Fifty Shades of Unsaid: Women’s Explicit and Implicit Attitudes Towards Sexual Morality

The movie Fifty Shades of Grey has created a great deal of controversy which has reignited the debate on unusual and alternative sexual practices such as bondage. Erotophobic individuals have negative affect towards the type of sexual libertinism conveyed by the movie, while erotophilic persons have a positive attitude and emotional feelings towards this kind of sexual emancipation. Using the Implicit Association Test, this study aimed to explore the extent to which there is a difference in women's attitudes towards sexual morality on an explicit and implicit level. Our findings found that erotophobic and erotophilic women differed only on an explicit level of sex guilt and moral evaluation, while no difference in the implicit measure was found.


Introduction
There can be no doubt that the movie adaptation of the book Fifty Shades of Grey (De Luca, Brunetti, James, & Taylor-Johnson, 2015) has been a phenomenon. There has been no more eagerly anticipated movie this year (Robey, 2015). In 2011, British author E. L. James's novel (the first of the trilogy) was published by Vintage Books, while Hollywood released a movie adaptation of the book on Valentine's Day 2015. Both the trilogy and the movie A large body of research has provided findings concerning implicit attitudes towards homosexuality (Anselmi, Vianello, Voci, & Robusto, 2013;Banse, Seise, & Zerbes, 2001;Breen & Karpinski, 2013;Jellison, McConnell, & Gabriel, 2004;Jones & Devos, 2014;Steffens, 2005). Other studies did not directly investigate sex-related implicit attitudes, but instead used the concepts of implicit and explicit processes in sexuality, such as explicit vs. implicit memory for sexual words (Bush & Geer, 2001), implicit vs. explicit priming of the sexual system (Spiering, Everaerd, & Janssen, 2003), or implicit attitudes toward mainstream sexual terms (e.g., kissing) and Bondage-Domination-Sadism-Masochism terms (e.g., bondage) (Stockwell, Walker, & Eshleman, 2010). In a recent study, Macapagal and Janssen (2011) tested the link between automatic associations with sexual stimuli and the dimension of erotophobia-erotophilia. The authors concluded that the valence of sexual stimuli can be treated automatically and this is related to trait affective responses to sex.
Jointly considered, findings showed that sexually implicit stimuli presented outside of awareness had a different impact when compared with explicit stimulus presentations. These findings authorize us to consider both an explicit and implicit level in our investigation of sex-related attitudes.

