Why Did This Prestigious Porn Award Show Take Away Its Plus-Size Category?

So some BBW performers and content makers decided to do something about it. “We went to AVN on our own,” says Kelly Shibari, one of the performers active in the process. “We said, ‘OK, what do you need from us to make this category happen? We will make it.’ We were all told that more DVDs, with more variety, from more studios equals an [AVN award] category. So we said, ‘OK, now that we know that, we’ll do that.’” And they did.

BBW performers like Shibari, April Flores, and others, along with directors, producers, distributors, and marketers, started focusing on creating more mainstream porn that featured plus-size women looking glamorous and having hot sex, as opposed to engaging in nonsex fetish activities.

As they were working toward greater recognition in explicit entertainment, mainstream pop culture was exploring body acceptance too. Melissa McCarthy was killing it in Hollywood blockbusters, Inside Amy Schumer was earning accolades (and criticism) on Comedy Central, plus-size model Tess Holiday was beginning to make waves in the fashion world, and the discussion about size positivity was taking off.

So when AVN announced that it was instituting the BBW Performer of the Year category in 2014, it was welcomed as another feather in the cap of women who weren’t made in the size-zero mold, for whom sexuality had long been a fraught topic.

In the years since, that visibility has only increased. Pornhub declared 2015 “a major year for body positivity” when it revealed that searches for BBW had steadily risen from 2013 to 2015. Alex Hawkins, spokesperson for porn streaming site xHamster, tells me that the United States is currently the top consumer of BBW porn in the world. “XHamster loves its Big, Beautiful Women!” he says. Meanwhile, New York Fashion Week 2017 just concluded, with bodies of all sizes on display across numerous runways.

So then, amid all this forward momentum, why did the most prestigious organization in porn seem to turn its back on its plus-size models?

According to AVN, it wasn’t personal—it was just the rules. “DVD production in the BBW niche has steadily declined,” says Sharan Street, an editor at AVN. And DVDs are important to the nomination and selection process.

In fact, AVN later wrote on its website: “The BBW Performer of the Year category [was eliminated] due to a continuing decline in DVD content featuring BBW performers.” There are more performers now than ever, and more ways for them to release their content. But there are fewer BBW porn companies releasing DVDs—not to mention that most BBW models are now producing their own content online, for membership websites, clip stores, and webcams. That’s a great workaround for a lack of opportunities offered by mainstream porn companies, but it doesn’t make them contenders for AVN’s most prestigious caste of awards.

Furthermore, the material they’re making doesn’t necessarily qualify as porn to AVN. “The majority of BBW content on the Internet right now is fetish content,” says Kelly Shibari. “It’s feeding, it’s gaining, it’s face-sitting, it’s squashing. It’s anything but standard boy-girl sex, which is what AVN considers porn to be.”