated in this web of racial and bodily politics. Part of the goal of this newsletter is at least to try. What I’m most interested in is how PAWG has become mainstreamed, to the point where much of the content I find on Twitter when searching for PAWG-related content is either jokes or people using PAWG in their display name as a joke. The concept of PAWGs and their contemporary status is, in my opinion, kind of hilarious. The simplicity of the term — saying it out loud like “pog” — practically ensures that we will never escape it.
Obviously, I’m engaging with that here, too. Half the reason I started this newsletter is just because I think the name is too funny to pass up. But we can enjoy the humor of the word, delight in PAWGness and its cultural status and still critique all of this, too. Considering I’m a bit of a PAWG myself, I’m constantly partaking in the construction of these nuances, even if that means perpetuating my own objectification in an abstract sense. That aside, I’m at very least glad to have developed in a time where my ass need not be a source of insecurity. Now, when I ask someone if an outfit makes my butt look big, I pray to God they tell me “yes.” It would literally ruin my day otherwise. Does this make be a bad person? I’ll think about it!
As a youth in the 1970s, long before the term PAWG, I observed that some of the black girls, more often than the white girls, had really round rumps. I remember mentioning to some teenaged buddy back then what I called "the black girl ass." Nonetheless, I have always preferred sexual partners with white skin.
It seems incredible that one can be called a racist for having preferences for a sex partner with a particular color of flesh or a particular body construction. Even if I believed in "cultural appropriation," how may a woman appropriate a rear end as though it were a food recipe from a Caribbean island? Given the hundreds or thousands of genetic and environmental factors that go into sexual selection, how can having a preference for the skin tone of a partner be a clear sign of "racism?" If anything, the observation that a "white girl" has a "phat ass" like that of a black girl should seem more objectionable as fetishizing the female buttocks and conceptualizing the female form as a Frankenstein's Monster of interchangeable bits than for the supposedly discriminatory statement the statement makes that phat ass becomes "more valuable" when hitched onto to a white girl.
If a sexual preference for skin color is racist, the next step is a government program to teach us what we should like in sexual partners and the step following that is for the government simply to assign us sexual partners (or pornography) without regard to our desires.
I will continue to enjoy the sight of the round asses I like to view on girls of the skin color I find pleasing, secure in the knowledge that others have the same right and privilege to enjoy what they find pleases the eye in sexual matters.
Maybe write one on Olympics and the PAWG discourse