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Sexuality & Culture (2014) 18:5675 DOI 10.1007/s12119-013-9173-6
ORIGINAL PAPER
Bryant Paul Matthew J. Kobach
Published online: 26 March 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract Previous research has established that men and women respond differently to distinctive characteristics of mediated sexual portrayals. The current study experimentally tests a series of predictions derived from both sperm competition, and minimal parental investment perspectives about between- and within-gender responses to content manipulations of sexually explicit videos. Results indicate that men experienced greater post-exposure arousal and less negative affect after viewing sexually explicit videos than did women. Further, men who viewed more explicit sexual depictions tended to report greater post-exposure arousal than those who saw less explicit depictions. No within-gender differences were found for women in terms of content explicitness. Also, regardless of degree of explicitness, women reported lower levels of post-exposure arousal in response to content depicting male ejaculation than content that does not. Men, though expressing greater post-exposure arousal to less explicit content depicting male sexual climax than that which does not, showed no difference in arousal response when they saw more intensely explicit depictions, whether or not male ejaculation was shown. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for future application of evolutionary theory in studies of mediated sexual content.
Keywords Pornography Media Gender Arousal
Introduction
There is a widespread assumption among pornography producers, consumers, and critics that men and women respond to sexually explicit content differently. The
B. Paul (&) M. J. Kobach
Department of Telecommunications, College of Arts and Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USAe-mail: [email protected]
MaleFemale Reactions to Variations in Sexual Explicitness in Pornography: An Empirical Testof Predictions of Intra- and Inter-gender Differences
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Pornography Characteristics and Gender Responses 57
common belief appears to be that women respond more positively and less negatively towards, and are likely to become more sexually aroused in response to less explicit (softcore) pornographic content, whereas men tend to be more positively sexually responsive to more intensely explicit (hardcore) content. This assumption has received a modicum of empirical support (Grados and Mosher 1999; Hald 2006; Mosher and Maclan 1994). Although a number of social scientic theoretical perspectives have been relied upon to both predict and explain such gender differences in response to sexually explicit materials (for...
