The objectification of women in mainstream pornographic videos in Australia

Journal of Sex Research, Nov, 2005 by Alan McKee

However, this is not the same thing as consensual sadomasochist or bondage and domination/discipline acts, and must not be confused with them. In sadomasochistic and consensual B&D scenes, there is no point at which consent is not clear: all participants make it explicit that they are willing participants at all points in the process. There is no initial non-consent which might encourage a spectator to think that people might enjoy being forced to do things which they say they do not want to do. There is no point at which it is suggested to viewers that "No" actually means "Yes." In sadomasochistic scenes, explicitly, "Yes" means "Yes" (Albury, 2002a).

The second point of disagreement in previous research into violence in pornography is how expansively one should understand violence. Should the concept include only physical force, or should it include verbal and emotional force (Cowan et al., 1988)? Should it include putting people into awkward situations (Cowan & Campbell, 1994), anything that causes physical or social discomfort, or any kind of physical contact that is not explicitly gentle and tender (Dines et al., 1998)? There is no agreement on these questions in the literature.

With an awareness of this tradition of research, I aimed in this analysis to produce measures of violence which were as detailed in description and execution as possible. To this end, I drew on previous research to identify three familiar areas of violence: physical violence, measured by number of scenes including non-consensual physical sexual violence; verbal violence, measured by number of scenes including non-consensual use of sexually violent language; and coerced sex that does not necessarily involve physical or verbal force, measured by number of scenes including other forms of non-consensual sex.

I believe that this is the first study to make explicit the issue of consent in relation to violence. I also made explicit the limits of what would be coded as violence. The definition of violent actions comprised physical or verbal attacks which were obviously not consensual and therefore included an element of desire to harm (including emotional harm) other participants. In deciding what counted as violence, I drew on the work of a number of previous researchers. My basic definition fitted that of Baron, as quoted above: "Any form of behavior directed toward the goal of harm; or injuring another living being who is motivated to avoid such treatment." This made it possible to measure violence objectively by drawing the attention of coders to a number of exclusions from the category of violence.

"Isolated moments of rough sex play" were defined for coders as including those moments: "where a character may throw another on to a bed, push him back against a wall, etc., while the character being pushed laughs or makes clear in another way that he is enjoying this."

To exclude consensual sadomasochistic practices, I provided a detailed definition of sadomasochistic scenes for coders in the following terms: