Eye Contact in Porn: Multifaceted Responses to Direct Gaze in Brief Sexually Explicit Videos Among Heterosexual Cisgender Men

ABSTRACT

In pornography created for (and often by) heterosexual men, it is common for women performers to look directly at the camera. This simulates eye contact with viewers and is intended to create a participatory point of view. Little is known about the function of direct gaze in this context. In other domains, eye contact can increase physiological arousal, but also facilitate nurturant connection. Eye contact in porn may thus have a range of functions, which we explored in a preregistered study. Participants (N = 799) watched a brief sexually explicit video that had a high prevalence of eye contact (n = 399) or no eye contact (n = 400), then completed measures of eroticism, nurturance, guilt, other measures of affect and desire, participatory perspective, and whom they experienced sexual desire for. We found no significant differences in eroticism, nurturance, guilt, or other affect or desire measures across conditions, but found some evidence that eye contact may facilitate a participatory (vs. observational) perspective and desire for the performer in the film (e.g. vs. someone else), .05 < ps < .10. Overall, our findings provide preliminary insight into the function of eye contact in pornography and provide promising avenues for future research.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Elizabeth Le for her assistance with stimuli creation and coding.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Preregistered. The materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/ynx3k/?view_only=ce90070f8d4642d2993743674f743aac.

Notes

1. In our preregistration, because we planned to conduct two tailed tests, we specified bidirectional hypotheses. However, we also included our directional predictions in the preregistration, which correspond to the unidirectional hypotheses that we articulate here for clarity. In our preregistration, we also grouped “affect” and “desire” into a single “response” for our hypotheses for nurturance and eroticism for brevity (e.g., we predicted higher nurturant response, rather than nurturant affect and desire). Here, we have disaggregated “response” into “affect” and “desire” for clarity.

2. The only options provided to participants for gender/sex by CloudResearch at the time of data collection were “male” and “female.”

3. In addition to exclusions based on our preregistered criteria, we excluded four participants who demonstrated a severe lack of attention through nonsensical responses to open ended questions.

4. For the full desiderata that we used to select videos for this study, please refer to our supplement.

5. https://osf.io/cdxg3/

6. While the generalizability of our stimuli would have increased with each additional performer that we added, identifying scenes with a suitable proportion of eye contact and editing them accordingly was time-intensive, so we chose three to maximize variability in material while remaining within pragmatic bounds of study preparation.

7. We excluded their data from all analyses (n = 30).

8. As an a posteriori sensitivity analysis, we also tested our hypotheses in a traditional ICM-CFA SEM framework, where we reran our main model with only the strongest indicators for our each of our factors pertaining to eroticism, nurturance, and guilt and constrained loadings across latent variables to zero. This did not change our overall pattern of results.

9. Conceptually, each contrast other than that for gaze direction served as blocking variables and were not of primary interest.

10. The performers in the videos that participants had seen were Alexis Adams (n = 2) and Chloe Amour (n = 2).

Additional information

Funding

This research was undertaken thanks to funding from the Canada 150 Research Chairs program to SMvA, an Ontario Trillium Scholarship from the Ontario Trillium Foundation to AMG, and the University of Michigan Psychology Department.