Dr. Helen: Is Control over Porn Really about Control over Men’s Sexuality?
National Review Online recently ran an article entitled “Getting Serious About Pornography” with the following warning: “It is ravaging American families.” The author is “a psychologist who lives with her children in Virginia.” She wrote the piece anonymously. Anonymous states:
Imagine a drug so powerful it can destroy a family simply by distorting a man’s perception of his wife. Picture an addiction so lethal it has the potential to render an entire generation incapable of forming lasting marriages and so widespread that it produces more annual revenue — $97 billion worldwide in 2006 — than all of the leading technology companies combined. Consider a narcotic so insidious that it evades serious scientific study and legislative action for decades, thriving instead under the ever-expanding banner of the First Amendment.
“Hmmm,” I thought, “is the First Amendment really ever-expanding?” I don’t think so; it seems to be ever-shrinking, but that’s a topic for another article. My main problem with this piece is the insinuation that porn is to blame for an entire generation not being able to form lasting marriages and that it is damaging families and leading to rape and every other kind of ill in society.
The author of the article thinks that she lost her husband due to “porn” (he ran off with another woman). She mentions a number of reports that point to porn’s “harmful effects,” such as one released by the Witherspoon Institute. “The Social Costs of Pornography” claims that pornography has negative effects on individuals and society. The ominous video on the report’s website, however, makes me wonder what its real motive is. Perhaps it’s controlling the sexuality of males?
WELL WHEN-EVER SOME FEMINAZI TRIES TO TELL ME WHAT KIND OF PORN TO WATCH THATS WHEN I SAY ‘WELL SHE CAN TRY AS HARD AS SHE LIKE BUT SHE IS NOT GOING TO GET A DATE WITH ME’!
Sorry, Helen, you are full of more crap than a Christmas goose. And sorry all of you need to justify your habits.
I can verify Anonymous’s experience. My husband got more and more into porn to the point that it took away his interest in participating in family life, and certainly took away his interest in sex with a wife. He said he didn’t want to make the effort to relate to a person. It was too much trouble (and no, I’m not demanding; anything but). And no, I’m not 300 pounds and ugly.
When I put pressure on his addiction, he took up with a mentally unstable woman who promised him he could have his porn. According to what she said to others, the addiction grew, and he was masturbating to it.
Helluva example to the kids. You guys can justify this all you want, and I feel sorry for your women. There are lots of studies out there that back up what I’m saying. Read them.
Now he’s got no woman at all, other than the pictures online to masturbate to.
Enjoy.
Anna,
Latest study shows the same as all earlier studies:
70% of married men masturbate
30% of married men lie to pollsters
If you think the masturbation started after you finding the porn, you are wrong. Men start masturbating in their early teens, and their parents train them to hide it well by punishing or ridiculing, or god-bothering whenever they are caught.
He’s been masturbating before, during and after your marriage.
“Addicted to Porn” means that a man wants to look at somebody other than the spouse as well. Lots of somebodys that are young, fit, blemish free, flexible, and as perfectly beautiful as makeup, an airbrush and photoshop can make them. In the words of Christy Brinkley, supermodel of the 80′s: “Even Christy Brinkley doesn’t look like Christy Brinkley”.
You aren’t going to be able to distract a man away from looking at other women. We’re just not wired up to look at only one woman. We’re talking at least many hundreds of thousands of years of genetic selection, and more likely hundreds of millions. You should be grateful that he’s looking at porn. Grateful, because porn is quiet, 100% disease free, perfect looking, folds for easy storage and never nags, and rarely asks for jewelry. Porn is perfect, and when men start wandering towards new, living, breathing females, these differences become very obvious and irritating. Porn is unreservedly accepting of erectile disfunction, and never is disappointed. The physical intimacy of masturbation includes a perfect partner that always knows exactly when and where to touch, and exactly the correct timing, technique and speed. Wives are almost as good, from nearly as much practice. New girls are awful.
Like Italian sports cars, new lovers are great fun for about 1 week. Then the bills start. The parts require constant tweaking. The paint job requires protection from the weather, sun and all touching. The dollars per mile cost is unbelivable. Half the time the car won’t start for one reason or another, and it will leave on it’s own to be in “the shop”. The car never pays for what happens in “the shop” but it keeps going back. It’s always in your mind, and sometimes in her conversation, that to really drive the new model to the limits, you need to be one of a handful of highly trained professionals, with incredible natural gifts. Like her previous driver, not the current one.
And, of course, sooner or later they always get stolen. Usually sooner.
Men know this, and my experience is that men think about wandering, fantasize about wandering, and occasionally do wander, but if it’s serious or for any length of time, it’s just a symptom of a marriage that has run it’s course. Other partnerships and joint ventures get started, work, make all the parties happy for a while, then dissolve. Marriage is often the same. Nowadays, a woman doesn’t become ‘damaged goods’ and can only marry once. Consequently, the downside of divorce is lessened today. Any economist will tell you that as an action such as divorce becomes less damaging and painful, the more it will happen.
Be glad that you don’t live in areas of Asia that I’ve visited, where there is no divorce; the wife is just beaten into submission, and the mistresses are paraded along in front of her. This isn’t new. In the old testament, they’re called ‘concubines’. I vastly prefer today’s system.
And don’t go thinking that this is brand new, with the internet. Or with color printing, or black and white printing. Or oil paints. Or tempura paints. Or charcoal sketches. Or sculpture. Or stick figures on the wall. We’ve had pornography for a long, long, long time. Some of the earliest sculptures ever found were of the ‘earth mother’. Remembering being 15, I can assure you that a doll that can be easily carried in one hand will work very well as the fantasy stimulus required to get the job moving.
Face it, if your marriage is just based on sex, it’s doomed anyway, because eventually one or the other of you just aren’t going to be biologically capable enough as you both age, and you’re just praying that you both slide into decrepitude and disinterest at about the same rate.
And no, I don’t believe in “porn addiction”. If exposure to porn were harmful, I’d be as dead as the triceratops.
If porn were addicting, I could not have taken the time to type this, when an entire planetful of porn is literally three clicks away.
Having worked for a market research firm for too many years, let me correct one point in your lengthy comment. 100 percent of people lie. Lying – it’s not just for men anymore, and no less about masturbation. If someone tells you that they never lie, they already have, and you might want to trust them the least. Just an observation, a point of order, if you will.
suicidal idiot said:
“Like Italian sports cars, new lovers are great fun for about 1 week. Then the bills start. The parts require constant tweaking. The paint job requires protection from the weather, sun and all touching. The dollars per mile cost is unbelivable. Half the time the car won’t start for one reason or another, and it will leave on it’s own to be in “the shop”. The car never pays for what happens in “the shop” but it keeps going back. It’s always in your mind, and sometimes in her conversation, that to really drive the new model to the limits, you need to be one of a handful of highly trained professionals, with incredible natural gifts. Like her previous driver, not the current one.”
Do you know some people here likely know who you are????? Do you know who you are???? Won’t you ask us????
/sarcasmmode but man you DO sound like Yoshiki. Right down to your screenname.
You serious? What puritan enclave are you living in? If you think your man wouldn’t masturbate if he didn’t look at porn, then you live in wonderland. You stigmatizing him like that and blaming porn for his family neglect might be a prism indicating you bigger issues in your former marriage than just his porn “habit.” I didn’t want to personally insult you, but your response to Dr Helen was classless in itself so I don’t feel so bad for my lack of restraint.
These women who “lost their husbands to porn” seem to assume everything else was fine in the marriage. Maybe they thought so, but maybe their husbands didn’t.
Is there such a thing as “porn addiction” or “sex addiction?” People can become unhealthily obsessed with all kinds of things, so yes, I’m sure there is. But “sex addiction” has come, in many cases, to mean male sexuality, as Dr. Helen has written on more than one occasion. The feminization of our culture has made womens’ worldviews, including sexuality, normative and mens’ pathological. Many men, maybe most men, like sex a lot, often. they like variety. Compromises need to be made in marriages, sure. But why must they always favor the womens’ norms? It’s a good thing that extreme patriarchal dominance, like that described by another poster in Asia, is gone or receded in this culture. But it is not justifiable or healthy to simply substitute the cultural dominance of female sexuality as the ;healthy” norm. Women don’t seem to understand that the more they try to stamp it out, the more it pops up elsewhere.
Wives claiming they lost their husbands to porn or sex addiction will become like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, an organization that has bullied governments into criminalizing perfectly safe levels of alcohol consumption because one of their family members got killed by someone blitzed on several times that much alcohol.
At the same time, I wonder how many men, caught cheating or looking at porn, claim “sex addiction” as a way of avoiding relational conflict, embarrassment or moral shame, choosing instead an “addiction” that offers victim status (it’s an illness, you know) and the option for absolution through “treatment.” Instead of the monastery, one goes to “rehab” to be cleansed not of sin but of “illness.”I couldn’t help myself, honey, I’m sick, I need treatment. And understanding.
Here’s a clue:
If a man is actually getting “more and more into porn,” and not the more likely scenario of just you taking increasing notice of a steady habit, then chances are it’s because he’s unattracted to you. It’s far more likely a SYMPTOM than a cause. And given the wantonly insulting nature of your post, I have a feeling what was turning him off wasn’t how attractive you think you are on the OUTSIDE.
Anna -
When I read these stories I have to ask one question – what was your sex life like with your husband? No – I don’t want you to answer me or anybody on this site, but i want you to honestly ask yourself what was it like.
I “hear” stories where intimacy has become a chore in the relationship, where couple no longer sleep in the same bed or where there are no physical relations at all. Additionally, I have “heard” other rumblings where one partner (typically the female) will withhold sex as punishment or only as a reward, as if her husband is pavlov’s dog.
I am very sorry your marriage did not work out – but like many stories, I want both sides before I make a call.
Marriages do fail to cheating and over indulgence to porn but those issues were typically rooted in those individuals long before they said their vows – at least that is my theory.
I had a wife who chose to withhold sex as punishment, and allow it as a reward, and considered my sexual interests perverted, who referred to my interest in intimacy as being “horny”. She is now an ex-wife.
I would guess that porn can have deleterious effects on the viewer, but is so pervasive those effects are hard to identify. However, isn’t porn a “victimless” crime? I would think the feminist would accept porn, and no need to scorn their sisters in the sex trade, so prostitution must be acceptable as well.
I would blame feminism, and the feminist who constantly denigrate, minimize and scorn their partners. How about the article on the last dozen women winning the Best Actor category to break up with their boyfriend/husband after winning the Oscar. Were all those guys watching porn?
Apologies, all, for the “wantonly insulting” and “classless” post. But it makes me angry when people are willing to deny and negate a very painful experience from my past. And one that I know is repeated thousands and thousands of times across the country — but we are jeered into silence.
The porn that gets a lot of mileage today is not historic “erotica,” it would be considered way beyond the pale in any culture that I know of except this one. It is connected to a very nasty industry.
You are right, of course, he had lots of other problems. And working with his multiple problems wasn’t easy. (And no, I never “demanded jewelry.”)
Frankly, I don’t know of any marriage that doesn’t have problems. One poster said he “wasn’t attracted” to me. I did notice an inverse relationship to being attracted and porn exposure.
The point is, in any long term marriage, people will go through periods where they aren’t attracted to each other. Most people, for example, aren’t sexually turned on by cancer patients — and yet I was one for awhile. He had a disabling stroke in his 50s — I’m not normally attracted to crippled men. But I learned to be attracted to HIM, because he was my husband.
In the old days, this used to be called love. You love the person, not the body parts. The person who compared a new relationship to a car more or less illustrated my point. A woman is there and exists for satisfying your needs — a car that needs work. How sad.
I am healthy, and have had other relationships, and better ones. He is alone now, and will probably remain so.
I guess if you think jacking off in front of a screen (sorry, classless, I know) is a richer and more fulfilling life than actually loving someone, I have nothing to add. Except a life which is driven by sex, rather than having sex be an expression of a fulfilling life, is sad, sad, sad.
No wonder more and more women are choosing the Cynthia Nixon option.
p.s. Anticipating the next objection, Nixon said it was indeed a choice. CNN ran an article about how women are “choosing” sex with other woman as an alternative.
Uh… thanks but no thanks. There are already enough humorless, anti-sex lesbians out there giving us lesbians a bad rap, we don’t need another one.
Tango takes two Anna . . . but the saddness and distruction that happens because of the addiction or being driven to distraction is a family catastrophe of the ultimate category. It makes no difference who the social failure is primarily associated with, the male for becomin distracted or the female for driving him to it, it just absolutely does not matter. What does matter is the lost souls, the entire family and in my case the totally extended family, have their lives destoryed and their souls damaged.
Anna, you say your husband had a “disabling stroke,” his personality and sexual habits deteriorated … and you blame pornography for the change? I’m sorry, lady, that’s just bizarre.
I am sorry about your divorce.
Do you think your bout with cancer scared him? It sounds like he didn’t want to relate to you not other women — otherwise he would not have run off with another woman, he would have been content with his porn. I’ve heard that sometimes people try to distance themselves from their spouses when there is a grave illness, it makes the prospect of loosing them easier.
As for the dissolution of his next relationship, I’m sure he felt like an absolute s—, and probably didn’t have the courage to make it work.
I know my husband has porn, I’m positive he umm…takes care of business while he looks at it. I just don’t care. Our sex life is fine, our marriage is fine, he’s a great dad.
Even if porn addiction is a real thing I think for most people porn is no more harmful (and maybe as helpful) as a glass of red wine at night. Making it illegal for everyone because of the excesses of a few is wrong.
Perhaps a bit of research on your part might have turned out the link between strokes and hypersexual behavior. Here is a link that will help you out.
http://www.sexualityandaging.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Bowes_Kellogg-Spadt-Hypersexual-Behavior-Following-Stroke.pdf
You wouldn’t be the only person who failed to make the connection between serious brain injuries and changes in behavior.
Other types of brain damage, such as brain stem damage, can result in the opposite result: partial or complete loss of libido. That is not a good thing either.
Every time you were “too tired” or you sighed and crossed your arms and spread your legs grudgingly you drove your husband to porn. Every time you manipulated him or bargained sex for chores or broke his spirit by withholding, you drove him to porn. I have a VERY hard time believing any man would prefer his hand and the internet to the real thing – but when the real thing became a bitter sullen withholding manipulative shrew, it is certainly understandable he preferred porn. Porn is something men use when they are between women, or when the woman they are with does not satisfy their libido.
Hummm. I think I see your problem.
Anna, not many man need a woman around on a full time basis.
Why do you have a problem with a man masturbating? What do you expect a guy to do when you are too tired, have a headache, have your monthly visitor, just did it last (night, week, month, year), etc… ?
The girls in porn come in all varieties. They are never ‘not in the mood’ nor do they find it necessary to unleash a stream of criticism for the slightest mistake.
I think the author has a good point.
Trust me dufus……she wouldn’t want a date with you. She’s too smart and classy for you.
Trust me dufus…she wouldn’t want a date with you. She’s to smart and classy for you.
Thanks Dr. Helen! I feel better already! I saw that article linked at Hot Air, and it worried me, as I have been known to, ahh, sneak a peak every once in a while. I thought I had a pretty healthy relationship, too, so reading that I was experimenting with the most dangerous drug known to man was rather disturbing.
