The Sociology Of Pornography

The Sociology Of Pornography

Author: Indra

Email: Anonymous

Pornography in the American Social Strata

The debate over pornography and its place in society has grown immensely in the last few years, becoming one of the hottest issues in America. The reasons as to why people use porn is a complicated question that can be assessed in many ways and before one can answer this question, one needs to ask what porn is and who its users are. When analyzing pornography from a sociological standpoint, immediately issues of deviance, class factors and gender stratification arise. Our group project intends to examine specifically who looks at porn by using several sociological factors: race, class, gender, religion and emotion.

Although lawyers, feminists, priests and scientists all have given their professional opinionated description, an adequate definition of pornography does not seem to exist. Some distinguish between erotica and porn, with porn being more violent, portraying unequal power in sexual relations or showing activities that are judged to be immoral. The Webster dictionary defines pornography as ?the depiction of erotic behavior intended to cause sexual excitement.? Porn or not, representations of sexual behavior have existed through centuries and across cultures. Within western society, sex itself has been considered ?evil? and revolting. This is exactly why the concealment of the sex organs and teaching feelings of shame towards human sexuality is so common. History has proven that with shame comes curiosity and rebellion, this is why we have such an interest and as such, prevalence of pornography. People in America have been taught that human sexuality is shameful and in turn, we are automatically intrigued. This intrigue is then examined and where is the easiest and fastest place in the world to get information? That?s right, the Internet. It is estimated that 60 percent of the Internet is pornographic material. As with any business, pornography is about supply and demand and despite societies? negative connotations, people are obviously still interested. This is why we decided to examine what kinds of people look at and watch porn.

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Since we had studied the GSS in class, we felt it would be useful to put what we had learned about to work. As we researched and examined the GSS, we found that there were a variety of different ways to examine the issues of pornography. We decided the best way to identify who looks at porn was to use people who had viewed a pornographic film within the last year. This variable is termed by the GSS as xmovie1. We used xmovie in the row role of all of our inquiries and was used as our main variable. The ...

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Since we had studied the GSS in class, we felt it would be useful to put what we had learned about to work. As we researched and examined the GSS, we found that there were a variety of different ways to examine the issues of pornography. We decided the best way to identify who looks at porn was to use people who had viewed a pornographic film within the last year. This variable is termed by the GSS as xmovie1. We used xmovie in the row role of all of our inquiries and was used as our main variable. The column role of our inquiries varied according to the factors we chose to examine: race, class, gender, strength of religion, total family income and happiness. The GSS terms these variables as race, class, sex, reliten, and happy.

With our topic and statistical method chosen, it was time to form our hypotheses. It is common knowledge that porn as we know it is used predominantly by men. Therefore, our hypothesis on gender was that more males than females would have seen a pornographic film within the last year. Since pornography has negative societal connotations, we believed that the lower class, which also is considered to have negative societal connotations, would be more likely to have seen a pornographic film within the last year. We made a similar hypothesis in terms of religious affiliation. From a biblical perspective, sexual intercourse is exclusively reserved for marriage. Since pornography is usually pictorial of sexual intercourse out of wedlock, than people who view porn are likely to have less religious affiliation. In terms of race, since there are a more whites than blacks in America, it was our hypothesis that the majority of people to have watched a pornographic film within the last year would be white. It is known that people who are unhappy are likely to commit deviant acts and pornography is considered deviant, therefore, people who are unhappy are more likely to have seen a pornographic film within the last year. With these hypotheses formed, we then performed the GSS on each of the variables we had chosen.

Each survey sample contained between 23,000 and 26,000 people and our findings were varied however, nonetheless intriguing. In terms of gender, our hypothesis was that more males than females would have seen porn, this was correct. 29.8 percent of males and 16.9 percent of females have seen a porn film within the last year. The assumption that porn is viewed predominantly by males is indeed correct, with only half the amount of females having admitted to watching porn . In terms of race, our hypothesis was that more whites than blacks would have seen porn, this too was correct with 79.7 percent of whites and only 16.5 percent of blacks admitting to having watched porn. It should also be noted that 85 percent of whites claimed to have not watched porn. Our reasoning was correct since there were much more whites than blacks who participated in the survey. 83.8 percent of the people surveyed were white and only 13.1 percent of people surveyed were black. In terms of class, our hypothesis was that the lower class would have the highest rate however, we were wrong. Only 5.8 percent of the lower class surveyed admitted to having watched porn whereas both the working and middle classes admitted much more. Within the working class, 48.9 percent of people admitted to having watched porn as well as 42.2 percent of the middle class. In terms of strength in religious affiliation, our hypothesis was that people with less religious affiliation would be more likely to have watched porn, in some ways, we were correct. Meaning that, people who claimed to have ?not very strong religious affiliation? were the highest admitted at 50.1 percent, however the second highest were people who considered themselves to have ?strong religious affiliation? at 24.7 percent. In terms of happiness, our hypothesis was that people who were ?not very happy? would be more likely to have watched porn, we were wrong. 58.6 percent of people surveyed who claimed to have watched porn considered themselves ?pretty happy? whereas only 14.1 percent of people who considered themselves ?not very happy.? All of these findings may be viewed in the graphs provided at the end of this paper.

Out of the five variables we created and tested hypotheses for, three of them were correct. This was seen in sex, race and strength of religious affiliation. The most interesting findings were in terms of gender, class and happiness. In terms of gender, although males did claim to have seen porn more than females, the findings showed that almost one-fourth of the American population have viewed porn. We were extremely surprised to find that both the middle and working classes had a higher rate of having seen a porn film than the lower class. I would speculate that this is due to the fact that both middle and working classes have easier access to porn, especially at work, where many of them have computers. Another surprise was to find that 58.6 percent of people who watch porn considered themselves ?pretty happy.? Since pornography is considered an issue of deviance, we assumed that happiness would be a contributing factor, we were shown this is not the case. I believe that investigating this occurrence further would, indeed, be worthwhile as well as a functional argument against pornography as a form of deviance.

On the whole, despite the controversy concerning our topic, I believe it was incredibly useful as well as interesting to examine the sociological issues surrounding pornography. As we were shown in our hypothesis of the GSS surveys, there are many assumptions that people make that are incorrect and need to be adjusted. In doing this assignment, I learned just how informative and functional the GSS could be. In terms of pornography, many people have been taught or think that it is wrong. This is largely due to the fact that more research has been done on the possible negative consequences of porn than what actually determines its use in the first place. Our study has attempted to examine some of the more general issues of who and why people use pornography using the GSS. I think that we have done this in an informative as well as interesting manner. Moreover, empirical research cannot provide answers to whether porn in itself is bad or wrong. I believe that one must consider all of the factors objectively in order to make an accurate judgment and as with anything, one must use moderation.

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