On the Association of Sex and Violence In the Fantasy Production of College Students*

Abstract

This paper investigates whether there is an association between sexual imagery and violent imagery in stories produced in response to ambiguous Thematic Apperception Test stimuli. In addition, two commonsense assumptions about sex and violence are examined: (a) do men have more sexual imagery than women? and (b) assuming men are more aggressive than women, do they produce fantasies with more violent themes? Thematic Apperception Test protocols administered to 80 college students as part of a study conducted at Syracuse University in the late 1950s were examined using two scoring systems--one for sexual imagery and one for violent imagery. An association between sex and violence was found for men only. The conventional wisdom that all men ever think about is sex was undermined by the finding that men and women do not differ in the production of sexual imagery. In terms of production of violent imagery, men and women also do not differ. The fact that females are less aggressive than men is overt behavior may be a function of social and cultural forces which operate differentially on men and women.

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