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Category: Project

Description: Project summary: Mainstream pornography has a long and well-documented history of relying on socio-cultural stereotypes to deliver its viewers sexual gratification. Concerns about this have been compounded in recent years by: (1) pornography’s massive hold over the Internet where it draws hundreds of millions of viewers daily; (2) the fact that this includes many young people for whom online pornography is an important source of sex education; and (3) that the stereotypes used in online pornography are not rarely blatantly misogynist and racist. Yet, despite ample accounts on if and how these stereotypes (could) harm the mental health and physical well-being of individuals and communities, one question remains a lacuna within our scientific understanding: Why do so many people, from highly diverse socio-cultural backgrounds, enjoy watching this? To understand this, this project introduces an innovative and interdisciplinary multi-methods design to study: (1) What popular stereotypes look like in today’s online pornographic landscape. Approach: We analyze metadata from 250,000 Pornhub videos (2008–2024) using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques on titles, tags, categories, view counts, and ratings. This allows us to trace how stereotypes are constructed and circulated across popular pornography platforms. In a follow-up study, we apply qualitative narrative analysis to thumbnails from a subset of 75–150 videos to examine how these stereotypes are visually shaped. (2) Which people, with what social backgrounds enjoy these, and why. Approach: We develop a multi-method toolkit combining in-depth interviews with two experimental video studies. One experiment uses physiological measures (heart rate) to capture unconscious bodily responses, while the other employs a latency-based survey to gauge implicit cognitive preferences. Together, these methods reveal both conscious and unconscious attractions to gendered and ethno-racial stereotypes that are shaped by both short- and long-term socialization processes. (3) How young people look at these stereotypes. Approach: We use participatory research methods, in the form of a tailored research game called X-Posed, to engage (about 50-75) young people aged 16-25 in in-depth discussions about how they perceive and navigate gendered and ethno-racial stereotypes in pornography. (4) How we can effectively prevent detrimental effects of these stereotypes for young people’s sexual development. Approach: We design and rigorously test a new pornography literacy module as an addition to existing sexuality and relationships education in the Netherlands. Its effectiveness will be evaluated through a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) with a socio-demographically diverse group of 16–25-year-olds. Using pre-, post, and follow-up tests, we compare outcomes between participants who receive the module and a control group who does not.