While this article focuses on violence against women, men can also be victimized by violence. Click here to learn more.
“When I heard the second scream, I knew something was wrong,” Max shared.
He and his friend, Chris, were walking in a park late one night when they heard a blood-curdling cry. They turned to look at one another, half expecting to hear laughs from a friend who’d startled another friend. The laughs didn’t come. Instead, Chris and Max heard another pained scream, including the unmistakable voice of a woman shouting, “Get off of me!”
The pair bolted toward the sound. Upon arrival at the scene, they witnessed a young man fleeing. They found a shaken young woman in tears, her shirt and bra ripped. They consoled the woman. Apparently, she knew the man who attacked her, and she begged Max and Chris not to call the police.
While the situation didn’t go as far as it could have, the damage was already done. This is one of the innumerable examples of gender-based violence that happens every day to women and girls everywhere.
1 in 3
The above example illustrates the devastating power of sexual violence toward women, emphasizing the alarming pervasiveness of such incidents.
According to data from the World Health Organization (WHO) and their partners, 1 in 3 women are subjected to physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner or sexual violence from a non-partner across their lifetime.
That number, equitable to about 736 million women, has remained mostly unchanged over the past decade. What’s more is that the WHO’s data exhibits sexual violence to be very common in young women too: 1 in 4 women between the ages of 15 and 24 who have been in a relationship will have already experienced violence by an intimate partner by the time they reach their mid-twenties.
At Fight the New Drug, our mission is to educate on the harmful effects of porn through science, facts, and personal accounts. We aim to highlight decades of research linking porn to various issues, including sexual violence.
Listen to one expert discuss how porn and violence are interlinked:
As Dr. John Foubert said in the video above, the odds that porn and sexual violence are not connected are very, very low.
While porn is by no means the sole cause of this form of violence toward women, and not even close to every porn consumer will become a perpetrator, porn certainly plays a role in fueling and perpetuating violence against women based on the evidence listed here. Porn dehumanizes women, and when someone is dehumanized, it is easier to commit violence against them.
Porn normalizes violence against women by packaging it as entertainment and selling it as an arousing fantasy. Porn has been shown to eroticize the very acts of violence women have been victimized by.
Let’s dive into five studies that show how porn can normalize sexual violence toward women.
Study 1: Porn includes high levels of verbal and physical aggression (2010)
After analyzing 304 scenes from popular porn videos, the study found high levels of both verbal and physical aggression. More specifically, 88.2% of the scenes analyzed contained physical aggression, including spanking, gagging, and slapping, while 48.7% of scenes contained verbal aggression, primarily name-calling.
But that’s not all: men were usually the perpetrators of the aggression, and females were overwhelmingly the targets.
Furthermore, women frequently targeted responded neutrally or with pleasure to aggression, implying sexual violence is not a big deal or pleasurable.
Study 2: Porn can foster sexist attitudes (2013)
After looking at a probability-based sample of young Danish adults, this study concluded that increased past pornography consumption was significantly correlated with less egalitarian attitudes toward women and more hostile sexism.
The study noted a correlation between hostile sexism, particularly in participants with lower agreeableness, and benevolent sexism among women. Moreover, sexual arousal from the porn was, at least in part, found to bring about sexist attitudes.
Study 3: Porn consumption is linked to sexual victimization in teenage girls (2019)
The goal of this study was to see if the number of online sexual experiences an adolescent female has could be used to predict the odds of sexual assault for or the number of physically violent dating partners of that same female.
In the study, young females who had a high probability of engaging in online sexual experiences were more likely to experience sexual assault one year later as compared to those who experienced the most sexual attention online.
The study notes that there was a high probability of internet porn use for the first group. Those intentionally seeking porn and sex chatting predicted having more violent partners a year later, according to the study.
Study 4: Meta-analysis confirms a connection between porn consumption and sexual aggression (2016)
The Journal of Communication performed a meta-analysis of 22 studies across 7 countries and found that the studies exhibit clear evidence that porn consumption increases physical and verbal sexual aggression.
More specifically, the study found the following: “[Porn] consumption was indeed associated with sexual aggression in the United States and internationally, among males and females, and in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. Associations were stronger for verbal than physical and sexual aggression, although both were significant. The general pattern of results suggested that violent content may be an exacerbating factor.”
Not all porn consumers become abusers, but it doesn’t dismiss the link between pornography and real-world violence or aggression. When porn teaches that aggression is a part of sex and an expression of arousal, that violence is normalized and eroticized.
Study 5: Women receive 97% of physically aggressive acts in porn (2020)
An analysis performed on 7,430 porn videos scraped from XVideos and Pornhub, two of the world’s most popular internet porn providers, found physical aggression against women present in 44.3% of Pornhub and 33.9% of XVideos scenes. The most common forms of physical aggression noted were spanking and gagging.
The study revealed that physical aggression outweighed verbal aggression in the sampled porn videos. However, when verbal aggression occurred, it often took the form of gender-specific language, including profane and derogatory names targeting women.
Why this matters
Because research suggests that mass media—ranging from magazines to TV to porn—can all have an impact on consumers’ sexual attitudes and behaviors, and the above studies definitively show that porn is full of sexual violence, we can draw the conclusion that sexual violence in porn can and does normalize and advertise unacceptable and abusive behavior—especially toward women.
In other words, if we are going to address sexual violence against women in our culture fully, we need to address all the sources that fuel, perpetuate, and normalize it.
