Aggression and Pleasure in Opposite-Sex and Same-Sex Mainstream Online Pornography: A Comparative Content Analysis of Dyadic Scenes

ABSTRACT

Existing research on aggression in online pornography is almost exclusively based on pornography featuring heterosexual sex. Pornography featuring sex between two men or between two women has received comparatively little scholarly attention, despite its growing industry presence and revenue. To our knowledge, no study has focused on comparing the aggressive content of different-sex and same-sex mainstream online pornography. To address this gap, we utilized a sample of 210 popular videos uploaded to Pornhub over the last decade. This sample consisted of three major categories: “gay” (male/male; n = 70), “lesbian” (female/female; n = 70), and “most-watched of all time” (male/female; n = 70). Our findings show that there are both more displays of aggression and more displays of affection and pleasure in same-sex online pornographic videos, relative to different-sex videos. We discuss the relevance and limits of dominant sexual and gender scripts when analyzing across subgenres of mainstream online pornography.

KEYWORDS:

• Pornography
• online
• aggression
• pleasure
• content analysis
• heterosexual
• same-sex

Declaration of interest

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

¹ We similarly refer to pornography featuring two men as “male/male” (m/m) and pornography featuring two women as “female/female” (f/f). While this terminology is semantically limited, it indicates our focus on dyads and precludes assumptions made about actors’ sexual orientations by uncritically adopting the labels ascribed to our data by the website (i.e. “Gay” and “Lesbian”).