Sexual Behaviors and Aggression in Gay Pornography

ABSTRACT

Previous studies have suggested a substantial number of men who have sex with men (MSM) have consumed and used pornography to learn about same-sex sexual behaviors. Yet, past research has focused almost exclusively on condom-use in the category of Gay pornography and ignored the types of sexual behaviors and aggression depicted within the content. This study examined aggression and sexual behaviors depicted in Gay online pornography (N = 415). We found fellatio and anal sex were the most common behaviors, occurring in roughly two-thirds of scenes, while kissing occurred in less than a third of scenes. Additionally, sexual aggression occurred in 31% of scenes, with spanking being the most common, occurring in 20% of scenes. Anal sex and forced fellatio were found to be predictors of physical aggression. These findings point to normalization of aggression and narrow sexual behaviors in Gay pornography, which may have implications for MSM’s norm perceptions related to sexuality.

KEYWORDS:

• Pornography
• Gay
• sexual behaviors
• aggression
• content analysis
• condom use
• MSM

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. In this study, the word Gay is capitalized to indicate the use of this word as a descriptor of a specific pornographic category. Notably, when Gay is used in this paper, it is not asserting that the actors identified as such but instead that a category is labeled as Gay.

2. Sampling occurred during the Spring of 2014.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.