Internet pornography: a social psychological perspective on internet sexuality

Journal of Sex Research, Nov, 2001 by William A. Fisher, Azy Barak

Systematic studies of the prevalence of sexually explicit materials appear at first glance to to verify views about the saturation of western society with violent pornography (see Barron & Kimmel, 2000; Cowan et al., 1988; Dietz & Evans, 1982; Malamuth & Spinner, 1980; Smith, 1976). A closer look at research findings in this area, however, provides a cautionary tale of conflicting and inconsistent results. We find, for example, that Malamuth and Spinner (1980) report a steady increase in sexual violence in Playboy and Penthouse across the 1970s, from about 1% to 5% of all text and pictures. Scott and Cuvelier (1987; see also Scott & Cuvelier, 1993), however, studied some of the same magazines over some of the same years and found that, over all of the 30 years of Playboy's publication, sexually violent pictures (.16 per issue) or cartoons (.58 per issue) were extraordinarily rare, and were actually decreasing in frequency of occurrence over time. In the realm of sexually explicit videos, Cowan et al. (1988) reported that fully 51% of X-rated videos sampled portrayed the rape of a woman, whereas Palys (1986) and Garcia and Milano (1991) found vastly less sexual violence in such videos, and Palys (1986) determined that levels of sexual violence in X-rated videos had been declining across the decade under study. Other researchers (Barron & Kimmell, 2000) report very high levels of sexual violence overall in sexually explicit magazines, videos, and Internet sex story postings, but at the same time note that the perpetrators of sexual violence in these media are usually or often women (65%, 49%, and 42% of perpetrators of sexual violence were women in magazines, videos, and Internet postings, respectively).

Initial reports of the prevalence of sexually explicit material on the Internet are eerily reminiscent of initial reports of the prevalence of print and video pornography. For example, Rimm's (1995) Georgetown Law Review paper, "A Survey of 917,410 Images, Descriptions, Short Stories, and Animations Downloaded 8.5 Million Times by Consumers in Over 2000 Cities ..." (since heavily criticized for methodological flaws; see Hoffman & Novak, 1995) provoked a Time magazine cover story concerning the saturation of the Internet with pornography (Elmer-Dewitt, 1995). The Time magazine cover story was quickly followed by passage of the U.S. Communications Decency Act of 1996, designed to suppress the flood of Internet pornography, but the Communications Decency Act itself was quickly declared unconstitutional. Current reports indicate variously that the online pornography industry will gross $366 million by 2001 (Spenger, 1999) or that it already grosses in excess of $1 billion ("Blue Money," 1999), and reports indicate that a spectacular 69% of all e-commerce involves the purchase of sexual materials ("Blue Money," 1999). Other sources report that 15% of all Internet users accessed one of the top five "Adult" websites in a recent month (Cooper, Scherer, Boies, & Gordon, 1999), that sex is the most frequently searched topic on the Internet (Freeman-Longo & Blanchard, 1998), and that all of the top eight word searches on the Internet involve pornography (Sparrow & Griffiths, 1997). In another example, Canada's national newspaper of record recently printed a two-part series entitled "The Triple-X Crisis. Is Pornography Out of Control?" (Cheney, 2000). This report informs readers that 3.8 million Canadians visited an Internet sex site in October of 2000 and reports that the average user visits Internet sex sites on 4 days per month. We note in passing that taking these statistics seriously requires us to believe that approximately 25% of all Canadian males, aged birth to death, visited an Internet sexuality site last month, and did so on an average of 4 different days.