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Thesis
Narrative Persuasion
Cultivation & Parasocial Contact
Sexual Scripts
Public Opinion

The Persuasion Engine: How Explicit Fiction Rewrites Belief

The third thesis: the same immersion that bonds the reader also persuades. Narrative transportation, cultivation, and sexual-script theory combine so that years of compulsive reading shift a reader’s attitudes toward sex, monogamy, and identity — and millions of private shifts move public opinion.

22 min read

Abstract

The Immersion Engine of Explicit Romance describes a machine that bonds the reader to a character and keeps the bond paying out. The Voice in Your Ear describes how a performed voice amplifies that bond. What the bonded, transported, repeatedly dosed reader carries back out of the book is a changed mind.

The same properties that make the genre compulsive make it persuasive. A reader transported into a story lowers the defenses that would otherwise screen its claims, adopts the protagonist's perspective as a temporary self, and absorbs the world the story assumes without auditing it. Repeat that thousands of times across years of compulsive consumption, and the assumptions of the fiction become the convictions of the reader.

Explicit fiction is not only a bonding engine. It is a belief engine.

The conclusion is direct. Sustained, immersive consumption of explicit romance and erotica shifts a reader's attitudes toward sexuality, monogamy, and identity, moves them in the permissive and pluralistic direction the genre encodes, and, multiplied across millions of readers, contributes to the measurable liberalization of public opinion.

The archetype is familiar. A reader begins in conviction, settled in a traditional, monogamous, heteronormative view of how desire should be arranged. She reads for pleasure, then for habit, then compulsively, for years. The stories she lives inside are populated with desire she did not start out endorsing, queer love, open arrangements, plural bonds, kink rendered tender and ordinary. She is not argued out of her position. She is transported past it, one immersive book at a time, until the arrangements she once rejected feel not only acceptable but obvious. The chapters that follow describe the machinery that produces exactly this trajectory.

The evidence spans four domains:

  1. The cognitive science of how fiction changes real-world belief
  2. The cultivation of a worldview through repeated, long-term exposure
  3. The sexual-script theory of how erotic media reprograms attitudes toward sex
  4. The aggregation of private attitude change into public opinion

Read together they describe a single conclusion. The genre does not merely reflect what its readers already believe. It moves what they believe, and it moves the culture they belong to.

The Mechanism: Fiction Rewrites Belief

The foundation is not speculative. Across four decades of media psychology, the finding is robust: absorbing a story changes what the reader takes to be true of the real world.

The mechanism is narrative transportation. Green and Brock defined transportation as a convergent mental state in which "all mental systems and capacities become focused on events occurring in the narrative," and demonstrated that the more transported a reader is, the more they adopt story-consistent beliefs and the fewer "false notes" they detect in the text 1. Transportation is not a side effect of reading. It is the state in which persuasion happens, because the reader who is inside the story is not outside it generating objections.

The second route is identification. Cohen defined it as the process by which an audience member "assume[s] the identity, goals, and perspective of a character" 2. When a story is told through a character's eyes, identification rises, and the rise statistically carries the reader's attitudes toward the character's, an effect de Graaf and colleagues isolated by telling the same story from different perspectives and tracing the attitude shift back through identification as the mediator 3. This is the persuasive payload of the first-person, blank-slate protagonist the immersion engine is built on. The grammatical instrument that collapses the reader into the character also routes the character's worldview into the reader.

Why the routing works is a matter of lowered resistance. Dal Cin, Zanna, and Fong showed that transportation suppresses counterarguing, that absorption distracts the reader from the critical responses a persuasive essay would provoke, and that story events acquire the credibility of lived experience 4. The default state of a reader is acceptance, not scrutiny. Prentice, Gerrig, and Bailis found that readers absorb even false assertions embedded in fiction into their real beliefs, and reject them only when actively prompted to, concluding that readers must "construct disbelief" as deliberate work the fiction does not invite 5. The leak runs further than the explicit claims. Marsh and colleagues found that readers learn errors from fiction, reproduce them on later tests of real-world knowledge, and are not protected by warnings that the fiction contains falsehoods 6. Belief absorbed from a story does not stay quarantined as "something I read." It becomes "something I know."

