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

Sex and Sexuality: A Content Analysis of Soap Operas
non-erotic films. After the initial exposure-treatment period, participants returned to
the laboratory on three more occasions (at the end of each of the three consecutive
weeks) and were exposed to a variety of pornographic materials assigned to each
week.
The study produced a large number of findings, some of which provided clear
evidence correlating heavy exposure with habituation to sexual stimuli. The study
revealed, among other findings, that: (1) massive intermediate exposure conditions
resulted in increased habituation to erotica over the nine-week period and gender
differences were not a factor, (2) massive exposure to erotica produced significantly
diminished affective reactions to it over time, (3) participants in the massive and
intermediate exposure conditions considered pornographic materials as being less
pornographic, and reported being less offended by pornographic materials and
portrayals of uncommon sexual behaviour practices, and (4) massive and
intermediate exposure conditions produced a trend of reduced aggressiveness,
decreased arousal and repulsion.
Clearly, all those studies have presented an evidence-base to support their own
hypothesis that repeated exposure to certain types of sexual media results in the
audience becoming habituated to them and that any strong emotional and
behavioural reactions that those types have caused initially become gradually
weakened by repeated exposure. But can those findings be accepted at face value?
Once again, those findings were produced using experimental and controlled
laboratory techniques, which inevitably brings into question their external validity as
experimental conditions do not produce real-world conditions but, rather, at times,
they significantly distort the experience of media consumption—particularly with
an area such as exposure to sexual media—and therefore make generalizations to the
outside-laboratory settings more difficult. As seen in the review of those studies
above, the laboratory artificiality conditions which dealt with explicit sexual
materials and the patterns of exposure to them, resulted in removing depictions of
sex from their original context, detaching them from certain functions and placing
artificial constraints that clearly impacted upon the way human subjects behaved or
responded. Perhaps those closely controlled research procedures provided a range—
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