Male interest in visual cues of sperm competition risk

Most forms of pornography are produced to sexually arouse men, and Malamuth [J. Commun. 46 (1996) 8.] has argued that they do this by appealing to male interests and preferences that evolved to solve adaptive problems associated with mating in ancestral environments. If sperm competition has been an important selection pressure during human evolution, then sexual arousal may be an adaptive response to its occurrence since frequent copulation can be an effective method of paternity assurance. Consequently, although men should generally find mate sharing to be aversive, they may nevertheless find cues of increased sperm competition risk to be sexually arousing. Therefore, they should be more aroused by pornography that incorporates cues of sperm competition, than by comparable material in which such cues are absent. This prediction was tested using several indirect methods. Content analyses of pornographic images on World Wide Web sites and of commercial “adult” video releases revealed that depictions of sexual activity involving a female and multiple males are more prevalent those involving a male and multiple females. Moreover, an on-line questionnaire on self-reported preferences and an on-line preference study that unobtrusively examined image selection behavior both yielded results suggesting that the patterns observed in the content analyses do reflect male preferences and interests.