Video Presentation: A Content Analysis of 50 of Today’s Top Selling Porn Films (explicit language)

A number of porn defenders claim that anti-porn activists harp on unusual, violent, women-hating examples of porn, and unfairly downplay the existence of ‘artistic’ porn on sites like Suicide Girls. anthonyjk_6319 believes that porn sites like “Gag on My Cock” and “Anal Suffering” are the “exception”, and that the “overwhelming majority of porn (something like 99.8%) deals only in consenting nonviolent sex acts.”

To clear up confusion about what porn is generally about, academic researchers Robert Wosnitzer, Ana Bridges, and Erica Scharrer, together with coders like Michelle Chang, analyzed 50 recent top selling porn films selected from lists compiled by Adult Video News, the leading trade journal of the porn industry. Their 71-minute presentation to the Pornography and Pop Culture conference in March is available as a Google Video. The conference agenda summarized the intent of their study, “Analyzing the Pornographic Text: Charting and Mapping Pornography Through Content Analysis”:

One of the limitations of the discussion of the content of hardcore
pornography has been the lack of large-scale content analyses. An
extensive new study of mainstream hardcore pornography — the most
important content analysis in more than a decade — will provide an
important base from which to evaluate the messages in pornography. The
researchers (from New York University, the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of
Rhode Island) have created a sophisticated coding protocol that was
applied to 50 of the most popular hardcore films, and the results
reveal much about the deep misogyny of the industry. Members of the
research team will give the conference a preview of some of the key
findings that will be appearing in future publications. The panel will
also include a discussion of the issues encountered by the coding team
who spent many hours viewing pornography.

Here are some of the highlights from this presentation:

5min:20sec into the video presentation – Many in academia think porn is a trivial issue

Robert Wosnitzer: “As I’m here faced with where I’m going next in my doctoral studies, and I’m being encouraged to leave the ‘porn thing’ behind, it certainly underscores the importance of doing this work… ’cause the ‘porn thing’ isn’t taken seriously enough. As we were talking about earlier in some of the presentations about how in the academy, porn is being talked about. It’s not serious. It’s not worth considering. Well I insistently think that’s fundamentally flawed.”

6min:45sec – Many young people get their sex education from porn

Clip from HBO documentary, “Thinking XXX” (2006)

“…my astonishment that these young women would watch porn literally as instructional videos… to learn how to position themselves better or how to give better blow jobs… for me it was just laced with such shame.”

7min:20sec – New porn performer reluctant to be ‘difficult’

Clip from ABC news show, “The Outsiders” (2007)

Porn actress: “…I think he saw the opportunity to kind of take advantage that…I wasn’t really going to say much, I wasn’t going to stop the scene altogether because I’m still new and I don’t want to be blacklisted…”

Narrator: “Filmmakers are now pushing performers more and more to extremes. Sophia is nervous about the pressure to perform sex acts she’s uncomfortable with.”

9min:40sec – Aggressive and violent pornography is common, contrary to some people’s perceptions

Wosnitzer: “Both of those clips say that aggressive and violent pornography is the exception and not the rule… What we will claim is that…aggressive and violent pornography is the rule. It’s not the exception.”

13min:38sec – The researchers looked for positive behaviors as well as negative ones

Wosnitzer: “…we’re also taking a look at the arguments that you’ll hear from pro-pornography, and somewhat accepting them and trying to prove them, and in doing that we disprove them… So one of the things we said was, ‘Let’s code for positive behaviors.'”

15min:00sec – The researchers looked at targets’ reaction to aggression

Wosnitzer: “…how is sexuality and aggression being fused together in one scene?… When an act of aggression did occur we wanted to know, what was the response of the person being aggressed?”

