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Arch Sex Behav (2015) 44:8997 DOI 10.1007/s10508-014-0353-8
ORIGINAL PAPER
Americans Attitudes Toward Premarital Sex and Pornography Consumption: A National Panel Analysis
Paul J. Wright
Received: 23 August 2013 / Revised: 30 January 2014 / Accepted: 28 March 2014 / Published online: 2 October 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Abstract Nationalpaneldatagatheredin2008(T1)and2010 (T2) from 420 Black and White US adults aged 1889 years (M = 45.37, SD = 15.85) were employed to assess prospective associationsbetweenpornographyconsumptionandpremarital sex attitudes. Premarital sex attitudes were indexed via a composite measure of perceptions of the appropriateness of adults and teenagers having premarital sex. Wrights (2011) sexual scriptacquisition,activation,applicationmodel(3AM)ofmedia sexual socialization was used as the guiding theoretical framework. The 3AM maintains that sexual media may be used by consumerstoinform their sexual scripts but that attitude change from exposure to sexual media is less likely when media scripts are incongruentwithconsumerspreexistingscripts.Consistent with these postulates, the association between pornography consumption at T1 and more positive attitudes toward pre-marital sex at T2 was strongest for younger adults, who are less oppositional to premarital sex than older adults. Contrary to the position that associations between pornography consumption and premarital sex attitudes are due to individuals who already have positive attitudes toward premarital sex selecting content congruent with their attitudes, premarital sex attitudes at T1 did not predict pornography consumption at T2.
Keywords Pornography Premarital sex
Sexual socialization Selective exposure
3AM
Introduction
Spurred by the sexual revolution of the 1960s (Smith, 1990), American social scientists have devoted much effort in recent decades to identifying predictors of nontraditional or permissivesocio-sexualnormsandvalues(Alston&Tucker,1973; DiMaggio,Evans,&Bryson,1996;Elias,Fullerton,&Simpson, 2013; Thornton, 1989). Norms and values surrounding premarital sex have been of central focus, as proscriptions against pre-marital sex have traditionally been an important component of the socio-sexual worldview in the US (Attorney General, 1986; Elias et al., 2013; Linz & Malamuth, 1993). Adult United States residents have, in general, become more accepting of premarital sex overtime. For example, nationally representative data generatedbytheGeneralSocialSurvey(GSS:Davis&Smith,2010) indicatethat,inthe1970s,32.7 %ofparticipantsfeltthatpremarital sex between adults was not wrong at all. In the 1980s, the gure increased to 40.6%, increasing further in the 1990s to42.6 %. Yet diversity of opinion remains. In the rst 10years of the 2000s (i.e., 20002010), for example, 25.3 % of participants said premarital sex between adults was always wrong, 8.4% almost...