I can speak to how we operationalize this definition within our study, because I think it is a really key distinction. The way we understood pornography in our study was that it was looking broadly at materials that depicted sexual activities in unconcealed ways as a way to create excitement. We were not specifically focused on violent and degrading pornography.
On that point, there are a couple of different ways to approach it. I think there's definitely a distinction between pornography and violent pornography, both by what you can draw from the literature and by the way that the youth in my study talked about it. I think in regular pornography, they would often talk about the variety of genres that exist. You have everything from erotica to couples uploading amateur videos of themselves to Hentai, which is a kind of cartoon. You have a variety of different types. Then you also have the types that people would talk about in terms of their violence.
The way I would understand violent pornography is that it's non-consensual acts of violence, degradation, or dehumanization in pornography. For me, the key word in there is “non-consensual”, recognizing that there's also pornography from, say, kink communities where it is consensual and might otherwise depict activities that seem violent.
For me, the key point is that looking at it, it's very difficult to separate out, because what is violent is subjective. You really need to consider that violent pornography is consumed alongside and in relation to wider sexual content. If we're going to be talking about this, and talking about pornography, it really should be talked about in terms of the medium as a whole, looking at how people are making meaning of these meanings in relation to both the violent pornography and the non-violent pornography, and how they're understanding that themselves.