Aggression in Pornography Has Tripled: How Algorithms, Rough Sex, and Silence Are Rewriting Sexual Scripts
Friday, November 14, 2025.
If you want to understand what’s happening to American sexuality, don’t bother with marriage statistics or dating questionnaires.
Look at the “most viewed” section of Pornhub.
That’s where the erotic imagination of the country is being shaped, standardized, and exported in real time.
And according to a new long-range study in The Journal of Sex Research, what people are watching today looks markedly different from what they watched 25 years ago.
Visible physical aggression in mainstream pornography hasn’t crept upward; it has tripled.
Not because all of America suddenly became leather-friendly, but because online porn now runs on an economy of intensity rather than intimacy.
In a new longitudinal analysis of highly viewed mainstream videos, Eran Shor and Xuanchi Liu found that visible aggression rose from about 20% of popular videos in the early 2000s to well over 50% in the 2010s and 2020s (Taylor & Francis Online).
This isn’t a story about kink taking over suburbia.
It’s a story about how algorithms trained on engagement metrics have quietly become the nation’s sex educators.
In a culture that preaches consent but rarely models it, the default teacher becomes pornography—optimized not for connection, but for watch time. If you want to know how we got here, you have to understand how this study finally asked the right question.
A Twenty-Five-Year Look at What People Actually Watch
For years, research on porn aggression was patchy and politically overcooked. Scholars analyzed whatever they could get their hands on, from DVDs to VHS tapes to isolated websites. Very little of it reflected what the average viewer was consuming online.
This new study bypassed the moral debates and went straight to the evidence.
The researchers sampled 255 Pornhub videos uploaded between 2000 and 2024, each with at least two million views, focusing on the content that actually defines the mainstream and functions as a cultural model (Taylor & Francis Online).
They coded what the camera could show them: visible physical aggression such as spanking, hitting, and choking, whether or not performers appeared to consent; nonconsensual aggression, which required clear signs of resistance that were ignored; and additional variables like hair pulling, verbal aggression, and aggressive titles.
The point wasn’t to classify porn morally, but to understand what has been normalized across two and a half decades of mass consumption.
Across the entire time span, nearly half of the videos contained some form of visible aggression.
But the trendline is where the cultural story emerges. In the early 2000s, about one in five popular videos featured physical aggression. In the last decade, that number rose to well over half.
A change this steep would be considered revolutionary in any other domain.
Because it happens in porn, we treat it like trivia, when in reality it’s a map of how sexual scripts change under algorithmic conditions. Shor and Liu’s work updates earlier content analyses like ( Alyssa Bridges and colleagues’ classic study of best-selling pornography videos), which already documented high rates of aggression but did not extend into the streaming, algorithm-driven era (PubMed+1).
The Spanking Explosion and the Creation of a New Default Script
The most dramatic shift in Shor and Liu’s study was the rise of spanking.
In the early 2000s, fewer than 20% of most-viewed videos included it; by the late 2010s and early 2020s, spanking appeared in more than half ( Taylor & Francis Online).
Researchers describe spanking as a “lighter” form of physical aggression, a diplomatic way of acknowledging that context and meaning matter.
But the crucial point is not whether spanking is intrinsically harmful. The crucial point is that its frequency exploded and then stabilized at a very high level.
When a behavior goes from occasional to omnipresent, it stops being a kink and becomes a dialect.
In mainstream porn, spanking is no longer a choice; it is punctuation. It’s what bodies apparently do when they touch each other on camera.
Porn didn’t invent this desire, but it did reliably standardize it through repetition.
Hitting and Choking: From Margins to Mainstream
Even when you strip out spanking, Shor and Liu still found significant increases in other forms of aggression, including hitting and strangulation.
Choking is the most striking shift. It did not appear at all in the earliest videos sampled, yet now appears in roughly 15% of the most popular videos in the 2020s (Taylor & Francis Online) That lines up with a broader research landscape showing that sexual choking has moved from rare to routine for younger adults.
In a recent campus probability survey, (Debby Herbenick and colleagues) found that more than 25% of women and over 20% of transgender and nonbinary students had been choked during their most recent sexual event, while substantial proportions reported choking a partner (PubMed).
Other work suggests that frequent choking is associated with elevated physical and mental health risks, including higher odds of injury and trauma symptoms (PMC).
A therapist I know told me about a nineteen-year-old client who admitted, with the quiet embarrassment only the young can manage, that he didn’t know choking needed to be discussed beforehand.
He assumed it was something “people just do,” because in the only sexual content he’d ever seen, it appeared suddenly, without explanation.
He wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. He was just following the script he had been handed. Porn didn’t teach him violence. It taught him that sex unfolds with a full-on throttle, and not with a flirty conversation.
Why the Algorithm Prefers Aggression
I don’t believe that our cultural rise in sexual aggression is proof of some collective slide into depravity.
I may have a chewy moral center, but I don’t waste my time masticating over that question.
