Chapter 4 Sexual Content in Soap Operas - Leicester Research ...

Sex and Sexuality: A Content Analysis of Soap Operas
of literature, primarily experimental studies, has employed the arousal hypothesis in
order to explain audience reactions, mostly among male viewers, to violent sexual
content, eventually producing contrasting and discrepant findings—those
discrepancies, according to Gunter (2002), can be attributed to the choice of stimuli
used in the experiments.
The main focus of such experimental research has not been merely on whether
or not arousal is induced among an audience as a response to sexual materials, but
also on whether viewers become aggressively aroused (Malamuth and Check, 1983b
and 1983a; Malamuth, Check and Briere, 1986; Ramirez, Bryant, and Zillmann,
1982; Zillmann and Bryant,1984; Zillmann and Weaver, 1989). According to the
arousal model, the aggression-induced effect of a violent sexual scene helps further
induce sexual arousal in viewers; and once they are aroused in this way, the arousal
becomes compounded with their anger to enhance it further. This reaction,
consequently, increases the possibility that a viewer will openly display anger in the
form of aggression (Gunter, 2002: p. 215).
Early studies examining the reactions of convicted rapists and normal men to
both rape and consenting sex found that convicted rapists were aroused by both rape
and consenting sex, whereas normal men were aroused only by consenting sex
(Abel, Barlow, Blanchard and Guild, 1977; Quincy, Chaplin and Upfold, 1984).
Other studies showed that even college students, men rather than women, were
aroused by scenes depicting sexual violence and rape, however only when the
victims were portrayed as enjoying the forced sexual intercourse (Malamuth and
Check, 1983a; Zillmann and Bryant, 1984).
Similarly, Bushman et al. (2003) reported that men who scored high in
narcissism found film portrayals of rape that were preceded by consensual and
affectionate activity as more entertaining and enjoyable than men who scored low in
narcissism. Meanwhile, having assessed a number of personal traits in 160
undergraduate students, Bogaert (2001) reported that students with personality traits
of a high self-reported degree of sexual arousal, dominance psychoticism, hyper-
masculinity and Machiavellianism were correlated with the likelihood of selecting,
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