The objectification of women in mainstream pornographic videos in Australia

Journal of Sex Research, Nov, 2005 by Alan McKee

Time spent talking to other character's. There are other ways to communicate apart from speaking, but measuring speech gives some sense of relative subjectivity, so coders measured how much talking each of the characters did. Instructions on this point were explicit, in order to focus on conversation that could reasonably be seen as expressing character and subjectivity:

   Note length of time the character spent in conversation in course
   of the video. Do not count grunts, or exclamations like 'Oh, yes.
   harder,' or 'You like that?'

Time spent looking at the camera. I also measured how much interaction the characters had with the camera. When characters look at or speak to the camera, they acknowledge that they are being watched and thus express subjectivity.

Time spent speaking to the camera. Film studies tradition dictates that the most powerful form of interaction for suggesting agency in a film is when a character both looks at and talks directly to the camera. Coders thus measured how much time each character spent talking directly to the camera.

Violence in Pornography

As discussed above, I followed the model presented by Cowan et al. (1988) and measured violence as a subset of behaviors that suggest objectification. As with the case of degrading pornography, there is no clear definition of violence available to the researcher. Although this has been a key term in pornography research, no commonly agreed-upon definition exists as to what actions or forms of representation constitute violence.

Before attempting to isolate a workable definition of violence in pornography for this project, I thoroughly reviewed extant literature on the topic, as summarized below. There are three main traditions of analysis into pornography, violence, and effects on consumers: sex offender studies, aggregate studies and laboratory experiments.

In sex offender studies, researchers interview subjects who have committed sex crimes--including, though not always limited to, rape--and ask about their exposure to pornographic materials. This information is then compared with the pornographic consumption of non-offending control groups. It is generally agreed that these studies have demonstrated that rapists tend to use less pornography-both violent and non-violent--than control groups; and that, on average, they come from more sexually repressed backgrounds and are exposed to pornography at a later age (see Abel, Becker, & Mittleman, 1985; Gebhard, Gagnon, Pomeroy, & Christensen, 1965; Goldstein & Kant, 1973).

The methodology from sex offender studies has provided the most reliable data we currently possess about the effects of pornography on its users. Findings from such studies have proven consistent and replicable and there is little dispute about the interpretation of such data (for exceptions see Brannigan, 1991; Check & Malamuth, 1986). In contrast, the data generated by aggregate studies and laboratory studies are contradictory and highly contested. In aggregate studies, researchers compare the availability or consumption of pornographic material in a society with reported levels of sex crimes, particularly rape. Some aggregate studies show that in societies where pornographic material is more readily available, rates of reported rape drop, or at least rise less quickly than other forms of crime (e.g., Kutchinsky, 1991). However, other studies show that there is a correlation between availability of pornography and rape rates (e.g., Scott & Schwalm, 1988a). Possible explanations for these disjunctions include the distinction between availability and consumption, the presence of intervening variables, the fact that people consuming pornography are not demonstrably the same people as those committing sexual violence, and the fact that evidence is being interpreted in multiple, contradictory ways. Aggregate studies are now falling from favor because of these problems.