As an aside, I’d posit that some higher education can do a lot of harm to women’s ability to maintain healthy relationships. I knew women in college who seemed to go in pretty OK, and then radicalized in more ways than one. One result seems to be, in my own observations, the inability to stay with a partner happily. IMHO.
…although at one time women with higher education were more likely to get divorced, the stats have reversed. Women w/ higher education are *less* likely to get divorced now. Makes sense. If you want to raise healthy children you have a better chance with a man around.
On the subject of porn. Doesn’t bother me, although I don’t really want to see it. I’m far to slender to be my husband’s ideal, and don’t want to think about it…but I guess that does prove he likes me for my mind!
A study some years ago pointed out that all (in the study anyway) sexually oriented serial killers and rapists had sexually repressive childhoods devoid of porn. If this is true then the way to stop these individuals from developing is to, yes, you guessed it, provide everyone with free porn. It could be part of the new health plan. Why, oh, why, didn’t Congress think of this sooner? Hey, wait a minute is this April first?
Not so sure about that. I remember my dad reading us a story about Ted Bundy where he talked about how he got his start reading Playboy. It was an attempt by my dad to sour us on porn. Didn’t work – maybe because I realized even then that in bundy’s case (which is .0001% of the norm), porn was a symptom, not a cause, of his criminally psychopathic behavior.
The “porn” that Bundy consumed as a child consisted of the EC crime comic books of his day that routinely depicted women in states of bondage, etc. When he was later apprehended he was found in possession of cheer-leading and majorette magazines. These things were pornography to Mr. Bundy because of his sick, twisted mind, they did not cause his demented mental state. Check out a documentary by the name of “Natural Porn Killer” for more details (if you so desire.)
Does this ‘blame porn for everything wrong in the world’ attitude remind anyone else of the post-Columbine ‘video games make kids into killers’ argument against Doom II and other violent games in the mid-90′s?
Indeed, whenever something goes wrong in any instance, it’s almost human nature to want to blame something. Nine times out of ten, the blame is pointed at the wrong thing, usually something widely used. People like to think that outside stimuli is to blame for most problems, without ever blaming the individual. Everyone is different and have different mechanisms working inside our brains, different triggers, different desires, etc. Yes, perhaps an outside stimuli may have set off one of the ‘triggers’, but that trigger had to have been formed prior, or even play on triggers that are close to another. But most of the time, it’s a giant network of triggers inside one’s mind that has been developing for an individual’s entire life. Humans are very interesting in this regard and to flat out blame something like video games or porn instead of the individual is a failure of human intelligence and reasoning.
Interested if there are any other guys who think that some of the sexiest women keep their clothes on in public. I am not out to ban porn myself,I just find it unnecessary (I must have x-ray eyes or something).
Dr Helen may be right about women’s expectations. Marriage is becoming less attractive to productive men as they may lose control over assets they have worked hard for. Women have to compete harder with each other and to explain what the benefits are to men.
I think more people will live together apart if you follow my drift?
Like your stuff Dr Helen.
I’ve sat in the airport in Riyadh on many occasions waiting for a flight undressing women mentally despite that they were wearing abayas and niqabs. Some real hotties, I’m telling ya!
nothing like getting a peek at a wrist in Riyadh. Seriously, they were probably dudes in disguise.
A high acceptance of the anti-marriage mindset dooms society. The nuclear family is indispensable to its very survival. Furthermore, we must have families with at least three or more children. They must make up for those not “doing their share”. Much of Europe has no future. The drop in population has resulted in an outright disaster.
Mr. Thomson:
Western society does not want children. Instead our popular culture stigmatizes those who have children. Our government and most businesses penalize those who choose to procreate responsibly by laying a huge financial burden upon them. Popular culture sets a perpetual teenaged, childless, Peter Pan, of either sex, as the model to emulate.
In most of western society today the only people who can afford to have more than one or two children are the wealthy who can afford a comfortable lifestyle employing a nanny and private schools, or even more splendiferously, with only one spouse working, and the poor who can put all the expense of raising children on the government, at taxpayer expense.
Why would any skilled, educated, hard working middle class couple choose to give up nearly all hobbies, all chances at “great” vacations and fun, and devote thousands of hours each year and literally millions of dollars to raising children in a middle class household today. To make such a decision, that runs counter to today’s conventional wisdom, they must either be stupid, or ideological fanatics of some kind.
Where’s the pay off?
You will see middle class birthrates go up when our society changes to make childrearing less of a horrendous burden, and when it provides some advantage instead of endless headaches, worries, and sacrifice.
I’m trying to parse the amount of sarcasm in this post, so forgive me if I missed it. I’m a “skilled, educated, hard working middle class” father of two, and frankly my kids are the greatest thing in my life, much more fun that vacations, hobbies or anything else (although those have their place). Where’s the pay-off? Raising my kids IS the pay-off, whether it’s the simple innocent joy that my five year old radiates daily or the sense of accomplishment and maturity that my idiot teenage son experiences as he marches to adulthood…man, I can’t imagine how empty my life would be with out them in it. Sure, I might have more time and money but at what cost? At what cost?
Agree with Dave. My wife and I decided to live on one income after our first child was born and we lived on one income untill our third headed to college. Always considered that decision to have been one of our best with a PhD, MD and a financial analyst in the family to show for it. Helped the two of us to grow up also and that was an unexpected Bonus.
I’m sorry but your comment is an almost perfect example of the “Me generation.”
In most of western society today the only people who can afford to have more than one or two children are the wealthy who can afford a comfortable lifestyle employing a nanny and private schools, or even more splendiferously, with only one spouse working, and the poor who can put all the expense of raising children on the government, at taxpayer expense.
My wife and I had our first child when I was a third year medical student on a scholarship. She quit work to care for him and his brother and sisters as they came along. I have a file of funny stories on how we survived for the next eight years. Let’s just say we didn’t go out to eat much. Now, I am very proud of my five kids and, when I am asked why I had so many, I reply, somebody has to be a taxpayer. I made five of them.
Children are by far the most rewarding thing I have ever done in my life. Thank god I finally found a woman I trusted enough to have children with…took me till I was 40 but I found her. Now I have 3 wonderful children who are right this very second bouncing off the walls with anticipation of our Disney World trip. Nothing, no reward, award, vacation, past beautiful woman can hold a candle to the memories already formed…
Been in both worlds as I was playing until I found my wife. Playing was so self centered and truth is I don’t remember most of it…the bimbos, the booze, the trips and concerts all fade away into a blur. But I can remember every single moment of every single birth, I can remember all the victories, defeats, arguments every single moment of my life is delicious. All thanks to my family and my wife.
To the original author of the NR article…sorry but I don’t think that porn destroyed your marriage. I think expectations did.
Helen as usual you rock.
Rex–are you crazy? American society is entirely set up for the benefit of the traditional family. The government provides tax breaks for making babies, society lionizes and popularizes the “Octomoms” and Jon and Kate’s of the world. Single people are looked at with pity, a childless couple even more so….Having kids is great (I’ve got three of my own) but not for everybody–and many people should stop and think a lot longer before bringing another human being into the world. To characterize our society as somehow anti-family or anti-children is to live in a delusional fantasy world–we’re exactly the opposite.
Jacksonhunber31 – I suspect you have no kids. The minor tax breaks for having kids don’t begin to meet the costs of having kids. As noted in another comment, the government help is great if you have no money and/or don’t care how your child turns out. But most parents care a great deal and will spend all of their time and money trying to give their child a good life – and in today’s United States that means a million per kid if you give them private school, private college etc. Sure you can do it on less, plenty of people do, but giving a child an upper middle-class life style is a million dollars.
Then, after not helping you raise your children to be highly productive members of society, capable of earning good salaries, the government steps in and takes 50%+ of those earnings in taxes and gives them to people who did not raise any kids or did not invest the same time and money in their kids.
I wouldn’t call 99.9% of porn “sexy,” nor 99.9% of porn actresses for that matter. Harsh lighting, extreme closeups (*shudder*), inane dialogue, and shoddy excuses for “plot” reveal that the whole point is instant gratification. It doesn’t bother with atmosphere or ambiance or foreplay for that matter.
There’s a great quote out there, though I don’t know the source:
“It is more erotic to wonder if you’re about to be kissed than it is to be kissed.”
Masturbation is healthy for both sexes. Whatever gets you ‘there’ safely in the privacy of your own domain…
Maybe when men stop being intimidated by women’s private toy collections women will stop bitchin’ about men’s porn watching and even join in. Wait. Hasn’t that already happened for a lot of enlightened couples?
kwitcherbitchin’, people and have a happy marriage!
Bravo.
I think porn probably increases frequency of masturbation in men … and that part of the reason men watch so much of it is that many women are too busy (or cannot be bothered) to satisfy men’s sex drives.
To assert that it breaks up marriages, I suspect, is to get the causation involved exactly backwards.
Er. Uh. Eh. You do realize women have sexual needs too, right big fella? Perhaps if some men spent a little time on the woman’s love button she’d be more (ahem) interested in Mr. Happy. lulz
In my marriage, porn is a great safety valve. I have a much greater desire for sex than my wife, so when my wife is unwilling/uninterested in making love, I can use porn to “self-service” my needs. This is much better solution that me being angry at her because my needs aren’t being met. And it also avoid the other option of me trying to guilt/pressure her to make love when she isn’t “in the mood”.
This. In my ideal world, I’d be having sex with my wife once a day; that’s all I need (I know guys who ‘need’ a lot more than that). She’d be totally happy with once a week. So what happens? On average, twice a week. Now, that’s not terrible in the grand scheme of things. But if I didn’t masturbate, I’d go crazy. And you can only masturbate so many times to the images of the vanilla sex that your wife lets you have (and don’t talk to me about communication – I have brought up the idea of experimenting with positions, fantasies, etc. many, many, many times). So porn it is. It makes me no less randy for my wife, and when we do it, I do not envision some porn babe in her place. It’s simply a steam valve that is a lot safer and cleaner than the ways of the past (prostitution, adultery).
This could have been written by me. Second.
yo–
my husband is not shy about sharing his bizarre fantasies. They don’t really turn my crank, but I try to oblige him ocassionally, even if I don’t really feel 100% into it. My question is: why do a higher percentage of men than women seem to like the kinky stuff–domination, bondage, role playing, dress up? What do women have to do to really appreciate or like the less traditional stuff? I’ve tried . . . I really have. I think he’s just grateful that I’m willing to try something at least once. Maybe it’s the whole thing about men being more visual, and women needing that emotional connection. I just don’t know.
Somehow, I don’t think porn has much to do with it.
MC
Women are happy with the ONE they pick . . . Men instinctively seek many . . . so you get to be anyone you want to be and he’ll be made happy by the variation on a theme.
That is a communication problem- your wife isn’t listening to you. Not your fault, but a communication problem nonetheless.
There are two kinds of porn:
The visual, which is primarily for guys.
The literary, which is more, um, democratic, but is easier to market because it isn’t so, you know, visual.
And by “literary porn” I mean that if you write the filthiest, most hard-core story you can think of; if you can translate the visuals of, say, a XXX bondage video into words, it’ll have a place on a big-box bookstore shelf, probably as a trade paperback with a title like “Rough’n'Ready.” I work at such a store. In fact, as I type this, it occurs to me how much socially acceptable, utterly nasty literary porn is marketed in so many different categories:
Magazines: There are a few, one or two each to cater to each of the following interest groups: White straight males; black straight males; white homosexual males. “Closeted” persons of both sexes have a wide variety of other magazines to choose from. They don’t involve graphic sex. Just naughty bits in various stages of readiness.
If you’re into gay hardcore fiction and/or “urban” or black hardcore hetero- fiction, you’ll find your titles marketed in “Fiction/Literature” and “Romance.”
“Gay” and “Lesbian” hardcore literature makes up more than half of the titles in the “Gender Studies” section. Pedarasts particularly can find illuminating material in a sneakily sleazy series called “My First Time.”
If you’re into white female-driven hardcore mostly-hetero- fiction with themes ranging from “regular” sex to bondage to threesomes (or more) to whatever involving the “undead”, then the “Romance” section is your place to get your smut on.
Guys looking for a literary thrill can go to the “Penthouse letters” volumes in “Human Sexuality.”
If you get turned on by graphic descriptions of the kind of deviant and perverted sexual activity that, if you pursued it in your real life, would win you life without parole, then you can find every disturbing/sick appetite fully satisfied in the “True Crime” section. (I despise you most of all, btw.)
If you’re a teenager trying desperately to develop a life-long fetish for [1] schoolgirls [2] panties [3] homosexuality or just plain old gender confusion [4] pedophelia – all of your needs will met by acquainting yourself with the “softcore” contents of many of the “Manga” comic books in the “Graphic Novel” section.
If you require instruction in how to employ bits of all of the above into your “boring” sex life, the “Human Sexuality” has more than enough literature – fully illustrated, but without showing anything naughty (and that just barely) than a nipple or two. I don’t recommend actually buying one, since the local junior-high and high school student body – male and female – have already made every single copy unsellable in their after-school homework sessions.
And stay away from the middle-aged guy who’s just standing there, reading the Penthouse letters.
Oh – I almost forgot to mention just how much porn accounts for the glossy books in the “Photo Essays” section. Quite a bit, as it turns out.
I’ve been selling this stuff for five years now. Gay magazines, manga, and the titles in the Romance section get bought. Everything else gets read in-store. Hetero-magazines simply get used in the men’s room, or conspicuously examined over in the “Current Affairs” section by guys looking for a hook-up. The Photo Essay books get stolen.
Hardcore, on sale now at your local bookstore.
I think the reason written porn is easier to market is that it’s easier on the conscience. Not everyone who uses visual porn is aware that a large percentage of the women involved are prostitutes and drug addicts, sex slaves etc, but some are aware–and writing has no actual person that is or can be seen as a victim. It’s just somebody’s imagination. The same goes for visual porn which is CG–no real people (or children) were harmed, or so it would seem.
The real trouble here is that science no longer exists. Just think of how many things you’re expected to swallow based on nothing but assertion of a scientist. This Dr. Helen person sides with studies that show rape is diminishing and porn is the cause; but it could also be the increase in women buying pistols that explains the cause–criminals go for soft targets, and avoid uncertainty if they can. There are other studies that say rape is actually increasing, and others that say there has been no statistical change. When we have this ‘the science is settled’ argument cast up, my skeptical nerves start to jangle.
The fact is the overall effect of pornography of every kind is unknown except in anecdotal individual cases. Sociology resides in the fuzzy-studies building for a reason; it’s not a hard science. It might someday be, but thus far it’s not as accurate as the odds-makers in Vegas. What’s happened to science (and medicine, and really any ‘expert’ opinion) is that you can pick what you want to believe because you can find a scientist (or expert) who agrees with you, or who has an axe to grind, or who can be bought by any moneyed interest, be it libertarians or environmentalists or ‘Big Oil’ or ‘Big Porn.’
In that sense the reality-distortion effect of porn is irrelevant. When nobody believes in objective reality anyway, what difference does it make that some guys can’t find a girl ‘dirty enough’ to date?
