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Pornography, Rough Sex and Gendered Harm: Just Sex on Screen? By SamanthaKeene, London: Routledge, 2025, 204 pp., £145.00

Year: 2026
Type: book-review
Abstract: In Pornography, Rough Sex and Gendered Harm: Just Sex on Screen?, Samantha Keene draws on interviews conducted with 24 heterosexual adults from Aotearoa New Zealand in order to explore the complex -and at times contradictory -ways in which men and women make use, and make sense, of pornography in their everyday lives.Engaging with participants' personal narratives in a manner that is marked throughout by candour, compassion, and clarity, Keene exposes the ways in which pornography can be a site for both pleasure and pain, with gendered dynamics infusing its modes of representation, consumption, and effects.The ways in which pornography can 'normalise and reiterate wider societal (mis)understandings about sex, power, gender, and consent, thereby contributing to the cultural conditions of possibility for sexual violence' (p. 3) are never far from view in Keene's account.However, analysis throughout the book is also driven by a commitment to attend to 'how mainstream pornography can be experienced as both pleasurable and harmful, sometimes at the same time', with the power to influence people's everyday experiences of sex, consent, and intimacy in 'intricate, complex and nuanced ways' (p.8).This is important but challenging work, for participants and researchers alike.In this respect, Keene's candid reflections on her own positionality are particularly welcome.Situating the book from the outset in relation to her own exposure to, and engagement with, pornography, Keene explores how embarking on academic research on this topic requires undertaking a form of 'dirty work' 1 that brings its own personal and professional stigma.As a response, or at least an interruption, to the potentially negative effects of this, Keene encourages those of us working on sex and sexuality to publish 'brave accounts of research journeys' (p.16).These can 'provide stories of survival' (p.16) that will not only support and motivate peers but challenge conventional knowledge hierarchies and ill-fitting institutional processes.Across the unfolding chapters of Pornography, Rough Sex and Gendered Harm, Keene offers new and valuable insights into the personal, interpersonal, and societal impacts of mainstream pornography in contemporary society.Chapter 2 situates her fieldwork in the wider (and often 1 E.
DOI: 10.1111/jols.70034
Language: English
Field: Psychology
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7126226874
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