Pornography, Masturbation, and Relational Satisfaction

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ At a broader level, recent model specification research informed by Slater’s (2007, 2015) reinforcing spirals model of media effects suggests that variables such as age, education, and marital status are better conceptualized as predictors of pornography use, which in turn affects sociosexual outcomes, rather than as confounders of associations between pornography use and sociosexual outcomes (Wright & Tokunaga, 2022; Wright et al., 2022).

² Should the pot call the kettle … ? One of us (Wright) until only very recently approached questions of confounding the same way, many times over (see Wright, 2021, for a mea culpa).

³ The GSS does not assess masturbation.

⁴ It is also worth noting that the relationship remained negative and significant (partial r = −.249, p < .001) after adjusting for the other masturbatory measure in the dataset, participants’ belief that they have the right to masturbate (1=never, 4=always; M = 3.47, SD = 0.87).

⁵ The relationship between desire to masturbate and pornography use is likely bidirectional (i.e., the desire to masturbate leads to pornography use but pornography’s influence on sexual fantasy and arousal also leads to a desire to masturbate).