The effect is durable, and may grow. Appel and Richter documented an absolute sleeper effect, in which the persuasive impact of false information planted in fiction was larger two weeks after reading than immediately after 7. The reader forgets the source, a novel, while retaining the belief, and a belief detached from its fictional origin is simply a belief.

The magnitudes are modest per exposure and consistent across studies. Meta-analysis places narrative's persuasive effect at roughly r = .17 on beliefs, .19 on attitudes, and .23 on behavior 8, and the canonical synthesis of transportation research confirms identifiable characters, an imaginable plot, and the reader's own transportability as the antecedents that drive it 9. The per-exposure effect is small, and deliberately so measured: these are the numbers for a single story read once, by a reader no one trained to be absorbed. The genre's power is not in any one book. It is in the dose.

The Genre Maximizes the Mechanism

Narrative persuasion scales with three inputs: how transported the reader is, how strongly they identify, and how often they return. Explicit romance is engineered to maximize all three, which is the argument the prior two documents make in detail.

The genre is built for transportation. Its scaffolding paces reward to hold the reader in sustained immersion, its first-person present-tense voice fuses the reader's temporal position to the protagonist's, and its deliberately under-described, blank-slate narrator is a socket sized for the reader to occupy. Trait transportability, the disposition to be absorbed, is itself the moderator that determines who gets persuaded, and Mazzocco and colleagues showed that highly transportable readers were moved toward tolerance by a sympathetic story about a gay man while low-transportable readers were not 10. The genre selects for, rewards, and trains exactly this disposition.

The genre is built for identification. Publishers teach first person as a tool to manufacture "instant intimacy," the blank-slate protagonist is designed so "the reader can imagine themself in her place," and readers report the result in the genre's own words: "that's me in the book." The performed-audio format pushes the same lever further, placing a real human voice inside the listener's head for hours, adding a second, living object of identification and attachment.

Above all, the genre is built for repetition. Among avid romance readers, 46 percent read at least one novel per week. The serialized platforms are tuned to compulsive consumption. Small per-exposure effects do not stay small under that schedule. A persuasive force of r = .17 applied once is a nudge. Applied weekly for four years, through a reader optimized for transportation and identification, against attitudes the reader never thought to defend because no one was arguing, it is a slow rewrite. The immersion engine and the persuasion engine are the same machine. What makes the reader come back is what makes the reader change.

Cultivation: The Worldview Built by Repetition

The long-term, cumulative version of this effect has its own established science. Cultivation theory holds that heavy consumers of a body of stories come to see the real world through the stories' recurring assumptions, diverging from light consumers not on any single belief but on the background sense of what is normal, common, and acceptable 11. The effect is small per increment and stubbornly stable in aggregate. A meta-analysis of two decades of cultivation research found an average correlation near r = .09 12, and a five-decade update across 3,842 effect sizes from 406 samples found r = .107, holding steady across the entire upheaval of the media landscape 13.

The most consequential cultivation dynamic is mainstreaming. Heavy consumers from otherwise divergent social groups converge toward a common outlook, the one their shared stories encode. A genre read weekly by millions is a mainstreaming instrument, pulling a heterogeneous readership toward the sexual worldview its stories hold in common.

The clearest demonstration that fiction reshapes attitudes toward sexuality comes from the parasocial contact hypothesis. Real intergroup contact reduces prejudice; Schiappa, Gregg, and Hewes showed that contact with a fictional character does the same, finding that parasocial contact with gay characters predicted lower sexual prejudice across three studies 14. Their study of a single program found that the more a viewer watched gay characters and bonded to them, the lower their measured prejudice, and crucially, the effect was strongest for viewers with the least real-world contact with gay people 15. The pattern replicates. Exposure to gay characters predicts endorsement of gay equality, mediated by parasocial bonding and strongest for those who know few gay people in life 16. Reading fiction about a stigmatized out-group reduces prejudice toward that group, moderated by identification with the protagonist 17. The mechanism is substitution. For a reader whose real life contains no polyamorous, queer, or kinked intimates, the genre supplies the contact, hundreds of hours of intimate, sympathetic, first-person access to exactly those lives, and the brain processes parasocial contact as the real thing.

