EXPOsing Men's Gender Role Attitudes as Porn Superfans

Abstract

Much contemporary debate about pornography centers on its role in portraying and perpetuating gender inequality. This article compares traditional gendered attitudes between cisgender men attending the Adult Entertainment Expo (n = 294) and a random sample of male respondents from the 2016 General Social Survey (GSS), a U.S. representative survey of general attitudes and beliefs collected every two years (n = 863). Our survey borrowed questions from the GSS to measure attitudes about gender equality across four dimensions: (1) working mothers, (2) women in politics, (3) traditional gender roles in the family, and (4) affirmative action for women in the workplace. Through bivariate analyses, we found that “porn superfans” are no more sexist or misogynistic than the general U.S. public on two of the four measures (women in politics and women in the general workplace) and held more progressive gender‐role attitudes than the general public on the other two measures. We conducted binary logistic regressions for those two measures to determine if the relationship remained significant when controlling for other factors. For one dimension, working mothers, it did (p < .001). Our results call into question some of the claims that porn consumption fosters de facto negative and hostile attitudes toward women.

Smitten by the Written: Corpus Analysis of Agency and Roles in Pornographic Video Titles

“…On the one hand, pornography consumption has been showed to be linked to objectifying, unequal gendered norms, and both hostile and benevolent sexism (Peter, Valkenburg 2007;Brown, L'Engle 2009;Hald, Malamuth, Lange 2013;Mikorski, Szymanski 2017;Willis, Bridges, Sun 2022, to mention just a few). In contrast to these findings, some studies link pornography consumption to liberalism and egalitarianism with respect to gender (Baron 1990;Jackson 2019) or report no relationship between pornography consumption and unequal gender norms (Vangeel, Eggermont, Vandenbosch 2020) and sexually objectifying behaviour (Yu et al 2021). What further complicates the issue is that a lot of the research has been cross-sectional and demonstrating causality has proven difficult.…”

Plastic fantastic: Sex robots and/as sexual fantasy

“…They’re a version, from this masculinist, male patriarchal point of view, a very degraded view of women, reduced…to a form with penetrable holes that can be sold off and commercialized and circulated among men” (Campaign Against Sex Robots, n.d). And yet, what little we know about sex doll and robot consumers at this point indicates that for them the fantasy of intimacy with a “brought to life-partner”—via doll personalization, modifications, online textual narratives and shared photographic poses—creates an “embodied intimate fiction” (Su et al, 2019: 28) that may distinguish their experiences from those between porn consumers and the porn stars they idolize (Coursey et al, 2019; Jackson et al, 2019).…”