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How Sex Tapes Turned Us Into Performance Critics
Celebrity leaks are always good for a voyeuristic thrill, but they also bring out the worst in us
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
“Sex” might not be the most searched word on Google — that honor goes to “Facebook,” for some reason — but it’s up there. It’s the engine of the internet, always has been. And as that engine has evolved from photos to videos to people streaming their own freaky tales on sites like onlyfans, it’s become not just a tool for titillation, but self-promotion.
That’s why, when a recording of A$AP Rocky doing the deed dropped in mid-December, it didn’t seem to be anything earth-shattering. One of hip-hop’s preeminent sex symbols getting busy isn’t shocking. What did surprise viewers was just how anticlimactic the whole experience was: A$AP limping his way through the back shotting clip to the soundtrack of his own non-autotuned moans. The ensuing social media roast, in which Pretty Flaco’s demonstrably unpretty stroke game came under review, got so hot that he issued a statement, uh, ASAP:
There was a time when just the release of such a tape would have been enough to boost Rocky’s profile, even his sales. But two data-cap-stretching decades into the age of porn on demand, our expectations for what makes a good sex tape have really switched up. We’ve gone from stiff-arming the celeb leak to analyzing clips with the pure, shit-eating joy of Tony Romo during a Sunday night film study. In Rocky’s case, that scrutiny was centered in hypocrisy: How could an artist whose persona and catalog are rooted in sexual prowess be so (seemingly) wack between the sheets?
That we’d reached this question at all signaled a shift in attitudes around sex tapes broadly, but it also articulated what we expect from sex tapes — particularly those featuring celebrities, and extra-particularly those featuring Black celebrities. For Black men…
