performers: maya, seryo
site: african lesbians
production credits: none listed
release date: june 25, 2022 | clip
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| l: maya, r: seryo |
oh, [insert the good place meme here], we're really in it now.
i said i was going to try to sample as much girl/girl from as far around the world as i could, and if there's one site that represents the bottom of the barrel for the typical girl/girl fan, it's african lesbians. there are a number of reasons for this: first of all, girl/girl fans are, in aggregate, deeply racist (it's no accident that girl/girl brands feature petite blondes far out of proportion to their share of the population). but also, everything on african lesbians is atrociously shot on ancient equipment, amateurishly and all too frequently unenthusiastically performed, and seemingly actively resists glamorizing either the performers or their activity to any meaningful degree. the result is a host of crude, awkward and unlovely videos that still occasionally manage to show something beautiful, a spark of vivid humanity buried within inexpressive, squalid tedium.
in fact, the african lesbians brand is far better represented on tube sites, where inventive and hooky titles, abbreviated runtimes that show only the choicest bits, and a pretense of anonymity and amateurishness help its offerings stand out from the pack for general porn consumers interested in black girls, than on its own website, which struck me as archaically structured and difficult to navigate during the period when i took out a subscription to sample the wares in the first half of 2022.
over the course of six and a half months i collected almost thirty videos that were, as far as i could tell, first published in 2022. no dates are listed on the website, although buried within the metadata for each video are what appear to be filming dates; this one had a date of may 2, 2020 attached to it. stockpiling material for later release is a time-honored porn tradition, of course, and there are several other clues on the website that point to a more professional operation than the "amateur amateur secret lesbians caught on camera" marketing on tube sites would have you believe.
the biggest clue is simply the recurrence of performer names. within the 29 videos i downloaded, the tall, pretty model called maya appeared five times, and the short, unsmiling model called seryo appeared four times. whether they are career sex workers engaging in a long-term career strategy or temporary sex workers who shot a lot to get paid a lot a few years ago and got out is difficult to say (the site very deliberately makes it impossible to track uploads if you are not subscribed). but despite the grottiness of the production, assuming that the performers involved are necessarily more exploited than their western counterparts just because they are members of the global south and behave undemonstratively according to western porn conventions is some colonizer-ass thinking.
(not to say that they're definitely not exploited! we live in a cruel world and people have to do a lot of things to survive. and survival sex work including reluctant porn production is all too common under any jurisdiction. i certainly wouldn't say i trust the ethics of african lesbians dot com, especially given the content of some of their sister sites, but i've been around too long to trust the ethics of any pornographers at this point. i just hope everyone got that money.)
anyway, it's the 2020s. some of the biggest pop stars, movie stars, and supermodels in the world right now are african, and i've enjoyed a lot of work (primarily music) out of africa in recent years. i would dearly love it if porn production that matched the sexiness and glamor of even an average nigerian, angolan, tanzanian, south african, ugandan or ivorian music video emerged on the continent. until then (and, not for nothing, we're still waiting on l.a. to consistently produce work at that level), there's this.
i have no idea whether the "tanzanian babes" of the title is accurate. both girls seem to speak english, but the british colonized everywhere. they certainly don't say a word in the walking-in-the-forest introductory portion of the video, which uses subtitles more like old silent movies used title cards, telling us what they would be saying if they were speaking, than like closed captions. but the ambient noise (it sounds like a nearby preacher, or drill sergeant, is yelling throughout) and blurred-out extras suggest good reasons for diffidence while guerilla filmmaking. but once the passersby disappear, the acting that they didn't put into dialog, they do put into making out, both on the forest path and then in the interior room we cut to and where the action takes place.
maya, wearing long purple braids in this video, could be a star if avenues for becoming one are open to her; shapely, with a cute face and a real chemistry with the camera, she performs pleasure very well. when it is seryo's turn, her face remains obscured -- although the position, lying across the arms of two easy chairs, is a visually striking one, it can't be a comfortable one -- but she ends by jerking herself off and producing the kind of pseudo-evidentiary moisture that western porn dignifies with the name of squirt. unusually for african lesbians, there were some almost well-composed shots during the sex, with real symmetry and wit to them. everything else about the visuals was worse than unimpressive -- the lighting, the decor, the resolution, the mise-en-scène -- but hey, shot composition is something.
this is a better score than far more adequately shot and performed scenes have received from me before. i couldn't tell you why; for some reason i believed their kissing. maybe i'm just a sucker for the tall/short dynamic. maybe i just wanted african lesbians to be better than it is, or had lower expectations in the first place. regardless, vive l'afrique.
performances: 19
cinematography: 15
editing: 11
script: 7
sjw points: 8
total score: