Abstract
According to confluence model theorizing, pornography use contributes to sexual violence, but only among men who are predisposed to sexual aggression. Support for this assertion is limited to cross-sectional research, which cannot speak to the temporal ordering of assumed causes and consequences. To address this issue, we employed generalized linear mixed modeling to determine whether hostile masculinity, impersonal sexuality, and pornography use, and their interactions, predicted change in the odds of subsequently reported sexual aggression in two independent panel samples of male Croatian adolescents (N1 = 936 with 2808 observations; N2 = 743 with 2972 observations). While we observed the link between hostile masculinity and self-reported sexual aggression in both panels, we found no evidence that impersonal sexuality and pornography use increased the odds of subsequently reporting sexual aggression-regardless of participants' predisposed risk. This study's findings are difficult to reconcile with the view that pornography use plays a causal role in male sexual violence.
Highlights
While we observed the link between hostile masculinity and selfreported sexual aggression in both panels, we found no evidence that impersonal sexuality and pornography use increased the odds of subsequently reporting sexual aggression—regardless of participants’ predisposed risk
We focus on whether antecedent levels of hostile masculinity, impersonal sexuality, and pornography use were associated with subsequent changes in the odds of self-reported sexual aggression
Hostile masculinity was significantly correlated with contemporaneously measured sexual aggression at T3, r = .13, p = .006, and at T4, r = .11, p = .020, but impersonal sexuality and pornography use were not associated with contemporaneous sexual aggression at any wave
Summary
The construct of impersonal sexuality (sometimes referred to as sexual promiscuity in earlier research) has been measured in a variety of ways. Our observations of Wright et al.’s over-reliance on inflated effect sizes are corroborated by more recent meta-analytic findings which indicate that once control variables are properly accounted for, non-violent pornography use is generally not associated with sexual aggression (Ferguson & Hartley, 2020) In this context, it should be noted that most of the controls considered in the current study were related to pornography use, they were generally not found to be related to self-reported sexual aggression. That Baer et al (2015) failed to observe a significant correlation between their measure of sexual interest (which included an indicator of masturbation frequency) and sexual aggression The association between these two variables only existed among young men who were high in hostile masculinity and impersonal sexuality. We will be in a much better position to decide which aspects of the confluence model, if any, need revising
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