The Influence of Sexual Music Videos on Adolescents’ Misogynistic Beliefs: The Role of Video Content, Gender, and Affective Engagement

Research on how sexual music videos affect beliefs related to sexual aggression is rare and has not differentiated between the effects of music videos by male and female artists. Moreover, little is known about the affective processes that underlie the effects of sexual music videos. Using data from a nationally representative three-wave panel survey among 1,204 Dutch adolescents, structural equation modeling showed that viewing sexual music videos by male artists increased the acceptance of female token resistance (i.e., the notion that women say “no” to sex when they actually mean “yes”) among adolescent girls, but not adolescent boys. Furthermore, viewing sexual music videos by male artists influenced girls’ acceptance of token resistance indirectly via affective engagement. The findings suggest that effects of sexual music videos on stereotypical sexual beliefs depend on the specific type of music video and viewers’ gender, and can be partly explained by viewers’ affective engagement.