The Prevalence of Aggressive Content in Online Sexually Explicit Fanfiction

Fanfiction (literature by admirers of works of fiction that incorporate characters or settings from these stories) has gained growing popularity in recent decades, particularly among female readers. While many fanfiction stories contain sexually explicit elements of the original story, some are specifically written, either partially or solely, for pornographic purposes. However, despite its popularity as an alternative form of pornography, sexually explicit fanfiction has garnered much less research attention than visual mainstream pornography or erotic fiction. We conducted a textual analysis of both the most popular fanfiction stories (n = 525) and a random sample of fanfiction stories (n = 360) from AO3, the leading website for fanfiction. Results showed that about half of the stories in the overall sample were marked with tags conveying aggression, while acts of non-consensual aggression or rape were present in almost 20% of the sample. A verification content analysis of the full text for 60 of these stories further suggests that the prevalence of aggression may in fact be substantially higher. We argue that since fanfiction is mostly read by women, our analysis takes an important step toward shedding light on women's sexual preferences.