Colonisation has had an enormous impact on attitudes toward sexuality in te ao Māori. Now, mainstream pornography is potentially doing the same.

All this week on The Spinoff we’re talking about porn. Click here for more Porn Week stories. 

The way sex and sexuality existed traditionally in te ao Māori was vastly different from the forms we often see reflected in contemporary New Zealand society. 

Before colonisation, it’s likely that te ao Māori had a vibrant fluidity around sexual identity, more equitable gender dynamics within relationships and an open celebration of sexual pleasure and reproduction. Manifestations of these pre-colonial attitudes are expressed in art like waka huia that show female figures intertwined, pouwhenua with emphasised genitals, mōteatea describing same-sex relationships between men, cheeky dances like the kopikopi performed by widowed women and haka designed to entice love interests. The list goes on and on.

Colonisation brought the suppression of these traditional attitudes toward sexuality through religion and Western ideas around gender and sexuality. “With the imposition of colonisation, we also had the introduction of Victorian ways of looking at the world,” says Victoria University associate professor of health Dr Clive Aspin (Ngāti Maru, Ngāti Whanaunga and Ngāti Tamaterā). “They imposed this very narrow view of Victorian sexuality on Māori like they did all around the world.” 

The same can be said of modern day pornography. University of Auckland psychologist Jade Le Grice (Te Rarawa, Ngāpuhi), says that just as colonisation moderated ideas around Māori sexuality, the proliferation of mainstream pornography only adds another layer. In past interviews she has described pornography as a form of “modern-day colonialism”.

Māori and mainstream porn

In 2019, the website Pornhub released insights into New Zealanders’ content use. The statistics counted average time spent on the website (just over 10 minutes), how users view the content (mostly on laptops and desktops) and the most popular search terms. That year, the most popular search term (by a significant margin) was “Māori”. 

For Le Grice, that statistic raised alarm bells. She remains concerned, especially when it comes to the implications of those depictions on wāhine Māori. “It’s media that comes from overseas and that has different assumptions about gender, and how we treat one another,” she says. “The sex that people are watching in pornography comes from cultural context where you have inequitable gender relations.” 

Otago University student Ahinata Kaitai-Mullane (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Waitaha) recently completed her Master of Indigenous studies on how mainstream pornography depicts wāhine Māori. It was stumbling across a nine-word tweet that set her on the pathway: “Are you a Pornhub category or are you privileged?”

“I thought to myself, ‘that’s really interesting the way that marginalised identities are fetishised in porn’,” she recalls. Her MA thesis in Indigenous Studies, which she completed earlier this year, discovered parallels between colonial representations of Māori in Pākehā photography, artwork and postcards from the 1900s and in a sample of 50 Pornhub thumbnails that were tagged with the word “Māori”.

Kaitai-Mullane’s research observed that across both formats it’s wāhine Māori in particular who are fetishised: almost every video in the sample had Māori women in them, while only around half had Māori men in them. That was true of the majority of the colonial artworks too.

“There was a strong parallel between the pornographic gaze now and the earlier postcard trade,” she says. Just as those earlier depictions emphasised youthful Māori women who weren’t fully dressed, within contemporary pornography, videos featuring Māori women tended to be attached to adjectives like “teen”, “young” or with reference to being students. Just as Māori women in postcards were referred to as “Māori belle”, “Māori girl” or “Māori maiden”, in modern day pornography wāhine Māori remain nameless and oftentimes faceless. 

“That connects to an idea of wāhine Māori being replaceable,” Kaitai-Mullane says. “In being objectified, you’re not a person and therefore you don’t need a name or a face because you’re serving a purpose in that sexual narrative and that is the start and the end of that story.” 

This type of pornography created and recreated colonial ideas about Māori women in multiple ways. Domination over Māori women was implied through camera angles and literal violence toward wāhine within the videos. Among the videos, non-heterosexual sex was entirely nonexistent too. And while Māori were labelled, Pākehā in those same videos went largely unmarked.

Most of the international academic research that focusses on Indigenous representation in porn revolves around the absence of it and the way that plays into the desexualising of Indigenous people. “We have a really unique situation here where that isn’t the case,” she says.

But why do historical postcards and modern pornography matter so much? “Those representations create and reflect sexual scripts in society,” she says. In doing so those portrayals shape expectations around what’s normal when it comes to sex, the body and identity in relation to Māori women. 

For now, there remains some uncertainty around the real-world impact these kinds of depictions have on Māori, explains Kaitai-Mullane. “But we can make assumptions that it’s probably feeding into lots of those negative perceptions,” she says, and points to examples like the likelihood of wāhine Māori being prosecuted for crimes compared to Pākehā, or not being viewed as legitimate child carers.  

As pornography becomes ever more inescapable, there’s a danger that negative narratives will become even more prolific and influential in how people think about sex, and how young people learn to have sex. A research project into young people’s experience and views about pornography in New Zealand found that a quarter of New Zealanders had seen pornography before the age of 12. “Many of them are watching it in order to obtain an understanding of what sex is,” then chief censor David Shanks told RNZ in 2019. “Anyone will tell you that is a terrible outcome because pornography is an awful educator.” Knowing this, Kaitai-Mullane believes education that gives viewers the tools to think critically about the porn they’re watching could be key to disrupting negative outcomes. 

Reindigenising sex and sexuality 

Since the second wave of feminism there has been ongoing debate over whether or not pornography inherently creates and maintains sexual oppression. Kaitai-Mullane believes both sides of the argument make valid points. There is degradation that happens in the majority of pornography, especially for women, trans and non-white people, she says. “But there’s also space for people to be empowered by creating erotic and sexual content if that’s done in a way that’s wāhine Māori lead, other people aren’t profiting off of that, and it’s not aligned with colonial ideology but instead as an expression of tino rangatiratanga.”

But she’s careful to emphasise that none of this responsibility should be placed on individual sex workers who create pornography. “When doing that job you have to be catering to a market and so what really needs to change is the market,” she says. “People need to change their preferences so that they’re not aligning with these colonial, dehumanising ideologies”. 

Reflecting on the damage that moralistic approaches to sexuality have had on te ao Māori since colonisation, there’s a risk of critiques of pornography perpetuating the same type of suppression. So, when it comes to expanding how we think about sex and sexuality, it’s crucial that we look back. “Our history, and our stories are so important in challenging not only the way things are now, but also that period of time after colonisation,” she says. Although the impacts of colonisation have resonated across almost all dimensions of our lives, “reconnecting is a really good way to challenge those narratives”.