Abstract
ABSTRACTThis article questions the scientific model of porn studies following Kuhn’s epistemological work. Can porn studies be thought of as a pornology; that is, an organized and coherent scientific discipline? Keywords used in the scientific literature dealing with pornography are analyzed through a lexical network approach. A request for the term ‘Pornography’ was made on two databases (ScienceDirect and PubMed) for the period 2006–2017. Analyses were conducted to study interactions between keywords so that themes emerge and to determine whether the network of concepts might reflect a small-world organization, indicative of the paradigmatic aspects of a discipline. Six themes were identified, underlying a negative conceptualization of pornography. The most important themes are related to legal issues posed by cybersex and to forensic problems. Globally, the scientific approach to pornography appears coherent and organized (S > 1). However, temporal analysis shows a gradual decline in the consistency of the works.
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