Between Sexual Objectification and Sexual Agency: the Most Watched Porn Videos in the Czech Republic

Abstract

In alignment with the feminist “sex wars,” sexual objectification and sexual agency are considered to be opposites that exclude each other. I used the sexual script theory to perform a qualitative content analysis of the five most-watched heterosexual porn videos in the Czech Republic on Pornhub. The study shows that although sexual objectification and agency are opposite types of behavior, they do not exclude each other; they intertwine. The levels of objectification and agency depend on the roles portrayed by the actors, but even though the women in the analyzed videos are cast in more sexually experienced roles, which grants them more sexual agency, they are still more objectified than the men. To my knowledge, this is the first study to measure how the levels of sexual objectification and sexual agency vary with the different genders of the actors.

Keywords: sexual objectification, sexual agency, sexual scripts.