The Pornified Humor of “Jomok” and the Over-Sexualization of Black Gay Men Online

  • 17/12/2025
  • Category: Commentaries
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Author: Aisya Sabili
Editor: Ayom Mratita Purbandani

Introduction

The lexical item “jomok” has emerged across Indonesian social platforms as a quick, low-effort joke format, most visibly as Memes, WhatsApp stickers, and short video snippets that blend porn-coded humor with homoerotic cues. In popular explanations, the term is often glossed as a portmanteau of jokes and homok (a slangy rendering of “homo”), and traced by users to meme communities from 2023 onward.[1][2] While these descriptors sound casual, the visual grammar of many “jomok” assets is because of the recurring use of Black male bodies as the punchline aligns with a long media history that frames Black masculinity through sexual excess and spectacle. The result is not mere “edgy humor,” but a pattern of over-sexualization and digital shaming that travels well because platforms reward speed, shock, and repeatability.

Patricia Hill Collins’ account of Black sexual politics documents how controlling images of Black men—hypersexual, physically imposing, always already sexualized—are recycled to stabilize racial hierarchies.[3] Contemporary public-health and social-psychology research likewise finds that Black men who have sex with men confront group-specific sexual stereotypes that flatten agency and personhood.[4] When “jomok” deploys Black male bodies as a meme template, it taps into a reservoir of meaning; the body becomes a visual shorthand for sex, then a cue for laughter, then an excuse for ridicule. Humor theory calls this a superiority move, laughter that positions the audience above the subject yet here the move is racialized and homophobic at once.

Over-sexualization in Social Practice

Limor Shifman describes memes as units that invite reuse and variation.[5] A template lowers the cost of participation and raises the pressure to join in. You do not need to invent a joke. You only need to drop a sticker at the right moment. The more a template is reused the more its meaning hardens. When a template codes sex on sight and ties that code to a specific kind of body the social rule becomes easy to follow. Laugh now. Move on. No questions asked.

Stuart Hall argues that representation is a process that produces meaning.[6] Repetition, he notes, creates the illusion of common sense. If one body type repeatedly appears as a sex symbol, that is what the body becomes in the shared imagination. The outcome is a cultural shortcut that makes over-sexualization look harmless. Platform governance choices can also allow this shortcut to persist. On the other hand, Tarleton Gillespie documents how content rules and moderation workflows often struggle to account for context and irony.[7] Humor often slips past filters because it is framed as play. Yet the harm such content causes is cumulative, not singular. Each new instance looks trivial. Each instance may seem trivial, together they produce a situation where ridicule feels safe and ordinary. Work on digital shaming gives a name to this climate. Daniel Trottier, for example, shows how loosely coordinated publics use visibility to teach lessons through embarrassment and scorn.[8] Participants can deny intent, targets still carry the mark.

Taken together these strands show how “jomok” over-sexualization functions as social ordering. The joke helps groups bond. The template lowers friction. The repetition manufactures common sense. The platform struggles to see the pattern. The public converts visibility into a disciplinary tool: one that sustains a layer of deniability. None of this depends on explicit slurs. It depends on practice and flow.

Homophobia and Racism are Dressing Up as Playful Humors

Homophobia in “jomok” rarely arrives as an open insult. It often comes wrapped in play. Disparagement humor theory shows how jokes about a stigmatized group can relax social restraints against prejudice. When people hear a joke that targets a group, the joke can act as if prejudice is acceptable in this setting. Thomas Ford describes this as a “release of prejudice.” After exposure to disparaging humor, people who already hold bias become more tolerant of later discriminatory acts.[9]

This release works through norms. The joke reframes hostility as fun, listeners read the room and adjust. Studies find that the context of a relationship matters for homophobic jokes. People respond differently with friends than with strangers, yet the basic pattern is similar.[10] Work on delegitimization warns that ridicule can erode the moral standing of a target group. Once a group is framed as laughable, it becomes easier to dismiss their claims to respect and protection.[11]

Sadly, homophobic patterns in these jokes persist through “plausible deniability.” Speakers can say they are only joking, listeners can insist they did not mean it, yet the social effect remains. In settings where men worry about being seen as gay, trading in homophobic banter can perform straightness for the group. Even in places where overt homophobia has declined, critics note that inclusive talk can sit beside subtle policing practices. Humor becomes a safe channel to reaffirm boundaries without owning the hostility.[12]

