Relationships and Infidelity in Pornography: An Analysis of Pornography Streaming Websites

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.