The objectification of women in mainstream pornographic videos in Australia

Journal of Sex Research, Nov, 2005 by Alan McKee

Naming. This measure stems from the idea that names are important signs of agency in human culture. To be granted a name is to be seen as a person with an identity; in contrast, being nameless is being not fully human. I examined whether characters were given names or remained as nameless bodies having sex in these videos.

I also drew on the film studies tradition of thinking about how filmic devices are used to encourage us to see characters either as subjects with which to identify or objects at which to look. From his analysis of the history of representation of female nudes Berger (1972) argued,

   Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch
   themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations
   between men and women, but also the relation of women to
   themselves. The surveyer of women in herself is male: the surveyed
   female. Thus she turns herself into an object--and most
   particularly an object of vision: a sight (p. 47).

Mulvey expanded on this, arguing from her survey of mainstream Hollywood cinema that in audiovisual media, woman is "'image,' man is 'bearer of the look'" (1975/1990, p. 33). She noted that subjects in film tend to have agency and to drive the narrative, but visual strategies are used to create women as objects of the look. Many of these strategies are measurable, such as who is centered in the frame and who the camera follows, who is in focus, how characters are lit, and where the characters' gazes direct viewers' gazes (Mulvey).

I focused on two measurable elements in this project. The first was who looks at the camera in pornographic videos. This point has been articulated by Dyer (1982), who pointed out that the equation of looking and power is not straightforward. However, he drew attention to the way characters display their subjectivity by "returning the gaze," or looking back at the camera. This is now generally accepted in film studies as giving an insight into which characters are powerful (e.g., Hantke, 1998).

The second point I studied was the presence of speech in these films. Postcolonial theory has argued strongly for the importance of characters being allowed to speak for themselves in representations. This idea has been developed in relation to racist representation in film. It is argued that when characters speak in a film, they are showing personality, character, and subjectivity; members of dominated groups do not speak (Said, 1985; Spivak, 1988). Thus, if pornographic videos featured only men's voices, pleasures, and opinions, this would give the masculine perspective more power.

From these insights, I developed three measures. Measuring such elements of the text is extremely reductive and ignores the messy textual details of how people speak, the tone of voice, how they hold their head, whether it sounds as though they mean what they say, and so on--all of the details that mediate the ways in which viewers interpret audiovisual images in the real world. However, this is a requirement of content analysis--that measures be developed which can be quantified, even at the expense of accuracy in understanding how images might actually be interpreted (McKee, 2003).