Who Likes Violent Porn? New Research Upends Expectations

Feminist activists and social commentators alike have long decried the level of aggression portrayed in pornographic videos. The argument is that watching such videos teaches men that violent sexual behavior is acceptable. Furthermore, some maintain that men who watch violent porn may even develop a taste for aggressive sex that they didn't have before.

According to the received wisdom, porn is produced for and consumed by male audiences. In this view, pornography plays into the patriarchy, in which men seek to subjugate women, viewing them as little more than sex objects for the purpose of their own sexual gratification. Thus, the content of internet porn reflects the tastes of its male consumers.

Given the vast amount of porn now available online, it’s difficult to estimate the percentage of it that portrays violent content, especially considering that different sites cater to different tastes. Estimates range from as low as 10 percent to as high as 90 percent.

This wide range is largely due to the different ways in which researchers define aggression. Anti-porn writers tend to cite statistics at the high end of this range. This is because they count acts that may be considered playful, such as spanking, tickling, or pulling hair, and to which the woman appears to have consented.

Most Men Do Not Like Violent Porn

But even if estimates in the lower range are more accurate, the question still remains: What kind of people find violent porn arousing? Surely, these must be men, at least according to the received wisdom. After all, women viewers should empathize with the women performers who are the targets of abuse, and thus they should find such content to be repulsive rather than arousing.

Until fairly recently, the vast majority of porn users were men, and these arguments made sense, even if there was little empirical evidence to support them. In recent years, however, more and more women have been consuming porn. So now the question becomes: What sort of porn do women want to watch?

So far, the general assumption has been that women would be interested in romantic scenes portraying loving couples who are attentive to each other’s sexual needs—and preferably with soft music playing in the background. With the rise of female porn viewership, a number of porn companies have started producing such “female-friendly” content. But is this really what women want?

Recent research has challenged the accepted opinion that men like violent porn and women like romantic porn. Surveys reveal that most men are turned off by violent porn, and furthermore, at least some women report finding depictions of aggression against women to be a turn-on. This suggests that interest in violent porn may not be so much a difference of gender as one of personality.

More Women Than Men Say Violent Porn Turns Them On

To further understand what kind of people like violent porn, McGill University (Montreal, Canada) psychologist Eran Shor conducted interviews with 122 people, roughly equally divided between men and women. Her findings challenge the received wisdom on porn preferences among men and women.

First, she found that many men and women don’t like violent porn, insisting that they’re turned off by depictions of aggression against women. While it was expected that women wouldn’t like violent porn, this finding does challenge the narrative that men just want to dominate women and use them as sex objects.

Second, among those who said they were turned on by violent porn, the majority of these were women. Overwhelmingly, women were more likely than men to state that they found aggression to be arousing and that they actively sought out aggressive displays in porn. The only exception was that very few men or women expressed an interest in watching videos that portrayed non-consensual aggression.

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In fact, the concept of “consensual aggression” was key in understanding these women’s interest in violent porn. Many of the women in this study found acts such as biting, spanking, hair-pulling, and other kinds of rough handling to be playful and arousing as long as the female performer was giving verbal or facial cues of consent.

“Consensual Aggression” Is the Key

Shor notes that many of the female participants initially denied any interest in violent porn until further into the interview when they came to understand that the interviewer was also including consensual aggression. Overall, two-thirds of the women in this study confided that they found at least some aggression in porn to be arousing, and about half confessed that they sometimes sought out “harder” forms of aggression as well.

Importantly, these women insisted that had already been attracted to consensual aggression and dominance before they started viewing porn. In other words, they actively sought out what they were already interested in rather than developing a taste for it after having seen it first in porn. Such revelations challenge the narrative that watching violent porn creates a desire to act out this kind of aggression with sex partners.

Those women who did express an interest in violent porn also made it clear that they didn’t like it all the time. As one respondent put it: “It depends on the mood. Sometimes I like it; sometimes it grosses me out.” Rather than explaining an attraction to violent porn in terms of gender or personality differences, it seems even better to think of it as one type of porn that many viewers enjoy on occasion.

Many of the women who said they liked violent porn also confided that they often felt guilty about it afterward. Here we see the conflict between personal preferences and social expectations.

Finally, these women also insisted that even though they enjoyed viewing aggression in porn, they would not want to be treated that way by their sex partners. Comments such as these get at the fact that porn consumers understand porn is fantasy, not reality, and moreover that it is an aspect of their sexuality separate from their partnered sex life.

Human sexuality is complex and multifaceted. Relying on gender stereotypes about sexual preferences and proscribing particular acts as disgusting or decadent do little to help us understand the panoply of human sexual behavior. Overall, the respondents in this study express a healthy sexual attitude, namely that whatever consenting adults do in private is just fine—and nobody else’s business.