Pornography

This book assesses American, Canadian, and Swedish legal challenges to the explosive spread of pornography and its contribution to violence against women within their significantly different democratic systems and constructs a political and legal theory for effectively challenging the sex industry under law. The obstacles are exposed as more ideological and political than strictly legal, although they often play out in the legal arena. The pornography industry is documented to exploit vulnerable populations in making its materials. A thorough analytical review of empirical studies that use complementing methods demonstrates that using pornography substantially contributes to consumers becoming more sexually aggressive, on average desensitizing them and contributing to a demand for more subordinating, aggressive, and degrading materials. Consumers often wish to imitate pornography with unwilling partners; many demand sex from prostituted people, who have few or no alternatives. Most young men regularly consume pornography. Legal challenges to the harms are shown to be more effective under legal systems that promote equality and when the laws empower those most harmed, in contrast to state-enforced regulations (e.g., criminal obscenity laws). Drawing on feminist theory, among others, this book argues that pornography is among the linchpins of sex inequality, contending that a civil society forum can empower those harmed, with representatives who have more substantial incentives to address them. This book explains why democracies fail to address the harms of pornography and offers a political and legal theory for making the necessary changes. The insights can be applied to other intractable problems of hierarchy.

Pornography and Aggression

This chapter reviews the results of ecological time-series studies, experimental studies, case-control studies, and meta-analyses of the relationship between pornography viewing and aggression perpetration. Antisocial personality characteristics can increase the risk that a subset of pornography viewers will engage in sexually aggressive behavior subsequent to pornography exposure. Public health professionals may be invited to play a role in policy decision-making that balances the public’s right to sexually explicit material against the risk that some viewers may be activated by viewing violent-looking pornography.

LESS CARE, MORE STRESS: A RHYTHMIC POEM FROM THE ROMAN EMPIRE

This article considers a short text that was widely circulated in the mid- Roman Empire, in both a four-line and a six-line version, usually on gemstones. The text is a poem of sorts, but of a quite distinctive type. Part of it can be scanned according to the rules of classical (quantitative) metre, but more striking is the consistent rhythmic (stressed) pattern. Stressed poetry is not otherwise attested so early; this text may point to a substrate, now largely hidden from view, of popular verse that preceded the metrical revolutions of late antiquity and the Byzantine world. The poem is also a piece of visual artistry, designed to be looked at (particularly in its gemstone format). This hybrid status, between high art and popular culture, can also be detected in the content of the poem, which gestures towards both the poetics of intellectual elitism (using intertextual allusion, and dismissing the views of the masses) and a level of sexually aggressive assertion of embodied selfhood. It is a valuable witness to a form of middling literature (and a middling demographic), caught between aspirations to elite-style individuality and the mimetic imperative of an empire-wide consumer culture.

Characteristics and associated factors of self-disclosed sexual aggression in a national representative sample of Belgian adults aged 16-69

Sexual violence is a major public health, societal, and judicial problem worldwide. Studies investigating the characteristics of its offenders often rely on samples of convicted offenders, which are then biased by low reporting and conviction rates of sexual offences. The reliability of self-report studies of undetected sexual offenders, however, is threatened by underreporting of sexually aggressive acts. Despite these limitations, we argue that it is important to publish available data on self-disclosed sexual aggression to learn more about those who are more likely to report own sexual aggression and to further improve self-report methods. Based on a self-report study conducted in a representative sample (n = 4,693) of the Belgian general population aged 16 to 69, we provide lifetime and past-year prevalence rates of sexual aggression and report the characteristics of the events, including type, target, and the applied coercion strategies. A logistic regression analysis revealed factors associated with self-disclosed sexual aggression. Almost 4% of all participants reported at least one incident of hands-on sexual aggression. Men were more likely than women to report sexual aggression (aOR: 5.33 (95% CI:3.62-7.86). Furthermore, a history of sexual victimization was associated with sexual aggression. In most cases, the target was an (ex)partner or friend. About 4 in 5 perpetrators indicated that none of the given coercion strategies (i.e., force, threat, verbal pressure, or exploiting the victim’s incapacitation or the own position of authority) applied to the incident. Further research is needed to clarify under which circumstances sexual aggression occurs and which factors increase reporting thereof.

Narcissism and Subjective Arousal in Response to Sexual Aggression: The Mediating Role of Perceived Power

The present research examined the associations that narcissistic personality features had with subjective arousal in response to sexually aggressive behaviors, as well as whether these associations were mediated by the power that was believed to accompany these behaviors. Participants were 221 community members (115 women, 106 men) who completed a self-report instrument that captured narcissistic admiration (an agentic form of narcissism) and narcissistic rivalry (an antagonistic form of narcissism). In addition, participants were asked to rate how powerful they would expect to feel if they actually engaged in an array of sexually aggressive behaviors (e.g., “Tying up a person during sexual intercourse against her/his will”) as well as how sexually aroused they would be by each behavior. A multilevel mediation analysis revealed that both narcissistic admiration and narcissistic rivalry were positively associated with subjective arousal in response to sexual aggression and that these associations were mediated by the perceived power that was believed to accompany these sexually aggressive behaviors. These results suggest that perceptions of power may play an important role in the connections that narcissistic personality features have with subjective arousal in response to sexually aggressive behavior for both men and women. This discussion will focus on the implications of these results for understanding the connections between narcissism and sexual aggression in both men and women.

