“Harder and Harder”? Is Mainstream Pornography Becoming Increasingly Violent and Do Viewers Prefer Violent Content?

Abstract

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.

Ethics Statement

Because we are analyzing the content of freely available online materials, no ethics approval was required.

Notes

¹ Using this sampling strategy allowed us to reach a sample of videos that are less popular but still represent a wider range of production years, which is important for both comparability purposes and to try to assess change over time.

² In addition to overall time trends in aggression, we also examined time trends in each of the specific measures of aggression noted previously (e.g., biting, pulling hair, hitting of the body, choking, forced gagging, spanking, and forceful penetration). We found no significant trend for any of these practices.

³ Nevertheless, we also ran robustness checks for the entire sample (n = 269). Results for the main variables of interest (both the measurements of aggression and the measurements of pleasure) remained in the same direction and statistical significance did not change.