Jim Wilson,
I have great news for you! Go buy Freakonomics and give it a read. There’s a pretty good breakdown of how internet rollout correlates very, very closely with drops in violence against women, particularly rape. There are areas that were bypassed for a while for tech/cost reasons, and those same areas lagged behind in the rape incident drop.
Regarding the models being drugged out, helpless waifs…. Well. I’ve known a few models, and I can tell you that nowadays, there is so much competition that for a girl to make money showing her body, it has to be almost perfect. Crackheads, heroin addicts, and other ladies in desperate conditions are rarely able to muster the self control to diet religiously while at the same time spending a couple of hours in the gym every day.
Take a really close look at some centerfolds (I have) and try to tell yourself that these girls are strung out addicts. Nope. Usually they’re students or young professionals who really like the idea of making some very good money for laying around in no clothes getting their pictures taken. Meanwhile, they have undeniable, documented irrefutable proof that they are extremely beautiful and desirable.
Maybe you just need to update your porn collection. I agree that some of the girls in ’70′s porn do match your descriptions, but absolutely not nowadays.
You are right on about science. Social science is an oxymoron, as mostly morons enter the field. Same for political science.
When the fuzzy minded can train Black Widow female spiders to not kill their mates, then they can comment on male and female sexualiity and how to modify it. What is, is what is.
1. Any field of study (“political science”, “social science” “climate science”) that includes the word “science” isn’t one.
2. EVERYBODY masturbates. The ratio of “Admits to it”/”Lies about it” varies by year and gender; when I was young, 90% of men admitted to it, while the other 10% lied about it, while for women it was more like 60% admit/40 lie.
The first thing psychologists do is establish that the victim’s mummy and pappy were so dysfunctional that they caused permanent brain damage to the child. That removes the good doctor from any accountability regardless of the lack of progress no matter what behavior modification or pill tinkering takes place thereafter.
Dr. Anonymous in Virginia betrayed her own cause as a doctor and as a woman. Blaming porn is the socially safe way to preserve the original character assessments she made about her husband, plus never have to reveal any of her own dirty marital laundry to anyone.
Normally, men do not dump their wives because of or in the pursuit of pornography. Dr. Anonymous got dumped. It appears (from this article) that she isn’t interested in confronting, nor dealing with the truth of why it happened. Maybe the guy was an ass. Maybe she was a flaming bitch. Poof! All gone.
Pity her children.
Pity her patients.
And God forbid the next poor soul she chooses for a mate.
It’s the same mindset that thinks that prohibition will save humanity from itself.
They confuse people who have a free will with animals, who have instincts, and this permeates through almost all their thought — they are often are tedious, difficult people to have to deal with every day, because the concept of personal responsibility does not exist in their mind and they think that blackmailing is sufficient motivation, and when they mess things up, it never ever is their fault either.
Besides that any father who abandons a family with 5 young kids is either mentally vacant in the first place (and so a bad choice to set up home with) or totally desperate to get away from a crazy wife.
The ‘pornstar girlfriend’ is not the reason for leaving, meeting her may have made the decision easier, but the real problem is a mad, obsessed therapist who believes that porn is addictive and that men have no control over themselves. She probably hounded the poor guy and used her professional training to ‘fix him’ for quite a while before he finally fled.
It is because Traditionalist women and traditionalist white knights view men as animal’s compared to the “feminine divine”. Go read up on traditionalist literature from the early 1900′s. It is all there.
When it comes to boy’s, young men and men, society doesn’t give a damn. They are more interested in beating us into line(treating the symptoms) then figuring out the root causes.
Look at prohibition, women complained to Mr.White Knight ministers about their coal miner, factory worker and (insert dangerous profession here) husbands spending all their free time drinking.
That is what started prohibition. Never did these supposedly “loving Christian” wives ask “why is my husband drinking so much?”. Gee wiz could of been seeing his buddy die on the job, or waking up every day knowing he might not be around tomorrow.
It is like that with education, white knights and conservative/traditionalist women’s answer to the boy crisis so far is: “train them to do cheap labor” or blame them for their own problems(another beat them harder response).
A part of me can’t wait for world war three(I know it is horrible), because when that happens traditionalist women and Mr. White Knights/Mangina’s are in for a very rude awakening when the vast majority of America’s Son’s say “No way!”.
Some thoughts:
First, we have surely had enough of laws against this because it “leads to that.” Such laws are almost always predicated on fantasy, are covertly founded on unsavory, anti-Constitutional agendas, and quite frequently cause an increase in undesirable consequences: in the behavior targeted for reduction, in the destruction it supposedly causes, and in the trustworthiness of law enforcement and the judicial apparatus. So from both Constitutional and utilitarian perspectives, a law banning or restricting porn because it “leads to” rape, or marital dissolution, or the Boston Red Sox in the World Series yet again, is right out.
Second, there is no imaginable argument by which discussions and depictions of sexual activity can be separated — politically, artistically, scientifically, or any other way — from discussions or depictions of any other event or idea. Porn has a deep history; what’s changed about it is that it’s now available through high-tech channels that the Victorians didn’t have. What has a shallower history by far is feminist harridans looking to castigate and demonize men for masculinity-linked behaviors. From Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon forward, militant gender-war feminism has been the moving force to criminalize porn.
Note also: The Victorian culture of Nineteenth-Century England, which was supposedly the pinnacle of sexual repression, featured a great deal of sex-for-hire. Porn was available then, though it was much harder to come by and didn’t arrive over Pay-Per-View or the Internet. Yet at a time when the population of London was a little over one million, London’s prostitutes entertained Londonian men at an estimated rate of 2,000,000 per week. So subtracting porn from our milieu, or making it harder to acquire, is certainly no guarantee of marital stabilization.
Maybe then easier access to prostitutes is the key to stable Victorian marriages?
Great essay Dr. Helen. Maybe marriages will come back when women act like women and men act like men.
This Ladies husband turned to porn because he was so turned off by her constant Psycho Analyzing of everything thing he did shortly followed with “Your doing it wrong!”
I had the exact same thoughts when I read that National Review article. Even though the author tried to cloak her opinions in gender-neutral language, I knew exactly what she meant — and thus noticed how she failed to include the female end of the so-called “porn problem” (the romance novel is essentially the female equivalent.)
Misandry sickens me, but what can I expect from a Republican magazine?
P.S.: The Democrats are no better in this respect, and my browser doesn’t recognize the word “misandry.” It does recognize “misogyny.”
Perhaps the problem with modern day relationships (whether single or married) is there is so little left in our populist culture which is non-sexual that Viagra, pot, alcohol and heavy-duty kiddie porn are the only sexual desires remaining for those who lack passion for their partner or themselves.
Speak honestly Dr Helen; I’m a 48 year ‘sexually liberated female’* and I have no doubt that today’s teenagers know more about and have more ‘sex’ than you or I could ever dream of imagining. In today’s highly-sexual populist culture the adults are the innocent and the children are the experts.
This is by design-market people to be stuck on an eternal hard-on and they won’t have the wherewithal to take care of themselves. Or rather, the Infant Nation hooked on pot, porn and Viagra to keep adults mind-numbingly dumb.
*’sexually liberated female’- means being a stupid female who was part of the Sisterhood movement which insisted that all reproductive decisions fall entirely on the female’s shoulders; or rather, I get to have that orgasm but the consequences are entirly my responsibility even though I am only half the equation.
We are all equalized chauvinist pigs and women did this to ourselves, not men.
Gloria Steinem may have burned our bras but she left a legacy of sagging sized-DDD siliconed tits hanging off anorexic skeletal bodies with botox-stiffened faces screaming like wicked witches about the plight of Eve Ensler’s skanky disease-filled va-jay-jay.
beautifully put! btw, anna is correct as well!
I have never read a post that screams ‘sexually frustrated’ more loudly than this post. It’s filled with a long series of unsubstantiated assertions about ‘everyone else getting laid’, except you. I agree that feminism hasn’t helped women, but the rest of your post is hogwash. Keep your insecurities about not getting any to yourself in the future or try to participate in the conversation in a constructive way rather than projecting.
She lost her husband to porn? Yep, he ran off with the new Penthouse.
That right there is funny, I don’t care who you are.
I considered declaring it the winner of the thread but didn’t want to foreclose future comments.
Of course it’s about control. But that itself is not a bad thing. We always want to control men’s sexuality. When it’s “too far out there” we say, “uh, no more,” and we send people to jail if they do it anyway. And that’s a great thing to do for a lot of things that are obviously too far out there. It seems like a great thing to ask whether or not porn is too far out there, but it seems kinda silly to suggest that we might not want to control men’s sexuality.
I think what you might really mean is that society has an interest in controlling behavior which rises to the level of unwanted violence. Sexuality and unwanted violence are two different things.
(to understand the difference between acceptable and unwanted violence, go to a rugby game)
I think that women don’t like “visual porn” and male masturbation because they don’t like the competition for guy’s attention and money. It’s as simple as that.
Yeah, but ever wonder why women don’t like competing over that part of their lives?
As much as men “have needs” and are “visual creatures”, women “have needs” as well. . . most women have the need to be loved and cherished. And to know that they are worth a man dying to himself for. . .
Why do women choose movies and books that involve noble heros and men that ultimately willing to give themselves up for ONE woman? Same reason men look at porn and masturbate. Women have needs too. And they are just as important.
“As much as men “have needs” and are “visual creatures”, women “have needs” as well. . . most women have the need to be loved and cherished. And to know that they are worth a man DYING TO HIMSELF FOR. . .”
Indeed! Women’s fantasies are by far the most obscene.
Of course, women want a man who is willing to give himself to one women! It makes it easier to exploit him. If you don’t believe me, look at the American laws regarding paternity fraud, starting here:
http://www.sptimes.com/News/061800/Perspective/Can_it_truly_be_Fathe.shtml
After all, marriage is, historically and cross-culturally, a breeding contract.
Bimbette, honey, if you don’t think men need to be loved and cherished as well, you might want to consider what effect that has on other relationships in your life.
I think it’s just easier to blame porn than to admit she chose to marry a douchebag.
This whole article on National Review is not about porn. It is about finding someone or something to blame for an individual’s personal problem. What we heard was “it is not my fault or my husband’s fault. It is the availability of porn that is at fault.” Hence, I am a victim and my responsibility ends at my attempt to eliminate the external cause.
I had the same response to the article. I can certainly understand how *some* men might be harmed by over-consumption of porn. But in reading Anonymous’s article, I simply could not believe the set of events she laid out. I felt like a very large chunk of the narrative had been left out. The fact is, most men do look at porn to one degree or another, and nearly all of those men are fine. And the same goes for women who look at porn or read romance novels.
I’m far more likely to believe that over-consumption of porn as itself an indication that there is something wrong in the marriage itself. Many couples watch porn in moderate amounts in the same way they read books on better lovemaking or relationship building. It helps them to connect with their partner. If sexual needs aren’t being met, then turning to porn as a means of fulfilling those needs isn’t irrational. I’m not saying it’s the woman’s fault, either: the man in the couple might very well be incapable of expressing his needs adequately.
In any case, it seemed very clear to me that Anonymous was speaking from a position of severe emotional pain and not a little bit of anger at her situation. Some of that is justified. But in the end, the people responsible for the failure of the marriage are the two people *in the marriage*. People make choices, and need to face those consequences. Anonymous clearly doesn’t want to blame her husband for the marriage’s failure, but if her narrative is close to the truth, then that is the conclusion. The fault is *his*, not the fault of porn. We don’t blame cocaine for drug addition. We blame the person making those choices. That there might be some ameliorating circumstances doesn’t change the core truth of it.
You’re one to talk about controlling others.
Im libertarian when it comes to sex. So long as its “safe” sex. I have found that those who complain the most and want to control others, usually end up being the most wierd. Now where did I put my box of feathers?
I’ll also add to my prior comment; as a woman who was experienced in the Art of Liberal Sex (ie lots of sex partners in multiple ways, all free of charge) my specific thoughts on porn relates to differences between those who do and those who don’t.
In my results I have found that men who do not habitually engage in porn (film, mag, internet) are far more passionate towards the sex act and in-tuned to both our specific needs as compared to those habitual viewers who are disconnected from the activity as they often are having sex with the porn image stuck in their brain-it is impossible to sexually satisfy an image.
Regrettably, so few men avoid porn so few women will ever know the difference.
Susan:
I’m just curious how you know which sex partners use porn and which don’t? Do you survey them? Have you run a statistically significant sample (at least 30 different partners, some who use porn, some who don’t?).
Methinks you doth protest too much.
“a psychologist who lives with her children in Virginia.” Of course.
And she’ll raise a new crop of dysfunctional males and dissatified females.
Pity her patients, and her patients’ children, and their children, and . . .
Anyway, the New Deal, the Great Society destroyed the family, and Trillions in handouts and grants from the current gang of social interventionsists keep up the destructive wave.
Ain’t gonna change. Nothing to do about it. Go Galt.
Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO is a complete f*&%ing idiot. An overcontrolling nanny-stater too dumb to realize that’s what she is. That site would improve instantly if she’d just stop posting.
The whole thing is premised on “blame men”, and also blame any excuse that happens to be handy for this woman’s (the author’s) failure in her marriage. The man ran off? OBVIOUSLY it had NOTHING to do with HER, why she’s just a perfect little angel! It’s those evil outside influences. Spread the blame! Don’t take responsibility! And above all don’t let men make their own choices.
You’re not being fair to Ms. Lopez. She followed up the original post that linked to Anonymous’ essay with a variety of responses and her comments indicate that she understands that both partners are involved in the dynamic. K-Lo is not hostile to men.
Fueled by a combination of access, anonymity and affordability, online porn has catapulted overall pornography consumption—bringing in new viewers, …. Cyberporn is even giving rise to a new form of sexual compulsiveness. …. 15% of online-porn habitues develop sexual behavior that disrupts their lives. “The Internet is the crack cocaine of sexual addiction,”…two-thirds of…. 350 divorce lawyers …the Internet played a significant role in divorces in the past year, with excessive interest in online porn contributing to more than half of such cases.
Cyberporn is also a major problem for employees with internet acces at work.
I don’t think online pornography is the root of the problem when it comes to compulsive behavior. Pornography does not drive the compulsion, any more than cocaine creates an addiction. Predisposition to compulsion is a symptom of something beyond the object of intent. I would think it would be safe to say; if not porn then ______. (fill in the blank.)
Looking at the situation from the point of view that pornography is the cause of compulsive behavior is an excellent way to see how personal behavior gets legislated, such as the prohibition and criminalizaton of drugs for personal/private use.
Source?
I think you should look closer at your statistics regarding the divorce lawyers. First off, looking at internet porn is frequently cited as a reason for infidelity, per attributing culpability in the divorce settlement (it’s also relatively easy to legally establish), so that part of that figure can be attributed in part to the gold digging factor. Secondly, among the leading reasons the Internet is being cited in divorces is linked to the use of Facebook and other social networking sites, which are allowing spouses to pin down (with real or imagined relatinoships) their spouses for being too intimate on-line with acquaintances.
So, would you suggest we ban or limit FB for married couples?
While porn consumption might be cited in many divorce cases, let’s not for one minute assume that any trial lawyer is primarily interested in uncovering the truth. What trial lawyers are interested in is winning their cases, and that had better be true, especially if you are their client. Citing porn consumption is just one many routes trial lawyers travel to paint their opposition in the least favorable way possible.
