The main research focus of studies in which the content of pornography has been analyzed has been to understand how women’s sexuality is described in the conventional pornographic media (e.g., pornographic magazines and videotapes) aimed at men (Gossett & Byrne, 2002). Researchers have explored whether or not the content of the pornographic material presented degrades women’s sexuality in terms of sexual inequality and sexual objectification. For example, Cowan, Lee, Levy, and Snyder (1988) have shown that pornographic movies are saturated with images depicting gender inequality and male dominance over women.

As the Internet has become a very popular medium for pursuit of sexual interests, representation of sexuality on the Internet has started to draw research attention. However, only a few researchers have investigated the content of pornographic material on the Internet (Gossett & Byrne, 2002; Mehta, 2001; Mehta & Plaza, 1997). Analyzing pornographic still images in Usenet, Mehta found that themes portrayed vary, ranging from being mildly offensive to some people (e.g., nudity), to the extreme or abhorrent (e.g., bestiality), to illegal content (e.g., child pornography, rape). Gossett and Byrne found that women are more likely to be portrayed as sexual victims, whereas men are more likely to be portrayed as sexual perpetrators. However, these researchers have focused on the representation of women’s sexuality on pornographic websites aimed at males.

McNair (1996) notes that in the 1970s “complex and sophisticated discourse about sex became a feature of women’s magazines, and porn for women appeared in the form of Playgirl” (p. 98). Despite this now-established custom of women’s pornography, little attention has been paid to the question of how sexuality is portrayed, both offline and online, in pornography aimed at women.

The Internet is not a medium exclusively for men to find expression for their sexuality. Some researchers have pointed out that the Internet could also provide unique opportunities for women, in that regard (Leiblum & Döring, 2002). Technological and communicative aspects of representation of sexual material on the Internet may motivate women to watch such content, and women could also construct for themselves a new medium for sexual discourse by communicating with other women on the Internet and building communities (Leiblum & Döring, 2002). Indeed, now it is not uncommon to observe pornographic material produced for women and by women (Cunningham, 2014; Schauer, 2005). We believe that this situation warrants further research on the characteristics of pornography on the Internet that is aimed at women.

Our aim in this study was to compare the content of pornographic websites aimed at women with the content of pornographic websites aimed at men, focusing on the concepts of sexual inequality and objectification.

Literature Review and Research Hypotheses

Sexual inequality has been one of the most frequently investigated topics in pornography research. Generally, in this context, sexual inequality has been defined based on the demographic characteristics of the model (Cowan & Dunn, 1994; Cowan et al., 1988). For example, Cowan and Dunn defined sexual inequality as differences in the status of the model, including age, role, occupation, and appearance. Cowan and Campbell (1994) defined sexual inequality in terms of racism, such that black models used for producing pornography were unequally represented, having lower status than white models. Cowan et al. (p. 300) identified two types of sexual inequality in pornography: blatant inequality (e.g., rape, bondage, torture) and subtle inequality (e.g., the use of authority or class).

Previous researchers have found that the women in pornographic movies are portrayed as being younger than the men. Additionally, the women portrayed are described as whores, and the men are the pimps; the women are slaves, the men are their masters; the women are secretaries, and the men are bosses. Brosius, Weaver, and Staab (1993) found that the focus in pornographic videotapes produced between 1979 and 1988 was on men’s sexual desires and superiority over women, by portraying the women as sexually willing and available objects. Garcia and Milano (1991) found that the sexually aggressive or violent acts towards women portrayed in pornographic videotapes were not common, but that women were portrayed as having lower status than the men in terms of their respective occupations.

In 1996, McNair expressed an expectation that pornography on the Internet would be similar to the conventional and traditional pornography of that time and would contain sexual inequality as a major theme. Recently, in analyzing Internet search patterns, Ogas (2014) argued that women who like to access pornography online tend to watch the pornographic content that is aimed at men. However, there is a new trend of pornographic websites created to cater for women’s tastes and produced by women directors. In this genre, sexuality is depicted positively without sexual discrimination and humiliation (May, 2011). On this basis, we reasoned that pornographic websites aimed at women would tend to depict women’s sexuality in terms of sexual equality, compared with pornographic websites aimed at men. We, therefore, proposed the following hypothesis:
Hypothesis 1: Pornographic websites aimed at women will be less likely than those aimed at men to have themes that represent sexual inequality.

