Use of violent pornography has been associated with rape-related attitudes and behaviors. Alcohol consumption is also a major factor in the commission of violent acts against women. To date work on this project has demonstrated that: 1) alcohol consumption appears to increase the acceptability of and decrease the perception of force in sexual violence; 2) permissive cues, such as the mere presence of alcohol in a situation and normative information, can intensify alcohol's effects; 3) individual difference factors, such as hypermasculinity and alcohol outcome expectancies, appear to moderate both the effects of alcohol and permissive cues. The proposed work will employ response conflict theory to continue a thorough and systematic investigation of these factors. Four experiments are proposed to examine the relationships among contextual story cues, environmental social influence cues, and alcohol consumption on sexual and affective responses to, as well as cognitive judgments of violent pornography, in both men and women. In addition, the influence of predispositional characteristics, including alcohol expectancies, hypermasculinity, and rape myth attitudes will be investigated. The knowledge gained from these studies will contribute to understanding how the interaction of alcohol consumption and violent pornography influence the sexual victimization of women. In particular, the process by which men, especially those with violent tendencies, might integrate sexually violent behavior into their own behavioral repertoires will be explicated Furthermore, examining women's responses will lead to further understanding alcohol's role in the occurrence of victim self-blame and subsequent underreporting of sexual victimization.
