Prevalence of BDSM Pornography

The prevalence of BDSM pornography is of interest in several regards. First, it might serve as a proxy indicator for the actual prevalence of kink, though we should not take that for granted: there are far more cowboy movies than cowboys, for instance. Second, it is politically contentious insofar as anti-pornographic rhetoric has often exaggerated the prevalence of BDSM in pornography, and tied this to rape culture (see Kutchinsky (1991) for a discussion and bibliography). Finally, it is relevant to the hypothesis that pornography is important in the etiology of kink.

There are serious definitional and methodological problems in all the following research. “Pornography” itself is a very ambiguous term. From the point of view of Christian conservatives, for instance, it may include mass-market novels, radio, and television programs whose focus is primarily “romantic,” not erotic. The frequent assertion by some authors that all pornography involves the exploitation of women would seem to preclude by definition erotic materials that feature only men, or that are non-documentary (text, cartoons, etc.).

Again, there are many possible standards for terms like “hard-core,” “aggression,” or even “rape” in the context of a photograph or the narrative of sexual theater. Is the presence of a leather collar by itself S&M? If there is no negotiated consent in a video, should we assume the video is meant to depict a rape? (This question of depiction, of course, is independent from whether or not the video actually records a rape.) To some large extent these are subjective determinations.  These ambiguities are exacerbated in non-documentary media such as drawings (which probably account for the bulk of all pornography worldwide).  Malamuth and Spinner (1980) note the difficulty of deciding "what constitutes sexual violence within a cartoon stimulus." 

Finally, there is a strong argument to be made that market segregation operates within the pornographic industry. Kinky materials, like homosexual materials, may be sold be different vendors than those who sell heternormative pornography. If that is true, it casts substantial doubt on the methodologies of the studies below.

Study	Rate	Variable	Sample
Cowan et al. (1988)	51%	Rape	Videos
Smith (1976)	33%	Coercion	Erotic novels
Soble (1986)	16%	BDSM	300 magazines
Malamuth and Spinner (1980)	10%	Violence	Playboy and Penthouse cartoons
Palys (1984)	6.4%	Aggression	150 videos, Vancouver
Malamuth and Spinner (1980)	5%	Violence	Playboy and Penthouse photos
Winick (1985)	4.9%	B/D	430 magazines in NYC
Canada (1984)	3.4%	Violence	Stories in magazines
Kutchinsky (1981)	2%	Hard-core SM	Magazines and videos, Denmark
Canada (1984)	1.2%	Violence	Photos in magazines
Winick (1985)	1.2%	S/M	430 magazines in NYC

Some comments are in order. Nearly all of these surveys place the prevalence of BDSM in a given field of pornography somewhere between 1% and 7%, with the “harder” content being proprtionately less common. This range is quite consistent with the best estimates for the prevalance of kinky people overall. In fact, it is lower than the likely estimate for the number of people who have ever experimented with BDSM.

The very high incidence of rape found by Cowan et al. (and also by Smith) has been critiqued by Fisher and Barak (1991), among others, for lack of a control group. However, none of these studies here used control groups. It seems likely that depictions of sex without explicit consent—i.e. rape fantasies—are a very common trope both in pornography and in mainstream media (e.g. Gone with the Wind, Blade Runner).  Notably, while these materials depict coercive sex, it is generally depicted as enjoyable for both parties (Winick 1985).  The implication is that women enjoy rape, but not that women's enjoyment of sex is irrelevant.  (See Morgan 1982 for one of many discussions on this point.)