Why is accepting pornography (a legitimate tool of self-gratification) always looked upon as “enlightened”? Marriage (for those who are married and know this) is infinitly complex. Pornography is just one of many facets that face an individual that is part of a couple; like doing the dishes, listening, spending time together or apart – whatever it takes to make the two-person lifetime endeavor work.
I regard porn as good mental hygiene. We are not all paired with partners share our sex drives. Plus, porn in and of itself is only visual, which is mildly arousing but it is what you do with the image, by use of fantasy, that is creative activity, even artistic, if you allow me the license. In my experience, people who are exposed to porn and accept it without harsh judgment, both men and women, are much less inhibited and open to exploration well beyond the missionary position.
The NRO article is part and parcel of the personal Jihad of Kathryn Jean Lopez (aka JLo) at National Review. She is a huge Catholic scold/prude and she’s been on this rant for years.
Please, no “Catholic prude” name-calling. As a devout Catholic and a non-prude, I can assure you that Miss Lopez is a good distance from our norm. Most of us are more sexually active than non-Catholics — or did you think we reproduce by fission?
Well, Democrats reproduce by frisson apparently.
That would be KLO, not JLO. While both Catholic, I’m sure JLO’s sexual attitudes are 180 degrees away from KLO’s even though they are just one letter apart.
I read that article by Anonymous as well. I have a bit of unsolicited advice:
Lady, your marriage didn’t fall apart because of porn. Your husband turned to porn because your marriage was falling apart.
Woman say this all the time: “Men are simple creatures. Keep them fed, keep them f**ked, let them watch a football game every now and then and they’re yours for life.” I’ll admit, it’s pretty much true. But if we’re so simple and it’s so easy to keep us happy, why the hell don’t you do it?
Some good thoughts here (as always)…
I would submit that pornography (and erotica, for that matter) are subjects where men and women often simply don’t understand one another. It’s possible for some to achieve an intellectual sort of understanding, without getting it on an emotional level. But that’s not new, or special; plenty of us have hobbies we’re fanatical about, which our spouses have learned to sigh and accept.
So I’d suggest that we acknowledge this fact — that this is a subject where men and women generally don’t understand each other — and move on. I don’t need to understand everything my wife does.
I’d also suggest that referring to porn as an addiction is misleading, unless you can prove that it’s harmful — which, so far as I know, has not been done. Simply saying that men want it and are reluctant to give it up isn’t enough. (I confess: I’m addicted to oxygen.)
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
Pornography is isolating and commodifies women.
This is the fundamental problem. Pr0n teaches solipsism with respect to sexual arousal: the other person in the sex act becomes immaterial, merely a vehicle for getting oneself off. That’s why the girls in pr0n mostly look interchangeable: same silicone bodies, same robotlike expressions, same trashy getup. In effect, the viewer is conditioned not to look at these girls as real individuals but as anonymous members of the mythical species “lusty women”.
Every civilization that has ever thrived has found the necessity to control sexuality, period (male and female alike). Sexuality, like fire, is good in its proper context but must be kept contained to avoid causing massive societal damage. Indulgin in pr0n is like shooting off bottle rockets in the middle of a field of hay; it may be fun for a while but if you get away with nothing bad happening it’s merely due to luck.
“Porn destroys marriages” isn’t any more extreme of a position than “tobacco kills.” It’s a statement of fact. An extreme position would be to claim that every single user of porn will become an addict and have his marriage fall apart. The statement, “porn destroys marriages,” only implies that at least two marriages were destroyed by the use of porn.
I’m an educated, social, non-isolated, community involved female who watches porn when regularly seperated from my husband. I find it quite satisfying and manage to have as much of an emotional sexual relationship with my husband as I did when we were first married. He ironically does not watch it, but he certainly enjoys the benefits of having a wife that is quite comfortable with her sexuality. These archaic ideas about porn, in my generation and non-christian-fundamentalist social groups, are insulting to women like me and an attempt to illicit moral shame. Get over it and I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that my husband does not “feel” objectified…
I don’t think either extreme opinion (“porn destroys many marriages” / “porn is harmless”) is tenable.
First note that while it’s essentially impossible to find men in their 20s who have never seen porn, that does not mean they have all had significant or comparable exposure. Some have seen porn for less than an hour in their lives and decided it wasn’t for them, and some have seen porn for 3 hours a day for years.
Second, I think many people get some notion of what is normal sexuality from watching porn. For example, I have a friend who was invited back to a girl’s place after a few group dates, and decided that foreplay should be followed with some spanking. The girl was taken aback; spanking would have been OK with her at some point, but first sex should be more vanilla. I don’t know where he could have gotten the notion that spanking was then acceptable, except he did watch a lot of porn. Even without searching for spanking titles, it seems that spanking was on many of them in the 1990s. (I confess that I watched porn then too, but its notion of what is normal did not rub off on me.)
Third, I have heard from educator friends that high school girls now get a lot of pressure from their boyfriends to engage in anal sex. This was pretty much unheard of 20 or 30 years ago in high school or college, even though a lot of people were having sex. Perhaps that was because back then “anal” was a niche product on a video or magazine, which you would likely not see unless it had “Anal” or “Back Door” or some such in the title. Whereas now many (most?) hardcore scenes include anal sex as the final or penultimate act (followed by ejaculating on the girl’s face or into her open mouth; ass-to-mouth, which used to be quite rare, is now commonplace).
Finally, I think that dissatisfaction with normal women’s bodies probably is in part due to porn, especially as breast implants and other surgeries have become common, but also to images from fashion and television. This is pretty much the inevitable result or modern technologies, as people like to look at beauty, and we have far more efficient means of disseminating images than we did 100, let alone 300, years ago.
I gotta agree with Semper Why. Men are ruled by their stomachs and their sex. You satisfy both urges and that’s all it takes. Its as simple as that. Women are totally different and I can only figure out my wife about 15% of the time. The other 85% is a total mystery. I would like to get that figure up to 35% but its not something that’s ever gonna happen soon.
Remember: we men can never achieve perfection as husbands. We can only aspire to “adequate”.
Not so! Just ask the men who associate with widows. Those dead men were absolute wizards about everything she could ever have wanted. Adequate doesn’t begin to describe them.
“And I wonder — does porn distort men’s attitudes as much as romance novels and Lifetime TV distort women’s? Maybe we should discuss the many social institutions that are giving women unrealistic expectations of men and a sense that they have the right to control men, and men’s sexuality, in their own interest.”
Right on, Helen. You nailed it.
I’ve had this pet theory about porn for awhile. Its not exactly a secret that men have a very deep instinctual desire to ‘spread our seed’ that women, who can only have one child at a time, just don’t have. Women don’t like to hear this, but its true. Now, you get porn involved, and I think its a way to trick this deep seated, but simplistic part of the brain into thinking that you’re cheating when you’re really not. So in a way I think its a safe outlet for this potentially hazardous instinct.
Me too! I’ve been trying to list all the things that women don’t want to hear, but I need to eat and sleep…
“So in a way I think its a safe outlet for this potentially hazardous instinct.”
Talk about understatement. In light of AIDS one wonders why we are even debating this.
I would suggest that the female views that when “her man” views the exposed body parts of any female that the perspective of competition now enters the picture (pun intended). . . results female can not compete with a commercial product so cheaply available on the market. Fear that she will lose the “sperm donar” who is supposed to allow her to produce the most viable of offspring. Thus the tissue in the trash becomes the death warrant of her commitment to him.
I’ve got news for Anonymous.
A guy doesn’t leave his wife because his mistress has an awesome computer with more porno on it…
I’m not on any kind of crusade but to nullify the potential for destruction from porn so cavalierly seems equally shortsighted as the original article. Pornography, at least for some percentage of people, is habitual and the study you reference seems dramatically far afield from my experience and the experiences of many. We have all heard or read stories similar to the authors and to believe this is the result of her “not satisfying her man” is juvenile. I don’t believe every man will react to porn as the man in the article but I do believe that a percentage of men will and I strongly believe that exposure before or during puberty is just dangerous. My first exposure was around ten or eleven finding an old pulpy Penthouse in the woods. The smell of wet paper can give me an erection to this day. It was like a hit of the strongest drug imaginable. I spent years chasing that initial “shock” feeling being pulled ever deeper and into ever more aberrant elements of porn. To say women aren’t objectified in this mindset makes me question what the bias is toward porn that would make someone deny this.
Again, I don’t believe every man will react in this way but to think that at least some or many men don’t react in dramatically negative ways to this stuff and that it is just an outlet is just factually wrong.
Right, look at traditionalist’s/conservatives record so far. They are no better then the marxist’s. Marxist’s want to control the economy/property and Conservatives/traditionalist’s want to control males for the benefit of traditionalist/conservative females.
They will use any issue as an excuse to up the pressure. Look at child support, most guy’s paid their fair share(in fact child support law’s haven’t really increased non-payment rates at all) and conservatives/traditionalist’s used that to create law’s that made men chattels of women. Look up the definition of “chattel”, then look at the child support system.
And then the DV issue, look at how traditionalist’s/conservatives worked it so now the Mistress of the house(traditionalist/conservative women) have the ability to punish their slave(husband) if he refuses to do as they command.
And yet Traditionalist’s/conservatives also worked it so women can murder, rape, kidnap, assault or mutilate men with little to no penalty.
Women have the legal right to rape men in America!
No, they will use this pornography debate in such a way as to ban men from using the internet all together to suppress the MRM(apply hacking/computer related crimes with pornography or something).
I’m a single woman, so I can’t speak to the issue of porn when it comes to men. But I couldn’t agree more with the unrealistic expectations women have about men, due to being influenced by romance novels/movies, and I’d add TV and music as well.
From the youngest age women have been taught that there’s one special person out there for them – one man that’s going to sweep them off their feet and make them happy forever. Listen to any song on the radio and it’s about love/romance. There’s rarely a movie or a show in existence that doesn’t have a love story of one sort or another, even if it’s not the main plot.
Women AND men have been brainwashed by this society to think that unless they have a relationship, they are nothing.
Before you buy what you’ve bought culturally, I dare you to find a woman whose husband is addicted porn or consumes it regularly enough that it affects her and the marriage relationship.
I think you’ll be in shock.
Your comment about “women having to be in a relationship or their worthless” is a totally different topic. Every human being is worth something, and I think you would agree with that. Tell me how pornography makes a woman feel like she is worth something? Or is she just worth her physical appearance and sexual performance?
Paul A’ Barge hits it on the head. KLO has been on the anti porn soapbox for years. It’s her brand of prudish conservatism. I’ll stick with the Ace of Spades HQ version thank you very much.
I suspect that “Anonymous” was slim and attractive until she got married, and then suffered from a fatocalpyse. Her husband lost interested and turned to porn. Rather than striving to improve her own appearance, she tried to guilt him into being attracted to a fattie and he didn’t respond well. Then she blamed him and porn rather than herself and the twinkies.
A very logical hypothesis, Lamont. It’s apparent that you deductive abilities are not wanting.
A Hat tip from a fellow crime-fighter.
Holmes
Banjo said:
“Pornography is isolating and commodifies women.”
I disagree; human trafficking commodifies human beings. Pornography perhaps commodifies images of men and women. There is a difference.
If the woman felt that her husbands urge to look at or watch pornography was a contributing factor to the dissolution of their marriage, I see no reason to discount her.
Certain pornography is legal, yet that does not mean that all should be forced to accept it as “normal” for them or acceptable for their partner to engage in. There are those who truly feel it is immoral and want no part of it in their life or in their home. It’s a choice, and that means someone who does not want to engage in watching pornography or be partnered with a person who watches pornography, certainly has the right to object and than could truthfully cite it as a reason the breaking up of that relationship.
I also think that AKD is spot on in his/her analysis.
The study cited that found that “all men watch porn” was tiny — 20 subjects at the time of the report in December — and relied on self-reporting. What I found significant was that the subjects started watching porn as little boys, which is likely to skew their view of what a healthy relationship might look like.
… just like reading romance novels is likely to skew women’s perception of what a real relationship with should be like. Or reading feminist nonsense, for that matter.
“does porn distort men’s attitudes as much as romance novels and Lifetime TV distort women’s?” As I guy, i haven’t read my romance novels lately…but my guess is that at one point these novels highlighted strength and courage as part of their leads character. So yes, they were illusions, but they still had some + value to their characters (much like superheroes.) Porn does not. It is weird how most of the guys I work with can’t see a lady without the conversation going down the tubes right away. That porn has made a difference in the way they view women is very obvious.
“In fact, all of their sexual practices were quite conventional” conventional by whose standards? Tiger’s? Jesse’s? kind of a meaningless statement if you ask me…
Dan C: By their own standards, which were formed, or malformed, as little boys (average age 10) when they started using porn. It’s hard for me to imagine that their views of healthy sexuality weren’t shaped by the pornography they consumed. More on that study here: http://www.cnbc.com/id/34242866
“It is weird how most of the guys I work with can’t see a lady without the conversation going down the tubes right away. That porn has made a difference in the way they view women is very obvious.”
How is this any different than say in the ’20s, the 30s, the 40s? Ever seen Mad Men? Men have been catcalling and objectifying women since the dawn of time. The only difference now is that the men don’t actually say the vulgar things to the women.
I’m a man, and I’ve also been a nurse for a very long time. Nursing is dominated by females (no surprise) and my consistent experience has been that females initiate and extend the conversations you are talking about far more than the men do. I’ve also worked in exclusively and mostly male environments (the military)which reinforced these observations.
I can personally attest to the power of porn and it’s devastating effects. It starts with seeming innocuity and results in a compulsion focused on vapors which don’t really exist. It messes up real sexuality with real women. I am fully in favor of the First Amendment but I also support the idea of making porn less available to our young men.
I can personally attest to the power of real p*ssy and it’s devastating effects. It starts with seeming innocuity and results in a compulsion focused on vapors which don’t really exist. It messes up real life as there are few real women out there. I am fully in favor of the First Amendment under any and all conditions. If you aren’t free, You’re a slave. I doesn’t matter if you’re a slave to congress, the president or a woman.
Well, then you’re not really fully in favor of the First Amendment, only uses thereof which you approve. I’d also not that they’re not “our” young men, they each belong to themselves and get to make their own choices. I don’t recognize your right individually or acting through the government as your agent to restrict their access to information or entertainment.
Women have their own version of porn. The “princess” movies put out by Walt Disney Studios.
I can’t tell you how many men I know whose girlfriends (before they were wives) were not only sexually available, say X times/month, but who were also actually interested in sex. And, then literally within weeks of getting married the interest fell off, followed by the frequency. An old girlfriend of mine confided in me one day (well after we stopped dating and had become friends) that she couldn’t wait to get married (to no one in particular) so she could a) stop having sex so often and b) stop being as “adventurous” as she was with sex. Lovely, no?
I am not saying I don’t some men who are jerks – not by any stretch. But, we’ve created a world where women’s feelings, no matter how irrational, counterproductive, manipulative, or downright misandrous are to be indulged at seemingly every cost. I don’t like looking at porn because it messes with my motivation to do productive things. At the same time, I absolutely refuse to cheat on my wife. So after 6 months of no sex and I can’t tell you how many years since my wife was last actually interested in sex, it is an occasional relief.
