Ignoring a woman's dislike of sexual material: Sexually impositional behavior in the laboratory

The purpose of the current studies was to determine if participants would ignore a woman's dislike of sexual material in a laboratory setting. Two experiments (N = 130) were conducted in which participants were asked to show, under the guise of a distraction task, neutral, erotic, or nonerotic distracting slides to a female confederate who was depicted as strongly disliking erotic material. More men than women showed erotic slides to the female confederate who was described as disliking erotic material. Fewer men and more women showed autopsy slides when the female confederate was depicted as disliking erotic material than when she was depicted as feeling neutral about erotic material. These results provide preliminary support for this laboratory paradigm as an analogue of sexually impositional behavior.