Overview and Hypotheses
The present pilot study aimed to explore women's explicit and implicit attitudes towards an emancipated and liberal sexuality, such as the Bondage-Domination-Sadism-Masochism practice conveyed by the movie Fifty Shades of Grey. Any explanation of the aim of the current study must begin with a crucial consideration: We were not interested in recruiting a sample of movie supporters vs. opponents, also because real opponents of the movie surely did not see it. We aimed instead to investigate the different attitudes (explicit and/or implicit) of people who saw the movie. Our idea is that erotophobic and/or moralist individuals would generally oppose and disapprove of the sexual libertinism shown, and if some of these decided to see the movie, they did so because they consider it to be largely a romantic and loving film. Instead, erotophilic and/or emancipated individuals may support and encourage the sexual libertinism displayed in the movie.
We aimed to explore the extent to which there is a difference in attitudes towards sexual morality on an explicit and implicit level. To test our aim, we randomly selected women older than 30 years of age who had seen the movie, and their dispositional traits of erotophobia-erotophilia were assessed. The choice of a totally female sample is due to the movie's prospective of female submission in which the Bondage-Domination-Sadism-Masochism practices involve the male protagonist as the dominant partner and the female protagonist as the submissive partner. Empirical evidence suggests that about 89% of women who are engaged in Bondage-Domination-Sadism-Masochism expressed a preference for a dominant man (Ernulf & Innala, 1995). Women were also administered a sexual satisfaction measure in order to exclude attenuate confounding due to sexual satisfaction or sexual distress. Additionally, we operationalized the concept of an emancipated and liberal sexuality through some Bondage-Domination-Sadism-Masochism photograms taken from the Fifty Shades of Grey movie. We also operationalized the concepts of sexual morality/immorality in terms of cleanliness/dirtiness. Indeed, the main strength of the current study is that it does not adopt the traditional IAT "good/bad" attribute contrast (Greenwald et al., 2003), but instead adopts the categories of "dirty" and "clean". Empirical evidence has shown that abstract concepts of morality/immorality are grounded in situations of physical cleanliness/dirtiness, in that water and soap eliminate more than physical dirt and weaken guilt from an individual's moral misbehaviours (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999;Lee & Schwarz, 2010;Schnall, Benton, & Harvey, 2008;Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006). Indeed, we do not wish to investigate the conceptualization of sex in terms of goodness/badness and consequently we are not interested in the sexual pleasure or satisfaction which we hypothesized as being unassociated with the moralist attitude. We Europe's Journal of Psychology 2016, Vol. 12(4), 550-566 doi:10.5964/ejop.v12i4.1124 Lanciano,Soleti,Guglielmi et al. 553 are instead interested in the conceptualization of unusual sex practices in terms of morally dirty and guilty attributes.
Despite the exploratory nature of the current study: H1: At the explicit level, we expected erotophobic women to exhibit higher levels of sex guilt, moral and romantic evaluation of the movie, and to declare that their motivation for seeing the movie was connected to the media phenomenon surrounding the film or that they had seen the movie by mistake. (See Measures section for a detailed explanation). H2: At the explicit level, we expected erotophilic women to exhibit higher levels of fantasies and reflections after seeing the movie, a higher sexual evaluation of the film, and to give sexual motivations as the underlying reason for having seen the movie. H3: At the implicit level, we expected all participants (both erotophobic and erotophilic women) to show a high IAT effect. We also expected no difference between the two groups in IAT effect to be found. In other words, along with erotophobic women, we also expected erotophilic women who explicitly assessed themselves as being sexually emancipated, libertine and modern, to associate the sexual perversions portrayed in the movie with the concept of dirt.
H4: We expected that explicit and implicit measures would not converge to discriminate women's attitudes towards sexual morality. We also expected that the IAT would not be able to detect the differences between erotophobic and erotophilic attitudes found at the explicit level.

Design
The study was approved by the Ethical Committee of the Department of Education, Psychology, Communication of University of Bari. The study adopted a 2x2 mixed design with the IAT block (congruent vs. incongruent) as within subjects, and the explicit sex attitude (erotophobic vs. erotophilic) as between subjects. The dependent variables were: (1) explicit measures of sexual satisfaction, sex-guilt, affective responses to the movie, evaluation of the movie, motivations for viewing the movie, and (2) the implicit measure of the IAT effect (Greenwald et al., 1998).

Participants
A sample of 25 female Italian volunteers (age range = 31-64; M = 46.88; SD = 7.20) was recruited through an advertisement and among the researchers' acquaintances through a snowball sampling method (Biernacki & Waldorf, 1981). To distinguish the two explicit sex attitude groups (erotophobic vs. erotophilic), a median-split procedure was applied to the measure of sexual attitude (Macapagal & Janssen, 2011; see Measures section).
On the basis of the median score (score = 70), we distinguished erotophobic vs. erotophilic women.
The two groups were homogenous as regards age (t(23) = 1. Implicit Attitudes and Sexual Morality 554 p = .53), and previous reading of the trilogy (χ 2 (2, N = 25) = 1.13, p = .57). Detailed characteristics for the two subsamples are shown in Table 1. Table 1 Characteristics for the Two Subsamples

