Pornline: New Spaces Mean New Representations? Bodies, Gender and Sexual Practices Through the Lens of Pornhub, Xnxx and Xvideos Video Previews.

If sexuality is perceived as a marginal topic in sociology, this seems truer for pornography, whose field of study seems to be considered a dirty work (Irvine 2014). But it is unquestionable that nowadays sexual contents are available more than ever (Paasonen 2019). This visibility is possible thanks to pornographic platforms, which are the main containers of pornographic offer. The multiplication of sexual contents and the easy access open up new interrogatives related to new sexual practices and to the changes of morality. The idea of this research is that the unprecedented number of representations of bodies and sexual practices offered by porn platforms today could be a useful opportunity – far away from censorship – to investigate sexual desires, by exploring the content offering. In addition, sociological studies around the topic of online pornographic contents are prevalent unexplored by literature. For this reason, we are presenting a research that focuses the attention on representations of bodies in porn platforms. We have collected in six months - using the technique of the analysis of content - 850 previews of the videos categorized as Top of the day in Italy in the three most visited platforms in Italy and in the world: Pornhub, Xvideos, Xnxx. We have selected 386 previews from Pornhub, 284 from Xvideos and 180 from Xnxx. The aim is to explore how bodies are represented in this kind of platforms: what are the effects of technological transformation of porn in bodies’ representations? What the representations of sexual practices can tell us about sexual preferences and tastes in the contemporary era? Are there any differences related to gender roles in representation of bodies?