One of the major concerns of many persons has been the connection between sexuality and violence. A canon of the post-Freudian psychologies has been that suppression of sexuality may cause an outcropping of violence and sadism. A literary parallel is the allegedly puritan era of Queen Victoria and the concomitant flowering of sadomasochistic erotica. Today such literary and graphic forms as paperback novels, comic books, and television programs exploit violence as a means of entertainment, and many persons are concerned lest these influence the youthful reader or viewer toward similar behavior, or at least cause an insensitivity to the suffering of others.
In the early phase of our research questions concerning sadomasochism were not routinely asked. Later every person was queried about whether he was sexually aroused by seeing pictures of, or reading about, rape, flagellation, torture, and violence in general.
Half of our 16 major comparative groups, including both the control and prison groups, had over 90 per cent of their members who reported never having been sexually aroused by such noncontact sadomasochistic stimuli, and another four groups gave essentially the same figure (89 per cent). The remaining four groups contain the three aggressor groups: the aggressors vs. children (88 per cent), vs. adults (85 per cent), and vs. minors (79 per cent). The range of response among all groups is so small that the only significant finding is the clustering of these aggressors in the lower quarter of the range.
In examining degree of response to sadomasochistic noncontact stimuli, one is struck by the fact that in 11 of the 16 groups the same or nearly the same percentages of individuals within a group reported moderate and strong responses. This is curious, for with a stimulus to which the great majority have no response one would expect those with a moderate response to outnumber those with a strong one. This expectation is fulfilled in only three groups, including two of the aggressor groups. In the remaining two groups, including one aggressor group, the strong responses outnumber the moderate. What this equivalence between moderate and strong response in most groups means, and why the three aggressor groups lack this equivalence, is not known.
Of the sex offenders whose offenses included violence or duress, between one eighth and one fifth reported arousal from sadomasochistic noncontact stimuli. While it is probable that in a few cases such stimuli triggered an offense, it seems reasonable to believe that they do not play an important role in the precipitation of sex offenses in general, and at most only a minor role in sex offenses involving violence.
There is a rather disappointing lack of correlation between arousal from noncontact sadomasochistic stimuli and the content of dreams and masturbatory fantasy. In part this may reflect the haste with which we covered the latter two subjects; more probing might well have unearthed data resulting in a high positive correlation. At any rate, there are only two noteworthy coincidences: more aggressors vs. adults had sadomasochistic dreams than any other group, and they and the aggressors vs. minors head the list of those with sadomasochistic masturbatory fantasy.
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