15min:44sec – In non-porn media, aggressors usually suffer consequences

Wosnitzer: “Typically when aggression occurs in television studies, there’s usually some bad consequence to it… Somebody’s either punished or they’re hunted down or killed or something else…”

16min:45sec – The reseachers focused on the porn that is commonly being viewed today

Wosnitzer: “We went through Adult Video News every month. [It] publishes a list of the top 250 best sold and rented adult DVDs… [W]e avoided the issue of ‘What is pornography?’ because AVN defined it for us, in a sense… We took the top 50 from each month, went back over a six month period, randomly generated took the top 50 films. We coded by scene. We had a total of 304 scenes that we coded over this randomly generated list of the top 50 films.

17min:50sec – Definition of aggression and violence in the study

Wosnitzer: “We can read aggression and violence defined as any action causing or attempting to cause physical or psychological harm to oneself, to another person, animal or inanimate object, intentionally or accidentally, whereby physical harm is understood as assaulting another verbally and nonverbally.”

18min:27sec – This study has been peer reviewed and accepted to conferences

Wosnitzer: “We have not published this research yet. It’s in the process of being published. It has been accepted to scholarly conferences, peer reviewed. This isn’t some ad hoc study that we just said, ‘Look at what we got’ and cooked up some numbers.”

21min:50sec – Aggressive acts frequent in the porn films

Ana Bridges: “…I’m going to begin to talk about what it is that we found after looking at these 304 scenes in these 50 top selling pornographic films. In total in the 304 scenes we coded a total of 3,376 acts of aggression. That ends up averaging…to an aggressive act every minute and a half. The scenes on average contained eleven and a half acts of verbal or physical aggression…”

23min:30sec – Condom use rare on the set

Bridges: “…condoms were present in 11 percent of the scenes… A discussion of ‘Let’s be safe’ or ‘Put on a condom’ or something of that happened in…one scene of the 304. Nice ‘education’.”

24min:00sec – Certain sex acts much more prevalent in porn than in reality

Bridges: “…we were able to code the sex acts and also compare them to the study that had been done in 1994. It was a very large national survey of actual adult sex practices. And so we were able to say, ‘Well, how well is pornography, popular pornography, portraying the reality of sex as it is actually being practiced and desired? …[F]emale to male oral sex was grossly overrepresented in pornography compared to…this national survey. Same with anal penetration… I think 1 to 2% of people said ‘Yeah, that’s great, I want to do it,’ but in 56% of scenes we’re seeing anal penetration being shown. Female to female oral was shown in 23% of scenes, and less than 1% of women said that this was something they found very appealing or did.

“…what it essentially amounted to is that the desires and sexual practices of men were well represented, were overrepresented, and the desires and sexual practices of women were grossly underrepresented.”

26min:30sec – Extreme acts common in porn, predictive of aggression

Bridges: “We also coded for, what…we’re calling loosely in this talk, ‘extreme acts’ (of sex acts). The only sexual sequence that we coded, which is…when one thing follows another, was something called ATM…’ass-to-mouth’. This literally involves anal penetration followed by oral sex…she is literally eating her own shit. That occurred in 41% of the scenes that we coded.

“Furthermore, every single one of these acts, as a whole these extreme acts, these were the only acts that were predictive of aggression in the scene. So if you actually say, ‘Can the kind of sex acts that are happening, can that tell us anything about whether a scene is going to be aggressive? Yes… These tell you the likelihood of there being other kinds of aggression in the scene, when these sex acts were represented, was…anywhere between 4 and 8 times more likely.”

28min:28sec – Few porn scenes lack aggression

Bridges: “So how many scenes didn’t contain aggression? About 10%.”

28min:45sec – Namecalling and insults common in porn

Bridges: “For verbal aggression, by far namecalling and insulting were the most common types. They were seen in almost half of scenes.”

29min:29sec – Gagging and choking surprisingly common

Bridges: “Gagging and choking were much, much more common than any of us thought when we first walked into this project.”

30min:10sec – 73
% of the aggressors are men; women are the usual targets

Bridges: “Slapping happened 30% of the time… Most of the aggressors in these films were men…73%. By far the most common recipient of aggression was a woman. Even when women were aggressing, they were generally aggressing other women.”

