Normalisation of Male Sexual Violence

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Chris Preston
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Re: Normalisation of Male Sexual Violence

Post by Chris Preston » Thu Dec 05, 2019 11:14 am

Martin Y wrote:
Wed Dec 04, 2019 12:06 pm
Chris Preston wrote:
Wed Dec 04, 2019 10:41 am
The dominance component is very real, even if all the men involved don't see it that way.
"Real" as in that's the women's real experience. But if "all the men don't see it that way" then seemingly it's not their experience. If, as I speculated above, this is to some extent naïve guys thinking choking is something you're expected to do for women then dominance is not what they're getting from it, if anything.
That does not excuse the behaviour.
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Re: Normalisation of Male Sexual Violence

Post by Martin Y » Thu Dec 05, 2019 11:27 am

Chris Preston wrote:
Thu Dec 05, 2019 11:14 am
That does not excuse the behaviour.
No, of course it doesn't.

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Re: Normalisation of Male Sexual Violence

Post by username » Thu Dec 05, 2019 8:09 pm

jimbob wrote:
Wed Dec 04, 2019 9:48 pm
cvb wrote:
Wed Dec 04, 2019 1:21 pm
I think it is probably a bit of both. Some men want to dominate/denigrate their partner and some men who only/mostly have p.rn as a measure of what sex constitutes act out what they see.

There still is a lot of straight p.rn out there that does not involve spiting, choking etc

It's not all rough, although that definitely has increased

I think incels are not much of an issue but maybe Pick Up Artists and their ilk are more so.

Mind you there have always been men like that
I was thinking along similar lines.

In the 70s and 80s the level of *public* sexual harassment and public acceptance of it (making it to mainstream comedy on TV) was far more obvious - along with the hidden abuse that we know was happening in many institutions without check.

I wonder if such violent acts during sex were still very prevalent then.
Don't watch any early Elvis films, some of them make 70s TV seem positively enlightened.
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p.rn is a big area to make generalisations about without looking at actual studies (and quite a few of them, frankly; it is sometimes picked on in rather biased way as a study target by people strongly motivated by things other than objective academic research).

Availability of particular types of p.rn does not necessarily say much about who is watching it and what its influence is. The popularity of two girls one cup for instance...
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Re: Normalisation of Male Sexual Violence

Post by username » Thu Dec 05, 2019 8:26 pm

I just wanted to add the most common fantasy by far in heterosexual p.rn is the sexual gratification of the female partner. If people are choosing to watch bdsm type p.rn (which is where I'd de facto put choking activities that appear on screen), missing this point and copying what they see, again I'd place that in a problem of education arena rather than elsewhere. ((I don't mean education=schools here, btw, but more generally a lack of information about what is being viewed).
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Re: Normalisation of Male Sexual Violence

Post by Grumble » Thu Dec 05, 2019 11:27 pm

username wrote:
Thu Dec 05, 2019 8:26 pm
I just wanted to add the most common fantasy by far in heterosexual p.rn is the sexual gratification of the female partner.
Is it? Where do you get your figures from? It might be the most common in what you watch but that isn’t necessarily representative.

ETA: also, if female gratification is shown in the context of the female being choked then where does that leave your argument?
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Re: Normalisation of Male Sexual Violence

Post by username » Thu Dec 05, 2019 11:37 pm

Grumble wrote:
Thu Dec 05, 2019 11:27 pm
username wrote:
Thu Dec 05, 2019 8:26 pm
I just wanted to add the most common fantasy by far in heterosexual p.rn is the sexual gratification of the female partner.
Is it? Where do you get your figures from? It might be the most common in what you watch but that isn’t necessarily representative.

ETA: also, if female gratification is shown in the context of the female being choked then where does that leave your argument?
My source for this is the writings of Marty Klein. I refer you to the post above by someone who has experienced choking as a pleasurable experience. That not all people enjoy the same sensations let alone fantasy is unremarkable.
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Re: Normalisation of Male Sexual Violence

Post by El Pollo Diablo » Fri Dec 06, 2019 10:17 am

username wrote:
Thu Dec 05, 2019 8:26 pm
I just wanted to add the most common fantasy by far in heterosexual p.rn is the sexual gratification of the female partner. If people are choosing to watch bdsm type p.rn (which is where I'd de facto put choking activities that appear on screen), missing this point and copying what they see, again I'd place that in a problem of education arena rather than elsewhere. ((I don't mean education=schools here, btw, but more generally a lack of information about what is being viewed).
I'm intrigued at the idea that the woman enjoying sex is a mere fantasy, rather than one of the main purposes of the sex in the first place. It's a bit like saying that one of the main tactics in football is to win the match, rather than the entire point of the f.cking thing.
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Re: Normalisation of Male Sexual Violence

