Is Sexual Consent Sexy?: Investigating the Effects of a Televised Depiction of Verbal Sexual Consent on College Students’ Sexual Consent Attitudes and Behavioral Intentions

ABSTRACT

Although depictions of sexual consent are rare in the media, such portrayals have the potential to instruct young people on the procedural details of sexual consent. Taking an entertainment-education (E-E) perspective, we examined the effects of a televised depiction of sexual consent that contained verbal sexual consent, versus a televised depiction that only included nonverbal sexual consent, versus a no-exposure control group to test for changes in college students’ attitudes and behavioral intentions toward sexual consent. In the pretest-posttest experimental design, those who were assigned to the nonverbal video condition reported less favorable attitudes about sexual consent between pretest and posttest. Additionally, interpersonal liking was an important facilitator of the E-E impact of the verbal sexual consent condition; the more the participants liked the characters in the verbal condition, the more positively about sexual consent they felt and the more likely they were to plan to engage in sexual consent. Narrative engagement did not mediate the effects of experimental condition on sexual consent attitudes and behavioral intentions. The implications for E-E are discussed.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. We could not enter whether participants had seen Normal People as a covariate because we only asked this question of participants assigned to one of the exposure conditions. However, we ran all of our results with those participants dropped, and because none of our statistical inferences changed, we included them in the final sample.

2. Enjoyment was measured with nine items that were adapted from Raney (2002) and Raney and Bryant (2002): “I thought the clip was true to life,” “I thought the portrayal of the sexual encounter was well done,” “I thought the clip was applicable to people like me,” “I thought the portrayal of the sexual encounter was of high quality,” “I thought the clip was relatable,” “I thought the actors did a good job with the scene in the clip,” “I want to see what happens next in the show,” “I want to continue watching the show,” and “I plan to find out more about this show.”

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in his article.