The Content of Contemporary, Mainstream Pornography: A Literature Review of Content Analytic Studies

Abstract

This paper provides a narrative review of recent studies (2005–2020) into the content of contemporary, mainstream pornography. Sex acts, such as vaginal sex, fellatio, and external ejaculation are ubiquitous within mainstream pornography. Cunnilingus, solo masturbation, or masturbation of a partner are all also relatively common. Condom use is infrequently depicted. While extreme sexual violence (e.g., rape) is rare, acts which some would consider to be violent (e.g., spanking) are common. Women in pornography typically enthusiastically engage in all sexual requests. Findings around the degradation of women are mixed. On some measures, men in pornography are more agentic than women; on other measures, the reverse is true.

Keywords:

• Pornography
• sexually explicit material
• content analysis
• violence
• objectification

Acknowledgments

Our thanks to Dr. Hollie Baxter for her feedback on this review.

Disclosure statement

The authors do not have any conflicts of interest to report.

Notes

1 Fritz and Paul (2017) content analysed videos from two specialized feminist pornography websites. However, they then compared this material to a sample of mainstream videos from Pornhub.com, so this study was included in the analysis.

2 A study analyzing DVD covers (Jensen, 2010) and a study analyzing written performer profiles (Brennan, 2018) were included. Although these studies are analyzing text, their aim is to provide insight into the content of video-based pornography. Thus, these studies were included.

3 Carrotte et al. (2020) report the exact search phrase they used to search the database Medline (p. 4), but not the exact search phrases used for other databases. Databases differ in how search phrases are constructed (e.g., different databases use different operators for proximity searching). We attempted to replicate Carrotte et al.’s (2020) search term using the search operators required for each database.

4 A number of articles reported on in this review have overlapping samples. Shor (2019) and Shor and Golriz (2019) report analyses from the same sample of videos, with some of the videos analyzed in Shor and Seida (2019) also overlapping with this sample. Fritz et al. (2020, 2021), Zhou and Paul (2016), and Zhou et al. (2019) all appear to be drawing from the same sample of videos (it is not directly stated, but all these articles include a statement indicating that the study was produced as part of a larger ongoing project, and similar details are reported around the dates of data collection and coding). Bridges et al. (2010) and Sun et al. (2008) used a similar sampling approach (sampling films from Adult Video News’ most-rented list during the 2004–2005 period). Thus, there may be overlap in these samples also.

5 It can be difficult to determine what constitutes “heterosexual pornography” as pornography may depict same-sex behavior between women, while being targeted toward a heterosexual male audience.

6 Rape is not a category on Pornhub, although rough sex is.

7 It is also helpful to be aware of the rate at which sexual behaviors depicted in pornography occur in “real-life.” Toward this end, there are several useful sources: for information on contraceptive methods see Jones et al. (2014) and NCHS (2019); for base-rate information on various sexual behaviors (e.g., anal sex) see Herbenick et al. (2010); for information on the frequency of rough sex, see Herbenick et al. (2021).