Another indication of sexual inequality is based on the relationship between the model(s) used in pornography and the viewer of the pornography, in terms of the amount of power given to the model. Some researchers have found that female models in pornography are depicted as powerless and unequal sexual objects (Bogaert, Turkovich, & Hafer, 1993; Cowan & Dunn, 1994; Cowan et al., 1988). If a model looks confidently and directly at the viewer, this is likely to indicate that this model has more power than a model who avoids direct eye contact with a viewer. Goffman (1979) suggested that behaviors such as head canting, knee bending, and self-touching by a model signified powerlessness and located the model in a position that was inferior relative to the presumed viewer(s). Extending on Goffman’s theory, Bell (2001) proposed four types of relationships between models and viewers: a) offer/ideal (the model offers herself/himself as an idealized exemplar of a class or attribute, looking away from the viewer); b) demand/affiliation (the model looks at the viewer, directly, smiling or not smiling); c) demand/submission (the model looks down at the viewer, not smiling); and d) demand/seduction (the model looks up at the viewer, head canted, smiling, or pouting). According to Bell, the portrayals of behavior classified as offer/ideal and demand/affiliation assign relatively more power to models, whereas the other two portrayals depict the models as powerless objects. Based on May’s (2011) definition of pornography for women as a genre in which women are depicted positively without sexual discrimination and humiliation, we expected that in this genre the producers would attempt to include more equal relationships between the models and the viewers than in the genre targeting men. Thus, we proposed the following hypothesis:
Hypothesis 2: Female models will be more likely to have powerless poses, such as demand/submission and demand/seduction on pornography websites aimed at men, compared with pornography websites aimed at women.

Finally, another important theme in pornography research is the matter of ob- jectification. Sexual objectification refers to depicting women in depersonalized ways or solely as objects (Bogaert et al., 1993). In an objectified image, the focus is on the nude female body or, specifically, the genitals, and the characteristics of the person as a human being are not considered. Feminist scholars, such as Steinem (1980), have argued that in pornography women are depicted as sexual objects for men, being passive and displayed for the enjoyment of active male subjects. Levy (2002) argued that pornography misrepresents women as enjoying submission, and even as desiring to be raped.

Bogaert et al. (1993) analyzed centerfold pages of Playboy magazine from 1953 to 1990. They found curvilinear relationships, such that objectification increased slightly only until the mid-1970s. Matacin and Burger (1987) analyzed content of cartoons in Playboy magazine in all issues published in 1985 and found that the majority (63%) of the cartoons did not include any objectifying elements but, when there were objectifying elements, “women were more likely to be the victims of sexual coercion, were more often depicted as sexually naïve and childlike, and were more often shown with a more attractive body than were the men in the cartoons” (p. 179).

However, men’s bodies are also objectified in sexual media. Rohlinger (2002) pointed out that sexualized images of men, such as the “erotic male,” have increased rapidly in recent years. To be perfect, men are “getting manicures and facials, dyeing their hair, concealing blemishes, and spending millions on plastic surgery” (p. 70). This raises the question of how pornographic websites aimed at women depict men’s sexuality in terms of sexual objectification. Based on Rohlinger’s observation, we proposed the following hypothesis:
Hypothesis 3: Women will be more objectified in images on pornography websites aimed at men, and men will be more objectified in images on pornography websites aimed at women.

Method

Website Selection

Given that there is no established method to sample pornographic websites and that there are numerous pornographic websites on the Internet, we focused on pornographic online magazines aimed at women or men, respectively. We believed that this genre-based approach provided several advantages in that: a) by strictly defining the conditions that each website should meet, this method of selection helped reduce the number of sexual websites; and b) a pool of sexual websites chosen by this selection method shared several common features of regular updates, and similar structural characteristics, and as a result, this selection method provided greater justification to compare those websites.