Seriously, men. Can any of you recall the last time your wife initiated sex with you? When was the last time your wife gave ANY thought to planning time to be alone with you. Or when your wife flirted with you? Or made you feel like she wanted to be with you?
L, of course I can, nearly every day of my life. Not actual sex, but some sort of sexual connection — even if only flirting, a long kiss, sending a dirty SMS, or copping a feel, every day. My wife has a slightly higher sex drive than I do, so she will initiate. (No, she’s not a “nympho”, I have 40 years of feminist brainwashing that male sex drive is evil and must be suppressed, and she does not. She’s normal, not me.)
How is this possible? After we first met, it took a few years of acceptance, love, encouragement, and fidelity to convince her not to be ashamed of her own desire.
I would be willing to make a very large wager that pornography has saved more marriages than it has destroyed. It gives men variety and an outlet for their sex drive when their partner’s desire or “give a s@!t” level doesn’t match their own. For some men this will be enough and they don’t need to move on to finding another woman to have a relationship with. No man would ever tell a woman that the only reason they can bear their monogamous sex life together is because they can fantasize about sex with other partners but it is true more often than not. I’ve never cheated on my wife but if I were forbidden access to pornography I would start looking to do so immediately. Most men with any self-respect and a working libido would do the same thing.
Plus it isn’t right for women to enforce their idea of sexuality on men. We all make compromises but it is necessary they be reasonable. Asking men to forgo even the most harmless outlets for their instincts is only asking for trouble. I put women who want to control what their men watch in the same category as men who want to control what their wives wear. Neither are fit for cohabitation. We can have preferences for when we are together but it is asking for trouble to try to dictate these things even when we are apart.
This discussion reminds me a bit of the cold war. Some women seem to be saying “you will only have one type of sex and it will be rationed according to the five year plan as set forth by me. You shall not look at foreign propaganda on the subject because the motherland shall provide for all of your true needs. Now comrade, please make an appointment for next year’s blow job.”
I would be willing to make a very large wager that pornography has saved more marriages than it has destroyed.
And the irony is that nearly all of the women will be totally freakin’ unaware of this, because the men do it in secret and don’t — can’t — tell them.
When was the last time “Anonymous”made enthusiastic love with her husband, and how often? I suspect she let him walk around hungry for years and was shocked, shocked that eventually he started going out for his meals. The use of sex by women to control men is as old as the oldest profession, but it doesn’t work forever and breeds bitter resentment. Men and women each have their needs that must be tended by their spouse or the marriage will fall apart, social customs be damned. A shared life is not only about what the wife wants and expects. It’s also worth noting that most divorces are initiated by the woman, not by presumably porn besotted men.
I think the problem with porn is that it’s become pervasive and mainstreamed. This offends a lot of people, even people who don’t mind a little porn now and then. The more in your face it is, the easier it becomes for the social cons to turn it into a punching bag. Then the people who really, really like porn stand up and the people who make their living off porn stand up, and usually (not always, but usually) they’re not the most mainstream type of person. Then you get the “porn crisis” freakout and the wave rolls back a bit and it becomes harder for me to find my giant girl covered in vegetable porn. I have to buy it from the Russians, the Russians use my porn money to buy off polititians, and pretty soon Europe has no natural gas.
So keep your porn private and your wife happy. The future of Europe depends on it.
“I think the problem with porn is that it’s become pervasive and mainstreamed. This offends a lot of people, even people who don’t mind a little porn now and then.” – Lost My Cookies.
Damn right, and I like a little porn quite often. But there’s a time and a place for everything – context, people, context!
I’ll agree to demonizing porn as creating unrealistic images of women the day fashion magazines stop airbrushing surgically enhanced anorexics. When women stop objectifying women, maybe then we can talk about mens part of it.
I’m also sick of men getting blamed for every nutty issue women have with their bodies, particularly their weight (size zero etc), as the women are generally doing it to each other! And the images they consume are from fashion industry & mags (with trickle down to Hollywood) which re largely controlled by *women* or gay men.
Or the flipside of fashion, the women’ ‘fitness’ genre which pushes ‘abs’ to the detriment of all esle, the exercises for which destroy the hourglass figure (as seen from front or rear). Then combine the exercize which results in boyish butts and loss of boob due to body fat reduction, leading to water balloon implants over ribs you can practically count.
Ugh. But tha crap is somehow our fault.
Yet we get the blame. Infuriating.
Me? I thought the most beautiful Playmates are the naturally pretty ones from the late 60s thru mid 70s
You might want to reflect on this article, Secularism and Human Sexuality, the last paragraph of which is particularly pertinent to this thread:
In a society in which females are taught to view males as sperm guns at best and as irrelevant at worst, women and men are released from the deep structures of being mothers and fathers, wives and husbands, daughters and sons, and sisters and brothers. With the advent of secularism, the feminists’ struggle for equality changed to one of independence. Are we surprised, therefore, that men have responded by viewing women as sex objects, the only female-male relationship left to them.
If the woman felt that her husbands urge to look at or watch pornography was a contributing factor to the dissolution of their marriage, I see no reason to discount her.
Really? None? You don’t think there might be any reason to suspect denial, no possibility that she might be looking for an outside reason for the divorce to divert (even subconsciously) any guilt she might feel?
Huh? A husband/wife looking at pornography is an outside reason? If pornography is not intimate, you must only be speaking of perhaps the persons behind the camera or the person being filmed. To me they may be the only ones who are not being “intimate” with the pornography, although there may be some voyeurism involved both by the watcher and the watched.
I contend that there are those in the world who find pornography objectionable and do not want to be partnered with someone who depends on it for sexual gratification. I think that would be a legitimate reason to dissolve a marriage.
Many of the women on this thread, starting with Dr. Helen herself, are intelligent, rational, understanding, and excellent. I won’t speculate about whether they make better lovers than the other women with whom about to address in a second.
Except to say, “Yes.”
“I’m absolutely sure you are.”
Now let me move on to addressing the other women here, many of whom seem quite bitter and unhappy and rather than expect the world to change to make you happy, you might consider changing some of your own internal attitudes and tastes in order to bring more of the best parts of the world to yourself, and keep them.
My comment:
You notice that many of the comments from women on this thread are about how awful the men are for having outside sexual desires and how the men should be totally satisfied with their one woman, and it’s wrong for men to look at porn, desire other women, pursue them, etc?
But you notice how LITTLE of those same women make any mention of efforts on THEIR part to SEXUALLY satisfy their lover’s mind and his CO*CK?
Agree or disagree?
I read that yesterday and also thought the First Ammendment “ever expanding” comment was odd and wondered why that article ever appeared at NRO.
“Lady, your marriage didn’t fall apart because of porn. Your husband turned to porn because your marriage was falling apart.” – in many cases, yes.
Or perhaps the husband is cognizant enough to realize his desires eclipse his wife’s', and starts (or more likely, resumes) the habit to avoid another source of arguments and marital problems. He might just be looking out for his marriage in his own way.
While I am fearful of recent attacks on the 1st Amendment, especially “hate speech” and McCain-Feingold, I do think that, looking narrowly at the issue of pornography, the 1st Amendment has indeed been expanding. Look up “pubic wars” on Wikipedia, for example. In 1968 Playboy had never shown pubic hair; then Penthouse came out, competing on just that point. Within a decade Penthouse was showing gaping genitalia. (At that time, adolescent boys could often find a Playboy or Penthouse, but had little access to hardcore porn.) Before “Deep Throat” (1972) porn movies were basically underground operations: low budget, hidden, rarely encountered or tolerated outside of a few red-light districts. And 1970s classics such as “Deep Throat” or “Debbie Does Dallas” while technically hardcore, were pretty tame compared to what we have now. It wasn’t moral scruples which kept porn relatively tame, and which made its increasingly hardcore nature such a slow progression, but rather fear of obscenity prosecutions. If someone had done anal closeups and “ass-to-mouth” in 1972, I dare say they would have gone to jail, even though such would have been displayed in theaters which would exclude minors. Now anything goes, with any motivated 10-year-old able to figure out how to find it. I don’t think seeing Playboy at 10, and Penthouse at 12, screwed me up, but I suspect watching a lot of hardcore and extreme anal would have done so.
Boy oh boy, where to go with this…
“I suspect that “Anonymous” was slim and attractive until she got married”
And I am sure her husband had the body of an Olympic sprinter through their marriage. This seems to be right up porns alley of the “you don’t turn me on anymore” excuse. Climbing up the porn hierarchy ladder from nude photos of women to bukkake and double-anal and all sorts of humiliation porn is a desensitizing journey. That’s the reason you climb it – the lower rungs don’t do it for you anymore. Porn is for men who can’t get turned on by the presence of a nude woman anymore (or cannot secure the presence of a nude woman).
For God’s sake, Christie Brinkley’s husband was addicted to this – if you need whacking material while married to Christie Effin Brinkley, then you got problems, the kind associated with rampant porn consumption.
As to Helen’s attempt to create some sort of equivalency between bukkake and a romance novel – REALLY? You’ve crossed the line between passionate advocate of rational gender parity into the land of a frenzied zealotry of contextless equality. There is nothing equivalent between creating an idiom of rugged men who bring women flowers and rescue them from their distresses and riding them off into the sunset and an idiom of women who will engage in ass-to-ass dildo foreplay with their asian twin before being ridden like Seabuscuit and slapped around while moaning like a banshee waiting for you to face shot her so she can fake female ejaculation and snowball for you. (Yes, I’ve seen it all, I work on the Internetz). Not equivalent, and not realistic in the least. If you are expecting this action on your wedding night, prepare for a confused wife and tremendous disappointment.
Of course you leave her – she doesn’t turn you on sexually anymore. And it’s her fault isn’t it…
It’s the same with gambling, too. I quit online poker even though I was winning because I realized that playing 12 hours a day, increasing the stakes every time I won was seriously messing me up. $.25 buy ins get boring once you win a tournament (or come in second).
By the way, I rescued this comment from the spam queue. it would appear Akismet gets twitchy about on line card games.
MEC, have you actually read any romance novels? I have, and a lot of the sex in them is stuff that would be considered rape if it happened in the real world — there’s a reason why they call them “bodice rippers”. But since the man in question is always a 28-year-old multigazillionaire with totally ripped abs, who is just dying to marry her and set her up so she’ll never have to lift a finger ever again, that makes it OK. Who’s being objectified here? BTW, I’m told the latest trend in these is that the heroine who is so passionately desired by the multigazillionaire is already pregnant with another man’s child.
Speaking of myths about porn, am I the only one disheartened that this whole conversation can happen and nobody debunks the idea that only Men enjoy it? Many women also enjoy pornography; either by themselves, or watching it with their partner. We’ve made the social price for Women enjoying porn so high that we’ve put it in the closet because the Male is (by long standing mythology) the sex craved horndog and the Female is the forever recipient of his advances. This view of course hurts both men and women.
Like annonymale, my experience is that exposure to porn at a young age can skew ones developing sense of sexuality and make establishing healthy relationship — with sex as a component — that much harder. When I was around 14 I found a bunch of VHS porn (pre-WWW) while house-sitting, and I was instantly hooked. Biggest problem: seeing all those gargantuan members convinced me that my own completely normal penis was embarrassingly small, so I got totally depressed and *avoided* situations where pretty girls would discover this (non) shortcoming. Talk about wasted opportunity! And when I did finally get a girlfriend, it was a letdown compared to the phony acrobatics and 4-on-1 lesbian cheerleader etc etc scenes that played constantly in my head. I’d often choose solo porn over a night with her.
I still watch porn from time to time, but the idea that my little kids are going to bumble into it online at tender ages makes my heart hurt. And the stuff today is light-years more intense than what I watched as a kid.
Focus group of one, FWIW.
I think for some guys with a fairly low sex drive porn is not a big deal – that probably accounts for acceptance of it among the intellectual classes.
But for normal guys with a normal sex drive porn can easily be highly addictive, and is a lot like a drug – a mood altering, reality altering drug.
But….but….that doesn’t fit into the Libertine…er…I mean Libertarian world view. And what about the studies, yeah if a study says it is harmless then, golly it must be so.
Just like scientific studies found that cigarettes had no link to lung cancer.
“Porn only leads to a sandwich and a nap.” Bobby Slayton, comedian.
I’ll always remember reading a statistic that claimed that local rape rates drop when cable internet access becomes more easily available. In other words, more porn, less rape. Why aren’t more women in favor of it?
Keating Wilcox is correct.
The days when porn availability was limited to magazines and videos and therefore limited its consumption usually to adults has changed dramatically with the internet. Young boys can now access it and there is no doubt that it forms their ideas of sexuality.
I have personal experience with my husband becoming addicted to internet porn. Through psychological counseling he was able to control the addiction. It took several years. He can attest to the fact that it is disrupttive and damaging to a person’s life. Nothing of value can be accomplished when a person spends eight hours looking at porn and masturbating.
There are help sites as well as AA meetings for families with members who are addicted to P and M. Porn amd masturbation. This is a very real problem.
Km, having been a young boy well before the Internet, I can assure you, young boys got access to porn then too.
Excellent, sober, and realistic analysis of an ill-thought-out piece which is unlikely to make most people think more highly of NRO.
What most disturbed me the most was Anonymous’s advocacy of government intervention. Coupled with her contention that pornography is a drug, what are the implications? Should the war on drugs be expanded to include this new “drug”? Or should pornography now be regulated by the FDA? Sorry, but you don’t have to love porn to think this is ridiculous.
There is a reason your husband ran off with the other woman. They love each other.
That is what broke up the marriage, a lack of love.
I could have quietly followed her and her husband throughout their days while married and immediately figured out why the marriage was failing.
The BIG sin of American women is they rationalize all their own sins and failures by blaming it on something else, and projecting their sins/failures on primarily men.
Before he ran off, did you show your husband even one molecule of true affection during the six months before he ran off with the woman who loves him? I doubt it.
Men are in fact human beings who need love too. If a woman does not show at least a minimal amount of appreciation or affection towards her man, it sends the signal that you don’t love him.
He cannot feel your love through some kind of telepathy. You MUST show it, and you must show it with some passion.
Love is a verb, and is action.
They don’t teach that at Brown, Wellesley and Berkeley.
Wow, a psychologist says porn is a-okay.
I guess that settles it then.
I think FemiNazis are the biggest threat to male sexuality (some of them look normal but try to strike up a conversation and the next thing you know, wham! you are a eunuch!). That and silly expectations brought about by women’s magazines (and TV shows) that suggest that men are just “remodelling projects” with the idea that you should get whatever you can and just keep pounding away until you get the prescribed metrosexual boy-man you really wanted.
As far as outlawing porn, let us review the success that the govenment has had with drugs before we create another whole area of contraband that criminals can profit from.
Lost My Cookies:
I haven’t laughed like this in weeks. Thank you.
Funny how a lot of people blame the husband if a marriage breaks up. If he runs off with another woman it is never the wife’s fault. I have been in a marriage where the wife lost ALL interest in ANY intimacy. It was me who kissed her before going to bed every night! It was me who kissed her every day before going to work and then coming home! Trying to talk about it only got me accused of only wanting sex. It was porn that kept me going for so long (4+ years) of trying to keep the marriage together. It took not only me telling her that I want out, but me finally seeing another woman to snap her back to reality! She then wanted to work on the marriage. I am happy to say that we are still together and that the marriage is strong(er?).
