NCJ Number
218375
Journal
Violence and Victims Volume: 22 Issue: 2 Dated: 2007 Pages: 226-242
Date Published
2007
Length
17 pages
Annotation
In order to examine whether distorted beliefs about sexual aggression affected men's perceptions of and emotional reactions to a female partner's sexual-interest messages, 107 men with and without hostile sexual beliefs viewed erotic slides with a female partner, who provided 1 of 4 types of feedback: clear disinterest, token disinterest, compliant interest, and clear interest.
Abstract
The findings support Hall and Hirschman's (1991) model of sexual aggression, which holds that the most common motivation for sexual aggression is a distorted belief that sexual aggression is appropriate and desired by women. In the current study, men who had distorted beliefs about the appropriateness of aggressive sexual advances reported fewer differences in the women's feedback about their interest in the erotic slides compared with the men who did not have such beliefs. The men with sexually aggressive beliefs were unresponsive to the partner's clear embarrassment in viewing the erotic images, reporting that their partners had consistently positive moods about the erotic images. On the other hand, the men without distorted beliefs about the acceptability of sexual aggression were more accurate in their perceptions of the women's responses to the slides, mirroring their partner's embarrassment and gearing their own responses to the slides to the woman's feedback. This article also discusses the validity of the research method as a means of testing Hall and Hirschman's model for explaining men's sexual aggression. The 107 heterosexual male participants were each paired with a female partner and told that the study would examine how men and women communicate with each other in situations that involve sexuality. In order to assess beliefs about women's sexual behaviors, the men were administered the short form of the Attitudes Toward Women Scale prior to viewing the images. 1 table, 5 figures, and 46 references