Taboos in Porn: Physical Aggression
TRIGGER WARNING: Swearing, Physical Assault, Sexual Assault, Sexual Violence, Abusive Relationships, Rape
This, for the last time, is not an open letter against pornography.
This is not an attempt to slut shame, kink shame etc., etc.
This is a call for a little more questioning and much more education about how we talk about sex.
So far, I’ve got up on my soapbox and talked about the colonial shadow of racism in porn categories and the cultural implications of porn’s love of the “barely legal” teen body. I hope your loins are suitably well-girded, because today’s topic is violence. Strap in (or strap on if that’s your thing), and I promise I’ll write about something nicer next time.
Fifty Shades of Fucked Up
In 2011, the world was changed forever when E.L James aka Twilight superfan Snowqueen's Icedragon introduced us to Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele.
And, damn, did 50 Shades have a cultural impact and then some. Sex toy sales jumped up by 400% and hospitalisations for sex toy related injuries doubled. Beyond sales figures, Fifty Shades of Grey brought a very different approach to sex into the mainstream consciousness. Bondage, BDSM and dom/sub agreements became weirdly normal to talk about over coffee, and we were all subjected to seeing terrible slogan t-shirts like “Waiting for My Mr Grey” (and worse).
However, what Fifty Shades missed out was healthy consent. In fact, the Venn diagram of healthy BDSM relationships and what 50 Shades of Grey and 365 DNI gave us is two circles on opposite sides of the room. Take this quote:
“I shrug, trapped. I don’t want to lose him. In spite of all his demands, his need to control, his scary vices. I have never felt as alive as I do now. … But his moods… oh –and he wants to hurt me. He says he’ll think about my reservations, but it still scares me. … Deep down I would just like more, more affection, more playful Christian, more… love.”
Hi, Anastasia. This is an abusive relationship. Being scared of your partner’s mood swings and violent outbursts is a big red flag.
Natalie Collins, founder of the “Fifty Shades is Domestic Abuse” campaign explains that Fifty Shades: “brought a niche sexual practice with its own rules, nuances and safety mechanisms into mainstream consciousness, without bringing any of the rules, nuances or safety mechanisms with it. It led to a shift in cultural consciousness which now presumes that, rather than this being a niche thing, large swathes of women are turned on by pain and powerlessness.”
That is, Fifty Shades went from 0-60 really quickly, skipping over the bit where boundaries were discussed (being forced to sign an all-or-nothing contract doesn’t count), safe-words were respected, and mutually informed consent was possible.
Which brings me to an important point. Rough sex and abuse are not synonymous. It is possible to be sex positive and submissive. It is possible to enjoy being pinned down, slapped, and called names (and/or to be doing the pinning down etc.), and to be a feminist. It is possible to get your rocks off to German dungeon porn and still think that porn needs to be re-contextualised in cultural consciousness.
Oh Yeah, Baby, Gimme Those Sexy Porn Facts
Porn is not a niche thing anymore, and porn that used to be seen as niche, kinky and hardcore has become solidly mainstream. One study (Bridges, Wosnitzer, Scharrer, Sun, & Liberman, 2010) found that 88% of porn videos contained physical aggression (slapping, choking, gagging etc.) and almost half contained verbal aggression. The perpetrators of the aggression were overwhelmingly male, and 87% of the aggression was directed at women.
In addition to increased violence, there is a trend towards porn that is more “normal” and less rooted in the world of shagpile carpets and funky soundtracks. The term “amateur” topped Pornhub’s searches in 2019. Other top-searched terms include “gangbang” and “bondage”. The top trending categories on Pornhub gay included “dominant” and “rough sex”. At the most extreme end of the scale, there are multiple accounts of actual rape being filmed and uploaded to Pornhub, then reshared and reposted and not taken down under the guise of “free speech”.