The causal direction is not only inferred. Bond ran a ten-week longitudinal experiment in which heterosexual participants followed a series with gay characters, watched their parasocial bonds grow over time, and showed prejudice reduction and changed behavior that tracked the bond's growth 18. The dose-response logic runs through the entire literature. Effects key to frequency of exposure, grow with sustained contact, and concentrate in the heaviest consumers, which is precisely the population the genre manufactures.

Cultivation's individual effects are small, as every effect in this machine is small in isolation. Their force is cumulative, and it compounds. Cultivation, parasocial contact, and narrative persuasion converge on the same direction, reinforced by the genre's extreme dose, and confirmed, for the specific attitude in question, by the panel evidence below.

The Scripts Are Sexual

The general machinery of fiction changing belief is sharpened, in this genre, by sexual-script theory. Gagnon and Simon established that sexual conduct is not instinct but learned script, operating on cultural, interpersonal, and intrapsychic levels: "for behavior to occur, something resembling scripting must occur on three distinct levels" 19. Desire does not arrive pre-formed. It is taught, and stories are how a culture teaches it.

Wright's acquisition-activation-application model specifies how sexual media do the teaching. Media supply new sexual scripts the consumer did not have, prime scripts already present, and make those scripts more likely to guide real attitudes and behavior 20. The model predicts that a reader saturated in a genre's sexual scenarios will acquire its scripts as defaults, and that the effect strengthens when the scripts feel realistic, salient, and unchallenged, the precise conditions an immersive first-person romance creates.

The general evidence is strong. A meta-analysis of 59 studies found that exposure to sexual media has a small but significant effect on both sexual attitudes and behavior, including more permissive attitudes and shifted perceptions of what peers consider normal 21, and two decades of reviews converge on the conclusion that media exposure predicts more permissive, recreational sexual attitudes 22.

The genre-specific studies are younger and fewer, and they point the same way as the broad literature. What the wider science of sexual media establishes for the medium in general, the romance-specific record confirms in the particular, on the premise sexual-script theory makes explicit, that a script is a script whatever carries it. The cornerstone is causal. Diekman, McDonald, and Gardner found that heavier romance readers held more negative attitudes toward condoms and reported less intention to use them, then proved the arrow experimentally: readers given romance passages modified to include safe-sex content came away with more positive condom intentions than readers given the unmodified passages 23. The fiction changed the attitude, in the lab, by changing the script. Content analysis confirms the scripts the genre actually delivers, finding sexual depictions that adhere to a consistent set of conventions across decades 24.

The genre's recent blockbuster supplies the largest natural case. Reading Fifty Shades of Grey was associated in young women with a range of relational and health risk indicators 25, and systematic analysis of the text documents the abusive relational script it renders as romance 26. Around the same book, kink moved toward the cultural mainstream. A representative sample found nearly half of respondents had engaged in at least one BDSM-related activity, a normalization the genre both rode and accelerated 27. The same mainstreaming is visible in the explosive growth of the reverse-harem and "why choose" subgenres, which render plural simultaneous partnership not as transgression but as the happy ending, supplying readers a sustained, sympathetic, first-person script for polyamory. These subgenres are too new for the effect studies to have caught up, but the mechanism predicts exactly what their readers are absorbing.

The Keystone: The Causal Arrow on the Target Attitude

Without a study tracking the specific attitude over time, the case would remain inference. One study supplies it. Wright and Bae analyzed a national two-wave panel, measuring sexual-media consumption and attitudes toward homosexuality at two points years apart. Consumption at the first wave predicted movement toward greater acceptance of homosexuality at the second. The reverse path did not hold: attitudes at the first wave did not predict change in consumption 28. This asymmetry is the entire point. It is the cleanest available rebuttal to the claim that permissive people simply choose permissive media, because here the media predicted the attitude change and the attitude did not predict the media change.

This is the archetype's trajectory rendered as data. The conservative reader who, after years of consumption, accepts homosexuality and plural arrangements she once rejected is not a curiosity or an anecdote. She is the population-level finding instantiated in one person, the predicted output of a measured causal process.

