Sexual Consent Communication in Best-Selling Pornography Films: A Content Analysis

Abstract

Even though young people report learning about sex from pornography, most do not think this sexual medium teaches them about sexual consent communication. But research shows that people are also able to evaluate pornography as consensual or not. Therefore, we proposed that pornography depicts subtle sexual scripts regarding sexual consent communication. We conducted a content analysis of 50 20-minute segments within best-selling pornographic films from 2015. We systematically coded the presence of various consent communication cues in these films. Consent communication was often depicted; nonverbal cues were more frequent than verbal cues. We found that the films either directly or indirectly supported several sexual scripts: Explicit Verbal Consent Isn’t Natural, Women are Indirect/Men are Direct, Sex Can Happen Without Ongoing Communication, Lower-Order Behaviors Don’t Need Explicit Consent, and People Receiving Sexual Behaviors Can Consent by Doing Nothing. Further research is needed to examine whether viewers are acquiring, activating, or applying these scripts. Sex education programs could benefit from acknowledging how consent communication is modeled in pornography and by teaching about pornography literacy.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

¹ Two of these segments were unintentionally from the same film (i.e., Interracial Angels). Because (1) there were two differently named files for this film and (2) independent sets of coders worked on the two segments from this film, this sampling error was not known to the researchers until after data collection and analysis. Since the 20-minute segments from this film were mutually exclusive, we decided to retain both in the presentation of our data.