Post by username » Fri Dec 06, 2019 10:19 am

El Pollo Diablo wrote:
Fri Dec 06, 2019 10:17 am
username wrote:
Thu Dec 05, 2019 8:26 pm
I just wanted to add the most common fantasy by far in heterosexual p.rn is the sexual gratification of the female partner. If people are choosing to watch bdsm type p.rn (which is where I'd de facto put choking activities that appear on screen), missing this point and copying what they see, again I'd place that in a problem of education arena rather than elsewhere. ((I don't mean education=schools here, btw, but more generally a lack of information about what is being viewed).
I'm intrigued at the idea that the woman enjoying sex is a mere fantasy, rather than one of the main purposes of the sex in the first place. It's a bit like saying that one of the main tactics in football is to win the match, rather than the entire point of the f.cking thing.
Mere?

Eta (You've rather confused actually playing football with watching football films too.)
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Re: Normalisation of Male Sexual Violence

Post by Fishnut » Fri Dec 06, 2019 8:42 pm

I've been reading this thread, and the split thread, with a mixture of bemusement, horror and disappointment. The most overwhelming feeling is disappointment as I had hoped for a more, well, evidence-based discussion. I know that not everyone has institutional access to journal articles but Google Scholar exists and often links to open access versions of papers. Even when it doesn't you can at least see the abstract. Yet while people have made claims such as,
and
and asked questions like,
and
no-one has bothered to see if the scientific literature has anything to say on these questions.

So let's try and summarise the discussions taking place and see what research has found...

I can see several different questions being discussed:
1) Is the survey EPD opened with an anomaly or does it accurately reflect the sexual experiences that women are having currently?
2) Have non-consensual acts during consensual sex increased in recent years?
3) If there is a rise, is this due to the increased normalisation of violence in p.rnography?
3a) Has there been an increased normalisation of violence in p.rnography?
4) Is p.rn being used as a substitute for poor sex education?
5) Is consensual violence during sex being used as a defence following the death of a sexual partner?

1) Is the survey EPD opened with an anomaly or does it accurately reflect the sexual experiences that women are having currently?

Herbenick et al. (2019) performed a similar survey of people from the US. In their introduction they summarise the findings of research on sexual experiences of men and women,
Throughout the scientific literature, there are indications that difficult things happen as part of sex, particularly to women. In one study, about 8% of young women indicated that they never felt able to tell a partner when they did not want to have sex, and an additional 30% felt able to do so only some of the time (Rickert, Sanghavi, and Wiemann, 2002). Compared to men, fewer women report finding sex arousing or pleasurable (Herbenick et al., 2010a, 2010b), and far more women than men (about 30% vs. 7%) report sex as painful (Herbenick, Schick, Sanders, Reece, & Fortenberry, 2015). Sex may also be consensual but not wanted (e.g., Peterson & Muehlenhard, 2007), wanted but “bad” (Littleton, Tabernik,Canales, & Backstrom, 2009), pressured or coerced (Byers,1996; Jeffrey & Barata, 2017), chronically painful (Ayling & Ussher, 2008), or beyond one’s own ability to stop or control (e.g.,Skarner, Mansson, & Svensson, 2017), with women more often reporting each of these.
So the literature already shows that there differences in experiences of sex between men and women, and women have far more negative experiences regardless of what aspect is being examined.

The survey asked people aged between 14 and 60 to quantify the number of times they'd felt scared during sex and got people to describe that experience. They found that more women had scary experiences than men (70.9% vs. 46.9%; p<0.001). They also found that "reports of scary sex were not significantly different by age, race/ethnicity, or education."

