Abstract
Sexual norms define perceptions of who is acceptable to partner with, how many partners are appropriate, and what sexual behaviors are acceptable to engage in. This shapes, in part, who has access to sexual pleasure and who is minoritized based on their sexuality. Though well theorized and researched for “in-person” sexuality, much less is known about sexual norms in other contexts/modalities, such as porn use and sexual fantasy, or how norms connect across these contexts. In the present study, we investigated sexual norms in porn, fantasy, and in-person sexuality, and similarities or differences between these. In an online study, gender/sex and sexually diverse participants (N = 706) manipulated digital circles representing porn use, sexual fantasy, and in-person sexuality. They used circle overlap to represent branchedness (i.e., distinction) and coincidence (i.e., similarity) in norm content, and circle size to indicate perceived norm strength. We found evidence that norm content was perceived to be more branched (i.e., distinct) than coincident (similar) and that norm strength for each context was high. This provides evidence that when people engage in each of these sexual contexts, they tend to do so through distinct normative lenses, rather than a singular lens that represents a universal set of norms applying across all sexual situations. This has implications for how we understand the associations between porn use, fantasy, and in-person sexuality, and highlights the importance of attending to sexuality in context.
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Availability of Data and Materials
To request data or study materials, contact Dr. Sari van Anders at sva5@queensu.ca.
Code Availability
Code for analyses is available as supplemental material. The code for the data visualizations is available at supplementary material to Gormezano et al. (2022).
Notes
As gender (i.e., sociocultural features) and sex (i.e., physical features) are aspects of people’s identities and experiences that often cannot be disentangled, we use “gender/sex” as an umbrella term to indicate gender and/or sex (van Anders, 2015).
These were, for example, features of all videos available on Pornhub.com and XVideos.com, which are the two most frequently visited “tube sites” that feature sexually explicit material in North America.
By majority norms, we mean norms that maintain majoritarian privilege and status for some, while minoritizing (e.g., discrimination, stigma) others on the basis of sexual identity/orientation/status and/or gender/sex.
By minorities and majorities, we mean people who experience marginalization or experience privilege based on how they are respectively situated relative to majority norms, and not statistical frequency (van Anders et al., 2021).
We decided on this operationalization based, in part, on the implausibility of average overlap for a pair of contexts across participants being 0% or 100%, which would truly indicate full branchedness and coincidence, respectively. Setting the thresholds for somewhat branched and coincident as between 5 and 80% overlap provided more room for falsification. Given that we have argued above that sexuality is more often assumed to be coincident, or explained by a unitary latent variable across contexts, we wanted to be more conservative in what would qualify as evidence for branchedness relative to coincidence. As such, we set the thresholds for “somewhat branched and somewhat coincident” asymmetrically: the threshold for evidence of branchedness was less than 80%, and the threshold for coincidence was greater than 5%. This made it easier to falsify the portion of this hypothesis around branchedness because of this lower threshold (80%) for full coincidence.
Notably, we did not preregister these hypotheses via OSF or aspredicted.org. However, they were submitted to (and approved by) the first author’s dissertation committee prior to data collection. A time stamped record of this document is available upon request.
A total of 811 background study participants did not meet one or more of our inclusion criteria. In addition, we excluded 24 “participants” who met our inclusion criteria but gave suspiciously similar (or completely identical) responses to at least one other participant. We did so in consultation with Prolific Academic, who conducted assessments of the overall veracity of the accounts from which these responses had come.
Gormezano et al. (2022) used these diagrams in a mixed-methods interview study focused on sexual interests/attractions across porn use, sexual fantasy, and in-person sexuality. They found that there was a high degree of coherence across open-ended responses where participants described the branchedness and coincidence in their interests/attractions across these contexts and how they configured their diagrams.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Dr. Meredith Chivers, Dr. Krystelle Shaughnessy, Dr. Tara MacDonald, and Dr. Martin Hand for their feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript as AMG’s dissertation committee members. We would also like to thank Kate Hunker and Marietta Konermann for their assistance with data collection. This research was undertaken thanks to funding from the Canada 150 Research Chairs program to SMvA and an Ontario Trillium Scholarship to AMG.
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This research was undertaken thanks to funding from the Canada 150 Research Chairs program to Sari van Anders and a Trillium graduate award to the first author.
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Gormezano, A.M., van Anders, S.M. Sexual Norms Across Pornography Use, Sexual Fantasy, and In-Person Sexuality. Arch Sex Behav (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-024-02845-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-024-02845-1