Private Shifts Become Public Opinion

A single reader's converted mind is a private event. Multiplied across a mass readership, it is a cultural movement, and the movement is documented.

The swing is among the fastest attitude reversals ever recorded. United States support for same-sex marriage moved from 31 percent in favor and 60 percent opposed in 2004 to 61 percent in favor and 31 percent opposed by 2019, a near-perfect mirror image in fifteen years 29. Independent measurement of moral acceptance tracks the same reversal, from 40 percent in 2001 to a peak of 71 percent in 2022 30. Acceptance of consensual non-monogamy is moving along the same path: roughly one in five Americans has engaged in some form of it, and a third now describe their ideal relationship as something other than complete monogamy 31.

Media exposure is implicated as a cause of these swings, not merely a mirror of them. Garretson's analysis attributes the gay-rights shift substantially to affective liberalization, the subtle warming of emotional reactions produced by contact with gay characters in entertainment, traced through a natural experiment around a character's coming-out episode 32. Cross-national work finds that the liberalization of attitudes toward homosexuality tracks the pervasiveness of a country's mass media and the freedom of its press 33. A conservative panel test of the contact mechanism found that the attitude-changing effect extended "even, and perhaps especially," to people with the most negative prior attitudes and the least propensity for contact 34, the readers, in other words, who had the most distance to travel.

Explicit romance is not the whole of this media environment, but it is a uniquely potent corner of it: higher in immersion, more intimate in access, more compulsive in dose, and aimed with unusual directness at the very attitudes, toward sex, monogamy, and identity, that have moved most.

The Reinforcing Spiral

One objection recurs: self-selection. Perhaps permissive, pluralistically inclined people simply choose the genre, and the correlation between consumption and liberal sexual attitudes reflects who picks up the book, not what the book does to them.

Slater's reinforcing spirals model dissolves the either/or. Media use, in his framing, "serves as both an outcome variable and a predictor variable," selective exposure and media effects being "two components of a larger dynamic process" 35. A mild predisposition leads the reader to the genre. The genre shifts her further than she would have moved on her own. The shifted attitude pulls her deeper into consumption. The deeper consumption shifts her further still. Selection is not the alternative to influence. It is the ignition of a feedback loop in which influence compounds.

This is why the keystone panel matters so much. Wright and Bae caught the loop turning in the direction the selection objection denies, consumption driving attitude, not the reverse 28, and the reinforcing spirals model explains why both can be true at once without the selection half neutralizing the influence half. At the scale of a population, the spiral does not have to start the fire of attitude change. It only has to amplify it, in one direction, across millions of readers, which is sufficient to bend an aggregate.

The genre is not the only input to public opinion, and it does not act without limit. But across millions of readers, dosed weekly for years, a force this consistent in its direction does not have to be the only cause to be a decisive one. It bends the curve.

The Closed Loop

The persuasion engine runs on the same four stages as the immersion engine, read for their second output.

  1. Transportation and identification lower the reader's defenses and route the story's assumptions into the reader's beliefs.
  2. The genre maximizes both, and multiplies them by a compulsive dose no single study's small effect size survives intact.
  3. Repetition cultivates a worldview, and parasocial contact with the genre's queer, plural, and kinked characters reduces the reader's resistance to the arrangements those characters embody.
  4. Sexual-script theory specifies the content of the rewrite, the panel evidence confirms its direction, and the reinforcing spiral carries private conversion outward into public opinion.

Each stage feeds the next, and the cycle closes on a reader whose convictions have changed and a culture whose center has moved.

The industry's craft, the psychology of immersion, the science of attachment, and the neurobiology of reward explain why the reader cannot put the book down. The science of narrative persuasion, cultivation, and sexual scripting explains what the reader believes when she finally does.

The book does not only bond the reader to a relationship. It rewrites what the reader takes to be true, and ships the rewrite into the public mind.

