Pornography in sex research: the construction of sex, gender, and sexual orientation

Abstract

The use of sexually explicit audio-visual material as a tool for psychological research has gained attention in the popular press as well as in field-specific publications in the past few decades. However, the conversation about such studies rarely addresses the complex nature of pornographic motion pictures, treating pornography as a simple stimulus rather than as a complicated spectatorial engagement with multiple appeals. This article examines the work of two of the most prolific researchers in the field of sexual response and sexual orientation studies, J. Michael Bailey and Meredith L. Chivers. The article explores the researchers’ assumptions about pornography and sexuality through the rhetoric in their published papers and the aesthetics and content of the specific audio-visual stimuli they employ. Although the researchers employ pornography as a presumptively pre-cultural tool that produces objective scientific knowledge about sexual orientation, gender, and sex, their use of this sexually explicit audio-visual material in fact constructs the very categories it is then used to examine.