Racial scripts often intertwine with these dynamics. When a meme relies on Black male bodies to carry the sex signal, race becomes part of the joke’s machinery. The audience is trained to read Blackness as shorthand for heat and danger. A reading that is not invented by “jomok” but inherited from a long media archive that casts Black men as hypersexual or as threats who must be contained. In porn discourse there are named archetypes that code Black men through size and conquest. Academic work on the BBC (porn slang for “Big Black Cock,” a genre tag and marketing hook that trades on the stereotype that Black men have exceptionally large penises and hypersexual “performance” in straight and gay porn) and Mandingo tropes traces how these ideas move from slavery era fantasy into modern porn tags and then into everyday talk.[13] When “jomok” reuses clips and stills that evoke those tropes, the humor repeats a racial script.

Conclusion

“Jomok” looks playful on the surface, but we always have to be critical and dive deeper when it comes to humor that targets specific people. A joke should not rest on degrading a group or shifting shame onto one person so that others can bond. If the laugh depends on someone else’s discomfort or on a community pushed to a lower rung, it is not harmless. Moreover, “jomok” also leans on porn-coded cues. Porn, as an industry and a traffic engine, often builds value from uneven power and weak consent. Making jokes that draw on pornography ultimately glorifies a toxic industry that uses body-autonomy as a commodity.

  1. Bagja, K. (2024). Arti Kata Jomok dalam Bahasa Gaul yang Viral di Medsos. [online] iNews.ID. Available at: https://www.inews.id/lifestyle/health/arti-kata-jomok-dalam-bahasa-gaul-yang-viral-di-medsos [Accessed 20 Oct. 2025]. ↑
  2. Brahmana, A.R.Y. (2024). Budaya Sosial Media Gen Z: Asal Usul Stiker Jomok WhatsApp Halaman 1 – Kompasiana.com. [online] KOMPASIANA. Available at: https://www.kompasiana.com/axel80659/665b5e06c925c45ca2517cd2/budaya-sosial-media-gen-z-asal-usul-stiker-jomok-whatsapp [Accessed 20 Oct. 2025]. ↑
  3. Collins, P.H. (2004). Black sexual politics : African Americans, gender, and the new racism. New York: Routledge. ↑
  4. Calabrese, S.K., Earnshaw, V.A., Magnus, M., Hansen, N.B., Krakower, D.S., Underhill, K., Mayer, K.H., Kershaw, T.S., Betancourt, J.R. and Dovidio, J.F. (2017). Sexual Stereotypes Ascribed to Black Men Who Have Sex with Men: An Intersectional Analysis. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 47(1), pp.143–156. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-016-0911-3. ↑
  5. Shifman, L. (2013). Memes in digital Culture. The MIT Press. ↑
  6. Hall, S. (2020). The Work of Representation. In: The Applied Theatre Reader. Routledge, pp.74–76. ↑
  7. Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the internet: Platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. New Haven: Yale University Press. ↑
  8. Trottier, D., Huang, Q. and Gabdulhakov, R. (2025). Digital Media, Denunciation and Shaming. [online] Taylor & Francis. Available at: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/93142 [Accessed 20 Oct. 2025]. ↑
  9. Ford, T.E. and Ferguson, M.A. (2004). Social Consequences of Disparagement Humor: A Prejudiced Norm Theory. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(1), pp.79–94. doi:https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0801_4. ↑
  10. Weitz, B. and Koc, Y. (2022). The effect of relational status on perceptions of gay disparaging humor. Current Psychology, 42. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03712-9. ↑
  11. Hodson, G. and MacInnis, C.C. (2016). Derogating humor as a delegitimization strategy in intergroup contexts. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 2(1), pp.63–74. doi:https://doi.org/10.1037/tps0000052. ↑
  12. de Boise, S. (2015). I’m Not Homophobic, ‘I’ve Got Gay Friends’: Evaluating the Validity of Inclusive Masculinity. Men and Masculinities, 18(3), pp.318–339. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184×14554951. ↑
  13. Samuels, P. D. (2019). Making Mandingo: Racial archetypes, pornography, and black male subjectivity. ↑