https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5830-7991
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ABSTRACT
There is growing public concern that sexually explicit material (SEM) negatively affects women, given that SEM often promotes women’s sexual objectification, passivity and submission to male desire. Using a sample of 552 female high school students (Mage at baseline = 15.8, SD =.48) who participated in a 5-wave longitudinal study in Croatia, we assessed if and to what extent were hyperfemininity and sexual agency, as possible, respectively, negative and positive outcomes of SEM use, cross-sectionally related to adolescent women’s sexual satisfaction. We then assessed longitudinal associations between SEM use and hyperfemininity/sexual agency over a period of 24 months. The results of the cross-sectional analysis indicated that sexual satisfaction was not associated with hyperfeminity, but it was positively associated with sexual agency. The results of directed latent growth modelling indicated that baseline levels of SEM use were significantly and positively associated with both sexual agency and hyperfemininity two years later, and an increase in SEM use over time was significantly, albeit weakly, related only to hyperfemininity. Given that SEM use may contribute to the development of hyperfemininity, our findings call for further investments into comprehensive sexual education programs for youth that include discussions about SEM.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. SEM encompasses pictures or videos that depict explicit sexual activities (e.g., masturbation, oral sex, vaginal and anal penetration) with an intent to sexually arouse the viewer (see Peter & Valkenburg, Citation2016).
2. Fourteen of the total of 22 high-schools in the Rijeka metropolitan area were selected for participation. Smaller schools (n = 7) were omitted due to financial constraints; one larger school was not included due to a recent arson. Coverage of the city’s high-school sophomore population was calculated to be at 63%.
3. The difference in the sample size at T5 was related to the fact that students enrolled in 3-year vocational programs completed their studies before the start of fieldwork for T5.
4. This is a usual procedure when searching for ‘a knot’, or a time-point in which the (overall) latent curve can be split in two (for the so called piecewise curve specification). A well-chosen knot is a point that separates two distinct parts of the latent curve. Based on the observation of changes in mean frequency of pornography use in our panel, we identified the knot that separated the first part of the curve, characterised by a significant increase in pornography use, from the second part, in which no increase was observed. The procedure is described in more detail in Flora (Citation2008) and Grimm, Ramm, & Estabrook (2017).
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Notes on contributors
Verena Klein
Dr. Verena Klein is a researcher at the Institute for Sex Research and Forensic Psychiatry at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. Her major research interests focus on women´s sexuality, sexual desire and entitlement to pleasure, and gender differences in sexual behavior.
Sandra Šević
Sandra Sevic is a researcher in Vilnius, Lithuania. She received her MA in Sociology from the University of Zagreb, Croatia.
Taylor Kohut
Dr. Taylor Kohut is a research associate in the department of psychology at Western University. Dr. Kohut primarily studies the nature of sexual media like pornography, and how exposure to such media can shape the way that people think, feel, and behave.
Aleksandar Štulhofer
Aleksandar Štulhofer is Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. His latest studies focused on sexual well-being in older European couples and network analysis of symptoms of male adolescents’ problematic pornography use