Instead, I think it’s evidence of how online platforms optimize for survival:
Algorithms reward stimuli that keep viewers engaged, and aggression produces predictably strong and measurable reactions.
It logically follows that strong reactions translate into longer watch times.
Longer watch times push videos higher in the rankings.
High rankings define what counts as “popular.”
Popularity then shapes expectation.
Expectation becomes education.
This loop has nothing to do with what people quietly fantasize about in the privacy of their own minds. It has everything to do with attention economics.
Online, “popular” does not mean “beloved.” It means “not skipped.” Pornhub is not showing us what people secretly want; it is showing us what stops the scroll. If it keeps you watching, it keeps the lights on.
Older content analyses, such as Bridges et al.’s work documenting that nearly 88% of scenes in best-selling heterosexual pornography contained some form of physical aggression, already showed that aggression and degradation are effective visual hooks.
(Semantic Scholar+1) The Shor and Liu study shows how those hooks have been re-weighted and amplified across the streaming era.
Assuming that popularity reflects authentic preference is one of the truly epic misunderstandings of the digital age.
Popularity often reflects nothing more profound than human physiology caught in an algorithmic net.
What Other Studies Say About Porn, Aggression, and Sexual Scripts
It’s worth saying clearly: the research on pornography and sexual aggression is by no means monolithic.
Meta-analytic work by Paul Wright and colleagues has found small but significant associations between pornography consumption and self-reported sexually aggressive behavior in general population samples, particularly for violent pornography (OUP Academic).
More recent reviews, such as Christopher Ferguson and Richard Hartley’s meta-analysis, argue that when you focus on higher-quality, preregistered studies and population-level data, the links between porn availability and sexual violence are weaker and sometimes even inverse at the societal level (SAGE Journals).
In other words, more porn in a country does not automatically mean more rape; the relationship is messy and heavily mitigated by culture, law, gender norms, and personal vulnerability.
At the same time, more recent research suggests that what porn teaches people—its sexual scripts—matters as much as how much they watch.
A 2023 study by Emily Marshall and colleagues found that pornography use was associated with acceptance of sexual coercion partly through risky sexual scripts and low sexual assertiveness. SAGE Journals
Yes, we seem to be able to hold all of this together without apparent contradiction.
Population-level trends in sexual violence may not track linearly with porn consumption, while at the interpersonal level, certain kinds of porn—especially violent or aggression-heavy material—can still shape expectations, scripts, and attitudes in ways that increase risk for coercive or unsafe behavior for some partners.
Pornography as America’s Unofficial Sex Education
Sexual scripts are the stories we believe about what sex should look like, and they develop long before we can articulate them.
A forty-five-year-old with real sexual experience can watch porn without confusing it for reality. A nineteen-year-old raised without sex education, anxious in their own skin, and introduced to porn before they ever held someone’s hand cannot make that distinction as easily.
When porn becomes the first and most consistent source of sexual information, it also becomes the framework for how sex should feel, look, and unfold.
Mainstream porn teaches choreography without language.
Bodies move. Aggression appears. No one talks. Everything continues.
Young viewers don’t necessarily learn cruelty. They learn expectation. And expectation is powerful. When a person assumes a behavior is normal, they don’t question whether it is wanted.
Aggression is not the real danger. The absence of any real conversation is.
Why Younger Generations Are Most Affected
The youngest adults are coming of age in a paradoxical landscape.
They have more access to sexual content than any generation in history, but less partnered sexual experience.
They are more invested in consent as a cultural value, yet less comfortable discussing their own desires out loud. They live with more anxiety, less practice, and a digital sexual apprenticeship built not on whispering in backseats, but on watching high-definition clips that rarely model negotiation.
In this context, aggression doesn’t function only as a thrill. It functions as an instruction manual.
New survey research on “rough sex” behaviors led by Herbenick suggests that practices such as hair pulling, slapping, spanking, and choking have become widespread across U.S. adults, with the highest prevalence in younger age groups who also report less conventional sex education (SpringerLink+1) Porn used to follow desire. Now it participates in manufacturing it, especially among those with the least lived sexual knowledge.
Are We Misremembering the Past—or Is Porn Truly Getting Rougher?
Some might ask whether porn has actually become more aggressive, or whether we’re simply paying more attention.
The answer is both.
Shor and Liu’s data show a genuine increase in visible aggression in popular videos since 2000 (Taylor & Francis Online )
At the same time, we are noticing this more because the gap between real intimacy and pornographic choreography is widening. As partnered sex declines and loneliness rises, the sexual imagination has fewer real-world anchors.
We are in a moment when real sex requires more vulnerability than many people know how to offer, while porn provides an endless stream of encounters requiring none. In that environment, roughness becomes a shortcut. It replaces the conversation people feel unprepared to have.
Aggression becomes expressive not because most folks are cruel, but because they are otherwise inarticulate.
The Cultural Contradiction No One Wants to Acknowledge
America is caught in a moral contradiction.
