Pain, Pleasure & the Porn Paradox: Why Some Women Find Aggression Arousing
Saturday, November 8, 2025.
Ask ten people what turns them on, and at least one will hesitate—because their answer sounds like a crime scene.
That hesitation is where modern desire lives: between wanting control and wanting to be released from it.
A study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found that many pornography viewers—especially women—are aroused by aggression.
Not cruelty, not humiliation.
The draw is that strange current where pleasure and pain meet and start speaking the same language.
Sociologist Eran Shor, who led the research, interviewed 302 adults about how they interpret aggression, pain, and pleasure in pornographic scenes.
Their answers weren’t lurid—they were recognizably human: ambivalent, curious, and conflicted.
Desire, it turns out, is rarely tidy, and never purely moral.
The Spark: When “Ouch” Means “More”
For centuries, Western philosophers treated pleasure and pain as moral opposites—heaven and hell divided by chalk.
Neuroscience has since erased that line.
In a landmark paper, Naomi Eisenberger’s research team at UCLA demonstrated that the anterior cingulate cortex and nucleus accumbens—the brain’s centers for processing both social pain and reward—share overlapping circuitry. Under certain conditions, distress, apparently, can flip into arousal.
In Shor’s study, more than half of participants said they found some level of aggression arousing.
Among women, that figure rose to roughly 66%. .
Many were drawn only to scenes in which the recipient appeared to enjoy the act—expressions of pleasure that made the aggression feel mutual rather than cruel.
“There’s no pleasure without pain,” one woman said. A man described it differently: “If it’s just pain, I stop watching. But if she’s uncomfortable and likes it, I like it.”
The nervous system records pleasure and pain on the same track, and what plays louder depends on context: safety, trust, and permission.
The Rules: Consent as Arousal
For many participants, BDSM was the genre that made this paradox safe. It carried visible signs of consent—safewords, ritual, and aftercare—that turned aggression into choreography instead of threat.
“I need to know she wants it,” one participant explained. “She has to enjoy it for me to enjoy it.”
A forty-one-year-old woman described submission as “liberating… a way to let go.”
Therapists recognize that phrase.
Letting go is what people come to therapy for—an easing of vigilance. In BDSM, that surrender becomes embodied.
As I mentioned in The Dark Side of the Tender Touch, touch is never just tactile—it’s also has a moral dimension. The difference between “hurt me” and “harm me” lies in who actually holds the power to stop it.
Fantasy, Safety, and the Brain’s Loopholes
Most participants drew a clear line between fantasy and reality. “In real life,” one woman said, “I have no tolerance for men who treat women like that. It should stay in the fantasy world.”
That boundary reflects what Gurit Birnbaum and Harry Reis describe in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology as eroticized distress: when safety and trust are implied, the brain can reinterpret fear as intensity.
The same neurochemicals—dopamine, norepinephrine, adrenaline—govern both arousal and alarm. The body doesn’t always know which is which.
The fantasy isn’t about pain; it’s about controlled chaos. It’s an experiment in aliveness—a way to feel something powerful without consequence.
Culture, Trauma, and Re-Framing
A smaller group linked their attraction to aggression with trauma. One trauma survivor told researchers that watching aggressive porn helped her rewrite her story: “Pain is also pleasure, so it empowers my past. It’s a way to cope.”
That perspective echoes Sari van Anders’ work in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, showing that sexual scripts can evolve to restore agency after violation. It isn’t pathology—it’s reclamation.
We live in a culture that sells violence as entertainment but moralizes it in bed.
Women are told to be self-possessed but never possessed; to feel desire, but only in polite doses. Aggressive fantasy becomes a way to smuggle intensity back into a culture obsessed with composure.
FAQ
Why are some women drawn to aggression in porn?
Because aggression under conditions of choice reads as intensity without danger. The overlapping circuits of pleasure and pain make tension erotic when trust and consent are clear.