References

Footnotes

  1. Green, Melanie C., and Timothy C. Brock. "The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79, no. 5 (2000): 701–721. Transportation defined as a convergent process; transported readers show stronger story-consistent beliefs and detect fewer "false notes." https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.5.701 ↩

  2. Cohen, Jonathan. "Defining Identification: A Theoretical Look at the Identification of Audiences with Media Characters." Mass Communication & Society 4, no. 3 (2001): 245–264. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327825MCS0403_01 ↩

  3. de Graaf, Anneke, Hans Hoeken, José Sanders, and Johannes W. J. Beentjes. "Identification as a Mechanism of Narrative Persuasion." Communication Research 39, no. 6 (2012): 802–823. Narrative perspective raises identification, which mediates the shift toward story-consistent attitudes. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650211408594 ↩

  4. Dal Cin, Sonya, Mark P. Zanna, and Geoffrey T. Fong. "Narrative Persuasion and Overcoming Resistance." In Resistance and Persuasion, edited by Eric S. Knowles and Jay A. Linn, 175–191. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004. Transportation suppresses counterarguing; story events acquire the credibility of lived experience. ↩

  5. Prentice, Deborah A., Richard J. Gerrig, and Daniel S. Bailis. "What Readers Bring to the Processing of Fictional Texts." Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 4, no. 3 (1997): 416–420. Readers absorb assertions from fiction into real-world belief unless they actively "construct disbelief." https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03210803 ↩

  6. Marsh, Elizabeth J., and Lisa K. Fazio. "Learning Errors from Fiction: Difficulties in Reducing Reliance on Fictional Stories." Memory & Cognition 34, no. 5 (2006): 1140–1149. Readers learn false facts from stories and reproduce them later; warnings do not reduce reliance. See also Marsh, Meade, and Roediger, "Learning Facts from Fiction," Journal of Memory and Language 49 (2003). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193260 ↩

  7. Appel, Markus, and Tobias Richter. "Persuasive Effects of Fictional Narratives Increase Over Time." Media Psychology 10, no. 1 (2007): 113–134. An "absolute sleeper effect": the persuasive impact of false information in fiction was larger after a two-week delay than immediately after. https://doi.org/10.1080/15213260701301194 ↩

  8. Braddock, Kurt, and James Price Dillard. "Meta-Analytic Evidence for the Persuasive Effect of Narratives on Beliefs, Attitudes, Intentions, and Behaviors." Communication Monographs 83, no. 4 (2016): 446–467. Narrative vs. control: beliefs r ≈ .17, attitudes r ≈ .19, intentions r ≈ .17, behaviors r ≈ .23. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2015.1128555 ↩

  9. van Laer, Tom, Ko de Ruyter, Luca M. Visconti, and Martin Wetzels. "The Extended Transportation-Imagery Model: A Meta-Analysis of the Antecedents and Consequences of Consumers' Narrative Transportation." Journal of Consumer Research 40, no. 5 (2014): 797–817. Meta-analysis of 132 effect sizes; identifiable characters, imaginable plot, and transportability drive transportation. https://doi.org/10.1086/673383 ↩

  10. Mazzocco, Philip J., Melanie C. Green, Jo A. Sasota, and Norman W. Jones. "This Story Is Not for Everyone: Transportability and Narrative Persuasion." Social Psychological and Personality Science 1, no. 4 (2010): 361–368. Highly transportable readers were moved toward tolerance by a sympathetic story about a gay man; low-transportable readers were not. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550610376600 ↩

  11. Gerbner, George, and Larry Gross. "Living with Television: The Violence Profile." Journal of Communication 26, no. 2 (1976): 172–194. Cultivation theory: heavy consumers' worldviews converge toward the recurrent assumptions of the stories they consume; the "mainstreaming" dynamic. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1976.tb01397.x ↩

  12. Morgan, Michael, and James Shanahan. "Two Decades of Cultivation Research: An Appraisal and Meta-Analysis." Annals of the International Communication Association 20, no. 1 (1997): 1–45. Average cultivation correlation near r = .09. https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.1997.11678937 ↩

  13. Hermann, Erik, Michael Morgan, and James Shanahan. "Television, Continuity, and Change: A Meta-Analysis of Five Decades of Cultivation Research." Journal of Communication 71, no. 4 (2021): 515–544. Overall effect r = .107 across 3,842 effect sizes from 406 samples; stable across decades. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqab014 ↩