30min:43sec – Targets in porn almost always show pleasure or neutrality when aggressed against

Bridges: “How did the person respond when they were aggressed?… In 95% of these 3,000 and some acts of aggression, the person was either neutral, as in no change of facial expression or verbal expression, or was sort of saying, ‘That feels great. Keep doing it. Right on.’ And in only 3% did we see some overt expression of displeasure or pain. Again, it seems to be very important to the people who are watching this to believe that the recipient of aggression is fact enjoying it, is choosing it at some level.”

31min:30sec – Porn conditions men to be aggressive and expect that women will like it

Bridges: “So in psychology, my field, we don’t know a ton about human behavior but there is one thing we do know, and that’s that people imitate what they see others rewarded for doing… [I]n the majority of cases [in the porn scenes], being the aggressor was something that paid off, it was reinforcing, it made it more likely that the behavior would happen again. And if you’re the one who’s watching it, it makes it more likely that you’re going to say, ‘Yeah, that sounds pretty good. They seem to like it. My girlfriend probably would, too.’ In no case…was the person in some way punished or discouraged from aggressing.”

33min:30sec – Porn films show 9 negative behaviors for every positive one

Bridges: “…in couples research we know that couples, even couples who fight a lot, as long as there’s a lot of good in the relationship, about five times more good than bad, they actually do pretty well.

“Less than 10% of the videos showed any kind of a positive act, and that included kissing… caressing happened maybe twice. Something like a verbal compliment, ‘Gosh, you look pretty’, not, ‘Slut bitch, come over here,’ that happened maybe five times in the 304 scenes. So we have a ratio of positive to negative behaviors of 1 to 9, which is not a sustainable, happy relationship.”

34min:32sec – Female-directed porn in the sample was little different from the rest

Bridges: “And we’re actually going to get back to one of the issues that was brought up earlier today, which is, ‘Well, you know, maybe we just go out and make ‘fem-porn’, we get more females to direct it. And then, it’ll be more egalitarian, it’ll be the kind of thing that we can all embrace and say, ‘Yes, this is what we want.’

“Well, of the popular films that we coded, less than 7% were directed by females. It is still dominated by very male-directed films. And we are now in the process of writing our second article from this study [where] we look at female-directed films specifically. And guess what. They’re not different. Not the bestselling popular ones. They’re on the whole just as violent, just as aggressive… One difference we’ve noted consistently is that they tend to show much more female to female aggression.”

36min:44sec – Porn teaches men to aggress

Bridges: “…we are teaching people to aggress. We are teaching people that slapping your girlfriend during the process of having sex is something that she will enjoy.”

40min-59min

Michelle Chang describes her experience viewing and coding 33 of the porn films in the study.

59min-62min

Wosnitzer discusses the ethics of conducting porn studies, how to make a safe environment for the researchers.

62min-71min

Question & Answer period.

See the complete presentation now on Google Video.

See also:

Gail Dines Presents: Pornography and Pop Culture (explicit)
Gail Dines
is Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Wheelock College in
Boston. For 20 years she has lectured across the country against
pornography and sexist portrayals of women. A Google video (1 hr 2 min) is now available of the lecture she gave to a rapt audience at the Pornography and Pop Culture conference
at Wheelock on March 24. This video describes the increasingly harsh
misuse of women in modern pornography–such as in the emerging
“ass-to-mouth” genre–and how the people, money and values of porn
reach deep into mainstream media and corporations.

This video includes explicit still images. Some may find it painful to
watch, especially victims of sexual violence. Acknowledging this,
activists have found that presenting today’s porn in an unfiltered
fashion is “an effective and rapid consciousness-raiser about misogyny and male views of women”. We have seen our opposition claim that we should go easy on porn because it’s a form of “art”, that it represents the empowerment of women, or that today’s porn is no more harmful than paintings or century-old erotica pictures. We feel the best counter to these arguments is to show people what today’s porn actually is.

