Mental Health
Prevalence and Determinants of Problematic Online Pornography Use in a Sample of German Women.
Open Access: No.
Abstract
Aim: To investigate problematic online pornography use in women, an issue that has rarely been tackled to date.
Methods: We used the data from a comprehensive, cross-sectional survey of a self-referred sample of 485 German women to examine the relationships between problematic online pornography consumption and a range of sexual behaviors, trait sexual motivation, and motives for pornography use.
Results: Approximately 3% of our sample had problematic pornography use. In multivariate analysis, problematic use was significantly associated with the overall time spent viewing online pornography, greater sexual motivation, and greater emotional avoidance. Our data also indicate that the influence of sexual motivation on problematic pornography use is mediated by the amount of time spent watching online pornography.
Clinical translation: Identifying these predictors for problematic use is important for specific prevention programs for women at risk of pathological use.
Strengths & limitations: This study is one of the first to show that women also experience problematic online pornography use and identifies risk factors for problematic behavior. The weakness of this study is that as in all studies on sexuality, people who are interested in the topic and are comfortable talking about it are more likely to participate, thus rendering the sample nonrepresentative.
Conclusion: Based on our findings, approximately 3% of women experience problems associated with engaging in online pornography consumption.
Relevance
Only 12.2% of the women in the sample watched no pornography. Yet 70% of the women who did watch pornography “reported low to medium problems” with their pornography viewing; 3% were “high.”
Among those factors that predicted problems with pornography were the amount of time viewing pornography, the diversity of the types of pornography viewed, and the use of pornography to regulate or avoid emotions. “This demonstrates that women with problematic online pornography use seek more diverse material, which could be an indicator for habituation effects. Habituation in turn could lead to tolerance building, leading consumers to explore new material to elicit the same neuronal response to pornography as when they initially started watching.”
Citation
Baranowski, A. M., Vogl, R., & Stark, R. (2019). Prevalence and Determinants of Problematic Online Pornography Use in a Sample of German Women. The journal of sexual medicine, 16(8), 1274–1282. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsxm.2019.05.010
