Abstract
Past research has identified a subgenre of mainstream pornography that attempts to create the illusion for consumers that sex is occurring between an adult and a minor (i.e., a child or young adolescent under the age of 18). This illusion is established through various textual, verbal, visual, and behavioural cues. Although the construction of adult–minor relationships in pornography has received some scholarly attention, there has been no attempt to investigate this phenomenon within pornographic videos available via the Internet. The current study addressed this omission by analyzing for content 150 of the most popular “teen” pornography videos available on three pornography websites. We coded for textual, visual, verbal, and behavioural content that connoted sexual activity between an adult and a minor. Results indicated that a small number of videos (28, 18.7 % of the sample) contained a disproportionate percentage of cues (54.2 %), with the remaining videos containing little or no youth sexualized content. We conclude that only a subsample of videos clearly attempted to portray adult–minor relationships. The prevalence of various cues within the sample was quantified and discussed, as were limitations associated with this study and directions for future research.
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Notes
It should be noted that the authors acknowledge the variability that exists within the feminist movement regarding attitudes toward pornography (i.e., some embrace a harms-based view and others do not). The goal of the current study was to determine whether an element of the harms-based framework receives empirical support (i.e., stated simply, is pornography rife with youth-sexualised imagery?). In terms of perspective, if the authors had to situate themselves, they adhere most closely to the polymorphous view (Weitzer 2010). This perspective does not regard pornography through a positive/negative lens but, rather, allows the data to determine which framework is most compelling.
Dines (2009) notes that such descriptors differ from abusive terms such as “slut” and “whore” traditionally reserved for women in pornography.
Internet pornography is typically accessed through what are sometimes called “tube sites”: pornography websites modeled after the popular video-sharing website, YouTube (Woida 2009). Compared to their predecessors, tube sites host a vast and diverse amount of free pornographic content, both commercially produced videos (which users previously would have been required to pay for) and user-uploaded material (Woida 2009). Given the advantages of tube sites, it is not surprising they are now the most popular sites offering pornography (Alexa, n.d.).
A list of the videos that were coded is available from the corresponding author.
A copy of the coding sheet is available from the corresponding author.
Length of the clip correlated modestly with the presence/absence of explicit reference to age/youth, r (148) = .24, p = .003 (i.e., the longer the clip, the more likely it was to contain an explicit reference to youth).
A reviewer raised the important point that the rates observed might be found in non-teen oriented pornography. Thus, an additional dataset, using the same three porn tube sites (PornHub, RedTube, YouJizz: 10 sequences per site; 30 sequences in total) was constructed and analysed for content. The same coding sheet was used. However, for these clips, no age categories were specified. (Indeed, those reporting specific age groups such as teen and MILF were omitted). An independent rater assessed 10 of the 30 clips (agreement rate was 98.1 %). Approximately 97 % of the clips (30) did not contain explicit or implicit references to youth. Thus, the material noted in the “teen” category does not appear to generalize to pornography that falls outside of this genre.
Zillmann (1989) summarizes experimental evidence attesting to a similar desensitization effect in male viewers, albeit using non-child pornography as stimuli.
In this study, “teen pornography” was operationalised as pornographic images from websites in which the age of the adult models was estimated to be under 18 during a pilot study. The researchers found that participants exposed to this material were faster to recognize sexual words when paired with sexually neutral images of underage girls, compared to participants who had been exposed to typical, non-teen pornography.
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Peters, E.M., Morrison, T., McDermott, D.T. et al. Age is in the Eye of the Beholder: Examining the Cues Employed to Construct the Illusion of Youth in Teen Pornography. Sexuality & Culture 18, 527–546 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-013-9210-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-013-9210-5