2018/04/18 by Eran Shor, Kimberly Seida · 75 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Advertising #Aggression #Business #Content (measure theory) #Gender, Feminism, and Media #Law #Mainstream #Pleasure #Political science #Pornography #Psychology #Sex work and related issues #Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology #Social psychology
paper · doi:10.1080/00224499.2018.1451476
published in The Journal of Sex Research 56(1), 16-28 (Taylor & Francis)
openalex publication_date 2018/04/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
It is a common notion among many scholars and pundits that the pornography industry becomes "harder and harder" with every passing year. Some have suggested that porn viewers, who are mostly men, become desensitized to "soft" pornography, and producers are happy to generate videos that are more hard core, resulting in a growing demand for and supply of violent and degrading acts against women in mainstream pornographic videos. We examined this accepted wisdom by utilizing a sample of 269 popular videos uploaded to PornHub over the past decade. More specifically, we tested two related claims: (1) aggressive content in videos is on the rise and (2) viewers prefer such content, reflected in both the number of views and the rankings for videos containing aggression. Our results offer no support for these contentions. First, we did not find any consistent uptick in aggressive content over the past decade; in fact, the average video today contains shorter segments showing aggression. Second, videos containing aggressive acts are both less likely to receive views and less likely to be ranked favorably by viewers, who prefer videos where women clearly perform pleasure.