Negative and Positive Comment Discourse Analysis on a Popular Pornography Website

Negative and Positive Comment Discourse Analysis on a Popular Pornography Website

Amber Golembiewski

Discussing sexuality can be taboo, but can discussing sexuality, in particular pornography, assist in understanding a larger cultural phenomena? This study examined comments posted on a popular pornography website, PornHub, with two main research goals. The first goal was to determine if there were differences in the level of aggressiveness in the comment section between lesbian pornography (FF) and heterosexual pornography (MF). The second goal of the paper was to examine if pornographic video titles which had more aggressive verbs, or other statements of degradation, would elicit more aggressive comments from users? The data was collected into a relational database management system called MySQL. A total of 40 videos were analyzed, 20 for FF and 20 for MF. Each video’s title was scored as negative, positive, or neutral. All posted comments were scored in the same fashion. Verbs used in negative comments were also examined. Any use of the word “fuck” as a verb was considered to be negative using Pamela Hobb’s argument that it is a metaphor for male sexual aggression. Common negative verb usage included “fuck”, “hammer”, and “pound”. Preliminary analysis indicated that there were more negative comments overall followed closely by neutral comments. After the final analysis is conducted, the author would like to examine homosexual pornography (MM) to see if it has any similar patterns in the comment section. Another future research project would look at the actual content of the pornography and then analyze the types of comments posted.