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Abstract In light of theoretical and empirical suggestions that mass media violent erotica may have antisocial effects, a content analysis was performed to ascertain the amount of sexual violence in the pictorials and cartoons of Playboy and Penthouse magazines. This analysis included all issues of the two magazines from January, 1973 through December, 1977. While the two raters, a male and a female, showed relatively high reliability in their ratings of sexual violence within the pictorial stimuli, less agreement was found on cartoon stimuli. Pictorial violent sexuality was found to increase significantly over the five years analyzed both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the total number of pictorials, although even by 1977 only about 5% of the pictorials were rated as sexually violent. No significant changes in the percentage of sexually violent cartoons were found over the years, although in Penthouse there was an increase in the absolute number of such cartoons. Throughout this five‐year period, however, Penthouse was found to have a greater percentage of sexually violent cartoons than Playboy (approximately 13% vs. 6%). The results are discussed within the context of empirical research in the area and the possibility that sexually violent stimuli may contribute to a “cultural climate” promoting a sexist ideology.
Malamuth et al. (Fri,) studied this question.