PORHOGRAPHY: EFFECTS OF EROTICA ON BEHAVIOR
Griffitt, May, and Veitch reported that “sexually aroused subjects of both sexes were found to attend visually more to opposite-sex than to same-sex targets and to look more at heterosexual targets than did nonaroused subjects. Sexually aroused subjects who responded negatively to sexual stimulation were found to . . . avoid heterosexual persons in . . . seating proximity. Only those who responded positively to sex stimulation evaluated more favorably or looked more at opposite-sex targets”. It is important to note that the subjective evaluation of the sexually arousing stimulus was the thing which differentiated behavior rather than the stimulation per se.
Abel and others studied the erectile response of rapists and non-rapists to sexual scenes (audio presentation) of rape and found that the rapists tended more often than non-rapists to respond with erections to this material. Rapists with the highest frequency of rape, those who had injured their victim and those who chose children as victims also were distinguished. Some rapists also developed erections to non-erotic violent descriptions indicating a commonality—for rapists—between purely violent and sexually violent scenes. Erectile response to nonviolent, mutually enjoyable intercourse scenes was minimal for these rapists.
These data suggest that normal individuals are not turned on by sexual violence or by violence alone, and that response is a characteristic of the viewer rather than of the material per se. Advocates of censorship take an antithetical viewpoint and assume that, for example, sadomasochistic material can produce arousal in anyone, contrary to the findings of Abel and others and Goldstein.
The question of whether sexual arousal is a general state facilitating many types of behavior or a specific state facilitating only sexual behavior is somewhat open. There are few persuasive data for the general arousal hypothesis, although psychoanalytic theory might support such a position.
Three studies discussed below examined the inhibiting and instigating effects of sexual arousal. The data seem to suggest that sexual arousal does not lead to aggressive behavior in normal adults. Baron, for example, found that “heightened sexual arousal was highly effective in inhibiting subsequent aggression by [angered] subjects but failed to influence significantly the strength of such behavior on the part of subjects in the non-angered condition”.
Donnerstein and others found “that mildly erotic stimuli had an inhibiting effect on aggression . . . whereas highly erotic stimuli tended to maintain aggression at a level similar to non-erotic exposure”. What would seem to be required is an experimental design which included a variety of conditions such as 1) varying order of presentation of erotic and aggression inducing stimuli, 2) varying levels of stimuli and, most important, 3) varying the choice of available responses to subjects.
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