Perceived Similarity, Utility, and Social Realism as Potential Mediators of the Link between Pornography Use and Condomless Sex

ABSTRACT

One of the most consistent findings in content analyses of popular, commonly consumed pornography is the near absence of condoms. A recent meta-analysis found that pornography use is associated with an increased likelihood of condomless sex, but the studies available for analysis rarely included measures of potential cognitive mediators underlying the association. Following the sexual script acquisition, activation, application model (₃AM) of mediated sexual socialization and the differential susceptibility to media effects model (DSMM), the present study examined whether linkages between pornography use and condomless sex are mediated by perceived similarity to actors in pornography and heightened perceptions of pornography’s utility and social realism. Social realism and similarity mediated the association between pornography consumption frequency and condomless sex in simple mediation models, but only social realism remained significant in a parallel process model inclusive of all three mediators.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Tokunaga et al. (2020) were able, however, to conduct model-based and path analytic meta-analyses to determine that it is more likely that pornography energizes consumers’ desires for the physiologically pleasurable sensations of condomless sex than it is that preexisting sensation seeking tendencies confound the association between pornography use and condomless sex.

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 results for each hypothesis test were parallel when conducted with the original measures (i.e., analyses with the original, non-trimmed indices generated the same conclusions as the analyses with the indices trimmed per the results of the CFA).

4. For a critical treatment of the use of control variables in pornography effects research, see, Wright (2021b).

5. Specifically, pornography consumption frequency, perceived pornography utility, and their multiplicative interaction term (i.e., pornography consumption frequency x perceived pornography utility) were entered into a logistic regression analysis predicting condomless sex. An odds ratio > 1 for the interaction term is indicative of the association between pornography consumption and condomless sex increasing as perceptions of pornography’s utility increase. The odds ratio for the interaction term was 1.08 (95% CI [.93, 1.24]).

Additional information

Funding

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