Revisiting the Role of Pornography Use in the Confluence Model Theory of Sexual Aggression

ABSTRACT

This research tested Confluence Model reasoning that pornography use should be related to sexual aggression among men who are high but not low in the predisposing risk factors of hostile masculinity (HM) and impersonal sexuality (IS). This hypothesis was examined with three online surveys of young adult males, including an American Mechanical Turk sample (N₁ = 1,528, M_age = 22.46 years); a national sample of Canadian students (N₂ = 1,049, M_age = 20.89 years); and a national sample of Canadian non-students (N₃ = 905, M_age = 21.66 years). As expected, synergistic interactions between HM and IS reliably predicted self-reported sexual aggression across samples. Results with respect to interactions with pornography use were more complex. The Confluence Model hypothesis was supported when pornography use was operationalized as the use of nine specific magazines but it was not supported when pornography use was operationalized with a contemporary inclusive approach that included use of internet materials. These discrepant findings are difficult to account for with Confluence Model theorizing and highlight the non-equivalence of pornography use measures in survey research.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Stephanie Montgomery-Graham and Erin Shumlich for their help with assembling study materials and recruiting participants.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2023.2174248

Notes

¹ We note that pornography use with a partner was also assessed in these studies, though this behavior is comparatively infrequent and conceptually distinct from solitary pornography use (Kohut, Balzarini et al., 2020). We also assessed the use of violent and coercive sexual media. While this is of clear relevance to the Confluence Model, we wish to examine it comprehensively in a separate report.

² Some may believe that Confluence Model predictions are more clearly supported by a regression model consisting of significant main-effects for HM and IS, a significant two-way interaction between HM and IS, and a significant three-way interaction between HM, IS and pornography use. Such a regression model only supports Confluence Model predictions, however, under conditions where measures of HM, IS and pornography use range from 0 → +∞. When variables are mean centered or standardized, the relevant model must be adjusted by adding a main effect for pornography use, and two-way interactions between HM and pornography use and IS and pornography use, to make equivalent predictions. Mathematical justification is available from the first author.

³ In fact, upon recognizing the robustness of the findings for pornographic magazines, it took the first author several hours of driving around a mid-sized Canadian city to even find an outlet that still sold pornographic magazines. And once he did, he was immediately confronted by an internal dialogue of self-presentation concerns: “Have people noticed that I am scanning the top shelf of the magazine display?”; “What would the cashier think of me if I bought that issue of 18teen? Perhaps I should get Over Thirty instead?”; “I’ve been staring at these magazines too long”; etc.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by an Insight Grant (435 2017 0549) provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (PI: William Fisher).