Sexual Violence in Three Pornographic Media: Toward a Sociological Explanation

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].. This study measures the sexually violent content in magazine, video, and Usenet (Internet newsgroup) pornography. Specifically, the level of violence, the amount of consensual and nonconsensual violence, and the gender of both victim and victimizer are compared. A consistent increase in the amount of violence from one medium to the next is found, although the increase between magazines and videos is not statistically significant. Further, both magazines and videos portray the violence as consensual, while the Usenet portrays it as nonconsensual. Third, magazines portray women as the victimizers more often than men, while the Usenet differs sharply and portrays men as the victimizers far more often. A series of possible explanations for these findings are offered, with the conclusion that the competition among men on the Usenet is an under-analyzed component of the differences among these media. With almost three decades of social science research on sexual violence in pornography, many of its characteristics are now well understood. We know that pornography contains images of both violence and sexual violence We have some idea of the negative effect of sexually violent pornography, especially on men's attitudes towards women (Allen, Unfortunately, however, the vast majority of previous research on sexual violence in pornography has approached pornography as an undifferentiated mass with regards to sexual violence. This study seeks to determine if this assumption is justified. Does pornography differ across media? In what ways, and to what degree? How can these differences be explained? These are the primary questions of concern to this paper. We begin our inquiry by reviewing past efforts to understand the content of pornography, and then present some tentative hypotheses concerning the levels of sexual violence across media. Through an empirical investigation of three contemporaneous pornographic media-magazines, videos, and Internet newsgroups (the Usenet)-we discuss differences in violent content, and speculate about some of the possible explanations for these differences. review of the literature to that branch of the research.) Although Smith (1976) found remarkable homogeneity in his sample of "adult-only" paperbacks, Malamuth and Spinner (1980) found increasing violence in their study of Playboy and Penthouse over a 5-year period, …