Pornographic imagery and prevalence of paraphilia

Abstract

The authors classified 1,760 heterosexual pornographic magazines according to the imagery of the cover photographs. Covers depicting only a woman posed alone predominated in 1970 but constituted only 10.7% of the covers in 1981. Bondage and domination imagery was the most prevalent nonormative imagery and was featured in 17.2% of the magazines. Smaller proportions of material were devoted to group sexual activity (9.8%), tranvestism and transsexualism (4.4%), and other nonnormative imagery. The authors suggest that pornographic imagery is an unobtrusive measure of the relative prevalence of those paraphilias associated with preferences for specific types of visual imagery and for which better data are lacking.