Studies of aggression in the laboratory must use proxy tasks, as one obviously cannot ethically put participants in danger.

To deal with this problem, the authors of one study investigated a more subtle form of sexual aggression: exposing a woman with known negative attitudes toward sexually explicit material to erotica or pornography.

The female was a confederate supposedly engaged in a memory task, and the participants (both men and women) were instructed to attempt to distract her by showing her a series of slides.

They could choose from pictures of sports, autopsies, nudes, partners engaging in sexual acts, or sexual deviance (including bondage). They knew the woman disliked sexually explicit material, and they also knew that all categories of slides were equally distracting to her.

Of the males, 72% ignored the woman’s stated dislike of sexually explicit materials and showed her slides from one of the three explicit categories, while 44% of the females did so. The authors replicated the experiment, but this time the participants were told that the female was neutral about sexually explicit materials. Female use of the sexually explicit slides was similar to that of the previous experiment (41%), but significantly fewer males (54%) showed the sexual material.

The authors suggest that this type of disrespect toward a woman’s stated preferences has implications both in the workplace for sexual harassment, and in the home for romantic relationships. Specifically, men may use sexual media or locker-room talk in an instrumental way—to distract, impose, or subtly aggress against women (especially women with a known dislike for such media). In relationships, perhaps this means that men may use sexual media to “get back” at a partner when angry.