Korean men’s interest in gonzo pornography and use of condoms

Abstract

This brief report examined correlations between Korean men’s interest in gonzo pornography, perceptions of pornography’s functional value, and use of condoms. Neither a higher interest in gonzo pornography nor the perception that pornography is a source of sexual information were directly related to condom utilization. However, interest in gonzo pornography interacted with pornography perceptions to account for variability in condomless sex. Simple-slope tests indicated that there was no association between gonzo interest and condom use when men disagreed that pornography is a source of sexual information. Conversely, gonzo interest became increasingly associated with a lower likelihood of using condoms as agreement that pornography is a source of sexual information strengthened. This finding supports the hypothesis that consumers will be most likely to reference pornographic scripts to inform their own sexual behavior when they perceive pornography as a form of sexual pedagogy. It also supports calls for increased efforts at pornography literacy education.

KEYWORDS:

• ₃AM
• Condom Use
• Gonzo Pornography
• Sexual Risk
• Unprotected Sex

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. While a number of studies have correlated pornography consumption with condom use (yielding a mix of null and positive results), these efforts have infrequently tested whether pornography consumption interacts with a theoretically specified psychological attribute of the consumer to explain variability in the likelihood of having condomless sex.

2. These movies were created by U.S. production companies. In Korea, producing and viewing pornography is officially prohibited. Koreans use proxy servers to access pornographic sites blocked by the Korea Communications Standards Commission, a governmental agency, and they primarily view foreign pornography (Sun et al., 2015). South Koreans’ consumption of material from the North America based website Pornhub, for example, has been on the rise, particularly in the phone traffic share, which had a 74% increase, the second highest increase in the world, after Cuba (79%; Pornhub Insights, 2018).