Eye Contact in Porn: Multifaceted Responses to Direct Gaze in Brief Sexually Explicit Videos Among Heterosexual Cisgender Men
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In pornography created for (and often by) heterosexual men, it is common for women performers to look directly at the camera. This simulates eye contact with viewers and is intended to create a participatory point of view. Little is known about the function of direct gaze in this context. In other domains, eye contact can increase physiological arousal, but also facilitate nurturant connection. Eye contact in porn may thus have a range of functions, which we explored in a preregistered study. Participants (N = 799) watched a brief sexually explicit video that had a high prevalence of eye contact (n = 399) or no eye contact (n = 400), then completed measures of eroticism, nurturance, guilt, other measures of affect and desire, participatory perspective, and whom they experienced sexual desire for. We found no significant differences in eroticism, nurturance, guilt, or other affect or desire measures across conditions, but found some evidence that eye contact may facilitate a participatory (vs. observational) perspective and desire for the performer in the film (e.g. vs. someone else), .05 < ps < .10. Overall, our findings provide preliminary insight into the function of eye contact in pornography and provide promising avenues for future research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".