Free Book Download: Diana Russell’s Against Pornography: The Evidence of Harm (explicit)
Against Pornography is unusual in that it goes beyond abstract
discussions of pornography to present the raw material, so readers can
judge for themselves. Dr. Russell reprints and analyzes over 100
cartoons and pictures from publications like Playboy, Penthouse,
Hustler and Cheri.

A New Category Debuts: Love and Beauty
Our new category, Love and Beauty, will show how sex, love, relationships and people can be so much more than the narrow, blinkered version that porn offers. Watching porn instead of seeking a loving relationship with a real person is like being given a gorgeous race car that can go 200 miles per hour, only to drive it backwards down the highway at a crawl and scrape it against railings and bridge abutments.

Now on Sale at Capital Video: Watch Women Eat Their Own Poop (explicit)
One of the newer crazes in porn is a genre called “ass-to-mouth”.
In a typical scenario, a man has anal sex with a woman, then puts his
penis into her mouth. In effect, the woman is being paid to eat her own
feces. How to interpret this as empowering to women is beyond our
imagination…

Apart from the symbolism, we would argue that paid A2M, short of
elaborate medical precautions, should simply be illegal from a
workplace safety point of view.

Capital Video’s Magazine Rack: Bondage, Racism and More
“Because her body is beginning to ache, she writhes on the carpet. It makes watching her even more arousing.”

“A bed is still one of the most convenient bondage platforms invented
by man. If the headboard is of the metal type, rather than solid wood,
so much the better. A girl’s wrists can readily be tied to it,
imprisoning her.”

“Tied to the post, Tracy takes a fearful whipping.”

“With
the shapely divorcee twisting like a snake and frantically protesting
the indignity he was inflicting on her, Rex proceeded to peel her black
panties down…”

Testimony in Minneapolis: With Growth of Porn, Rapists Show Less Remorse
[L]iterally hundreds of women have mentioned to me the anger and
despair they feel when their husbands, lovers, or other male partners
press upon them specific sexual acts which these men learned from
pornographic materials–acts of bestiality, sodomy, “swinging”, forced
group sex, etc. The men feel such pressure on women is acceptable
because porn is acceptable, and pornography was the so-called
“educational” source…

[T]he work of Dr. Natalie Shainess (psychiatrist of New York) and Dr.
Frank Osanka [sic] (psychologist and child-abuse specialist, Chicago)
show that convicted rapists who, even five to seven years ago,
expressed remorse about their acts of violence, recently show no such
remorse and often cite as a reason for their guiltlessness that
“everyone knows women want to be raped; all the porn stuff proves that.”

Porn Use Correlates with Infidelity, Prostitution, Aggression, Rape-Supportive Beliefs
In 1995, Human Communication Research reported on a meta-analysis of 33
different studies. Researchers found that “Exposure to pornography
increases behavioral aggression.
While there are many factors that influence this effect (for example,
the content of the pornography viewed), the researchers conclude that a
connection between exposure to pornography and subsequent behavioral
aggression exists.”

In 2000, researchers reported in Annual Review of Sex Research that “A
relationship exists between frequent pornography consumption and sexually aggressive behavior.
This relationship is especially strong for those with the highest
“predisposing” risk level for sexual aggression. Those who are at high
risk for sexual aggression and who frequently consume pornography have
sexual aggression levels that are four times higher than those who do
not consume pornography frequently.”

Salon: Porn Isolates its Users, Erodes Civility and Love
…whether
you approve of porn in theory or not, its effect will be to displace
[the mate of the porn addict]. Like crack, it tends to take over, to
push out other hungers that tend to nurture the human community by
making us dependent on one another. Since we are dependent on each
other we must be civil and loving. If we are not dependent on each
other then we needn’t be civil and loving. We needn’t have community
and family. That is the way in which any drug breaks down family and
community by isolating its user. Porn isolates its users also, meeting
their needs outside the social compact. The social compact becomes a
commercial compact between anonymous people, while those in the actual
human community are relegated to bystander status. It introduces a
third party into the erotic economy of a relationship…

Testimony in Minneapolis: Porn and the Death Spiral of a Marriage
…we would have incredible arguments with each other. I
would tell him I loved him, I only wanted to love him, I wanted to be a
good wife, I wanted our marriage to work, but I didn’t want to be with
these other people. It was he I wanted to be with, and no one else. He
told me if I loved him I would do this. And that, as I could see from
the things that he read me in the magazines initially, a lot of times
women didn’t like it, but if I tried it enough I would probably like
it, and I would learn to like it. And he would read me stories where
women learned to like it.