Measures and Procedure Explicit Measures
Sexual attitude -The participants' sexual attitudes were assessed through the Sexual Opinion Survey (SOS) (Fisher, Byrne, et al., 1988). The SOS consists of twenty-one 7-point items (1 = "strongly agree"; 7 = "strongly disagree") which measure normal variations in affective-evaluative responses to sex along a single dimension of erotophobia-erotophilia. Items address participants' attitudes towards a number of sexual behaviors (e.g., masturbation, fantasizing about sex, same-sex partners, oral sex). Specifically, the scale consists of 10 erotophobia items assessing negative affective responses to sex (e.g., "I do not enjoy daydreaming about sexual matters"; Cronbach's alpha = .78), and 11 erotophilia items assessing positive affective responses to sex (e.g., "Seeing a pornographic movie would be sexually arousing to me"; Cronbach's alpha = .91). Participants' scores on the SOS are obtained by subtracting the sum of the erotophobia items from the sum of the erotophilia items, and a constant of 67 is added to the difference. Higher scores indicated higher erotophilia, while lower scores indicated higher erotophobia.
Sexual satisfaction -Participants filled in the Sexual Satisfaction Scale for Women (SSS-W) (Meston & Trapnell, 2005). The SSS-W consists of thirty 5-point items assessing sexual satisfaction and sexual distress (1 = "strongly agree"; 5 = "strongly disagree"). Item scores were summed up into a total score (Cronbach's alpha = .91), and five sub dimensions: a) contentment (e.g. "I feel content with the way my present sex life is"; Cronbach's alpha = .76), b) communication (e.g. "I usually feel completely comfortable discussing sex whenever my partner wants to"; Cronbach's alpha = .72), c) compatibility (e.g. "I often feel that my partner and I are not sexually compatible enough"; Cronbach's alpha = .93), d) relational concern (e.g. "I'm worried that my partner will become frustrated with my sexual difficulties"; Cronbach's alpha = .90), and e) personal concern (e.g. "My sexual difficulties are frustrating to me"; Cronbach's alpha = .96).
Sex guilt -Women's sex guilt was assessed through the brief version of the revised Mosher Sex-Guilt Scale (BRMSGS) (Janda & Bazemore, 2011). This scale represents a brief 10-item version of the 50-item Sex-Guilt Scale from the Revised Mosher Guilt Inventory (Mosher, 1998). The scale consists of ten 7-point items (0 = "totally false"; 6 = "totally true"; e.g., "Unusual sex practices are dangerous to one's health and mental"). Item scores were summed up into the total score of sex guilt (Cronbach's alpha = .69). Higher scores indicated higher sex guilt.
Considering that erotophobic women saw the Fifty Shades of Grey movie too, we considered it crucial to explore the affective responses, evaluations, and motivations underlying their viewing of the movie. To address this aim, we needed to create the following specific items.
Affective responses to the movie -Participants were asked to assess through sixteen 11-point items ( Implicit Attitudes and Sexual Morality 556 scores of items p), q), and r) were averaged into the sub dimension of moral evaluation (e.g. "I felt guilty for having seen the movie" or "I felt dirty for having seen the movie"; Cronbach's alpha = .95).
Evaluation of the movie -Participants were asked to assess through six 11-point items (0 = "not at all"; 10 = very much") the extent to which the movie was a) erotic, b) hard, c) porn, d) sadomasochistic, e) perverted, and f) loving. The scores of items a), b), c), d), and e) were averaged into the sub dimension of sexual evaluation (Cronbach's alpha = .79). The score of item f) was considered as an index of romantic evaluation of the movie.
Motivations underlying viewing of the movie -Participants were asked to assess through seven 11-point items (0 = "not at all"; 10 = very much") if they saw the movie: a) to see an erotic film, b) to see hard scenes, c) to get excited, d) to criticize it, e) to comment on it, f) because the movie has been highly publicized, g) by mistake (i.e. no other movie was available). The scores of items a), b), c) were averaged into the sub dimension of sexual motivation (Cronbach's alpha = .87). The scores of items d), e), f) were averaged into the sub dimension of media motivation (Cronbach's alpha = .85). The score of item g) was considered as an index of viewing the movie by mistake.  Table 2 for details). The IAT consisted of five separate blocks of categorization trials (see Table 2). In each trial, a stimulus item (picture or word) was presented in the center of a computer screen, and participants were told to categorise it as accurately and as quickly as possible.

•
In Block 1 (Movie categorisation) participants classified each picture as belonging to the movie (press "E") or not belonging to the movie (press "I").

•
In Block 3 (Double categorisation congruent block) participants evaluated whether stimulus (picture or word) were either belonging to the movie or dirty (press "E"), and whether they were either not belonging to the movie or clean (press "I").

•
In Block 4 (Reversed movie categorization) participants classified pictures as not belonging to the movie (press "E") or belonging to the movie (press "I").