We defined pornographic online magazines as magazines on various sexual topics being published regularly and distributed in digital form. The pornographic online magazine differs from other explicit pornographic websites because content will be updated regularly (e.g., weekly or monthly), like a print magazine. It also differs from other online magazines because of its particular focus on sexuality. For this reason, for the study sample we chose websites that contained one of the following phrases in the introductory text: “pornographic online magazine for women,” “pornographic e-zine for women,” “pornographic online magazine for men,” or “pornographic e-zine for men.” To be considered as a target website, each website had to satisfy two further requirements: a) having self-description about its targeted audience, and b) not being simply the online version of a print magazine. Thus, for example, the online version of Cosmopolitan magazine was not considered. Fifteen websites met the requirements of pornographic websites targeted at women; seven met the requirements of pornographic websites targeted at men. For comparison purposes, we randomly selected two women’s pornographic magazine websites aimed at women (forthegirls.com and girlphoria.com) and two men’s pornographic magazine websites (eros-guide.com and xmag.com). The four websites were similar in that they were all online pornographic magazine websites, but they differed in terms of their target audience (women for the first two vs. men for the other two).

Pornographic Image Selection

The four pornographic magazine websites that we selected have their own image galleries, that is, an image archive. The numbers of pornographic images in the gallery varied. Drawings were excluded from the image selection. We chose 50 photographic images randomly from each website. For systematic sampling, we assigned a number to each image on a specific website and selected samples with 50 computer-generated random numbers. The number of male and female models featured on the male websites differed from the number featured on the female sites: on the websites aimed at men among the 114 models 97.4% (n = 111) were female and 2.6% (n = 3) were male, whereas on the websites aimed at women, among the 134 models, 63.7% (n = 84) were male and 37.3% (n = 50) were female.

Operationalization

Sexual inequality. We assessed sexual inequality in terms of the overall theme of the image and the model’s behavioral portrayal. Overall theme was composed of four choices: dominant (submissive), reciprocal, exploitative, and autoerotic (Garcia & Milano, 1991). The dominant (submissive) theme refers to the situation where one participant controls the sexual act physically. The reciprocal theme refers to mutual consent/mutual satisfaction between couples. The exploitative theme indicates the situation where one or more of the participants clearly uses another participant without consideration for the used person(s). Typically, this included inducements, such as alcohol, hypnosis, aphrodisiacs, money, or blackmail. The autoerotic theme refers to an image in which masturbation or self-stimulation is depicted. An image with a theme or themes related to either dominance or exploitation was regarded as portraying sexual inequality. Behavioral portrayal, or the bodily poses of the model, was assessed using the four types of model–viewer relationship described by Bell (2001; see above). An image including either demand/submission or demand/seduction portrayal was considered to be portraying the presence of sexual inequality. The intercoder reliability among the three coders was .84.

Objectification. Objectification refers to the de-emphasis of personal characteristics. Based on Bogaert et al. (1993), we measured objectification using the visibility of the face, eyes, body, and presence and number of shots focusing on the genitals. The coders rated the degree of visibility of each item on a 3-point scale of 1 (clearly seen), 2 (partly seen), and 3 (not at all visible). The intercoder reliability among the three coders was .96.

Results

Hypothesis 1

Pornographic websites aimed at men included more autoerotic (33%) and dominant themes (16%) than did those aimed at women (7.6% and 11.4%, respectively), whereas pornographic websites aimed at women contained more reciprocal themes (53.2%) than did those aimed at men (4%). Only 7.6% of the websites featured autoerotic themes aimed at women. These differences were statistically significant, χ² = 59.5, df = 3, p < .001.

Hypothesis 2

The most frequently used behavioral portrayal on pornographic websites aimed at men was demand/affiliation (35%), whereas offer/ideal portrayal was the most frequently used behavioral portrayal on pornography websites for women (20.3%). Pornographic websites for men portrayed models depicting demand/ submission (11%) and demand/seduction (14%) more frequently than did those for women (both 2.5%). The differences were statistically significant, χ² = 37.5, df = 4, p < .001.

The results indicated that pornographic websites aimed at men were more likely to depict themes of sexual inequality than those aimed at women.

Hypothesis 3

We assessed sexual objectification according to the visibility of the face, eyes, and body of a model, and the presence and number of genital shots. On men’s pornographic websites (55.6%), female models’ eyes were seen more clearly than on women’s pornographic websites (20.5%). This difference was statistically significant, χ² = 23.0, df = 2, p < .001. Female models’ faces were more clearly seen on men’s websites (58%) than on women’s websites (23.1%). This difference was also statistically significant, χ² = 21.9, df = 2, p < .001. However, no difference was found in body presentation. We found it interesting that there were fewer shots of female genitals on men’s pornographic websites (9%) than there were on women’s pornographic websites (35.4%). Based on these findings, it can be said that female objectification occurred more frequently on pornographic sites for women than it did on pornographic websites for men.

