The answer is sort of complex. Some of the research does sort out imagery that they consider violent and non-violent. In fact, though, some studies find that even the non-violent pornography increases the acceptance of behaviours like rape. We thought that only the violent pornography would produce that, but some of the research says that non-violent pornography produces this as well.
Next, with the images that are violent and degrading, if you ask subjects to look at whether they are you looking at things that are violent and degrading, the more they look at it, the less they rate it as violent and degrading. By asking for subject perceptions, which some studies do, you find that they become inured to things.
If you ask subjects—I don't want to be too graphic here—but if you ask subjects.... There's something like A to M, which means—I'll have to be graphic—ass to mouth, that is, a male inserting his penis into a woman's anus and then taking it right out and putting it in her mouth with her feces in her own mouth. You ask subjects whether that is degrading. After they look at that for a while, they decide it's not degrading pornography anymore, while the females continue to rate it as degrading. So it's hard to say whether we are looking at degrading pornography: ask the person who is looking at it.
Ejaculating into a woman's face first looks degrading, but then later the males say it's not degrading. The woman still says it is degrading. It's hard sometimes to categorize, depending upon on who is looking at it and who is evaluating it. That's the complication in the research as to who says it's degrading.
With this phenomenon that says even the non-degrading and the non-violent have some negative aspects and produce negative outcome, all of it includes what we call “boundary crossing”. That is, an individual who is not intimate with the people acting—that is, the viewer, who is not intimate—is engaging in an intimate activity with these individuals, which is boundary crossing. Why am I being intimate with somebody with whom I'm not intimate? I'm watching somebody; I'm visually invading someone. What we found is that the visual invading of people with whom you are not intimate leads to the physical invading of people. There's a connection just in the fact that you can boundary cross.
We thought originally, when we started the research, that only aggressive and degrading were going to cause the impact. More and more, we're finding that it's all of it.
The final piece is that it's very hard in this day and age to find visual depictions that aren't degrading and violent. The research says that 88% of the images have physical aggression in them. More than 50% have degrading images in them. There are less and less non-degrading, non-violent depictions out there to actually look at. We've developed a tolerance for it. People who look at it look at harder and harder kinds, so that the non-degrading, non-violent has become a small subset of what's on the Internet.
A to M is in fact the fastest-growing image on the subset in Internet pornography, and invariably people are asking for images in which men ejaculate into women's faces and into their eyes. Some of the research says that will produce pink eye and infections of the eye, and other kinds of things. That is an image that many men now think of as a common thing to do and are asking their partners to do, because it's so common in the pornography that's on the Internet.