Am J Psychiatry 1982; 139:1493-1495
Copyright © 1982 by American Psychiatric Association
Pornographic imagery and prevalence of paraphilia
PE Dietz and B Evans
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.
