No abstract

Under controlled experimental conditions, massive exposure to pornography resulted in a loss of compassion toward women as rape victims and toward women in general.Research on the behavioral effects of extensive exposure to sexually explicit writings, photographs, and motion pictures has been guided, if not controlled, by prevailing attitudes about human sexuality. Sex, according to the values manifest in these attitudes, is generally wholesome and good fun; the description or depiction of such behavior, regardless of how sexually stimulating and enticing it might be, must be free from censure (e.g., 15). Eysenck and Nias (9), for instance, promoted this type of moral stance. However, they hastened to point out that the portrayal of sex is occasionally neither wholesome nor good fun, and they went on to declare matters such as pederasty, rape, sadomasochism, and bestiality as socially undesirable and to advocate censorship for the pornographic exploitation of these sexual themes.Sex that entails any form of coercion or the deliberate infliction of pain is often deemed undesirable. Feminist Gloria Steinem (24) arrived

In a pretest, three phases of recovery from a standard physical exercise were determined. In Phase 1, subjects experienced high levels of physiological excitation and recognized that their arousal was due to exercise. In Phase 2, subjects maintained substantial excitatory residues from the exercise but felt that their arousal had returned to base level. In Phase 3, subjects' excitatory responses had decayed, and they knew they had recovered from the exercise. Subjects in the main experiment were exposed to an erotic film in the first, second, or third recovery phase after performing the exercise. Subjects viewing the film during the second recovery phase reported being more sexually aroused by the film and evaluated the film more positively than subjects in the other two conditions. Counter to the notion of arousal as a simple energizer of all behavior, these findings were interpreted as supporting excitation-transfer theory, which posits that residual excitation enhances emotional responses to unrelated, immediately present stimuli only when the prevailing arousal cannot be attributed to its actual source.

Male and female students and nonstudents were exposed to videotapes featuring common, nonviolent pornography or innocuous content. Exposure was in hourly sessions in six consecutive weeks. In the seventh week, subjects participated in an ostensibly unrelated study on societal institutions and personal gratifications. On an especially constructed questionnaire, subjects rated their personal happiness regarding various domains of experience; additionally, they indicated the relative importance of gratifying experiences. Exposure to pornography was without influence on the self‐assessment of happiness and satisfaction outside the sexual realm (e.g., satisfaction deriving from professional accomplishments). In contrast, it strongly impacted self‐assessment of sexual experience. After consumption of pornography, subjects reported less satisfaction with their intimate partners—specifically, with these partners' affection, physical appearance, sexual curiosity, and sexual performance proper. In addition, subjects assigned increased importance to sex without emotional involvement. These effects were uniform across gender and populations.

No abstract