Discussion

We investigated the issue of how men’s and women’s sexuality is being presented on pornographic websites aimed at men and women, respectively. Our findings support that of Krassas, Blauwkamp, and Wesselink (2001), who found that both Playboy (men’s magazine) and Cosmopolitan (women’s magazine) contain content representing male dominance in sexuality.

However, in our study we identified some differences in the content of men’s and women’s pornographic websites. First, consistent with findings in previous studies (Cowan et al., 1988), we found that men’s pornographic websites are more likely to include sexually unequal themes than are women’s pornographic websites. That is, men’s pornographic websites contain more male-dominant images (i.e., sexual acts controlled by male models) and more images depicting autoerotica (i.e., female masturbation, self-stimulation), compared with women’s pornographic websites, where there was a higher incidence of depiction of reciprocal themes (i.e., consensual sex). In terms of the power relationships between models and viewers that are depicted on pornographic websites, when we compared only demand/seduction and demand/submission behaviors where models are regarded as powerless sexual objects, men’s pornographic websites had more depictions of demand/seduction and demand/submission behaviors (25%) than did women’s pornographic websites (4%).

We found that women’s pornographic websites were more likely than men’s pornographic websites to portray objectifying of both female and male models by making their eyes and faces less visible. Further, women’s pornographic websites featured more shots of the genitals of female models than did men’s pornographic websites. That is, according to the traditional indicators of sexual objectification, our results showed that sexual objectification is occurring more frequently on women’s pornographic websites than on men’s pornographic websites.

In sum, we found that men’s pornographic websites are more likely to include elements of inequality in their content than are women’s pornographic websites, whereas women’s pornographic websites are more likely than websites aimed at men are, to include elements of objectification in their content. Given the findings in previous studies, the dominance of sexual inequality we found on men’s pornographic websites seems not unexpected.

However, we were interested to find that there was more objectification of men’s and women’s sexuality in the name of representing women’s sexuality on pornographic websites for women than there was on websites aimed at men. This finding, as Ogas (2014) argued, implies that, in part, women’s pornography is a repetition of men’s pornography. The way that men’s and women’s sexuality is represented is important in that it affects the viewers’ perception of sexuality in society (Fisher & Barak, 2001). This is all the more so given the fact that the Internet is now regarded as the most common channel for pornography consumption. Our findings can be expanded to the objectification theory proposed by Fredrickson and Roberts (1997), in which it is posited that a culture in which women’s bodies are regarded as something to be gazed upon forces women to accept men’s views on sexuality. In other words, consciously or unconsciously, women are subject to the cultural standards of sexuality. According to Fredrickson and Roberts, sexual objectification of a woman occurs “whenever a woman’s body, body parts, or sexual functions are separated out from her person, reduced to the status of mere instruments, or regarded as if they were capable of representing her” (p. 157). As a result, in the context of sexual objectification, people are used to perceiving the body as a commodity or the person as a dehumanized, rather than a human, being. People are under the pressure of constant body surveillance (Orbach, 2009). The mass media have played an important role in objectifying the human body (Aubrey, 2006), such that people are susceptible to the temptation of having plastic surgery, and to fantasies about unrealistic body shapes. We have shown that sexual objectification is evident on women’s pornographic websites, and that both men’s and women’s sexual body parts are more often depicted on these websites designed for women than they are on men’s pornographic websites. By visiting such websites often, it is likely that women may internalize “an observer’s perspective on physical self” (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997, p. 177). In addition, the increase of exposure to objectified images would exert negative effects on women’s mental health, increasing the risk of depression, sexual dysfunction, and eating disorders (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997; Moradi, Dirks, & Matteson, 2005).

There are limitations in this study. First, the issue of selection of websites should be raised. The four pornographic magazine websites used in this study are not representative of all the pornographic magazine websites available for men or women. Future researchers should include more examples of these types of website. Second, given that there was no previous reported research comparing the representation of men’s and women’s sexuality on men’s and women’s pornographic websites, our results are interim findings. More research on this topic should be conducted. In addition, new instruments should be developed to measure sexuality as it is represented online.

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This research was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF- 2013R1A2A2A03016013).

Jae Woong Shim, School of Communication and Media, Sookmyung Women’s University, Cheongpa-ro 47 gil 100, Yongsan-gu, Seoul 140-742, People’s Republic of Korea. Email: [email protected]