New Study Debunks Claim That Porn Is Becoming More Violent

A new study by researchers from Montreal’s McGill University contradicts the widespread belief, often promulgated by anti-porn activists, that the content of currently popular online porn is growing increasingly violent and depicting more acts of aggression than ever before. Just last year, the anti-porn group “Fight The New Drug” claimed  that a recent study had shown that a survey of “50 of the most popular porn films” depicted physical violence in an astounding 88 percent of the 304 sex scenes studied, and that in one instance, a single scene contained 128 “physical or verbal attacks.” But according to the new research published in The Journal of Sex Research for April 2018 by McGill University sociologists Eran Shor and Kimberly Seida, not only is the amount of “aggressive” content in porn—based on a study of “269 popular videos uploaded to PornHub over the past decade”—actually on the decline, but that consumers shy away from violence and aggression in their preferred porn viewing, instead gravitating predominantly to videos that depict women experiencing, or at least performing the experience of, pleasure. Unlike many previous studies claiming to quantify aggressive behavior in porn, the McGill researchers defined several different categories of aggressive behavior in porn scenes. The researchers counted acts which simply appear intended to cause “harm, pain or discomfort,” and created a separate category for video which depicted those acts as clearly non-consensual, as determined by verbal or visual cues. Conversely, anti-porn groups that claim excessive violence in porn usually count such acts as playful slaps on the ass, a hand on the throat, and the use of such terms as "bitch" or "slut," no matter in what context, as "violent acts." While they found that “depictions of visible aggression fluctuate but show no steady upward or downward trend,” with between 30 and 50 percent all videos uploaded each year depicting some visible aggression, the duration of aggressive scenes has shown a sharp drop over the past decade. “In 2008, nearly 13% of the average video portrayed visible aggression,” the researchers write. But in 2016, the average video contained aggressive content lasting only three percent of the total video running time. They also found that despite the popular misconception that porn viewers are growing more and more hungry for violent content, the opposite is actually true. “Videos depicting aggression, particularly of the nonconsensual type, are less likely to be viewed and less likely to elicit a favorable response (i.e., a 'like') from viewers,” the researchers found. “Conversely, videos where women respond with pleasure were more likely to receive greater viewership and a favorable response.” While clearly there remains a segment of porn viewers who enjoy scenes of aggression and degradation, “our study provides no support for the claim that the majority of viewers prefer to be exposed to such images,” Shor and Seida concluded. In fact, they wrote, the “shift away” from nonconsensual aggression in porn viewer tastes—and towards scenes that depict clearly pleasurable sexual experiences—will likely lead the industry to create fewer “aggressive” videos, as production adapts to consumer demands. Photo by Petar Milošević / Wikimedia Commons (Cropped)