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Sexual Media and Sexual Quality: Aims, Distinctions, and Reflexivity—Response to Commentaries

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. It is important to offer the disclaimer that the thoughts expressed in this article are our own. They do not represent the views or position of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

  2. We do not believe that diving primarily into one side of directionality negates the possibility of bidirectionality. For example, script theory (Gagnon & Simon, 1973), which focuses on how a variety of sources (including media) shape our attitudes and behaviors, does not negate the value of uses and gratification theory (Katz, Blumler, & Gurevitch, 1974), which focused on how a number of background factors influence selection of media use. Our theoretical focus is more on the scripting side, but we welcome future research on the uses and gratification side of this topic.

  3. Exploratory factor analyses showing these distinctions in an additional dataset are available from the first author on request.

  4. The Meltzer et al. (2017) study being cited in support of objectification potentially being beneficial (Prause, 2019) is an example of this. The study used the question, “On a scale of 0-100, where 0 = our relationship is completely non-sexual and 100 = our relationship is nothing but sexual, what number would you give your relationship?” We questioned the extent this was capturing objectification because we viewed the devaluation of identity as a central component of objectification. With deeper consideration, we realized this may be another example of researchers talking over each other through different understandings of terms used.

  5. For additional material, we recommend Buber’s (1937) expanding on the debate between Descartes and Kant. He suggests that objectification is more than cerebral and better understood in terms of our way of being. Buber posits two fundamental ways of being, that of I-It and I-Thou. In an I-Thou way of being, the I takes into account a person’s humanity, while an I-It way of being ignores the humanity of others and ourselves. In the context of a loving relationship, Buber explains, “Love does not cling to the I in such a way as to have the Thou only for its ‘content,’ its object; but love is between I and Thou. The man who does not know this, with his very being know this, does not know love; even though he ascribes to it the feelings he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses” (pp. 14-15).

  6. We note that the emotions assessed in the study (Gray et al., 2011) were relatively simple. Emotions of experience included viewing sexualized images and rating the sexualized person’s capacity to experience some variation of pain, hunger, pleasure, desire, fear, rage, and joy depending on the study within the larger paper. We question whether this type of objectification can increase ratings of sexualized person’s capacity to experience more sophisticated emotions (e.g., hope, admiration, or regret; Gaunt, Leyens, & Demoulin, 2002; Haslam, 2006).

  7. One of the best explanations we know of for identity comes from Professor Herman Kelman (1976), “an individual, independent and distinguishable from others, capable of making choices” (p. 301).

  8. We believe capacity for agency, connected to rational thought, and therefore consciousness is a particularly crucial component of personhood and thus identity. Descartes’ (1637/1956) famous idiom “I think; therefore I am” suggests conscious rationality is crucial for being/identity. To be fair, there is some ongoing debate on the extent that emotions and rationality both play a role in humanness and identity (e.g., Haslam, 2006). However, people generally consider more sophisticated emotions to be unique markers of humanness. No research to our knowledge has shown that sexual media increases the likelihood of someone perceiving another to have more sophisticated emotions (e.g., hope, admiration, regret).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, 3359 Mississauga Road North, Toronto, ON, L5L1C6, Canada

    Nathan D. Leonhardt

  2. Marriage and Family Therapy, Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA

    Travis J. Spencer

  3. School of Family Life, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA

    Mark H. Butler

  4. Marriage and Family Therapy, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA

    Alex C. Theobald

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Leonhardt, N.D., Spencer, T.J., Butler, M.H. et al. Sexual Media and Sexual Quality: Aims, Distinctions, and Reflexivity—Response to Commentaries. Arch Sex Behav 48, 2291–2303 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-019-01551-7

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