Alcohol, disinhibition, sexual arousal, and deviant sexual behavior

Alcohol Health & Research World,  Spring, 1991  by William H. George,  Jeanette Norris

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The relationship between a person's consumption of alcohol and subsequent disinhibition of sexual behavior is strong, although not well understood. Studies have found that for men, the mere expectancy that drinking has occurred can enhance arousal and disinhibition.

In settings ranging from candlelight dinners to drunken debaucheries, alcohol has been depicted as a solvent of sexual inhibitions. Studies of beliefs and experiences have attested to the pervasiveness of the view that alcohol provokes and heightens sexual responsiveness (Athanasiou et al. 1970; Brown et al. 1980). Yet the relationship between drinking and sexuality is far more complex than that defined by this simple formula: alcohol input --> sexual output. And this complexity is found in the relationship between alcohol consumption and sexual responsiveness to both deviant and nondeviant sexual materials.

The relationship between alcohol consumption and responses to deviant erotica is of particular interest and is the main topic of this article. Much research has demonstrated an association between the reading or viewing of violent pornography and rape-supportive attitudes and behaviors in normal males (Malamuth and Donnerstein 1984). However, controversy surrounds this issue because the exact nature of the relationship has not been established. The connection between alcohol and deviant sexual material may be important because of alcohol's strong link to sexual responding.

Alcohol and Sexual Arousal

The relationship between alcohol and sex is complex in part because the individual's responses to alcohol and to sexual stimuli involve complex psychological and physiological processes. Alcohol seems to have the paradoxical effects of enhancing and suppressing sexual responses, with the two effects reflecting the two processes.

There is an inverse relationship between the amount of alcohol consumed and the level of physical sexual arousal; that is, as the concentration of alcohol in the blood increases, sexual arousal diminishes. Several studies have shown that penile response decreases with increases in blood alcohol concentration (BAC) in a linear fashion (Briddell and Wilson 1976; Farkas and Rosen 1976). Also, the time required for men to achieve orgasm during masturbation increases as BAC increases (Malatesta et al. 1979). Exceptions to the pattern of suppression of penile response have been observed at low BACs.

With women, a similar pattern emerges: increases in BAC have been associated with diminishing vaginal arousal (Wilson and Lawson 1978) and increases in the time required to attain orgasm (Malatesta et al. 1982). That acute alcohol consumption suppresses the physical sexual response of both men and women is the clearest and most robust finding in alcohol-sex research.

On the other hand, subjective sexual arousal is affected not only by blood alcohol concentration but also by a person's beliefs about the effects of alcohol. That is, expectancies about the relationship between alcohol and sex generated by the culture influence how a person believes he or she will respond to sexual stimuli.

A methodological technique known as the balanced placebo design (BPD) has been helpful in elucidating the psychology of drinking. The BPD compares the independent and interactive influences of alcohol's physiological and psychological effects. The technique manipulates two factors in drinking: perceived alcohol content, which is known as the expectancy set, and actual alcohol content. Participants in BPD studies are led to expect that they will be given either alcoholic or nonalcoholic drinks; then within those two groups, half again either receive alcohol or do not (Figure 1). Thus, the BPD creates four groups: subjects who expect alcohol and receive alcohol, subjects who expect alcohol and do not receive it, subjects who do not expect alcohol and who do not receive it, and subjects who do not expect alcohol yet do receive it. An important shortcoming of the BPD is that it necessarily limits the alcohol dosage to relatively low levels. Despite this and other shortcomings, BPD studies have divulged much about alcohol's effects on men (Knight et al. 1986; Collins and Searles 1988).

In these studies, the men expecting to receive alcohol--irrespective of whether or not they did receive it--have exhibited greater penile responses (Wilson and Lawson 1976; Briddell et al. 1978) and subjective arousal (Lang et al. 1980; George and Marlatt 1986). Men who expect alcohol also have chosen to spend more time watching erotic slides (George and Marlatt 1986) and waiting to be shown erotic films (Abrams and Wilson 1983). In one study, the expectancy set increased the length of time subjects chose to view erotica, but only for subjects who had a high degree of guilt about sex (Lang et al. 1980). Such enhancements of sexual responsiveness based on the expectancy set have not been duplicated in studies employing erotic materials with low arousal potential (McCarty et al. 1982) and studies in which exposure to erotica was accompanied by competing processes such as divided attention tasks or instructions that counter arousal (Lansky and Wilson 1981; Wilson and Niaura 1984; Wilson et al. 1985). In sum, the expectation that one has consumed low dosages of alcohol has been found to enhance, in men, penile tumescence, subjective arousal, and the tendency to read or view pornography.