UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Both through its newfound prominence in mainstream popular culture, and by the sheer mass of material available to the consumer, the dictates of mainstream pornography on conceptions of gender and sexuality are at best highly visible and at worst deeply resonant within the cultural psyche. Using the force of the viscerally and psychologically affective medium of graphic sexual imagery, what I term "mainstream" pornography consistently maps binary gender roles to dominant and submissive power relations.