Size Matters After All: Experimental Evidence that SEM Consumption Influences Genital and Body Esteem in Men
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous research has found that images depicted in the mainstream media have a negative influence on self-esteem, particularly among women. With the ease of accessibility and distribution of sexually explicit material (SEM) in recent years, due largely to the rise of the Internet, it has been postulated that consumers of SEM may experience reduced self-esteem in an effect similar to that found in research on exposure to mainstream media imagery. This experimental investigation explored whether exposure to SEM influenced self-esteem in consumers and whether this effect was comparable with that of exposure to mainstream media. Male and female participants were randomly assigned to no imagery, mainstream media imagery, or SEM imagery conditions and asked to report levels of overall global self-esteem, as well as levels of body-specific and genital-specific self-esteem. Mean scores were significantly lower for female participants relative to males overall, but exposure to SEM imagery revealed a significant negative effect on body-specific and genital-specific self-esteem among men only. Implications and limitations of these findings are discussed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".