Pornography vs. sexual science: The role of pornography use and dependency in U.S. teenagers’ sexual illiteracy

ABSTRACT

This study examined U.S. adolescents’ pornography consumption, pornography dependency, and belief in a variety of notions contradicted by basic sexological science. Data were from 595 youth aged 14–18 who participated in a population-based probability survey. Consistent with the sexual script acquisition, activation, application model (₃AM) of sexual media socialization, adolescents who had viewed pornography were more likely to hold erroneous sexual beliefs than adolescents who had not viewed pornography. Also consistent with the ₃AM, more frequent pornography consumption and higher levels of pornography dependency were independently associated with holding erroneous beliefs about sex among pornography consumers. Counter to theoretical expectations, frequency of pornography consumption did not interact with pornography dependency in the prediction of erroneous sexual beliefs.

KEYWORDS:

• Pornography
• socialization
• sexual knowledge
• adolescents
• ₃AM

Notes

1 The question of whether pornography contributes to erroneous beliefs about sex is pertinent to the discipline of communication more broadly, given the centrality of the mass media exposure/erroneous social beliefs association to cultivation theory and research (Chia & Lee, 2008; Gerbner et al., 1994; Green, 2006).

2 This mediational approach was adopted in the present study because of the differing perspectives presented in this subsection. But it would not be unreasonable for future work to probe whether the association between more frequent pornography consumption and erroneous beliefs about sex is moderated by more or less exposure to specific categories of pornography.

3 Previous studies have focused on the sexual satisfaction, sexual risk behavior, and sexual aggression of the sexually experienced adolescents in the dataset.

4 Although CFAs were used to determine the final constitution of the multiple-item measures, it is important to note that the results for each hypothesis test and research question were parallel when conducted with the original measures (i.e., analyses with the non-trimmed, complete item indices generated the same conclusions as the analyses with the indices trimmed per the results of the CFAs).

5 Gender was not incorporated as an a priori moderator in the present study due to the goal of focusing on more specific, less global, contingency factors. Post-hoc analyses of gender as a potential moderator of the pornography/erroneous belief associations yielded null interactions.

6 For subsequent researchers’ reference, the correlations between erroneous sexual beliefs and each individual pornography category were as follows: gangbang (r = .16, p < .01), facial ejaculation (r = .24, p < .01), double-penetration (r = .24, p < .01), rough oral sex (r = .31, p < .01), amateur (r = .27, p < .01), BDSM (r = .14, p < .05), coercion (r = .13, p < .05), and simulated rape (r = .06, p = .31).