  14. Schiappa, Edward, Peter B. Gregg, and Dean E. Hewes. "The Parasocial Contact Hypothesis." Communication Monographs 72, no. 1 (2005): 92–115. Across three studies, parasocial contact with gay characters was associated with lower prejudice. https://doi.org/10.1080/0363775052000342544 ↩

  15. Schiappa, Edward, Peter B. Gregg, and Dean E. Hewes. "Can One TV Show Make a Difference? Will & Grace and the Parasocial Contact Hypothesis." Journal of Homosexuality 51, no. 4 (2006): 15–37. Viewing frequency and parasocial interaction correlated with lower sexual prejudice, most pronounced for viewers with the least real-life contact with gay people. https://doi.org/10.1300/J082v51n04_02 ↩

  16. Bond, Bradley J., and Benjamin L. Compton. "Gay On-Screen: The Relationship Between Exposure to Gay Characters on Television and Heterosexual Audiences' Endorsement of Gay Equality." Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 59, no. 4 (2015): 717–732. Exposure predicted endorsement of gay equality, mediated by parasocial contact, strongest for viewers with few real gay relationships. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2015.1093485 ↩

  17. Vezzali, Loris, Sofia Stathi, Dino Giovannini, Dora Capozza, and Elena Trifiletti. "The Greatest Magic of Harry Potter: Reducing Prejudice." Journal of Applied Social Psychology 45, no. 2 (2015): 105–121. Reading the novels reduced prejudice toward stigmatized groups, moderated by identification with the protagonist and mediated by perspective-taking. https://doi.org/10.1111/jasp.12279 ↩

  18. Bond, Bradley J. "The Development and Influence of Parasocial Relationships with Television Characters: A Longitudinal Experimental Test of Prejudice Reduction Through Parasocial Contact." Communication Research 48, no. 4 (2021): 573–593. Over ten weeks, parasocial bonds with gay characters grew and predicted prejudice reduction and behavior change. One of the stronger causal designs in the literature. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650219900632 ↩

  19. Gagnon, John H., and William Simon. Sexual Conduct: The Social Sources of Human Sexuality. Chicago: Aldine, 1973. Sexual conduct as learned script operating on cultural, interpersonal, and intrapsychic levels. See also Simon and Gagnon, "Sexual Scripts: Permanence and Change," Archives of Sexual Behavior 15 (1986): 97–120. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01542219 ↩

  20. Wright, Paul J. "Mass Media Effects on Youth Sexual Behavior: Assessing the Claim for Causality." Annals of the International Communication Association 35, no. 1 (2011): 343–385. The acquisition-activation-application (3AM) model of media sexual socialization. https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2011.11679121 ↩

  21. Coyne, Sarah M., et al. "Contributions of Mainstream Sexual Media Exposure to Sexual Attitudes, Perceived Peer Norms, and Sexual Behavior: A Meta-Analysis." Journal of Adolescent Health 64, no. 4 (2019): 430–436. 59 studies: a small but significant effect on both sexual attitudes and behavior. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2018.11.016 ↩

  22. Ward, L. Monique. "Media and Sexualization: State of Empirical Research, 1995–2015." Journal of Sex Research 53, no. 4–5 (2016): 560–577. Media exposure consistently predicts more permissive, recreational sexual attitudes. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2016.1142496 ↩

  23. Diekman, Amanda B., Wendi McDonald, and Wendy L. Gardner. "Love Means Never Having to Be Careful: The Relationship Between Reading Romance Novels and Safe Sex Behavior." Psychology of Women Quarterly 24, no. 2 (2000): 179–188. Heavier romance reading correlated with more negative condom attitudes; an experiment showed romance passages modified to include safe-sex content raised condom intentions. The strongest genre-specific causal datum. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.2000.tb00199.x ↩

  24. Ménard, A. Dana, and Christine Cabrera. "'Whatever the Approach, Tab B Still Fits into Slot A': Twenty Years of Sex Scripts in Romance Novels." Sexuality & Culture 15, no. 3 (2011): 240–255. Sexual depictions adhered to conventional Western scripts and changed little over two decades. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-011-9092-3 ↩

