Testing the Confluence Model of the Association between Pornography Use and Sexual Aggression: A Longitudinal Assessment in Two Independent Adolescent Samples

According to Confluence Model theorizing, pornography use contributes to sexual violence, but only among men who are predisposed to sexual aggression. Support for this assertion is limited to cross-sectional research, which cannot speak to the temporal ordering of assumed causes and consequences. To address this issue we employed generalized linear mixed modeling to determine if hostile masculinity, impersonal sexuality, and pornography, and their interactions, predicted change in the odds of subsequently reported sexual aggression in two independent panel samples of male Croatian adolescents. While we observed the link between hostile masculinity and self-reported sexual aggression in both panels, we found no evidence that impersonal sexuality and pornography use increased the odds of subsequently reporting sexual aggression—regardless of participants’ predisposed risk. This study’s findings are difficult to reconcile with view that pornography use plays a causal role in male sexual violence.