Research

Research Spotlight

The Effect of Violent and Coercive Pornography on Adolescent Males

What We Looked At

This review examined how exposure to gonzo, violent, and coercive pornography influences the formation of sexual scripts, attitudes towards consent, and expectations of intimacy among young males. The average age of first pornography exposure is 13 years (Children’s Commissioner, 2023), placing this exposure within a developmental period characterised by heightened social and sexual learning. Compounding this early exposure is a documented shift in consumption patterns among young males towards ‘gonzo’, violent, and coercive pornographic content (Bridges et al., 2010; Shor & Seida, 2018). Gonzo pornography is characterised by point-of-view filming, minimal narrative structure, direct address to the viewer, and an emphasis on ‘realistic’ or immersive sexual performance (Maina & Zecca, 2016). Violent pornography, depicting physical aggression, humiliation, or domination, was encountered before age 18 by 79% of a sample of 1,000 adolescents, and 47% reported exposure to depictions of apparently unwilling or coerced women (Children’s Commissioner, 2023).

The review is organised around two primary theoretical frameworks. Sexual Script Theory (Gagnon and Simon, 1973) proposes that sexual behaviour is guided by learned scripts absorbed from cultural and media sources. Wright’s Acquisition, Activation, and Application model (2011, 2014) operationalises this, specifying how repeated media exposure translates into behavioural outcomes across three stages: a viewer encodes a script from pornographic content, that script is later triggered by relevant cues such as arousal or a similar situation, and the activated script then shapes behaviour. These frameworks are supplemented by Cultivation Theory (Gerbner and Gross, 1976), which describes how repeated media exposure shapes viewers’ perceptions of what is sexually normal and prevalent, and Social Learning Theory (Bandura, 1977), which accounts for the imitation of behaviours that are modelled and, particularly, rewarded in media.

What the Research Found

Across the literature, pornography use is consistently associated with more permissive and performance-oriented sexual scripts. Braithwaite et al. (2014), in a survey of nearly 2,000 US college students, found that frequency of pornography use predicted greater hook-up incidence and higher numbers of sexual partners, with this relationship mediated by the internalisation of casual sexual scripts — consistent with an acquisition-to-application pathway. Sun et al. (2016), in a sample of 487 college men, found that higher pornography use predicted increased likelihood of incorporating pornography-derived acts during sex and using pornographic imagery to sustain arousal; higher use was also inversely associated with enjoyment of intimacy-oriented behaviours such as kissing and embracing. Wright, Herbenick and Tokunaga (2023) investigated the relationship between pornography use and sexual choking through mediating beliefs. They found that consuming pornography more frequently leads to more exposure to pornographic depictions of sexual choking, which in turn predicts a higher likelihood of choking sexual partners through the belief that sexual choking is pleasurable, the belief that sexual choking is safe, and the disbelief that sexual choking requires consent from the person being choked.

Content type is a critical distinction. Violent and coercive pornography is more specifically associated with power-based scripts and diminished attention to consent, while mainstream non-violent pornography is more broadly linked to casual sex norms. Demaré et al. (1993) found that consumption of sexually violent (but not non-violent) pornography predicted men’s self-reported willingness to use force or commit rape — a finding suggesting that coercive scripts derive specifically from violent content rather than from pornography use in general. More recent work by Krahé et al. (2022), surveying 1,181 German students, found that perceived pornographic realism predicted endorsement of risky sexual scripts and acceptance of coercive tactics, with no gender differences emerging in these associations.

Men who consume violent pornography tend to score higher on measures of rape myth acceptance and hostile sexism (Malamuth et al., 2012). Mediation analyses from multiple studies support sexual scripts as the mechanism linking exposure to these attitudinal outcomes: pornography use predicts risky script endorsement, which in turn predicts greater acceptance of coercion. It is important to note that these findings remain largely correlational, and causal direction is not established. Pre-existing hostile attitudes may incline individuals towards violent content, which may in turn reinforce those attitudes; longitudinal evidence to disentangle this is limited.

The evidence on emotional intimacy is less developed. Studies suggest that pornography emphasises physical performance over relational closeness, and that heavy users may deprioritise affectionate behaviours (Sun et al., 2016), but few studies have measured relationship expectations or satisfaction directly. The current evidence base supports more definitive conclusions about scripts and consent than about intimacy.

Several moderating factors shape the degree to which pornographic content influences attitudes and behaviour. Perceived realism is among the most significant: content perceived as realistic — a quality characteristic of gonzo-style pornography — is more readily acquired as a viable script and more likely to be applied. Real-world romantic and sexual experience may buffer these effects, as Peter and Valkenburg (2011) found that adolescents with greater dating experience drew less heavily on pornography-derived scripts. Peer environments also matter: where a peer group normalises casual or aggressive sexuality, pornographic scripts may be reinforced, while egalitarian peer norms or higher individual empathy may attenuate their influence.

The literature also contains findings that complicate a straightforward causal account. Landripet et al. (2019), in a two-year longitudinal study of Croatian male adolescents, found that preference for violent or coercive pornography declined over the study period, and that this was independent of overall use — inconsistent with a simple escalation model. Meta-analytic evidence indicates only moderate associations between pornography use and aggression-related outcomes (Krahé et al., 2022 cite a mean correlation of approximately r = .28 between pornography use and sexual aggression), and studies that do not differentiate content type frequently report weak or non-significant associations. These findings reinforce the content-specific interpretation: the evidence favours a model in which violent pornography specifically is associated with harmful scripts, rather than a claim that pornography exposure as such inevitably produces harm.

What This Means in Practice

The review’s central implication is that content type, not simply frequency of exposure, should be the focus of both research and educational intervention. Interventions focused solely on reducing pornography use without addressing the content young people encounter, or the scripts that content promotes, are likely to be insufficient.

The role of perceived realism offers a specific leverage point. Gonzo-style pornography is designed to appear realistic, and this quality is associated with stronger script acquisition. Media literacy approaches that help young people understand how pornographic content is produced, scripted, and performed — and how fundamentally unlike mutual, communicative sexual encounters it typically is — may attenuate this effect. The review suggests that such education should specifically address the fictional and performative nature of gonzo content, emphasise consent and communication as normal features of real sexual encounters, and provide young people with an opportunity to critically examine the messages embedded in the content they encounter.

Peer-led discussions may also be valuable, given that peer norms shape which scripts are reinforced or contested. The review underlines, however, that there is currently limited direct evidence on whether any specific intervention successfully reduces pornography’s influence on young people’s sexual attitudes. Educational approaches should be evaluated carefully rather than assumed to be effective on the basis of their theoretical coherence.

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