Media Psychological Reflections on the Organizational Framework of Sexual Media's Influence on Users' Short- vs. Long-Term Sexual Quality

But What's Your Partner Up to? Associations Between Relationship Quality and Pornography Use Depend on Contextual Patterns of Use Within the Couple

It is commonly assumed that exposure to pornography harms relationships because pornography changes the way that individuals think, feel, and behave in problematic ways. In the current research, we contribute to a small but growing body of work that challenges this assumption by carefully scrutinizing the relational context of pornography use. In contrast to dominant theoretical explanations in this field, we argue that at least some of the apparent negative “impacts” of pornography use on relationship quality may reflect partner dissimilarity in pornography use behavior rather than the consequences of exposure to such materials. Moreover, we further examine a particular type of pornography use – shared use with a partner – which previous evidence suggests may be positively associated with relationship quality. To this end, we sought to test whether dyadic patterns of pornography use, and related attributes, were associated with sexual and relationship satisfaction in two cross-sectional (N₁ = 200; N₃ = 207) and two longitudinal (N₂ = 77; N₄ = 277) samples of heterosexual couples. Across these samples, we found consistent evidence that partners who watch pornography together report higher relationship and sexual satisfaction than partners who do not, and notably, this association was not moderated by gender. Independent of this association, we also found evidence of a similarity-dissimilarity effect, such that the solitary pornography use of one partner was negatively associated with their own relationship and sexual satisfaction, but only in cases where their romantic partners used little or no pornography alone. Further consideration of several correlates of pornography use established comparable patterns of results for dissimilarity in attitudes toward pornography, erotophobia-erotophilia, sexual preferences, and sex drive. Importantly, only dissimilarity in sex drive statistically accounted for dissimilarity in solitary pornography use, suggesting that differences in sex drive may be implicated in the associations between pornography use and relationship quality. These findings demonstrate that links between pornography use and relationship health are partially a function of different dyadic patterns of pornography use within couples and do not always suggest relational harm.

Untangling the Porn Web: Creating an Organizing Framework for Pornography Research Among Couples

Research exploring the correlates, moderators, and potential consequences of viewing pornography for romantic couples has surged in recent years. Research in this area has primarily focused on the question of whether viewing pornography for either partner (or together) is related to enhanced, diminished, or has no effect on relational well-being. However, this narrow scholarly focus and the continued methodological limitations of research in this area have made synthesizing or drawing broad conclusions about pornography use from this scholarship difficult. One specific limitation of this area is the lack of any broad organizational framework that could help scholars categorize existing research while also laying the groundwork for future scholarship. In this paper, we argue for such a framework and suggest that relational pornography scholarship could be organized across five broad dimensions: the nuances of the content viewed, individual background factors, personal views and attitudes, a couple's relational context, and couple processes. We provide a justification for these five areas and then discuss how this framework could help organize and structure the research in this area moving forward.