It takes TWO people for a marriage to work. You will only get out whatever effort you put in. Miss “Anonymous” took the easy way out. Blame everything/everyone else but not admit she was just as much at fault.
You’re doing good work Dr. Helen. Thank you, and please keep it up.
“For God’s sake, Christie Brinkley’s husband was addicted to this – if you need whacking material while married to Christie Effin Brinkley, then you got problems, the kind associated with rampant porn consumption.”
Really? And how often was Christie having sex with her husband? As often as he felt necessary? Consumption of porn has a great deal to due with a discrepancy between the personal need for sexual release and the availability of an outlet for that release.
It’s not that, you say? It’s that he shouldn’t need to see images of someone else when he’s married to such a hottie? Tell me then… did Christie make a set of pornographic videos of herself for her husband? A great many men are highly audio-visual when it comes to stimulation. It’s not that SHE’S not as stimulating as someone in a porn video, it’s that IMAGINATION is not as stimulating as audiovisual materials.
That goes for any other wife out there who thinks no one else should be “starring in” mental images associated with sexual gratification. If your frequency of (at least helping in) satisfying your husband’s sexual desire is less than what is needed, then bridge the gap by offering to star in your own homemade videos, and let him use that as a substitute for other pornography.
Or you could just pay more attention to bridging that gap in person, and preserve your marriage the way it should have been being preserved to begin with.
I have to buy it from the Russians
Well, you don’t HAVE to buy it from the Russians. You can do what people used to do before the internet came along – use your imagination.
I do get the impression though that a large part of the Russian economy depends on Europeans and Americans buying porn.
I personally find this article hopelessly one sided.
The porn issue may have been the cause or perhaps it was the result of this bad marriage. Does she really believe that porn caused him to spend his nights alone? A “few years he had taken to sleeping in the basement”? This situation could not have been satisfying for anyone involved. What happened to the 5 kids in this broken marriage?
“Anonymous” describes what her ex found attractive: “physical qualities of a porn star… bleached blond hair, heavy makeup, provocative clothing, and large breasts” That describes nearly all actresses on TV or movies, not porn.
As the author has chosen to stay unknown, we will never find out how real her version of this story is, as we only have her version of the truth.
I still watch porn from time to time, but the idea that my little kids are going to bumble into it online at tender ages makes my heart hurt. And the stuff today is light-years more intense than what I watched as a kid.
That’s the problem, isn’t it? Youve got fourteen year-olds today watching stuff that the wierdest perverts of twenty years ago could never have dreamed of.
Cody, I’d reply to you as I did KM above: I was 14 well before the Internet, and I don’t think there’s anything much new in porn.
I do think its more of a mixed bag than you’re willing to credit. In moderation, porn can be a useful cushion between differing libidos.
But my boy is eleven now.
I grew up on sneaking my dad’s playboys collected from the late 60s-late 70s.
Occasionally a Penthouse.
I got a more natural view of what pretty women should look like. I don’t think he will be the same. He certainly shouldn’t get the idea that ATM is the norm.
May I borrow your computer? Eeeww, what’s all this sticky stuff on your keyboard?
I see a political parallel: The efforts to malign the Tea Party members with a pornographic insult is strictly used by our detractors to control its natural, healthy political expression.
They State-Run media may wish to allow freedom of speech to have its way on the Internet, lest the real inducement to “socially criminal behavior” redound to their oppressive tactics.
Joan, you’re just as smart here as you are on the other sites. Good on you.
Like any other human activity, if taken to an extreme it will lead to lasting damage or death. I believe it should be easier for parents to shield their children from it with one click of a mouse or a switch on the TV, and those who create this material should be actively engaged in creating this solution. Having been to college and done a little side work with a private detective in the past, long before pornography was this pervasive, pornography is the least of our problems as adults re marriage. As for children it is a big one and we must address it.
My husband’s porn fetish ruined our sex life. It was there from the beginning and at first, I went along with it because it was supposedly “healthy and normal”. Problem was, things got weirder and weirder and I started to feel like a participant in Stupid Pet Tricks. I felt like nothing I could do could possibly compete. It eventually turned me off completely because in my mind,sexually, he was morphed into a drooling 14-year-old or a dirty old man in a raincoat. These are not sexy images. There’s a reason why most guys don’t mention porn among their “hobbies” in personal ads.
The final straw was when one of our little girls stumbled across an item from his stash.
I don’t advocate censorship, but my advice to guys is keep this stuff the hell away from your future wife.
OH and by the way, I am still regarded as “hot” judging by the looks I get from men, but it is still not enough.
What do you mean “Last straw”?
Did you force him to get counseling, or did you make it look like a suicide?
Are you hot? Cool, can you send me a photo or post again with a photo in your avatar?
Please, please can you send me a photo?
– SWM in raincoat, 65yo
Can’t go with you on this one Dr. Helen no matter what your husband’s predilections. Harnessing sexuality to family building is the definition of civilization. We will never control porn with laws but if you love civilization and the family, then you must cultivate society’s opprobrium to porn.
Harnessing sexuality to family building is the definition of civilization.
Wow, really?
Yes, it is. Read your history of civilization(s). There is a reason certain societal mores developed over the centuries.
You mean it wasn’t, oh, mutual defense, or the increases in productivity that come from specialization, or the rise of agriculture leading people to live in fixed locations instead of wandering groups of hunter-gatherers, or the end of the ice age allowing rapid population growth, or the migration of various tribes into the Fertile Crescent leading to leisure that our ancestors previously hadn’t had, but some primordial desire to control randy people to build families — family-building being, by the way, a commonn characteristic of pretty damn near all mammals, very nearly all birds, and a surprising number of cold-blooded terrestrial and aquatic creatures — that is the sole factor that leads to human culture?
Do tell.
Dang. How do you mod people up on this?
Read your history of civilization(s). There is a reason certain societal mores developed over the centuries.
Yes … and virtually all of those civilizations were patriarchal and polygamous, and treated women as property.
Let’s hear it for old-fashioned values!
Just like the whole issue with Tiger is to use him as an example of how a man will be punished for his sexuality.
Nice try, Ms. Smith, but like all porn-ostriches, you’re ignoring the actual point: the massive, overwhelming prevalence of porn has an increasingly negative effect over time. A 12 year old looking at Dad’s Playboy? Not such a big problem. A 50 year old looking at depictions of the violent rape of little girls? Just a step away from another little girl raped and murdered in the real world. And that 50 year old started with the old man’s Playboy.
I have no doubt that all or at least the overwhelming bulk of men have looked at pornography – I sure as heck have. But, ask the boys – does a pair of boobies in a Playboy get the blood rushing as much as it did 30 years ago? No – because men who look at pornography get increasingly desensitized to the beauty of the female body and become increasingly obsessed with mere sexual release…and that takes madder music and stronger wine.
Think a bit before you comment on pornography, next time.
Mark, there are other reasons why, 30 or 40 years after puberty, the blood doesn’t pump like it used to.
Sorry to say.
Wow, Mark, you’re a super-hero. Able to leap tall strawmen in a single bound! Watching or looking at porn for 30-odd years does NOT lead directly to desiring paedophile rape porn. Sheesh!
And at ten this theoretical serial-murdering pedophile was eating potatos and looking at the Sears Catalog. Your point is –?
In Science something that happens only .000001% of the time is probably not caused by something that occurs 99% of the time. There is an unknown cause.
Okay admittedly, I didn’t read all of the comments. There may be someone else out there who posted something similar to this, but what’s with all the porn-bashing?
I always felt the Pornography, like alcohol, guns, drugs, or nearly any other supposed evil, is merely a human nature amplifier. It either reveals or brings to light aspects of our psyches which are already there, just under the surface. If you like to watch abusive, perverse, and bizarre sexual acts being performed, then you are likely an abusive, perverse,and bizarre individual. Like the guy who beats his wife, but only when he drinks, it’s something that’s always there. The loss of shame or inhibitions because someone else is doing it on camera, or because you ingested a mind altering drug, or because you can get away with it, is not an excuse for bad behavior. If watching porn altered your perceptions of sex, then your perceptions were probably incorrect in the first place.
As for porn having a negative effect on relationships, ignoring a problem, or finding another outlet doesn’t make the problem go away. Porn is a symptom of problems in a relationship when experienced privately, in secret. Is it good to keep anything private or secret in a relationship? Do you hoard all of the cookies and pizza as well? If you want something in a restaurant, you have to ask for it. The waitress can’t read your mind. The same is true in the bedroom! Healthy relationships are not effected negatively by pornography.
Personally, I feel that pornography has made me a better lover. You don’t learn how to do these things in Sex Ed class at school, or watching PBS. It taught me how to spot a fake orgasm very early on. The chick who’s eyes are open who’s looking at something off camera while she screams is probably faking it. It taught me that it’s okay to talk during sex.
Eye contact is important.It taught me that sex is a full body experience. You watch a well done lesbian show, where the girls are really into each other, and you’ll see them spending more time kissing and stroking each others arms, backs, and stomachs than rubbing their genitals. You wanna know what women like? Ask a woman.
Asking questions is very important. Most modern internet porn has interviews with the girls before they start, and these are often surprisingly candid insights as to what different women like, and gives easy to follow trends. Interviews with porn stars in porno mags also offer such insights, but few people who peruse porn intermittently because of a sense of shame actually read the articles, which is ironic, considering it’s a classic excuse.
Most of all, porn has shown me that women like a guy who’s confident, assertive, and interested in fulfilling her needs as well as his own. Not to toot my own horn but when I lost my virginity, I was asked “I thought you said you were a virgin! How many women have you really been with?” My reply? “Thousands.” I’ve never had a complaint. My thanks go out to all the hard working professionals of the porn industry.
“[...]porn has shown me[...]”
Porn has shown you squat. Women are FAKING it in porn. THAT is why they get PAID to ‘ACT’.
Women are drugged up and screwed up mentally who make pornos:
http://www.shelleylubben.com/
Women fake it to make it in porn. That’s all it is. You men have been duped and your women are suffering because of it.
Time for a reality check.
MEC2,
I don’t think Helen means “rugged men who bring women flowers” when she talks about “romance novels and Lifetime TV”. I think there is something less innocent and more sadistic about the images of women-men relationships projected by our mainstream culture, where men are women’s toyboys at best. Bukkake porn is no more pervasive than “Sex and the City”, and these two kinds of entertainment mirror each other in more than one way.
“She found that after viewing porn, men looked at women more as objects than as human beings.”
I am awaiting the article that makes the observation “He found that after years of marriage, women looked at men more as wallets than as human beings”.
What I wonder is porn’s effect on girls. Unless you buy the theory that girls only do what boys want them to – a completely untenable argument, in opinion – what are we to make of how girls of all ages display themselves on social networking sites? There they are, on their own pages, where either themselves or their girlfriends are posing provocatively in their own bathroom mirrors. Look at Facebook. Everyone must have a “friend” who’s friends with an attractive high school girl. 95% likely there is at least one soft-porn picture of them, taken by them, posted by them. If you look at less reputable sites that exist to collect and display such pictures in a giant archive, you’ll how depraved these little victims of male expectation can get.
Do I object? No way – unless she were my daughter. But since this was all preceded by the “stripper tween” phenomenon by several years, usually funded by Mom, I wonder – are we really to believe that girls don’t like displaying themselves this way, that it really is so degrading to them, that they don’t enjoy it? I had always more or less thought the answer was Yes, but frankly the more Facebook pages I see the more mirage-like that argument becomes. Buyer’s remorse experienced after the fact, however profoundly, does not mean that the original impulse was insincere or coerced, only that competing values eventually caused her to feel shame. Well – the world is large and contains multitudes, people contradict themselves. Why can’t both sensations be sincere?
In my opinion, the democratization of porn will have a profound effect mostly by radically – forgive me – actualizing the ego rather than for any other reason. A really hot 16 year old girl is going to be even more intensely trapped in her “hot bubble” once she learns that 100 males from her high school are worshipping her one photo with Janey where they’re both displaying their panties, cleavage, swimming-toned abs, and long tongues that they took that one night after the Fall Formal. The pitiful victim thing is real in some cases, I’m sure, but most? I think that’s just propaganda maintained because no matter what innovations the subversives devise, the vast majority of men will never prefer a sluttish girl to a virginal one. And on that Darwinian imperative bedrock the whole enterprise may crash. We’ll see what happens when these 12 year old girls and boys raised on the expectation that double-penetration is normal (or fun or hot) grow up and become parents. Should be interesting.
Good article, Dr. Helen. I like how Anonymous tosses off her possible part in the dissolution of her marriage with a blithe “I was far from a perfect wife.” Putting aside the fact that none of us is the perfect spouse, that phrase could indicate a wide gamut of behavior on her part. Either she doesn’t want to give us details that might spoil the “porn wrecked my marriage” story line, or she is amazingly non-introspective for a psychologist.
Thank you for this well-constructed brief of “the other side of porn.” I’d never encountered some of these ideas, most particularly the study you cite. It’s hard to set aside my prejudices about the subject — I’m still sure of it’s deleterious effect in my own relationships — but you’ve made me consider the possiblity that my own attitudes and expectations play into the scenario more than I would have thought.
Perhaps pornography is more of a symptom than a cause, in most cases. A person can easily get addicted to any activity or substance and it can take on a life of its own. Most of the time there is an underlying need or desire for adventure or maybe the thrill of something that is looked upon by society as “forbidden fruit.” If it is something that is serves a purpose, does not cause problems, and is kept in the open between couples, then perhaps there might be a place for it. It could be something similar to sexual role playing. If it could cause problems, then it should be shunned. Each person reacts differently. Some people can drink one glass of champagne on their anniversary and none for the rest of the year, others let their lives be ruined by alcoholism. Children need to be protected, but adults need to look at the issue realistically, and not at the same time they are looking at pornography. Open, honest communication by both spouses is what makes a marriage work, and that goes for issues like this one as well.
From the study:
“Not one subject had a pathological sexuality,” he said. “In fact, all of their sexual practices were quite conventional.”
Yes, if you start with the premise that addiction to porn is not a sexual pathology. That statement is akin to saying of a drug addict, “He was temperate in all other things…except his drug use.”
Another gem:
“Pornography hasn’t changed their perception of women or their relationship, which they all want to be as harmonious and fulfilling as possible,” he added.”
What does this prove? Porn addicted men may want a harmonious and fulfilling relationship. But it doesn’t follow that because this is so porn is not counterproductive to those aims.
The author here is a psychologist. She should ask some of her colleagues who treat men what the number one issue facing men today is.
There seems to be a notion floating around that because it is natural for men to be turned on by these images it must be healthy and, therefore, it has no deleterious effects on a man’s relationships with actual women. What is being ignored is the obvious: Porn is intrinsically self-centered. It’s not about promoting genuine intimacy between couples. It’s not about communication, love, sacrifice, and unfettered giving of the self. It’s about self gratification. Much easier than working at an actual relationship.
Perhaps the author is willing to promote the idea that all man’s baser instincts are healthy and should be acted upon?
Didn’t think so.
