Popular culture meets pornography: Exploring aggression in sexually explicit fanfiction and readers' preferences


Ezelbahar Metin, McGill University

Fanfiction (literature by admirers of works of fiction which incorporates characters or settings from the original work) has gained growing popularity in recent decades with the advent of the Internet. Archive of Our Own (AO3), the leading website for fanfiction, hosts over 11 million works of fanfiction, including 2 million written in the past year. While many fanfiction stories contain sexually explicit elements of the original story, some are specifically written either partially or solely for pornographic purposes, largely akin to other erotic literature. Furthermore, like erotic literature, and unlike most mainstream visual pornography, fanfiction is mostly written and consumed by women, making it potentially more female-friendly and women-focused. However, despite its popularity and potential for producing an alternative form of pornography, sexually explicit fanfiction has garnered much less research attention than online mainstream pornography or erotic fiction. In this research, I answer the following questions: 1. What is the prevalence of sexual aggression in explicit fanfiction? 2. What are the sexual preferences of readers of explicit fanfiction? 3. How does aggression in explicit fanfiction vary based on gender dynamics, genres, and sexual orientation? To answer these questions, I utilized a mixed-methods approach. First, I followed in the footsteps of recent research on visual pornography and conducted a textual analysis of both the most popular fanfiction (n=525) and a random sample of fanfiction (n=360) from AO3. The popular fanfiction stories were selected based on the number of times each story had been read (“Hits”). The random fanfiction sample was selected through a random number generator. I analyzed these samples by coding the “tags” of each work, which are key words authors use to describe the contents of their story. I also conducted preliminary in-depth interviews with readers (n=19) of sexually explicit fanfiction published on AO3. Participants were recruited via online advertisement on pages dedicated to fanfiction (Facebook and Tumblr). I found that about half of my sample was marked with tags conveying aggression. More popular stories included a slightly higher rate of aggressive tags than randomly sampled stories (54% and 44%, respectively). A third of the works contained at least one act of BDSM, while acts of non-consensual aggression or rape were present in almost 20% of the sample. Humiliation was present in a quarter of the works, and incest and themes of incest and pedophilia appeared in about 10% and 3% of the stories, respectively. All 19 interviewees, consisting mostly of women of varying sexualities, reported that they enjoyed reading some form of aggression at least sometimes. Although some specified that it was not for their sexual enjoyment and had more to do with the characters or the narrative, none of the interviewees had a strong negative response to the presence of aggression. Moreover, many of the participants in the study enjoyed reading depictions of pleasure in response to aggression in same-sex pairings, which goes against the radical feminist criticism of aggressive pornography as a representation of male dominance over women (Dines, 2010; Dworkin and McKinnon, 1988). Additionally, a number of participants preferred to read about women receiving aggression from men in a sexual context, with the condition that they enjoy the act. In fact, many respondents said that the pain itself could be enjoyed sexually by the receiving character. Lastly, 13 respondents differentiated what they like to read in fanfiction from what they like to practice in their personal lives, with 10 respondents specifying that they read aggressive or non-consensual fanfiction without practicing them in real life. This study contributes to the sociology of sexuality in various ways. Much of the academic research on pornography has focused on the role of aggression in pornographic videos, while most of the literature on written erotica remains focused on sexual scripts and the attitudes of readers to the sexual material. Research into women’s pornography preferences, be it in video or written format, is only recently being explored as in-depth as men’s preferences. This is in part due to the strong feminist critique of pornography and dismissal of written erotica as a legitimate avenue of study. Studying fanfiction which has a reader demographic of mostly women is thus an important step in uncovering more about women’s sexuality and preferences.

This paper will be presented at the following session: