Associations Between Pornography Use Frequency, Pornography Use Motivations, and Sexual Wellbeing in Couples

ABSTRACT

Pornography use is prevalent, even among partnered individuals. Although pornography use motivations represent key predictors of sexual behaviors, prior studies only assessed the associations between pornography use frequency and sexual wellbeing, with mixed results. This cross-sectional dyadic study examined the associations between partners’ individual and partnered pornography use frequency, motivations, and sexual wellbeing. Self-report data from 265 couples (M_{age_men} = 31.49 years, SD = 8.26; M_{age_women} = 29.36 years, SD = 6.74) were analyzed using an actor-partner interdependence model. Men’s greater emotional avoidance motivation was related to their own lower sexual function (β = −.24, p = .004) and greater sexual distress (β = .19, p = .012), while their higher sexual curiosity motivation was related to higher partnered sexual frequency (β = .15, p = .031), their own greater sexual satisfaction (β = .13, p = .022), sexual function (β = .16, p = .009), and lower sexual distress (β = −.13, p = .043). Women’s higher partnered pornography use frequency was associated with their own greater sexual function (β = .15, p = .034) and lower sexual distress (β = −.14, p = .012). Additionally, women’s higher individual pornography use frequency (β = .33, p < .001) and lower sexual pleasure motivation (β = −.35, p = .002) were associated with higher partnered sexual frequency. No partner effects were observed. Findings highlight that women’s pornography use frequency and each partner’s motivations might play crucial roles in couples’ sexual wellbeing.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Laurence de Montigny Gauthier and Mylène Desrosiers for their assistance with data collection.

Disclosure Statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Notes

¹ Given the low number of items covering different aspects of excitement seeking (i.e., escaping into a fantasy world, providing novelty in life, and giving a sense of excitement), Cronbach’s alpha values may be relaxed, and we considered these values acceptable based on prior suggestions (Cortina, 1993; Nunnally & Bernstein, 1994). Nevertheless, to control for measurement error in the main analysis, we conducted confirmatory factor analysis following the guidelines described for dyadic data (Chiorri et al., 2014; Xu et al., 2016). The model showed acceptable fit to the data (CFI = .95; TLI = .94; RMSEA = .08, 90%CI = .08 to .09). We saved the factor score of the excitement-seeking motivation and used that as input for the main analyses to control for potential measurement error (Skrondal & Laake, 2001).

² Bias-corrected bootstrapped confidence intervals (CIs) were computed with the maximum likelihood estimator as bootstrapping is not available with MLR. This method does not alter the parameter estimates, only the confidence intervals associated with them.

³ To examine whether the identified associations were significantly different between women and men, we compared the original, unconstrained model to a model in which all paths were constrained to be equal between both partners. The corrected chi-square difference test (Δχ² = 126.89, p < .001) indicated a significant difference between the unconstrained and the fully constrained models. These results suggest that the associations differed significantly between women and men. Considering the sex-based differences in the original (unconstrained) model, we pushed forward this difference test by specifically constraining those associations that were different for women and men in the model (e.g., associations between one’s own emotional avoidance pornography use motivation and one’s own sexual distress). The corrected chi-square difference test (Δχ² = 26.43, p = .003) indicated a significant difference between the two models, suggesting that women and men differ significantly in the examined associations.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the SCOUP Team – Sexuality and Couples – Fonds de recherche du Québec, Société et Culture awarded to B. Bőthe and by the Merit Scholarship Program for Foreign Students (PBEEE) awarded by the Ministère de l’Éducation et de l’Enseignement Supérieur (MEES) to B. Bőthe.