Additionally,
...more women than men reported that someone had done something during sexthat made them feel scared. Specifically, 12.5% of adolescent women and 3.8% of adolescent men indicated that this had happened to them, as did 23.9% of adult women and 10.3% of adult men.
Of those who described scary sexual experiences,
The following thematic categories emerged: rape/sexual assault, incest, lack of consent and asking to stop, anal sexual behaviors, STI/pregnancy risk, choking, multiple people, sex toys and BDSM, being held down, threats, aggression, positions, and novelty/learning...
Fifty-eight respondents (50 of whom were women) described experiencing rape, forced sex, or fearing they were going to be raped... Many respondents (nearly all women) wrote about sexual encounters that became rough, uncomfortable, or painful, with them asking their partner to stop to no avail...
Table 2 (p 429) shows that fewer women than men in all age categories have had no scary sexual experiences.
Herbenick et al. (2019) table 2.png
Herbenick et al. (2019) table 2.png (145.28 KiB) Viewed 3589 times
We were struck, but not surprised, at the gendered aspects of our findings. Substantially more women than men reported that someone had done something during sex that had scared them.This is likely because scary things truly do happen more often to women than men during sex.This is important considering that women’s allegations of assault are still sometimes characterized as simple“misunderstandings”(e.g., Kitchener,2018; Levin,2016). We note that some of the men’s descriptions of scary sex (e.g., that referred to menstruation, adolescent/learning curve, first coitus, wondering whether the person who’s performing oral sex is friends with a prior partner) differed considerably from examples more often provided by women that pertained to rape,forced sex, being held down, threatened with weapons, choked, and painful sex that one asks to stop but that does not stop. Even among the pregnancy/STI risk responses, women’s experiences more often alluded to feeling pressured into unprotected sex. In contrast, men’s responses in this category described forgetting to use a condom, not knowing about a partner’s sexual history, or finding out a female partner had many prior sex partners. And yet, the overall proportion of men who reported ever experiencing sex as scary was nearly half that of women; subsequent research might focus on better understanding the range of (perhaps underreported) male trauma.
This ties in very nicely to this piece written a year ago. While it's a magazine piece it does reference scientific research and talks with experts in their fields.
For all the calls for nuance in this discussion of what does and doesn't constitute harassment or assault, I've been dumbstruck by the flattening work of that phrase — specifically, the assumption that "bad sex" means the same thing to men who have sex with women as it does to women who have sex with men.

The studies on this are few. A casual survey of forums where people discuss "bad sex" suggests that men tend to use the term to describe a passive partner or a boring experience... But when most women talk about "bad sex," they tend to mean coercion, or emotional discomfort or, even more commonly, physical pain. Debby Herbenick, a professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health, and one of the forces behind the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, confirmed this. "When it comes to 'good sex,'" she told me, "women often mean without pain, men often mean they had orgasms." [my emphasis]
There are other studies out there with similar results. This one from O'Sullivan & Allgeier (1998) (behind paywall) found that among psychology undergraduates,
compared to men, a significantly higher proportion of women reported engaging in unwanted sexual activity (26% and 50% respectively... p<0.001. [p239]
I can't be bothered to find more as the literature seems to be as clear as literature can be that women experience more unwanted and scary sexual experiences than men.

2) Have non-consensual acts during consensual sex increased in recent years?
I've actually struggled to answer this question and the best I can do is say "I don't know". I can't find any evidence of longitudinal studies on this subject, and I can't even find any papers in previous decades that would enable me to do attempt a comparison myself. I expanded my search to see if anything of relevance would turn up accidentally, and while not exactly on-topic I found this paper by Pritchard et al. (2017) (behind paywall) which is a review on non-fatal strangulation as part of domestic violence. It points out that non-fatal strangulation within a domestic violence context has only really been the subject of serious attention by researchers and lawmakers and enforcers since the beginning of the 21st century. While this doesn't provide any insights into the question at hand, it does suggest that research into this field is new and still in its early stages. If the importance of non-fatal strangulation in domestic situations has only relatively recently recognised, research into non-fatal strangulation and other violent acts during more intimate situations are probably lagging behind.

DeKeseredy (2018, p85) writes about the poor state of research in this field and points out that the current research is conflicting, and that even if there is a correlation between watching violent p.rn and committing violent acts, it isn't at all clear which is the causal factor - do violent men watch violent p.rn or does watching violent p.rn make men violent?

3) If there is a rise, is this due to the increased normalisation of violence in p.rnography?
Given that I can't find any information of whether or not a rise has occurred, this question cannot be answered.

However, I did find a study by Joongsma & Fritz (2018) that looked into the relationship between p.rnography consumption and intimate partner violence and aggression and found that the level of p.rn consumption did not predict the risk of intimate partner violence and aggression.

3a) Has there been an increased normalisation of violence in p.rnography?

