Undergraduate Honors Posters
Document Type
Presentation
Publication Date
Spring 2014
Journal
Undergraduate Honors Posters
Abstract
The confluence model of sexual aggression (e.g. Malamuth, Heavey & Linz, 1996) suggests that pornography use, thought to promote sexual coercion of women through its presentation of submissive female imagery, works in conjunction with sexual promiscuity (SP) and hostile masculinity (HM) to produce antiwoman-aggressive outcomes. The following study re-examined the confluence model’s claims using a correlational Internet survey involving 188 adult male participants. As expected, confluence model results were replicated such that men higher in HM and SP were more likely to report sexually aggressing with higher (as compared to lower) pornography use. Furthermore, both HM and SP were strong predictors of consumption of violent compared to non-violent sexual media, suggesting that perhaps men high in sexual risk consume different types of sexual material altogether from men low in sexual risk. Critically, as predicted by the current researchers, substituting a measure of individual male’s sex drive for assessment of individual male’s pornography use in the confluence model accounted for all of the variance in sexual coercion previously accounted for by pornography. The novelty and statistical significance of these findings warrants a reappraisal of the confluence model’s suggestion of pornography as a driving factor behind antiwoman aggression.