The Rise of Spanking, Hitting, and Strangulation: A Longitudinal Evaluation of Aggression in Pornography
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the last two decades, a large body of literature has concluded that viewing pornography that features aggression is associated with attitudes that endorse aggression and with sexually aggressive behaviors. Yet, previous content analyses of pornography have produced substantial variability in reported rates of aggression. Furthermore, these analyses did not include data from the last decade and most of them failed to examine time trends in pornographic representations of aggression. We examined a sample of 255 popular online pornographic videos from Pornhub, over a period of 25 years, from 2000 to 2024. While any visible physical aggression appeared in 43.9% of the videos in the entire sample, nonconsensual aggression was rare. Moreover, depictions of aggression in the most viewed videos have not been stable over time, with rates of aggression nearly tripling between the first and last decades of the analysis. While this growth is primarily the result of increases in spanking, we also found significant increases in hitting and choking practices. We discuss the potential consequences of these increases, as well as possible policy and educational implications.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".