Pornography Consumption and Sexual Choking: An Evaluation of Theoretical Mechanisms

ABSTRACT

Many researchers interested In the socializing effects of pornography have found heuristic utility in the sexual script acquisition, activation, application model (₃AM) of mediated sexual socialization. Studies have emphasized overall pornography/sexual behavior associations, however, rather than mediating sexual beliefs that a ₃AM perspective suggests should underlie such associations. The present study used data from a campus-representative probability sample to examine whether linkages between pornography use and heterosexual-identified collegiate men’s choking of sexual partners is mediated by the belief that sexual choking is pleasurable, the belief that sexual choking is safe, and the disbelief that sexual choking requires consent from the person being choked. Sexual choking has been increasingly identified as a focal point of contemporary mixed-sex pornography as well as young men’s sexual behavior; it can also result in adverse health and legal consequences. Results were consistent with a sequential model positing that consuming pornography more frequently leads to more exposure to pornographic depictions of sexual choking, which in turn predicts a higher likelihood of choking sexual partners through the belief that sexual choking is pleasurable, the belief that sexual choking is safe, and the disbelief that sexual choking requires consent from the person being choked.

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Notes

1. The American Psychological Association recommends that the term “mixed-sex” be used rather than “opposite sex” when referring to male-female dyads or interactions:https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/bias-free-language/gender

2. The statistical significance, magnitude, and direction of all analyses were parallel when the hypotheses were tested with the unweighted data.

3. It should be noted that the lead creator of the pornography consumption frequency index presciently forecasted the declining value of the “picture” items as technological advances increasingly facilitated the streaming of pornographic video (J. Peter, personal communication with lead author, March 6, 2014).

4. In a similar vein, Leonhardt et al. (2019b) note the importance of sexual scripting evidence in relation to the assertion that a desire to masturbate is the true cause of associations between the use of pornography and sexuality related consequences: “We caution against thinking that any association between sexual media and a given outcome is primarily/only attributable to masturbation. A puzzling exercise is thinking how masturbation in and of itself might be longitudinally linked to increases in impersonal sexuality (Tokunaga et al., 2019), viewing women as a sex object (Vandenbosch & Eggermont, 2012; Vandenbosch & van Ooseten, 2017), and viewing marriage as being a less central component of life (Leonhardt & Willoughby, 2018), without considering the scripting message presented in sexual media” (p. 2296).

5. Pointing out that the meta-analytic magnitude of pornography/aggression associations can be reduced by purposefully selecting results with the maximum amount of control variables available (e.g., Ferguson & Hartley, 2020) may not be convincing to IRBs as an argument for the null impact of pornography, as most correlations are attenuated by the inclusion of multiple additional predictor variables (see also Bushman & Anderson, 2021; Meehl, 1971; Spector & Brannick, 2011).

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Funding

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