Porn Viewers Prefer Pleasure To Aggression: Here’s How We Know

Two researchers from Canada’s McGill University, who earlier this year published a study debunking the popular belief in some quarters that porn viewers have developed a craving for increasingly violent and “aggressive” content, have now penned an article explaining the significance of their findings. Eran Shor and Kimberly Seda on Sunday published their new piece on the web site The Conversation, which offers popularized discussions of academic research. (AVN.com’s original coverage of Shor and Seida’s research can be found at this link.) Despite previous studies, like the one at this link, claiming to show that nearly 90 percent of all scenes in “popular pornographic videos” depict acts of “physical aggression,” the Canadian researchers reached a different conclusion, finding that the amount of “aggressive” content on porn has declined sharply over the past decade. Shor and Seida were inspired to study aggression in porn after repeatedly hearing the same arguments in the media and by anti-porn advocates that, frankly, most porn fans have also heard—arguments such as those found in the 2010 book Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality by Gail Dines, who catalogues a lengthy list of allegedly violent and aggressive acts she came across while clicking through online porn videos. For example, Dines claimed that slapping a partner on the ass during sex was "violent," as was one partner placing his/her hand on the throat of the other, even when no squeezing could be observed. “Our interest in the topic of violence and aggression in pornography came out of reading and hearing claims both in the popular media and in academic circles that pornography is becoming ‘worse and worse,’” they write in their Conversation article. “Part of this argument has been the result of scientifically dubious claims about pornography being addictive and users needing to constantly ‘up the stakes’ in order to be satisfied.” In their study, which found that in 2016 only about three percent of porn videos depicted “non-consensual aggression”—down from 13 percent just eight years earlier—found not only that violence in porn is on the decline, but that the drop in “aggressive”porn appears to be a response to consumer demand. Porn viewers, they found, simply like it better when women in porn appear to be experiencing pleasure rather than pain or discomfort. “This shift away from non-consensual aggression may signify lower demand and, depending on the responsiveness of producers to the preferences of most consumers, might result in reduced distribution of material featuring non-consensual aggression,” the academics wrote in their Sunday article. Shor and Seida say that their research offers a new perspective on debates over the supposed link between porn and real-life domestic violence, as in a recent West Virginia University study claiming to find that “pornography is a major component of the problem of rural woman abuse.” But the McGill University researchers say that “aggressive” porn is becoming less common. “Indeed, it seems like the majority of mainstream viewers are gradually moving away from depictions of aggression and degradation, particularly non-consensual aggression,” they write. Photo By WillVision /Wikimedia Commons