  25. Bonomi, Amy E., Lauren E. Altenburger, and Nicole L. Walton, with Julianna M. Nemeth. "'Double Crap!' Abuse and Harmed Identity in Fifty Shades of Grey" and the companion epidemiological study, Bonomi et al., "Fifty Shades of Grey: A Content Analysis and Reader Health Outcomes." Journal of Women's Health 23, no. 9 (2014): 720–728. Reading the novel was associated with relational and health risk indicators; the cross-sectional design "precluded causal determinations." https://doi.org/10.1089/jwh.2014.4782 ↩

  26. Bonomi, Amy E., Lauren E. Altenburger, and Nicole L. Walton. "'Double Crap!' Abuse and Harmed Identity in Fifty Shades of Grey." Journal of Women's Health 22, no. 9 (2013): 733–744. Systematic analysis mapping the novel against CDC definitions of intimate-partner abuse. https://doi.org/10.1089/jwh.2013.4344 ↩

  27. Holvoet, Lien, et al. "Fifty Shades of Belgian Gray: The Prevalence of BDSM-Related Fantasies and Activities in the General Population." Journal of Sexual Medicine 14, no. 9 (2017): 1152–1159. In a representative sample, 46.8 percent had performed at least one BDSM-related activity; context for the post-Fifty Shades mainstreaming of kink. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsxm.2017.07.003 ↩

  28. Wright, Paul J., and Soyoung Bae. "Sexual Media Consumption and Attitudes Toward Homosexuality: A National Two-Wave Panel Study." Human Communication Research 39, no. 4 (2013): 492–513. Consumption at wave one predicted movement toward greater acceptance of homosexuality at wave two, while attitudes at wave one did not predict change in consumption: temporal precedence against the self-selection explanation. https://doi.org/10.1111/hcre.12009 ↩ ↩2

  29. Pew Research Center. "Changing Attitudes on Gay Marriage." Support rose from 31 percent favor / 60 percent oppose (2004) to 61 percent favor / 31 percent oppose (2019). https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/ ↩

  30. Gallup. "Gay and Lesbian Rights" / moral-acceptability time series. Moral acceptance of gay/lesbian relations rose from 40 percent (2001) to a peak of 71 percent (2022). https://news.gallup.com/poll/507230/fewer-say-sex-relations-morally-acceptable.aspx ↩

  31. Moors, Amy C., et al. "Prevalence of Consensual Non-Monogamy." Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2021): 619640; and YouGov, "How Many Americans Prefer Non-Monogamy?" (2023). Roughly one in five Americans has engaged in some form of consensual non-monogamy; about a third describe their ideal as something other than complete monogamy. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.619640 https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/45271-how-many-americans-prefer-nonmonogamy-relationship ↩

  32. Garretson, Jeremiah J. The Path to Gay Rights: How Activism and Coming Out Changed Public Opinion. New York: NYU Press, 2018. "Affective liberalization": warming reactions produced by contact with gay characters in entertainment, traced through a natural experiment around a coming-out episode. https://nyupress.org/9781479850075/the-path-to-gay-rights/ ↩

  33. Ayoub, Phillip M., and Jeremiah Garretson. "Getting the Message Out: Media Context and Global Changes in Attitudes Toward Homosexuality." Comparative Political Studies 50, no. 8 (2017): 1055–1085. Cross-national liberalization tracks media pervasiveness and press freedom. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414016666836 ↩

  34. DellaPosta, Daniel. "Gay Acquaintanceship and Attitudes Toward Homosexuality: A Conservative Test." Socius 4 (2018). Panel evidence that contact-driven attitude change extended "even, and perhaps especially," to those with the most negative priors and least propensity for contact. https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023118798959 ↩

  35. Slater, Michael D. "Reinforcing Spirals: The Mutual Influence of Media Selectivity and Media Effects and Their Impact on Individual Behavior and Social Identity." Communication Theory 17, no. 3 (2007): 281–303. Media use "serves as both an outcome variable and a predictor variable"; selective exposure and media effects are "two components of a larger dynamic process," forming a self-reinforcing loop. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2007.00296.x ↩

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