The Ubiquitous External Ejaculation: Examining Perceptions of Sexual Images Across Cultures

The persistent debates over pornography have often focused on differences between males and females, not only in the frequency of consumption or the type of material consumed, but also on the different ways that individuals may perceive sexually explicit images and respond to them. Some of these differences may be due to sex differences in a number of factors including sexual strategies, pathogen or sexual disgust, and own mate value as well as within sex differences in these factors. Previous studies have demonstrated that perceptions of sexually explicit images are influenced by the sex of the target in the image and the target's emotional affect, as well as sex of the respondent, their sexual orientation, short-term mating orientation, and disgust measures. However, these previous studies were conducted with participants from the United States alone. This study compared the findings from these US samples to those from non-Western ones (Philippines and Brazil) in order to examine the replicability across cultures of the US results as well as whether some variables (religiosity, for example) account for more or less of the variance in perceptions in different populations. Results indicated that there were some differences in terms of the amount of variance in perceptions explained by different variables across populations. Participant and stimuli related variables explained more variance in the Philippines while individual difference variables accounted for more variance in Brazil.