One of the few encouraging cultural indicators these days is that string of exposés affirming, once again, that the porn industry is rife with rape, sex tracking, and sexual abuse is starting to wake people up. Mindgeek executives were grilled by Canadian Members of Parliament; major mainstream media outlets covered the revelations; American politicians began to discuss legislation targeting Pornhub.
The more people are forced to confront the violence and ugliness of digital porn, the more difficult it becomes to ignore the fact that we are a culture having a public #MeToo moment while privately watching women and girls get brutalized and assaulted for entertainment and sexual satisfaction.
In case anyone needed more evidence that pornography is fueling a new, subterranean rape culture, British researchers Fiona Vera-Gray, Clare McGlynn, Ibad Kureshi and Kate Butterby have just published the largest study of online porn to date in the British Journal of Criminology. Titled “Sexual violence as a sexual script in mainstream online pornography,” the study included a survey of 131,738 videos from the UK’s most popular porn sites, Pornhub, XHamster, and Xvideos.
Screenshots were taken every hour for six months between 2017 and 2018, with the researchers recording keywords that fall under the World Health Organization’s definition of sexual violence. Over 8,000 of 131,738 titles contained references to sexual violence, with 5,785 of those referencing incest. Read more…