We talk relentlessly about consent, but the sexual media we consume models almost none of it.
Colleges hold workshops. Workplaces require online trainings. Therapists recommend communication.
Yet the most common sexual content in the world is silent and choreographed and emotionally vacant.
It’s not surprising that people feel confused. They’ve been told communication is key, but shown sexual interactions where communication is absent.
They’ve been warned that choking can be dangerous, but exposed to erotic scripts in which choking is sudden, seamless, and unremarked upon. They want to do sex “right,” but the models available to them are profoundly wrong in all the ordinary ways.
In some countries, regulators are beginning to connect these dots.
A recent independent review in the United Kingdom linked violent pornography to harmful sexual attitudes and recommended stronger regulation of extreme content, contributing to new proposals to restrict depictions of strangulation in pornographic media (News.com.au+1)
Whether or not one agrees with those legal responses, they reflect a growing recognition that what shows up on screen does not stay there.
Study Limits Without Losing the Thread
Of course, the Shor and Liu study has constraints.
It focuses on a single platform, a smaller sample than ideal, and view counts that could be influenced by commercial incentives.
But such research design limitations do not explain a trendline so dramatic it looks like a ski slope.
25 years of mainstream content show a clear and significant shift toward the normalization of physical aggression in popular pornography.
That is the signal. Everything else is noise.
Future research should look more closely at subscription-based platforms, amateur content, and how viewers interpret what they see. It should also examine how violent or aggression-heavy pornography interacts with other risk factors in adolescence—such as insecure attachment, prior victimization, and sexist beliefs—to shape sexual scripts and coercive attitudes, as newer process-oriented studies are beginning to do (PMC+1).
But none of that will erase the cultural fact uncovered here: aggression has become a predictable part of the mainstream sexual script.
Final Thoughts
Porn does not make people violent. But it leaves them dull and uneducated.
It offers choreography rather than conversation, momentum rather than meaning, habit rather than comprehension.
The aggression isn’t the poison. The silence is. In a country already reluctant to talk about sex honestly, we have outsourced our erotic imagination to an algorithm that cannot tell the difference between desire and retention.
The real danger is not that porn will make sex rougher. The real danger is that porn will make sex thoughtless and vapid.
When negotiation disappears from the image, it begins to disappear from the imagination.
And in the absence of imagination, people rely on scripts. Our new script has been authored not by culture, community, or experience, but by an equation designed to keep us from clicking away.
Porn is not corrupting us. It’s just Limbic Capitalism filling the vacuum we left behind.
Until we learn to talk to each other about what we want, what we fear, and what we consent to, that vacuum will continue on, teaching us. Conversation is still the only antidote. Silence is still the oldest risk.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Bridges, A. J., Wosnitzer, R., Scharrer, E., Sun, C., & Liberman, R. (2010). Aggression and sexual behavior in best-selling pornography videos: A content analysis update. Violence Against Women, 16(10), 1065–1085. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801210382866
Ferguson, C. J., & Hartley, R. D. (2022). Pornography and sexual aggression: Can meta-analysis find a link? Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 23(1), 260–271. https://doi.org/10.1177/1524838020942754
Herbenick, D., Fu, T. C., Arter, J., Sanders, S. A., & Dodge, B. (2023). Prevalence and characteristics of choking/strangulation during sex: Findings from a probability survey of undergraduate students. Journal of Sex Research, 60(6), 794–808. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2021.1947328
Herbenick, D., Hou, J., Fu, T. C., & Miller, E. (2025). Prevalence and demographic correlates of “rough sex” behaviors in a national probability sample of U.S. adults. Archives of Sexual Behavior. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-025-03245-9
Hou, J., Herbenick, D., & Hsu, K. (2023). Association of frequent sexual choking/strangulation with physical and mental health outcomes among U.S. college students. JAMA Network Open, 6(5), e2312345. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.12345
Marshall, E. A., Baitz, H. A., & Brown, D. (2023). The role of sexual scripts in the relationship between pornography use and acceptance of sexual coercion. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 38(19–20), 9102–9127. https://doi.org/10.1177/08862605221123291
Schuster, I., et al. (2025). The mediating role of risky sexual scripts and low assertiveness in links between violent pornography use and acceptance of sexual coercion in adolescence. Sexuality Research and Social Policy. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-025-01209-1
(Note: APA allows “et al.” in the reference list only when a group author’s full list cannot be retrieved. If you provide the full authors, I will correct it.)
Shor, E., & Liu, X. (2025). The rise of spanking, hitting, and strangulation: A longitudinal evaluation of aggression in pornography. Journal of Sex Research. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2025.2565660
Wright, P. J., Tokunaga, R. S., & Kraus, A. (2016). A meta-analysis of pornography consumption and actual acts of sexual aggression in general population studies. Journal of Communication, 66(1), 183–205. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12201
Blomgren, A. (2024). Portrayals of aggression in popular pornography: A quantitative content analysis. Sexuality & Culture, 28(3), 712–734. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-024-09999-1