Pornography Consumption, Sexual Liberalism, and Support for Abortion in the United States: Aggregate Results from Two National Panel Studies

Abstract

Elements of the sexual script acquisition, activation, application model (3AM) of sexual media socialization have been tested in many recent studies. Two core suppositions of the model are in need of further examination, however. The first is the assertion that exposure to sexual media can affect behavioral judgments beyond the specific behaviors that are depicted. The second is the assertion that the mechanism driving this change is a shift in consumers’ sexual scripts. This article probed these arguments within the context of pornography consumption and support for abortion using national panel data from two three-wave surveys conducted in the United States. As hypothesized, pornography consumption at wave one predicted a more a liberal sexual script at wave two, which, in turn, predicted more support for abortion at wave three. Following the reinforcing spirals model (RSM), the relationships between earlier support for abortion, subsequent sexual liberalism, and later pornography consumption were also examined. Supporting the RSM, abortion support was a prospective predictor of greater sexual liberalism, which, in turn, was a prospective predictor of pornography consumption.