Is this linked to trauma?
Sometimes. Survivors may eroticize controlled distress to reclaim agency. For others, it’s simply just the imagination at work—danger rewritten as play.
Does violent porn cause violence?
The research says not conclusively. Correlation exists, but causation does not. What’s certain is that fantasy teaches emotional grammar, and we all speak its dialect.
The Data’s Dark Mirror
Not all RESEARCH findings are comforting.
A 2024 study in the American Journal of Sex Education found that men who normalize violent pornography tend to hold more hostile attitudes toward women.
A report from Women’s Aid Ireland warned that scenes of strangling and degradation have gone mainstream, “fuelling high levels of violence and degradation of women and girls.”
Yet a meta-analysis of over 20,000 participants published in the Journal of Communication found only a weak link between violent porn and real-world aggression. Correlation isn’t causation—but it does expose our collective discomfort with fantasy and our confusion about what people imagine versus what they act upon.
Even the French High Council for Equality has labeled violent pornography “a factory for future rapists.”
Perhaps it’s simply the mirror we keep refusing to clean—a projection of our unease with bodies, power, and vulnerability.
What Therapists See
In therapy, I sometimes meet couples where one partner’s fantasy life terrifies the other.
What usually needs treatment isn’t the fantasy—it’s the shame around it.
Fantasy is private myth-making. It rarely predicts behavior; it reveals what the psyche is trying to integrate.
When couples can talk about these private stories, something remarkable happens: the fantasy loses its charge, and the relationship gains honesty.
The task isn’t to fix desire but to translate it—to ask what it’s trying to do for the person who carries it.
Aggression in fantasy can signal trauma, yes. But it can also signal trust—the willingness to play with power in a space where it can’t destroy you. The goal isn’t suppression; it’s daylight. Once spoken aloud, desire stops running the show from the shadows.
Why This Matters
Desire is never neutral. It mirrors, distorts, and sometimes heals the culture that shapes it. The fact that so many women find aggression arousing when it appears consensual suggests that the real theme isn’t domination—it’s permission: the freedom to stop performing control.
Arousal often blooms where fear once lived. Aggressive fantasy doesn’t necessarily glorify harm—it can metabolize it.
Couples who can talk honestly about this—without judgment, defensiveness, or moral panic—usually grow closer. Naming what frightens us is how we become trustworthy to each other.
Final Thoughts
Shor’s study doesn’t tell us what’s wrong with sexuality. It tells us how alive it still is.
Pleasure and pain, dominance and surrender, morality and fantasy—they’re not opposites. They’re actually in adjoining rooms with thin walls and poor soundproofing.
The moral complexity of erotic life isn’t a flaw—it’s the price of consciousness.
The moment we stopped being animals, we started needing stories to understand our pleasures.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s that fantasy isn’t a verdict.
It’s a confession of complexity. To explore what excites us without shame is not the end of ethics—it’s where ethics begin.
Be well, Stay indoors, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Eisenberger, N. I. (2012). The neural bases of social pain and reward. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(11), 512–519. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2012.03.009
Birnbaum, G. E., & Reis, H. T. (2023). Attachment processes and sexual regulation: Eroticized distress in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 125(4), 602–617. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000429
Shor, E. (2025). “It’s a Way to Let Go”: The intersection of pleasure and pain in pornography. Archives of Sexual Behavior.
van Anders, S. M. (2020). Beyond sexual orientation: Integrating trauma and agency into sexual script theory. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 49(4), 1027–1040. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-019-01561-3
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.
Bhuptani, P. H., Kenney, S. R., Napper, L. E., & Orchowski, L. M. (2024). Pornography use, perceived peer norms, and attitudes toward women: A study of college men. American Journal of Sex Education.
Women’s Aid Ireland. (2024). Facing Reality: Failure to Tackle the Harms of Pornography.
High Council for Equality (France). (2024). Report on the Harms of Violent Pornography.