Disentangling Cognitions About Sexual Aggression

We examined the extent to which evaluative attitudes toward sexual aggression are distinct from other cognitions regarding sexually aggressive behavior. Evaluative attitudes toward sexual aggression refer to the extent to which sexual aggression is viewed negatively or positively. In a secondary analysis of online survey data from 495 community men, exploratory factor analysis revealed that items from a measure of evaluative attitudes formed a distinct factor from items designed to measure cognitive distortions regarding rape. These findings suggest that evaluative attitudes may be distinct from cognitive distortions. Furthermore, hierarchical regression analyses indicated that evaluative attitudes explained unique variance in self-reported past sexual aggression, proclivity for sexually aggressive behavior, and likelihood to rape. If future research finds support for a causal relationship between evaluative attitudes and sexual aggression, well-established evaluative-attitude-change procedures from the social psychological literature could be adapted to address evaluative attitudes toward sexual aggression in interventions aimed at reducing sexually aggressive behavior.

Peer Review Round 1 of “Alcohol Cues and Their Effects on Sexually Aggressive Thoughts”

Alcohol and its effects on aggression has been the subject of many discussions and research papers. Despite this fact, there is still a debate surrounding what it is exactly about alcohol that causes aggression. The current study sought to replicate the past finding by Bartholow and Heinz (2006) that alcohol cues without consumption increase the accessibility of aggressive thoughts, which can then influence aggressive behaviors. In the present study, participants had to complete a lexical decision task that was set up to assess whether aggressive words were detected faster in the presence of alcohol-related pictures compared to neutral pictures. The results of this study did not replicate the expected finding as only a main effect of word type was found in which participants detected neutral words faster than aggressive words. Furthermore, the study was trying to assess the role of gender stereotype acceptance levels in this association, but no significant result was found, meaning that one’s degree of endorsement of societal expectations about genders did not influence reactions times in the lexical decision task. The results are discussed in terms of the limitations of the study, and propositions for future directions are addressed.

Peer Review Round 2 of “Alcohol Cues and Their Effects on Sexually Aggressive Thoughts”

Alcohol and its effects on aggression have been the subject of many discussions and research papers. Despite this fact, there is still a debate surrounding what it is exactly about alcohol that causes aggression. The current study sought to replicate the past finding by Bartholow and Heinz (2006) that alcohol cues without consumption increase the accessibility of aggressive thoughts, which can then influence aggressive behaviors. In the present study, participants had to complete a lexical decision task that was set up to assess whether aggressive words were detected faster in the presence of alcohol-related pictures compared to neutral pictures. The results of this study did not replicate the expected finding as only a main effect of word type was found in which participants detected neutral words faster than aggressive words. Furthermore, the study aimed to assess the role of gender stereotype acceptance levels in this association, but due to faulty design considerations, such analyses were not possible. The results are discussed in terms of the limitations of the study, and propositions for future directions are addressed.

Σεξουαλική επιθετικότητα νέων ανδρών και παράγοντες που την ενισχύουν

Objectives: The current study aimed at assessing the prevalence and risk factors for the perpetration of sexually aggressive behaviours, in men aged 18-30 years in the city of Heraklion, Crete. Methods: Stratified sampling was used to select the study sample. A total of 241 individuals accepted to participate in the study out of 335 initially found to meet the inclusion criteria (gender, age). For the needs of the current study a semi-structured questionnaire was used, including 4 sections and 43 items. The questionnaire examined the participants’ sociodemographic characteristics, their past sexual activity and experiences, their attitudes towards the rape myths, and the prevalence of perpetrating sexually aggressive behaviours. Results: Participants were men (n=241) with a mean age of 23.9 years (SD 3.4) and had their first sexual intercourse at the age of 17.2 years (SD 2.0). Out of a total of 241 participants, 8 (3.3%) reported a history of sexual victimization without intercourse before the age of 14 years and 2 (.8%) reported sexual victimization with intercourse at the same age. Based on the results of the multiple regression analysis, higher acceptance of rape myths was found to be associated with increased likelihood of perpetrating sexually aggressive behaviours (p<.001; CI=.721;1.471) after controlling for the participants’ sociodemographic characteristics and their past sexual activity and experiences. Conclusion: Future attempts to prevent or address the problem of sexual aggression could take into account the risk factors identified in the current study.