Again, it's hard to say. Bridges et al. (2010) analysed the content of the best-selling p.rn videos (they were still the dominant method of viewing p.rn in the first decade of this century) and found that,
Of the 304 scenes analyzed, 88.2% contained physical aggression, principally spanking, gagging, and slapping, while 48.7% of scenes contained verbal aggression, primarily name-calling. Perpetrators of aggression were usually male, whereas targets of aggression were overwhelmingly female. Targets most often showed pleasure or responded neutrally to the aggression.
So violence in p.rn was popular by the early 2000s but it was mostly consensual.

A study a decade earlier by Barron & Kimmel (2000) (behind paywall) compared violence in p.rn from magazines, videos, and Usenet. They explain why they chose Usenet as their internet-based source of p.rn,
While the World Wide Web has certainly caught the public's eye more than newsgroups, there is virtually no way to construct a list of all p.rnographic web sites from which to sample. Further, while some p.rnographic web sites contain stories, the majority primarily contain pictures, and thus do not provide the narrative elements important to this study. We used alt.sex.stories precisely for its narrative content. Finally, while many web sites with p.rnographic material have begun to charge for access, the Usenet remains free to all with access to the Internet.
I've summarised their results in the table below (the values are % so, for example, in magazines 38.5% of men were perpetrators and 50% were victims - values can add up to more than 100% because there can be multiple victims and perpetrators depending on the video),
summary data table.png
summary data table.png (48.75 KiB) Viewed 3589 times
The Usenet p.rn has significantly more violence by men towards women than the other forms of p.rn examined. When looking at the issue of consent with the violence their results show that consent is the norm in magazines but not on Usenet.
The vast majority of violence in magazines and videos occurs in the context of a consensual relationship. In magazines, 88.5% of the violence was depicted as consensual, compared with 3.8% as coercive and 7.7% as nonconsensual. In the videos, 91.8% of the violence was depicted as consensual, 5.1 % as coercive, and 3.1 % as nonconsensual. On the Usenet, however, 42.4% was depicted as consensual, while 10.2% was coercive and 47.5% was depicted as nonconsensual. Thus, less than half of the Usenet scenes that contained violence were consensual, statistically different from both magazines and videos (xZ= 51.38, df = 2, p < .001 ).
From this research I think we can argue that while violence in p.rn has been a longstanding feature, non-consensual violence has risen in prevalence with the increase in internet-based p.rn.

4) Is p.rn being used as a substitute for poor sex education?
There doesn't seem to be a huge amount of literature on this subject, that I can find at least. But the answer seems to be mostly "we don't know" with a side of "probably not". Goldstein (2019) (behind paywall) points out the problem that teachers face,
Because p.rnography is widely considered a problematic object for young people, and because people under the age of 18 (in most countries) are not legally supposed to be watching p.rnography at all, educators interested in tackling sexually explicit media in their classrooms have noted that their desire to do so renders them suspect to parents, students, colleagues and administrators
The study involved asking focus groups of young undergraduate students about their experiences with p.rn and concluded that,
Even though research around young people and p.rnography indicates that young people have complex, idiosyncratic engagements with p.rnography that run the gamut from disturbing, to mundane, to educative, to downright ecstatic, those engagements have almost exclusively been framed through a one-sided lens of inherent and inevitable harm. Under this framing, educators are very limited in what they can do when it comes to addressing p.rnography in school-based curricula, with the framework of media literacy and its top-down, teacher-centred emphasis on deconstructing p.rnography currently serving as one of the only acceptable ways of getting discussions on p.rn into schools.
Another study, by Albury (2014) (behind paywall) examines what we think p.rn is teaching adolescents and what we think it should be teaching them. It points out that,
This question of ‘what p.rn teaches’ is further complicated when ‘p.rn consumers’ are considered not as a homogeneous group, but as a diverse set of sub-groups, which includes same-sex-attracted and heterosexual people of diverse ages, genders, and cultural, political and religious affiliations.

Dawson et al. (2019)
(behind paywall) looked at the impact of p.rn on adolescents in Ireland and found that,
...homosexual and bisexual participants reported less satisfaction with their sex education, a majority had used p.rnography for sexual information, but being dissatisfied with school-based sex education did not predict p.rnography use for sexual information. Neither did using p.rnography for sexual information predict greater satisfaction with current sexual knowledge, but it was associated with greater aspirations to know more about sexuality and sexual health. Individuals may use p.rnography for information regardless of their sex education in school.
5) Is consensual violence during sex being used as a defence following the death of a sexual partner?
The short answer is yes.