Good insight Dr. Helen. I suspect that if “anomymous” didn’t blame porn and men in general she would be blaiming something or someone else. If she in fact is a psychologist then she is a damn poor one. Can you imagine her in counseling sessions on the search with her hapless victim clients to place blame rather than take responsibility. She doesn’t even have the courage, integrity, or basic responsibility to give her own name , let alone siting data from the other side of the argument. Now she will regard herself as victim of Dr. Helen. Did she mention who is buying all the trashy pulp novels ? Or watching the trashy daytime sit. coms. ? Pity the next poor fool who moves in with her as he will eventually become the next object of blame.
Watching pornography is only ever a symptom of something else going on. The only time it can unequivocally be considered harmful is if the viewer is a child. If someone finds the sex fetishes of their partner “weird,” it isn’t due to their consumption of porn; the porn is merely an outlet. Something else is going on either with the person or with the couple, in which case it becomes a decision whether or not perhaps to seek counseling.
I would hazard a guarantee that a good percentage of wives who see any male consumption of porn as vile also view erotic sex (versus procreative sex or maintenance sex) with their spouse as something dirty, unnecessary or unhealthy for their marriage. For husbands who watch porn surreptitiously from their spouse, I would hazard a separate guarantee that it is because they are unfulfilled sexually within the relationship, either with quantity or quality or both. If the spouse discovers it and is unwilling to consider that perhaps it’s her views of sexuality that are unhealthy and have contributed towards his seeking an outlet through porn, that it’s most likely a symptom of their relationship and not just a fetish of his, if she ignores this possibility and chooses not to engage with her husband to try and better understand each others’ needs, then she shouldn’t be at all surprised when he chooses to leave the relationship.
Finally, if you are a woman who views the above statement as sexist or misogynistic, I would urge you to reconsider that stance as well. Men are not wrong or disgusting for desiring more or more erotic sex with their partner. Whether they choose to suppress these desires to make for a more harmonious relationship or in favor of some greater need within the relationship (health reasons for one of the partners, perhaps), the spouse had damn well better make it incumbent upon themselves to understand what’s going on and why.
I used to believe that porn was something harmless. Sure, there were some people, mostly guys, who became obsessed with it. But if anything, I thought it was a phase many teenage boys went through and a few men who were not “getting it” at home. I have since learned a bit more.
I run a group for men who are dealing with all types of issues across the board. I have been blown away at the way porn- particularly internet accessible porn, has wreaked havoc on lives and marriages of so many of these men. Each man takes personal responsiblility, but like alcohol or drugs, this element introduced into their lives has become like a tumor in their relationships.
Many of these men have beautiful, healthy, and very sexual wives. For a few of these men, the door to prostitution and affairs has even been opened. Just as the man who sneaks off to get his drug fix, these men can step into their office to get their fix.
As a recovering heroin addict who works with addicts, there are some similar effects on how the brain reacts to porn- it’s the pleasure center. There is a reason why heroin addicts compare the needle to sex. It’s all about the endorphins.
Eventually these men I have been working with come to a point where they can’t get the same “rush” from their own relationships with their wives. There is shame, lies, covering up of tracks, and more lies. It is a cycle that reminds me of my own drug addiction.
It all clicked with me when I listened to a man share how he once smashed a porn video that he had bought and viewed. Feeling guilty and frustrated, he threw the smashed cassette in the trash only to dig the smashed video out of the trash the next night and fix the broken cassette so he could view it again.
What was even more amazing was that he wasn’t the only man in the room who had done this.
Is porn the only thing to blame? Of course not. But since these men have taken the porn out of their lives- the major “tumor” of their marriage has been removed so they can begin the real recovery.
Helen Smith’s view on the subject seems to suggest that “men just can’t help themselves”. They will go underground to get their porn and be resentful about it! Where does it say that we should condone men getting their sexual enjoyment by watching perverse acts performed by other people? Who says this is normal behavior? Watching porn is cheating plain and simple. You may tell yourself that it is okay, but in your heart you know it is wrong. The posts here saying “Thanks Dr. Helen! I feel better already!” prove this. Back up! You were right to feel guilty the first time. You are watching someone’s daughter/sister/mother degrade herself for your enjoyment. You deserve the guilt!
Who are you to condone or disapprove of behavior between consenting people? If a consenting couple watches porn, or if a spouse is open about watching porn (that is made by consensual participants) by themselves, then who are you to tell them what is wrong or not? If you think it’s wrong for and your life, fine, but don’t try and push to legislate my totally legal behavior just because YOU disagree with it.
Good god, now every time I masturbate to the visions in my head I’m cheating on my wife. Since I’m likely to have, between my ears, visions of people I’ve actually met maybe this is a more egregious cheating than pr0n.
Seems like we’re defining cheating down, considerably.
Porn could be said to have wrecked the anonymous psychologist’s marriage only if the woman her husband ran off with was from Eastern Europe and named “Porn”. He “ran off with a woman”, which indicates there was more going on than her husband in another room jacking off until she had enough of the terrible abuse (self- in this case) and filed for divorce.
Funeral Guy is right. The real story of the story of how a woman named Porn wrecked this psychologist’s marriage is hidden in the phrase “I was far from the perfect wife”. How far exactly? We’ll never know due to the ubiquitous human ability to rationalize one’s own behavior and demand that others read our minds and judge us by intent rather than result.
Of course, attempts to ‘control’ women’s ‘sexuality’ have never happened right?
Hell, I’m randy almost all of the time and my boyfriend barely ‘puts out’ so if he’s whacking one off to a magazine and not giving me some of that, yeah, I take issue but I gave up caring when 5 minutes max was all he could muster in the sack. lol But, I masturbate at least 2 times a day so there’s no pressure for him to perform and I’ve actually become a better master of my own domain anyhow.
As far as porn itself goes. It grosses me out. Why? It’s not the sex. It’s the sad (many drugged up) people performing in front of the camera who have messed up lives and many have horrible, traumatic childhoods. So, for me, watching porn is like watching a prostitute and I personally don’t need to go there just to get my rocks off.
Maybe some men are just lazy and can’t use their imagination though, which is probably why they aren’t all that good at making love.
Here is the prime example of the differences in the female and male . . . the female has he entire instinctive nature centered on finding the ONE set of genes that will produce the most viable offspring . . . the male has his entire instinctive nature centered on incresing the probability of his offspring being viable by having many different partners . . . now we get the marriage. The female is ready, prepared and willing to participate in the act as often as she can (and now days that is a freedom provided by birth control). Keep in mind that just because the act is birth controlled does not take away the instinct to do it as often as possible. The male, kind of sad, but now he is reduced to accepting the fact, rationalizing if you will, that he can no longer go spread the good genes. Strange that he still has the instinct to do so . . . but if he does . . . that female that he married will whack the crap out of him (control). Strange it is that human beings consider ourselves civilized. LOL
Hmm. If society didn’t reign in female sexuality, I think women would be effing every hot guy that they could easily nab and get in the sack with for a quick tryst. Men are called ‘normal’ when want to poke it in every available hole but women are called whores if they want to hop on more than a few throbbing knobs. Double standard much eh?
Women also cheat as much as men too. They are just better liars.
Trust me, if there was no chance of STDs or pregnancy I would be the biggest she slut and have no shame in it whatsoever. Love between the sexes is for fools anyway!
Truly find myself in agreement . . . and we call ourselves civilized? . . . heck to me we are hardly domesticated . . . and rapidly returning to the wild.
I was a young teen when I walked in on my father watching porn (he quickly pulled up his pants and turned it off – thinking I didn’t see anything). Later, I found he had a rather large collection (this was pre-internet). I was crushed. I had been raised in a Christian home and brought up to believe sex was supposed to be special bonding between two people who love each other. Sure, I had seen sex in mainstream movies, but nothing like what was on these videos. It was disgusting. And he was doing this while I was home. My father had been a stability in my life and after my discovery, I didn’t even want to hug him.
The long term effects have been strong. My view of sex and what it is supposed to be is very warped. I can’t think of it as anything but dirty and wrong. I want so badly to be married and have a life partner, but I can’t get past my aversion to sex. If sex is what I saw on those videos, I want no part of it. I can’t picture it any other way, though.
As for my father, he still doesn’t know that I am aware of his behavior. I know from visits back home that not only does he still engage in porn, what he is watching has gotten more and more hardcore (including tranny porn and fetishes with bodily functions). I also suspect he has cheated on my mom with many women. Another reason I am afraid of marriage. I don’t want to end up with someone like this.
Looking at porn may start off innocently enough (and I’m sure for some it stays that way) but for many, they become desensitized and need more to satisfy their needs. This could include escalating to violent types of porn and to acting out the fantasies they see. It is a very slippery and dangerous slope.
And if you think porn doesn’t hurt anyone, look at me. Other than what I saw on my father’s video that day, I have never looked at it. Yet, here I am, very hurt and wounded by it. It has warped my view of men, marriage and relationships. I sometimes wish my father would die so I wouldn’t have to pretend not to know anymore.
I’m sorry for the strained relationship between you and your father Anastasia, but it wasn’t porn that caused it, it was the fact that your father was irresponsible enough to masturbate with the door unlocked. Every man masturbates – with or without pornography – and to do so “out in the open” like that is either a sick invitation for someone to catch you or sign of somebody with reckless social behaviors.
I think the problem is that it showed the porn controlled him instead of vice versa. This was more than just a “cleaning the pipes” situation. He couldn’t even wait until his young daughter was out of the house to watch. That’s the danger with something like this. A girl’s view of her father is so important and something like this can be deeply scarring, especially if it is so contradictory to what he presents in public. Again, this was not basic, healthy masturbation. He is into some sick, demented stuff.
I understand people have different opinions on it, and I’m not asking anyone to share mine. I’m just giving my personal experience in response to Dr. Helen’s article.
Carl, how do you know that every man masturbates?
That’s irresponsible to make that statement to try to okay the activity. I’m not saying it’s wrong to masturbate, but this smacks of, “If it feels good, do it!” Liberal, hippy jibe.
It also feels good to a baby to go potty in his diaper. It’s a natural urge too, but is that okay? It feels good to satisfy the natural urge to smite an enemy when he’s offended you, but is that civilized, okay behaviour?
There are a lot of natural urges that feel good. . . If every man masturbates, then I’m pretty certain every man eats his boogers too.
Speak for yourself. Just because a therapist tells a man, “Porn addiction does not exist, therefore, don’t worry about what you’re doing. I’m not going to give you any coping skills to help you over your habit because it’s the cultural norm,” doesn’t mean that his life and relationships will not continue to be destroyed.
I find your response to this lady irresponsible, irrational, and unfeeling.
She’s hurt. How is, “Oh, it’s normal,” going to make her feel any better when she seriously has been emotionally traumatized? If she okays what her father did, will it really change her life for the better? Will it improve the lives of many people who have been debased by porn consumption/excessive masturbation? Most likely not.
I’d tell this lady to realize that men are not perfect, but I believe there are men out there who have higher standards and are willing to be noble in the sense that they would give up selfishness in any form (especially if it hurt her so deeply) for her.
The men’s liberation movement always happens historically before a women’s lib movement. Go study some history. I’m not a feminist, but I do believe that men’s failings to be unselfish and their penchant for selfishness destroys cultures. Men usually fail as leaders before women have to step in and attempt to take the lead.
I think you do culture a great disservice by your irrational thoughts.
But on the other hand, if you enjoy masturbating and porn and your partner doesn’t find it disrespectful, that’s you’re freedom! Enjoy it. As for people who don’t want it in their lives, don’t succumb to the bunk that Carl-Just-Another-Voice-Who-Speaks-For-Everybody-So-He-Thinks. . . set your standards, draw the line and don’t settle for less.
You “walked in” on dad years ago (innocently?), and have been spying on him ever since. I submit if anybody has a problem, it’s you.
Yes, at 13 years old, I walked in to my father’s office hoping to catch him masturbating to hardcore pornography.
Are you joking? My mind could never have comprehended something like it until I actually saw it. That’s why it was so traumatic.
Yes, I have a problem with snooping when I visit – I don’t deny that. It’s difficult for me to let it go. I care about him and this is something that scarred me very deeply.
I submit that you refrain from making judgments about someone you don’t even know.
Expect to get what you get here in the blog world . . . if you don’t like what people have to say . . . don’t post your personal stories . . . keep the post to perspectives and opinions.
Anastasia, in complete seriousness and without any snark, consider looking into therapy. Don’t let something that happened years ago keep afflicting your life.
Thank you, Charlie. It is something I have been considering for a while.
I did some years of therapy, and it made an immense difference for me.
Anastasia, you have just written the single most ridiculous thing I have ever read. You walked in on your dad whacking off. Big deal. It’s no different than if you walked in on him taking a dump. Awkward? Yes, but hardly worth ruining your life over. Would you be forever traumatized if you caught your dad on the can? Would you have trouble taking a dump yourself?
The first step is for you to acknowledge that you are acting silly. Whatever your father’s problems may or may not be you need to get over it and quit using it as an excuse for how you are behaving and feeling now. The other thing for you to realize is that your father’s sex life is just that… his sex life and it is private. Unless he tried to molest you, you really have no business loading all of your baggage on his shoulders. That is wrong. I hope he doesn’t know how you feel and that you don’t use it as a lever over him.
Finally, I think your problem is rooted more in the guilt inflicted by your religion than by the pornography your dad was watching. This lifelong, life affecting guilt over essentially nothing is just the sort of thing religions promote and it is one of the most devastating side effects of religious addictions.
UD, you might do well to look at Helen’s previous post. Anastasia’s reactions are her own; if they’re not like yours, that doesn’t mean she isn’t expressing real trauma.
Charlie, Anastasia’s reactions are definitely her own, and snooping on her father’s masturbation-fodder knowing perfectly well that he masturbates and that what he masturbates to (allegedly) bothers her is something which a reasonable person can criticize (UD) and another reasonable person with a different emphasis (yourself) can suggest warrants therapy.
Anastasia,
I regret that you were misinformed by your parents and clergy (who misinformed your parents on the nature of the universe, human beings, and) who gave you an unrealistic view of sexuality to the point where you consider it dirty and awful.
I don’t believe you were hurt by porn nor even by catching your dad masturbating briefly (which, while embarrassing among family members, has been known to happen from time to time and life goes on). I believe you were made overly fragile by the ridiculous nonsense you were taught.
And yes, your father may have mated with women other than your mother, which is natural and — in evolutionary terms at least — a good (or at least necessary) thing, without which our species would never have sexually outcompeted other species.
In other words, without a certain amount of promiscuity, there would be no nuns. Children. Or what have you.
I realize what I said is distasteful for those who “believe in” monogamy as the right way to live in in every case.
Yet it’s factual. And — Biblical (not that I’m a Christian).
That said, I can see where it would be distasteful for a teenage girl walk in on her dad looking at porn.
However, I just remembered I’ve walked on my parents having sex once ages ago and I don’t condemn them for it. These things happen. Hardly the highlight of my childhood, but stuff happens.
I think a person has to develop more resiliency than to let such an experience scar them for life.
I mean… and this is terrible; I don’t claim otherwise… as you know many people are sexually assaulted. Especially women, and children: female and male.
And they have to find the courage to go on and heal. Some do, some don’t.