•
In Block 5 (Reversed double categorization incongruent block) participants evaluated whether stimulus (picture or word) were either not belonging to the movie or dirty (press "E"), and whether they were either belonging to the movie or clean (press "I").
Error feedback in the form of a red letter "X" appeared after incorrect responses and participants had to correct error responses hitting the other key (built-in error correction procedure  One out of eight BDSM pictures from Fifty Shades of Grey. b One out of eight mainstream pictures of weddings. c One out of eight "dirty words": "Vomiting", "Diarrhea", "Sweat", "Spit", "Manure", "Mucus", "Anointed", "Sewer". d One out of eight "clean words": "Laundry", "Soap", "Water", "Scented", "Snow", "Source", "Lily", "Shampoo". The algorithm recommended by Greenwald et al. (2003) to calculate the D index has the following steps for IAT designs adopting the built-in error procedure: (1) use data from critical blocks (Blocks 3 and 5); (2) eliminate trials with latencies >10,000 ms; (3) eliminate subjects for whom more than 10% of trials have latencies <300 ms; (4) compute the standard deviation for all practice trials in the both congruent and incongruent blocks (Blocks 3 and 5) and the standard deviation for all test trials in both the congruent and incongruent blocks (Blocks 3 and 5); (5) compute separated means for practice congruent trials, practice incongruent trials, test congruent trials and test incongruent trials; (6) compute two difference scores (one difference between practice congruent trials and practice incongruent trials, and the other between test congruent trials and test incongruent trials); (7) divide each difference score by its associated standard deviation from Step (4); and (8) average the two quotients from Step (7), obtaining the D index.
A first sample 27 women were invited to take part in the experimental session but two of the women abandoned the session before completing the IAT task. Participants provided written informed consent to participate in the experiment. The retention interval between the movie's release and the experiment was 39.12 days on average (SD = 5.49). The order of administration of the self-report explicit measures was randomized across participants, and the order of the administration of explicit and implicit measures was counterbalanced between subjects.

Descriptive Analysis
To investigate the extreme emotions raised by the movie and the main erotic thread, descriptive analyses were run for each affective response and evaluation of the movie in the total sample (see Measures Section). Results  in the study. An independent sample t-test was run on both explicit and implicit measures, with sex attitude (erotophobic vs. erotophilic) as a between-subjects factor. Given the limited sample size, and to prevent the violation of normal distribution assumptions, the non-parametric bootstrapping method was used as a robust estimation of t-test. Bootstrapping provided a confidence interval (CI) around the coefficients, which are significant if the interval between the upper limit (UL) and lower limit (LL) of a bootstrapped 95% CI do not contain zero, which means that the difference between the two groups is different from zero. the two groups in the D index was found, meaning that women who explicitly evaluated themselves as erotophilic and sexually emancipated showed a moralistic attitude towards sexual Bondage-Domination-Sadism-Masochism practices at an implicit level, just as erotophobic women do. According to Cohen (1977), the effect sizes can be considered high (see Table 3).

Receiver-Operating-Characteristic (ROC) Analysis
To test Hypothesis 4, a receiver-operating-characteristic (ROC) analysis (Swets, 1988) was run to determine if and how well the IAT, at the implicit level, discriminated between erotophobic and erotophilic women at the explicit level. The D index was employed as a test variable indicating the "strength of conviction" that a participant falls into one category (erotophobic) or the other (erotophilic). An SOS score was employed as a state variable indicating the "true category" to which a subject belongs. The value of the state variable indicates which category should be considered positive (in our case erotophilic). ROC analysis provided an Area Under the Curve (A.U.C.), as a measure of discrimination which ranges from 1 (perfect discrimination) to 0 (null discrimination), with the value .50 representing random discrimination. The ROC analysis yielded an AUC of .45 when erotophilic was considered the positive value of the state variable. The ROC result suggested that, at the implicit level, the IAT did not discriminate women who explicitly evaluated themselves as erotophilic from ones who evaluated themselves as erotophobic. The IAT was not able to detect differences between erotophobic and erotophilic attitudes found at the explicit level. In other words, and confirming our expectations, explicit and implicit measures did not converge to discriminate women's attitudes towards sexual morality.

