I will seek to understand those factors that most influence consumption of sexually oriented media. I will also consider what implications, if any, these results of my analysis might have in understanding broader realities. I found several articles that examined the relationship between subscription rates of sexually oriented magazines and rape rates by state. This analysis found no relationship between subscription rates and rape rates. Other literature regarding sexually oriented media analyzed content patterns such as depictions of women and portrayal of sexual violence.
Most literature confirms that women are usually depicted in submissive roles as objects for men.
However, an examination of the hypothesis that increasing rape reports might be due to increasing sexually violent content in sexually oriented magazines revealed that, in fact, depictions of sexual violence were not on the rise. Still other sociological literature analyzes sexually oriented media to form the basis for arguments for and against legal policy which would censor sexual media deemed obscene as opposed to artistic or having social value. Most sociological literature about sexually oriented media discusses studies about how media use affects behavior, rather than what factors influence sexually oriented media consumption. Upon undertaking further research, I found that this trend could be extrapolated to most sociological literature regarding any type of media consumption. To the end of evaluating the problem stated above, I conducted a five-step data analysis process including univariate analyses, bivariate correlation and scatterplot analyses, and multiple regression analyses to find the most parsimonious model.