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.
Abstract Teaser