Bingley,
so we have a sex instinct and it manifests itself in different actions in people according to their character and experiences. i would say that means it's not just the instinct at work.
instinct doesn't make our decisions for us. that must be obvious, or people couldn't abstain from sex, eating, drinking. the decision to do something (even something instinctual) is separate from the influences we can identify.
my point is that it's facile to say the media causes us to buy, kill, hate, vote and so on. each decision in these areas comes from somewhere inside the mind of an individual. if you could open that place up and look, it wouldn't contain a newspaper.