This Black dildo was manufactured in the People’s Republic of China by an erotic goods distributor in Van Nuys, California. The distributor anticipated its sale to US American, Spaniards, French people, Germans, Dutch people, Italians, Russians and other Europeans who fantasize about what they stereotypically regard as the large size of Black men’s genitals and correlate the relative darkness of the Black penis with relative size. 

It smells like chocolate. In colonial-era European commercial imagery, Black men are frequently associated with chocolate and coffee. 

The verbal description of this dildo on the box analogizes the dildo to the Japanese movie monster Godzilla, a mutant iguana fictionally emerging from US American tests of the atomic bomb in the South Pacific, from which the monster migrated to Japan and destroyed cities, just as the atomic bombs dropped by the US on Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed those cities in 1945, ending World War II in the Pacific theater. The numerous Godzilla films were particularly popular in Japan and the US during the 1950s and ’60s. Additional Godzilla films have been made since the 1980s.

As another sort of mutant produced by science run amok, Cockzilla amplifies the characteristics ostensibly intrinsic to Black penises in general. It is “beastly,” destructive, threatening to white men’s children and wives, and largely resistant to white men’s most advanced military and police technology, as well as admirable and “beautiful.”

Western imperialism generated a geographically and racially coded logic that Asian men are too feminine, Black men too masculine, and European men just right, symbolic configuration that also represented Asians as excessively spiritual and passive, African and other Black men as excessively physical and rebellious, and European or white men as the most rational and sexually self controlled, justifying the global dominance of white men. This logic justified the imperialists’ and the segregationists’ sense that they needed to control Black men and suppress their own inner likeness to Black men, but this logic also constituted Black men as desirable and admirably virile, and even as living, breathing proof of white men’s effeminacy and general inadequacy.

It is striking that none of the inscriptions on the box is in Chinese, despite the fact that the object was crafted in China. In the 21st century, China has been a major source of symbolically important Western and Afro-Atlantic commercial goods for which there is little market inside China.

This object was purchased from one of a chain of erotic goods shops in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederate States of America, which fought to preserve slavery in North America. Virginia remains part of the heartland of conservative and enduringly segregationist white American evangelical Christianity. Ironically, such religious and political conservatism are associated with a heightened demand for pornography and with the fetishization of interracial sex.

Virginia’s residents, in particular, tend to consider themselves more sophisticated than other Protestant southerners, and the state’s large cities are increasingly progressive, perhaps lending a certain chic appeal to desires that were once kept in the shadows and at the margins of society. The Taboo chain of stores seem to have proliferated in middle-class commercial districts of the city and seem to be frequented by people of diverse races and classes.

Its business card of the chain reads

@TabooRVA

Taboo

TabooRVA.com

6012 W. Broad Street

804.440.TABU

5100 Midlothian Turnpike

804.233.4418

10607 Patterson Avenue

804.741.0482

Mon-Thurs: 10a-10p

Fri & Sat: 10a-11p

Sun: 12p-8p

[On the back of the card appears a tatooed, dark-haried white woman surfing across the laps of five naked and tatooed white women, whose heads have all been cropped from the photograph.]