I've taken too long researching the other questions so I'm going to answer this one by saying you should listen to the Guardian's In Focus podcast on this issue. It talks with experts and examines how and why this defence is being used more frequently.

As an addendum, I found a paper that may help to answer username's question. O'Hara & O'Hara (1999) surveyed women who had had sex with both circumcised and uncircumcised men and found that,
Respondents overwhelmingly concurred that the mechanics of coitus were different for the two groups of men. Of the women, 73% reported that circumcised men tended to thrust harder and deeper, using elongated strokes, while unaltered men by comparison tended to thrust more gently, to have shorter thrusts, and tended to be in contact with the mons pubis and clitoris more, according to 71% of the respondents.
P.S. I'm happy to share copies of the paywalled papers with anyone who wants them.

E.T.A. I've only just scratched the surface of these subjects. Other papers I found but didn't get a chance to properly read include:
Mellor & Duff (2019) - The use of p.rnography and the relationship between p.rnography exposure and sexual offending in males: A systematic review
Lim et al. (2015) - The impact of p.rnography on gender-based violence, sexual health and well-being: what do we know?
Sun et al. (2016) - p.rnography and the Male Sexual Script: An Analysis of Consumption and Sexual Relation
Wright et al. (2016) - A Meta-Analysis of p.rnography Consumption and Actual Acts of Sexual Aggression in General Population Studies
Sendler (2018) - Lethal asphyxiation due to sadomasochistic sex training—How some sex partners avoid criminal responsibility even though their actions lead to someone's death
Burch & Salmon (2019) - The Rough Stuff: Understanding Aggressive Consensual Sex
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Re: Normalisation of Male Sexual Violence

Post by nefibach » Fri Dec 06, 2019 8:54 pm

Thank you for that epic post, Fishnut. That must have taken you an absolute age to research.

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Re: Normalisation of Male Sexual Violence

Post by username » Fri Dec 06, 2019 9:35 pm

Huge thanks to Fishnut.
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Re: Normalisation of Male Sexual Violence

Post by Martin Y » Fri Dec 06, 2019 10:16 pm

Yep. Outstanding post. Thanks.

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Re: Normalisation of Male Sexual Violence

Post by discovolante » Sat Dec 07, 2019 11:40 am

I don't know what to say. Thank you so much for putting so much time and effort into that.
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Re: Normalisation of Male Sexual Violence

Post by JQH » Mon Dec 09, 2019 9:53 am

Yes. A lot to read and think about. Thanks for posting.
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Re: Normalisation of Male Sexual Violence

Post by Fishnut » Wed Dec 11, 2019 11:27 pm

Thanks for all the kind words. Though I seem to have killed the thread which was not my intention! I was just trying to bring some much-needed evidence into the discussion.

I had some questions about the survey design so I did something that seemed to have not crossed the minds of those criticising it - I contacted ComRes. I wrote,
I was hoping I could ask some questions regarding the poll performed on behalf of BBC 5 Live regarding violence against women during consensual sex.

The survey data shows that only women were asked for their experiences but I can see no information on the gender of their partners. Were all those surveyed heterosexual or were same-sex sexual experiences included in the data?

Did the survey distinguish between consensual acts of aggression and non-consensual? If not, what was the reasoning for this?

For question 2 and 4, Thinking specifically of the occasions you have experienced slapping, choking, gagging or spitting during consensual sexual intercourse, how frequently would you say that these acts were unwanted? and Thinking specifically of the occasions you have experienced slapping, choking, gagging or spitting during consensual sexual intercourse, have you ever felt pressured, coerced, or forced into doing such acts? was any attempt made to determine which specific acts were unwanted?
I got a reply, which said,
Gender of partners was not recorded, nor was sexual orientation. It was not a requirement to be heterosexual to take part in the survey, so it is likely some non-heterosexual respondents are included.

Q1 did not distinguish between consensual and non-consensual. The purpose of Q1 is a screener question to measure level of experience.

For Q2-4, no attempt was made to distinguish between the acts; rather, it took them all as a collective.
It's not a hugely satisfactory reply but it's a reply nontheless. For those who still have questions about the survey I suggest they ask ComRes themselves. They can be contacted at info@comresglobal.com and were certainly quick in responding to me (3 days).
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