More than 90% of boys have seen porn by the age of 17, and three-quarters of youth use porn as their primary source of sexual education (Sun, C., Bridges, A., Johnson, J.A. et al, 2016). In 2014, Los Angeles police found links between the consumption of violent porn by under-age sex offenders (children and teenagers committing assault) and the violence of their crimes. A 2019 study found that 44% of Grade 10 high school students have been asked to act out something their partner saw in porn. Teenagers who actively seek out violent pornography are six times more likely to have aggressive sex than those who do not watch it (Rostad., Gittins-Stone, Huntington, et al, 2019).
Campaigns like We Can’t Consent To This UK are raising awareness of the reliance on men claiming “Sex Games Gone Wrong” in homicide trials. Elizabeth Yardley, a criminologist, argues that the defence of “rough sex gone too far” comes from a “culturally approved script for perpetrators of violence against women”. This culturally approved script is written by both mainstream media and porn, but it is hard to argue that porn’s ubiquity has not had a dramatic effect on the cultural convention that women are “asking for it”, even when they end up dead.
Cumming to a Conclusion
To be clear, porn does not turn people into sex-crazed murderers. Asking your partner to pull your hair or beat you on the bottom with you Woman’s Weekly does not make you depraved. But (and it’s a big one) the gap between what is normalised in porn and what is normalised in wider culture is the size of a canyon. This is the problem.
There is undeniably an element of cognitive dissonance required to imagine how rough, degrading sex can intersect with kind, supportive love when you haven’t experienced it. Aftercare and scenes where boundaries are discussed by fully clothed actors are rarely included in porn, and they’re pretty much never in in the 2-minute trailers or 20-minute compilations of violent, degrading shots of women being abused.
The problem is that, culturally, we don’t address this gap, this cognitive dissonance. We have left teenagers, young people and adults to get their entire conceptualisation of sex from porn and porn-influenced media. We have failed to normalise informed consent, and we prefer to brush off repeated instances of murder through “sex game gone wrong” rather than address the fact that sexual violence is being normalised.
Whether we like it or not, pornography is the central author of our cultural sexual script. What we see in porn shapes our own expectations of what sex looks like and how people having sex behave towards each other. The more porn we watch, the more reliant we become on this porn-approved script; porn is not just a fantasy. And we can’t afford to ignore that.
Aftercare:
For positive porn: Bellesa - https://www.bellesa.co/ , Make Love Not Porn - https://makelovenotporn.tv/
For beautiful art: @tinamariaelena on Instagram
For sensuality: @che.che.luna on Instagram, @evyan.whitney on Instagram
For education: https://schoolofsexed.org/ , @shibari.study on Instagram (rope bondage tutorials)
For support: https://mermaidsuk.org.uk/ (for trans and gender diverse kids and young people), https://www.samaritans.org/
References & Recommended Reading:
https://theattic.jezebel.com/i-dont-know-whether-to-kiss-you-or-spank-you-a-half-ce-1769140132/amp
Bridges, Ana J., Robert Wosnitzer, Erica Scharrer, Chyng Sun, and Rachael Liberman. “Aggression and Sexual Behavior in Best-Selling Pornography Videos: A Content Analysis Update.” Violence Against Women 16, no. 10 (October 2010): 1065–85. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801210382866.
Wright, P. J., & Randall, A. K. (2012). Internet pornography exposure and risky sexual behavior among adult males in the United States. Computers in Human Behavior, 28, 1410–1416. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2012.03.003.
Rostad, W.L., Gittins-Stone, D., Huntington, C. et al. The Association Between Exposure to Violent Pornography and Teen Dating Violence in Grade 10 High School Students. Arch Sex Behav 48, 2137–2147 (2019). https://doi-org.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/10.1007/s10508-019-1435-4.
Sun, C., Bridges, A., Johnson, J.A. et al. Pornography and the Male Sexual Script: An Analysis of Consumption and Sexual Relations. Arch Sex Behav 45, 983–994 (2016).:
