The objectification of women in mainstream pornographic videos in Australia

Journal of Sex Research, Nov, 2005 by Alan McKee

Previous content analyses have tended to note only the presence of particular sexual acts in scenes, not for how long they were practiced. One of the major innovations of this project was to collect this data in greater detail. Coders were given precise instructions on choosing which acts to code and how to time them:

   In each scene, how long in seconds is spent on each of the
   following sexual practices? Focus only on the primary sexual
   act in each shot. Choose the primary sex act ... by [following]
   the conventions of framing and editing.

A taxonomy of 74 distinct sex acts was developed for the project (see Appendix 1).

Kinds of sex acts causing orgasms. As a further extension of the concept of penis worship, I developed another measure to take account of possible phallocentrism in pornography. Some writers argue that mainstream representations of sexuality are centered on the penis and that they continue the myth of the vaginal orgasm, the false belief that women should be able to orgasm purely from being penetrated by a penis (Dell'Ollio, 1972). If pornographic videos showed women having orgasms purely from penile intromission, it could be argued that they were showing the sex act from the point of view of men, rather than as it is experienced by women. This would involve objectifying women under the criteria identified by Cowan and Dunn (1994). The coders thus noted the sex act that caused the orgasms in each scene in the videos.

I was aware of the generic expectation that the porn viewer will be able to see the orgasm. This means that men will often withdraw in order to ejaculate, sometimes masturbating themselves while they do so. I specified that the coders not to code this as masturbation if it occurred for five seconds or less.

The measures described to this point have been more detailed and developed versions of previous measures, albeit with no attention to status inequality, and with an attempt to develop a more detailed account of terms, such as domination and penis worship, that have previously been left to the subjective judgement of coders. However, I also wanted to measure the objectification of characters more clearly by drawing on the tradition of film studies, which identifies some characters as subjects--agents, fully human with developed internal states--and others as objects--about whose inner lives we know nothing, and whose agency is not clear. This offers a valuable new approach to the study of objectification in pornography. As Wicke (2002) has argued, "Textual analysis is particularly useful in debates about pornography ... in isolating features of style and content which are shared with other forms of representation" (quoted in Attwood, 2002, p. 94). I developed five measures to take account of the processes of identification in the pornographic films.

Central characters. I used the film studies concept of "point of view," which suggests that stories are always told from the point of view of a particular character--the character from whose perspective we see the story. Coders were asked to identify the central character of each film, or the character from whose point of view the video was presented, only if one was obvious. A central character in a narrative film would be the one from whose perspective the story was told. In a documentary or amateur film, it could be a character who appeared in multiple scenes throughout the film. This measure took place at the level of the video as a whole; the rest of the measures of identification were developed at the level of character.