Race and Trends in Pornography Viewership, 1973–2016: Examining the Moderating Roles of Gender and Religion

Abstract

While some research has uncovered racial differences in patterns of pornography viewership, no studies to date have considered how these patterns may be changing over time or how these trends may be moderated by other key predictors of pornography viewership—specifically, gender and religion. Using nationally representative data from the 1973–2016 General Social Survey (GSS; N = 20,620), and taking into account different ethnoreligious histories with pornography as a moral issue, we examined how race, gender, and religion intersect to influence trends in pornography viewership over 43 years. Analyses revealed that Black Americans in general were more likely to view pornography than Whites, and they were increasing in their pornography viewership at a higher rate than Whites. Moreover, Black men were more likely to consume pornography than all other race/gender combinations, but differed only from White women in their increasing rate of pornography viewership. Lastly, frequent worship attendance moderated trends in pornography viewership only for White men. By contrast, regardless of attendance frequency, Black men and women showed increasing rates of pornography use, while White women showed flat rates. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for research on the intersections of race, gender, religion, and sexuality.

Notes

¹ The term pornography is difficult to define and can often carry pejorative moral connotations that are not intended here. While some opt to use more neutral terms like sexually explicit media, the majority of studies on the topic still prefer pornography and thus we use the term. For the purposes of this study, pornography refers to sexually explicit media (magazines, movies, online videos) that are made/viewed with the intention of arousing the viewer.

² Ancillary analyses with religious service attendance recoded as 1 = Weekly, 0 = Less than weekly revealed substantively similar results to those we report in text (full models are available upon request).

³ The modification involves decomposing the “Black Protestants” category into the “mainline” and “evangelical categories” (Schleifer & Chaves, 2017). This transformation alleviates concerns over collinearity with our racial control variables and we believe better captures the group we call “conservative Protestants.”