Discussion
E. L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey has been the subject of a great deal of research (Comella, 2013;Downing, 2013;Stevens, 2014;van Reenen, 2014). Both the literary trilogy and the movie have created controversy rekindling the debate on consent and unusual sexual practices, such as BDSM. Generalizing over and above the specific context of the movie, sex may cause a variety of affective and cognitive responses and evaluations, such as positive affect, pleasure, satisfaction, a sense of freedom, but also fear of pleasure, shame, or guilt. A growing body of research has focused on explicit or self-reported attitudes towards sexuality (Fisher, Byrne, et al., 1988), while less is known about the role of implicit and automatic attitudes involved in sexual processing (Brauer et al., 2009;Oliver et al., 2009;Macapagal & Janssen, 2011).
The current pilot study aimed to explore women's explicit and implicit attitudes towards an emancipated and liberal sexuality, such as that conveyed by the movie Fifty Shades of Grey. We aimed to explore the extent to which there is a difference in attitudes towards sexual morality on explicit and implicit levels. Results seemed to encourage our idea that erotophobic women explicitly exhibited higher levels of sex guilt and moral evaluation of the movie than erotophilic women, while the latter showed a higher level of fantasies and reflections than erotophobic women after seeing the move. Moreover, erotophobic women claimed to have seen the movie by mistake. On the contrary, no difference regarding implicit attitude was found in the two sexual opinion groups: All women showed a positive average value of the D index (Greenwald et al., 2003). In other words, all participants -both erotophobic and erotophilic -were faster in the IAT categorization when BDSM pictures taken from the movie were associated with dirty items (congruent block), than when the movie's pictures were associated with clean items (incongruent block). This pilot study shows how explicit and implicit measures do not converge to discriminate women's attitudes towards sexual morality: Also erotophilic women -who explicitly assessed themselves as not A possible explanation of these results may be found in sex role stereotypes and socialization. In western society, for example, stereotypes for femininity include expectations that a woman be domestic, whole-hearted, pretty, emotional, dependent and passive. By contrast, masculinity stereotypes view them as unemotional, independent, active, and aggressive. Even if women are encouraged to appeal to stereotypical fantasies of heterosexual men when they show a true interest and pleasure in sex and unusual sex practices (especially outside the marriage), they are judged as being bad and immoral (Hamilton & Armstrong, 2009;Montemurro, 2014). As Simon and Gagnon (1986) noted, cultural settings are norms for sexual expression, such as the belief that women are sexually passive and men are sexually aggressive. As a consequence, we are prone to label as deviant women who initiate sex or men who are less interested in sex than their partners (Simon & Gagnon, 1986). In other words, we expect men to be more interested in sex and to engage in it more frequently than women because, many believe, that is how men are biologically wired (Montemurro, 2014).
Another possible explanation of our findings may be sought considering that Catholicism is deeply rooted in Italian culture due to the presence of the Vatican. As regards standards of sexual morality, according to the Catholic Church sexual pleasure is morally wrong when sought outside its procreative purposes (Catholic Church, 1997).
As a consequence, for Catholics the release of the movie Fifty Shades of Grey denoted the evolution of pornography that is significantly distant from a sacred idea of sexuality and human dignity (Mohler, 2015). The previous record sales of the trilogy, and the actual celebration of the movie alerted many Catholics to the fact that a lost sense of shame is an increasing and unavoidable phenomenon (Mohler, 2015).
The facilitation and automatism of sorting the movie's BDSM pictures portraying dirty concepts, as compared with the movie's BDSM pictures showing clean concepts, reflect the presence of an implicit moralistic attitude towards some sexual practices such as bondage or sadomasochism, since that these sex activities are conceptualized as sinful, unclean, dirty, and morally guilty. Also women who explicitly evaluate themselves as erotophilic actually believe that sex is personally degrading and associated with base and animal instincts. The strong association between the movie's pictures and dirty concepts, and between wedding pictures and clean concepts, was also confirmed by the positive average value of the D index in both erotophobic and erotophilic groups. The present findings might be explained by considering that when participants consider Bondage-Domination-Sadism-Masochism practices as guilty and dirty, the congruent categorization task appeared more facilitated, easier, and faster. The difficulty of switching between the two discrimination tasks (movie/no-movie pictures and dirty/clean words) when two concepts assigned to the same key are weakly associated (i.e. movie's picture/clean word or wedding picture/dirty word) determines a slower performance (Nosek et al., 2007).
The main strength of the present work was its attempt to provide an innovative contribution to the investigation of explicit and implicit attitudes in the sexual domain. The present study has however some theoretical and methodological limitations. First, our sample size was relatively small. Second, our female participants were not selected on the basis of highest erotophobia-erotophilia scores, but instead they were assigned to two groups on the basis of a median SOS score. Lastly, future studies could recruit a larger sample including male participants, and also assess the participants' level of religious attitudes, involvement, and affiliation. However, despite the sample size, effect sizes were large throughout analyses, indicating that these findings represent meaningful results.