Young New Yorkers Talk about Porn’s Effect on their Relationships (explicit language)
They have since broken up, and have stopped talking. “He was a lot more
innocent when he was younger,” she says. “He was looking for love and
companionship. Now he just wants a good lay. I’m sure he’s looking for
some huge-breasted, tight-assed bitch…” These days, she feels “very
jaded about love and sex,” but every so often, she finds her cynicism
dissolving… “I think it will be really rare, and hopefully it will
happen, that I can meet a guy who will be happy with only me.”

Time to Explore the Links Between Porn, Testosterone, Sexual Behavior and Violence
Pornographers achieve this combination of a high number of mindbody
links and maximum drug/hormone release by mixing sexual images with
male dominance, aggression and violent images intended to shock and
stimulate simultaneously. Porn scenes ranging from simple “male in
control” to aggression, rape, torture and murder, abound in Internet
porn geared to the male viewer.

Carol Queen: Time for the Porn Film Industry to Stop Being a Poster Child of Heterosexual HIV Transmission
Extremely risky acts are safer when condoms are correctly used. To porn
fans for whom the sight of a condom is pleasure-squelching, I say: Get
used to it. The (heterosexual) adult industry has for 20 years shirked
an opportunity to help normalize condom use. This doesn’t just put its
own talent at risk. It puts viewers and their partners at risk as well.

Jenna Jameson’s Tragic Backstory; Seeking Virgins with Paris Hilton
COOPER: …[I]f you had a daughter, if she came to you and said that she wanted to get into that industry?
JAMESON: I’d tie her in the closet. Only because this is such a hard
industry for a woman to get ahead and get the respect that she
deserves. I fought tooth and nail to get to where I am, and it’s not
something that I would want my daughter to go through. It’s not
something that any parent would choose for their child.

Los Angeles Times: “In California’s Unregulated Porn Film Industry, an Alarming Number of Performers Are Infected With HIV and Other Sexually Transmitted Diseases. And Nobody Seems to Care.”
[I]n studios in the San Fernando Valley…actors and actresses were working on movies. They put in long hours, commonly without meal breaks. They often worked without clean toilets, toilet paper, soap or water. More importantly, they were exposed to a host of infectious, and sometimes fatal, diseases…

National Feminist Antipornography Movement
“As Jerome Tanner put it during a pornography directors’ roundtable
discussion featured in Adult Video News, ‘People just want it harder,
harder, and harder, because like Ron said, what are you gonna do next?’
Another director, Jules Jordan, was blunt about his task: ‘[O]ne of the
things about today’s porn and the extreme market, the gonzo market, so
many fans want to see so much more extreme stuff that I’m always trying
to figure out ways to do something different. But it seems everybody
wants to see a girl doing a d.p. [double penetration] now or a
gangbang. For certain girls, that’s great, and I like to see that for
certain people, but a lot of fans are becoming a lot more demanding
about wanting to see the more extreme stuff. It’s definitely brought
porn somewhere, but I don’t know where it’s headed from there.’

Martin Amis: “A rough trade” (explicit)
Regan Starr who worked on the second film in this “line”, Rough Sex 2… “I got the shit kicked out of me,” she said. “I was told before the video–and they said this very proudly, mind you–that in this line most of the girls start crying because they’re hurting so bad…. I couldn’t breathe. I was being hit and choked. I was really upset, and they didn’t stop. They kept filming. You can hear me say, ‘Turn the fucking camera off’, and they kept going.”