TESTING THE COMMON WISDOM: THE SOCIAL CONTENT OF VIDEO PORNOGRAPHY

In his historical overview of the pornography issue, Wilson (1973) noted that social concern regarding pornography tended to wax whenever a relatively rapid increase in its availability occurred, and that this was often associated with new technological development. The last decade has seen both the burgeoning availability of home video technology and a new apex of concern regarding pornography. The video industry has been a favourite target of attention for journalists and others. Thanks to their efforts, we now "know" the content of video pornography: it is graphically sexual, depicts violence against women, encourages rape and rape myths, and is populated by performers who lack the talent and other attributes to succeed in more legitimate media. The current study represents an attempt to assess the veracity of this common wisdom through analyses of 150 sexually oriented home videos with respect to their sexual, aggressive, and sexually aggressive content. While the primary focus was on sexually explicit, "triple-X" videos, a number of more mainstream "adult" videos were also analysed for comparative purposes. As anticipated, triple-X videos were found to depict sexual content significantly more explicitly than did adult videos. Contrary to expectations, however, it was the adult videos that contained significantly more aggressive and sexually aggressive content, and depicted this violence with significantly greater severity.