The Rise of Spanking, Hitting, and Strangulation: A Longitudinal Evaluation of Aggression in Pornography

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.