Revisiting the Association between Pornography Use and Risky Sexual Behaviors: The Role of Early Exposure to Pornography and Sexual Sensation Seeking

Abstract

Among the suggested problems and harms associated with widespread pornography use among young people, risky sexual behaviors have been frequently mentioned. To further explore this public health concern, this article analyzed sexual sensation seeking (SSS) as a potential confounder of the association between pornography use and sexual risks using data collected in 2010 from a population-based sample of young Croatian adults aged 18 to 25 (n = 1,005). Significant, but small, correlations were found between the indicators of pornography use (age at first exposure, frequency of use in the past 12 months, and personal importance of pornography) and sexual risk taking. However, in a multivariate analysis, only age at first exposure to pornography remained a significant, albeit weak, predictor of sexual risk taking among both women and men. SSS, defined as the dispositional tendency toward the impulsive pursuit of sexual arousal and stimulation, neither confounded nor moderated this association. Overall, the findings do not support the notion that pornography use is substantially associated with sexual risk taking among young adults, but suggest that early exposure to sexually explicit material and high SSS are additive risk factors for sexual risk taking.

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Croatian Ministry of Science, Education, and Sports, as well as by United Nations Development Programme Croatia. We express our gratitude to Jochen Peter, Gert Martin Hald, Sean McConnell, and Valerio Baćak for their critical reading of the manuscript and insightful comments.

Notes

¹In this article, the terms pornography and sexually explicit material are used interchangeably.

²Cronbach's alpha for the scale composed of five binary variables was predictably low (.54).

³Statistically, full mediation and confounding are indistinguishable; conceptually, they are completely different. The concept of mediation assumes that the independent variable influences the mediating variable, which becomes a vehicle (or a “causal mechanism”) of the independent variable's impact on the dependent variable. In contrast, the concept of confounding is based on the premise that the confounding variable impacts both the independent and dependent variable. Controlling for the confounder, the association between the independent and dependent variable substantially changes to the point of becoming spurious (Mackinnon, Krull, & Lockwood, 2000).

^a Percentages do not always add up to 100 due to missing cases.

^b Only the participants with coital experience were asked the questions about pornography use.

*p < .05. **p < .001.

^a Associations in the female subsample (n = 368–478) are shown above the diagonal, and those in the male subsample (n = 402–500) are presented below the diagonal.

^b Spearman's rank correlation was used due to the ordinal character of the variable.

*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

*p < .05. **p < .001.

⁴It could be hypothesized that an early exposure to SEM may affect subsequent risky sexual behaviors among individuals who score high on SSS. As pornography commonly depicts unprotected and seemingly risk-free sexual activities with multiple partners (Coyne et al., 2009; Grudzen et al., 2009), its use at an earlier developmental stage may strongly influence sexual socialization of adolescents prone to SSS. Such exposure would facilitate the development of specific sexual scripts (Simon & Gagnon, 1999) in which sexual risks are systematically underestimated and a high value is attached to “unrestricted” sexual activity.