Research suggests that pornography has the potential to inform sexual and romantic scripts, but
no studies have examined the relational content within modern mainstream pornography. In this
article, we present a content analysis of 190 sexually explicit online video clips from mainstream
pornography streaming websites, coding for the relationship between participants (if any) and
whether the video portrayed acts of infidelity. We also contrasted those clips with a comparison
sample of 77 YouTube videos. We found that depictions of on-screen committed relationships
were relatively rare in pornography (7.9% of videos) compared to YouTube (18.2%), but that
infidelity was relatively common (25.3% vs. 2.6%), with pornography more likely to depict
women as engaging in infidelity than men. Relational content was more likely to be included in a
pornographic clip when the video portrayed a fictional narrative. These findings are consistent
with past research connecting pornography consumption with open and liberal sexuality.
