EXPOSURE TO EROTICA: PERSONALITY, SOCIAL DIFFERENCES, SEX DIFFERENCES
Some of the personality and social variables related to viewing or not viewing erotica have been detailed above. Athanasiou and Shaver have reported a long list of correlates of viewing erotica which include differences in political preference (Democrats versus Republicans), age, attitude toward social issues such as abortion, and other variables. In general, there is little surprise in these correlations, since they make sound social psychological sense.
One of the personality variables which seems central to response to erotica is guilt. Donald Mosher has developed a well validated measure of sex guilt, a “generalized expectancy for self-mediated punishment for violating or for anticipating violating standards of proper sexual conduct”, and demonstrated that high sex-guilt subjects rated erotic films as more pornographic, disgusting, and offensive, and more often saw oral-genital sex as abnormal than did low sex-guilt subjects.
Sex guilt was positively correlated (correlations usually > 0.3) with the following variables in Mosher’s study: religiosity, political conservatism, the belief that the government should enforce sex laws, the belief that homosexuals should be excluded from society, that love and sex are inextricably linked, that extra- and premarital sex are not good ideas, that abortion should be difficult to obtain or illegal, and that conservative standards of sex behavior are best. Additionally, sex guilt was positively correlated with preventing respondents from expressing their sexuality because of social disapproval, guilt feelings, and religious or other moral training.
Sex guilt was negatively correlated with number of sexual partners, intercourse frequency, oral-genital activity, and the belief that sex is fun.
Sex guilt, then, may be seen as a central psychological variable in predicting sex attitudes and sex behavior. Love and others used Mosher’s Forced Choice Guilt Inventory to predict the time spent viewing erotic slides. They found that “the viewing time of the low sex guilt group increased linearly as a function of increasing pornographic content. There was no significant increase in viewing time for high sex guilt subjects. Subjects with a moderate degree of sex guilt displayed a curvilinear pattern”. The three groups were referred to as the profligate, the priggish, and the prudent.
Ray and Walker reported that low sex-guilt female subjects rated masturbation, coitus, and petting stimuli as more sexually arousing, better, more pleasant, safer, and more appealing than did high sex-guilt subjects.
Based on the above, one would expect censorship, condemnation of material on the basis of its explicit sexual content, to enhance viewing of the material on the part of low but not high sex-guilt subjects. Schill and others conducted such an experiment and found that when material was labeled as “porno junk,” viewing time was highest for both high and low sex-guilt subjects. When the experimenter used the phrase, “I really enjoyed that porno stuff”, high sex-guilt subjects viewed it for an average of 2.55 minutes relative to the low guilt subjects who viewed it for an average of 0.79 minutes.
It would seem from these data that the “banned-in-Boston” effect served to increase viewing time for both groups, but the approval condition affected only the high guilt subjects’ viewing. In retrospect this is an intuitively satisfying outcome but clearly raises the question of the value of censorship to inhibit behavior. Fromkin and Brock and Zellinger and others have applied commodity theory analysis to the effects of restrictions on pornography and have found results which confirm “the commodity theory prediction that the imposition of age restrictions upon pornographic materials increases their desirability”. They conclude that “making erotic materials more difficult to obtain, harassing and punishing pornographers and purveyors of pornography, and restricting certain materials . . . may increase interest in the materials and render them more desirable than would have been the case without the restriction, harassment, or difficulty”.
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