Walking in on someone you know looking at porn, etc., just isn’t that uncommon of a life experience. I’m not saying it’s happened to everyone, but it shouldn’t destroy a person’s relationship with sex or their father.
That’s why I conclude it is more what you were taught about sex, including the conflict between what your dad claimed to believe and what he actually does, which is the problem.
And to me the answer is most emphatically honesty, gaining a better understanding of how people really are, and not relying on what I consider false sources to inform our beliefs. Yes, I expect you will disagree with that. I’m sure many people will.
It seems to me that looking at people you’re not married to’s images (or reading words about said people) and thinking about coiting with them IS a sin according to the Bible, particularly the New Testament.
So if a person insists on believing that’s true, I can understand how they conclude porn is just awful, and that it damages their relationship with a family member looking at porn.
But I think the available evidence tends to be much heavier on the side of we’re evolved primates descended from other primates (and our 2 nearest relatives are also quite sexual).
And when a person begins to look at things this way, then our sexual drives become quite understandable.
As far as your dad being into bodily functions or transvestite porn or whatever, I can only say that it isn’t my cup of tea, at all, but it isn’t immoral in the sense that violence, simulated rape, and child porn are. It’s personal taste (or distaste) not harming another person.
So I really would just let that be and not worry about it.
It really isn’t your business.
There was a time during my marriage when i spent a year on a course. During that year i wasn’t bringing any money into the home. I lost all interest in my wife, but not (visually) in other women, and i watched a lot of porn (i’d previously only looked at it occasionally for example if she was working nights). I stopped when i finished the course and started earning again.
I think a porn obsession is *much* more likely to be a symptom than a cause. I also think it’s just as, if not more likely, to be related to a pride problem than anything else as in my focus-group-of-one view, male sexuality is as much to do with pride as libido.
On the other hand i think the market in the past was limited and so porn was mostly limited to a common denominator i.e Playboy style porn. The internet taps into such a vast market there’s money to be made providing images that only 1 in a 1000 or 1 in 10,000 men find arousing and which many people might find horrifying. Another aspect of this is i think some porn is actually more like a branch of the horror genre where the main purpose of the film makers is to shock and disgust. The big worry for me is children coming across something like this that disturbs them for life.
What i did with my boy is buy some artsy “erotica” smut books which were relatively tasteful and placed them in the upper bookshelves when he was coming up to the right age in the hope he’d “imprint” on those kind of images rather than anything too horrible from the internet.
In short i do worry about the influence of internet porn on children and in some cases on the mental and physical health of the performers however the importance of the internet for political freedom is too vital to risk easily. I’d like some kind of compromise i.e laws forcing websites to have a rating which could be blocked by parental controls but currently my attitude to any kind of government control of the internet is *extremely* hostile as i feel they’ll use porn control for political control.
Ok, so porn distorts a man’s perspectives of his wife so completely that it destroys his ability to have a marriage. Guess that applies equally to fishing, drag racing, Harley scooters, running, woodworking, working for a living, . . . got a hobby of any kind that impacts your marriage . . . well it can destroy your marriage. Of course, if the female perspective is that it is “done to HER” then is when it really gets “bad”. Looking at the above list and I am sure that someone out there other than me knows of a marriage that has been destroyed by something as simple as “He runs so much” and “He does it everyday”.
To me there seems to have occurred a major cultural values shift, perhaps it was with “Rosie the Riveter” or maybe birth control but something happened and it “killed” June Cleaver! That entire perspective is deader than a door knob. Is it good that June is dead? . . . you got me . . . but all I can truly say is that there is a loss of respect and valuation of individuals throughout our culture.
So he watches porn . . . well it is cheaper than cocaine and if he’s smart he will do it at home . . . watching porn at public libraries and at work can destroy ya, just as quick as to much fishing, lol.
Keep this in mind . . . once the destruction begins, due to the loss of respect between the individuals (husband & wife) . . . the marriage is doomed.
James 1:13
Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man:
14 But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.
15 Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.
Porn has added a new dimension to me and my wife’s sex life. It’s great. If you object to pornography, don’t watch it, and leave the rest of us alone. Just as I was happy to see hands-off conservativism rising again, a bunch of social vice-cops have to raise their heads again. Sigh…
Um, has anyone even bothered to track the divorce rates in this country since the flood of porn began in the 80′s (with the VCR) and the 90′s (with the Internet)?
The divorce rate has DECLINED as the availability of pornography has risen.
Check your facts, people, before forming your theories.
Sorry, Doc, I think you’ve badly missed the point on this one.
It’s been eloquently pointed out in earlier comments that equating pictures of nekkid gurls with the festival of misogyny and brutality that comprises modern-day porn is disingenuous at best. What has been most notable in the overnight tsunami of pornography that has arisen from greater “freedom of information” has been the speed at which erotica has descended into all-perversion-all-the-time. Check out a few of the websites that start their name with an X and you’ll find that they have little to do with eroticism, and arguably little to do with sex.
The equation has been drawn above between pornography and “romance” novels. It’s a good one, too, since both have the primary effect of depersonalizing the object of desire. “Relationships” are difficult because Relationship Is Difficult. It could be argued that we, men and women, are made the way we are in order to confront our avoidance of self through gentle confrontation with the other – none of which can happen if the means of avoidance are more available than the encouragement to stand in there and fight it out.
Women have for generations been encouraged to regard men as beasts; men have similarly been encouraged to regard women as adorable little airheads. “Serial Monogamy” has served as a convenient outlet for those unwilling, on both sides, to confront the real issues, which go far beyond sexual incompatibility. Retreating into Bukakke and Bodice Rippers has not improved the situation.
Choosing to get stuck in the genital stage and opting for eternal adolescence is no more admirable than staying in the oral and anal stages, and has the same relationship with maturity – which is to say none at all.
Okay. So let me get this str8. A guy uses pr0n because his wife feels sex has become a chore rather than a fun, tempting, mutually pleasurable thing? The most likely reason the woman is feeling that way is because you’re doing it wrong, boyz. Believe me, if she’s having incredible orgasms when you make love to her, there is no way she’s not going to want more of the same. Of course, making love is the key and that includes making love to her mind and then her body but, I know most of you bust-a-nut-and-run types don’t have a clue about that anyway.
Also, don’t some of you man-children see the irony? You complain that the little woman treats sex like ‘work’ and then you masturbate to p0rnos where the woman has sex for ‘money’ as her line of ‘work’. Der.
For you ugly men with pot-bellies and wrinkled prune faces who want a young hottie, don’t complain when the hottie takes you for everything you’ve got and runs off with a hawt dude. Also, don’t forget that some women like the chase and once she’s gotten the guy from his wife, she tires of him. Look at Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. Poor Brad looks miserable. haha
P.S. You some men are selfish pigs under the sheets anyhow. Proof? Once a supposedly hetero man lands in jail he’ll even bang another dude to bust a nut. boo yah
I love my wife dearly. She is a wonderful woman and I find her extremely attractive. She loves me. I would probably be happy if we had sex twice a week. She would probably be happy if we had sex twice a year. As it is, we have sex about twice a month. This leaves me very frustrated and angry- which I hate because I adore my wife. I also don’t want to force her to do anything. It is not her fault she is not interested. I think it is a question of biology.
The alternative is much less satisfying, but it is a lot better than extreme anger and frustration. Sexual images speed the process along.
I read the NRO article and was relieved to find this article. The issue of porn has been studied to death. Guess what…it’s harmless. A recent survey found that 70% of med view porn on the internet. In a related study: 30% of med lie on surveys.
Hey, here’s an idea: Change all of the divorce, alimony and palimony laws that penalize men for doing what men do – falling in love – and then perhaps some of us will rejoin the pursuit of relationships game, which has been perverted into a fool’s errand for those of us who inherited some money. Sorry, but I don’t think bailing out some idiot single mom who is where she is because she made bad choices is the best use of my money. If I’m going to deal with children, I’ll do the fun part myself. Likewise for college graduate chicks with big student loans, and ALL single women, who seem very adept at running up credit card debt. No thanks. I’ll take any fantasy girl over those realities anytime, thank you very much. That said, graphic porn is gross. Just give me the old fashioned Playboy type of idealized girl next door, and I’m fine. If you want to ameliorate this, “problem” the first thing you need to do is realize that men are not responsible for perverting the natural order of male/female relationships, lawyers are.
One half thinks porn is harmless while the other half believes it is destructive to our society.
The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. For adults who use it simply as an outlet from a less interested spouse or as a tool in their lovemaking, it’s fine and personal.
For people who have compulsive tendencies or a predisposition to addiction, it can be dangerous and hurtful to their families if the behavior escalates to an unhealthy level.
It is also dangerous how easily accessible it is to children. This is really key. A twelve year old latch-key kid with a computer can easily access some pretty disturbing things. Being exposed to this at such an impressionable age can be extremely damaging to how a child or teen’s mind develops.
Just a comment about the study cited by Helen Smith – although I have not seen a published article upon which this study was based (the text of the study does not appear to be available on the Universite de Montreal website, nor on the website of The Interdisciplinary Research Center on Family Violence and Violence against Women (CRI-VIFF), the institute that funded the study), the half-dozen news items I found covering the story, including the bulletin that appears on the UdeM website, consistently report that “To do so, he [Lajeunesse] has so far recruited and interviewed 20 heterosexual male university students who consume pornography.” The AFP reported that “A handful of universities permitted him to address their campuses, and after appealing to some 2,000 mostly women students to take part, 20 heterosexual men agreed to discuss their sex lives in depth.” To deduce from this that “..virtually all men watch porn” is quite a leap. All that can be posited from this is that very few people were willing to talk to him. To proceed further and make broad claims about the effects of pornography based on a survey of a small number of respondents, all university students, all within the same age range, is not very informative. I would think Pajamas Media (which I respect very much) could do better.
I had the exact same reaction: how irresponsible to draw conclusions about “all men” based on interviews with 20 college aged men! And to conclude that porn has no harmful effects, based on 20 interviews! Dr Smith is usually more serious than this.
WRT to other posts in these comments.
1. As long as we are quoting anecdotes and personal stories, let me add this one: my family law attorney friends are telling me that compulsive pornography use is a growing factor in the divorces they are seeing. Call it addiction or whatever you want. Wives are feeling abandoned by the husbands to the computer screen.
2. All you apologists for porn use, consider this: Masturbating in front of a computer screen, when a live and willing woman is available, cannot possibly have survival value to the individual’s genes or to the species. Anybody who prefers an image to a real sex partner has no business playing the “nature card.” Nothing natural about it. If it is really an “understandable” biological response to something, to prefer a fantasy to reality, I suggest you take seriously the possibility that the biological responses have gone astray somehow….
I posted a similar comment on my own blog http://www.ruthblog.org/2010/04/02/more-on-porn/
Sorry, JRM- you stated the issue with a gigantic assumption and thus negated the point. Having a live and warm wife does not equate to “available”- years ago, Ann Landers replied to a letter of the “What does she have that I don’t have?” variety by asking “What has she given that I haven’t given?” It was true then, it is now.
And you need to show cause and effect data on the harm of porn, not anecdotes from friends. I’m not saying that porn it good, or positive; I am, however, suggesting that it may often be an important outlet when wives decide that sex is for when she’s “in the mood”. That one never works for a normal husband, no matter what a good guy he may be. It’s pure biochemistry.
Jennifer, I’ve got two questions for you:
(1) What do you suppose the men felt abandoned to?
(2) Is it fair to assume that a married man necessarily has a “live and willing woman” available?
Divorce lawyers citing some behavior as a cause of divorce doesn’t make it so. Divorce lawyers are interested in making their client’s opposite appear in the worst possible light, to maximize their own client’s gains. Uncovering the truth is for Perry Mason and Matlock. Years ago “recovered memories” were cited by all kinds of authorities. Those citations didn’t make recovered memories any more true than unicorns, though.
As to the second point, I’ve been in many adult relationships during my life. Having a partner in the vicinity isn’t the same as having a willing partner in the vicinity.
I’ll take a page from Ann Althouse’s detractors, Dr Helen: you, a psychologist! – quoting a wholly inadequate study of twenty – twenty! – college students and extrapolating from it that all men are unaffected by porn usage. It hardly rises above the level of anecdote, and could scarcely be called a study at all, but you’ve based your defense of porn on it.
I disagree with Anonymous on NRO’s conclusion that porn killed her marriage, and I vehemently disagree with her call for government studies on the issue. But at the same time, I recognize that porn can be destructive to relationships, and it’s simply foolish to deny that there’s a problem here. How big a problem? I can’t say. What should we do about it? Be thankful for parental control software, be sure to use it, and talk to your kids about the pernicious effects of regular porn usage. Be respectful of your marriage partner and attentive to each other’s needs, physical and emotional.
A young female relative recently updated her facebook profile picture: she’s posing with a friend, they’re both in bikinis, in an overtly sexual pose — her latest status update said something like “future porn stars!!!” followed by a declaration of love for a particular boy she knows. He replied, “Oh yeah! Can’t wait!!!” It’s probably a big goof to them, but it’s disturbing to me. First of all — don’t they realize that we (parents, aunts, uncles, etc) can see it? Second, why aren’t they embarrassed? Good knows how many people did “right-click, save” on that photo, and will have it forever. The girls’ real names are attached to it, too — this isn’t some anonymous internet forum. So far I haven’t said anything — if it was my daughter I would’ve said plenty already — should I? Or is simply too late, and I have to accept the “pornification” of youth culture?
Great Article; _Amazing_ comment section.
Is it a coincidence that the Instapundit pointer to this article
appears just after the one to Dr. Mosher’s survey of American women’s views on sex in the 19th century? The contrast is instructive.
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine
/2010/marapr/features/mosher.html
It will be no coincidence that, if our socio/economic situation
reverts to 19th century norms, so will relations between the sexes.
Two conversation starter quotations:
Women and cats. Men and weather. – Heinlein
Sexual desire is aroused by the sight of the face,
and not any other part of the body. – M A Foster
Blaming porn for an individuals addictive behavior is no different than blaming the cocaine, gambling, or addictive behavior for the addiction. This is a sad outcry, and the author is probably denying other reasons for her failed relationship.
Maybe Anonymous should have experienced some porn, and she wouldn’t feel so threatened by it.
ms,
I think you just drew an analogy wherein you suggested that people should try a little cocaine so they won’t feel threatened by their addicted spouse.
Is porn really going to help solve the types of underlying problems that ended Anonymous’ marriage? Or will it make those problems worse? I think the latter.
Riddle me this?
Why don’t men exclusively date porn actors (key word being ‘actor’)? I mean, if that’s what gets you going why not date the people who do for a living what you like and prefer a mate to do? And don’t give me that ‘madonna whore complex’ crap.
Be honest, men. Why don’t you date and/or marry porn actors?
Don’t let your double-standards get in the way of your answer either.
two points immediately come to mind in response…
1. who is saying that men aren’t interested in dating porn actresses? i imagine there are a couple issues between “anon dude on this forum” and “that chick in movie X” – namely supply: how many men watch porn? how many women perform? i imagine the number of men watching is thousands of times larger than the number of women appearing.
2. don’t the girls themselves have a say in this? perhaps they simply don’t want to get hitched or “tied down” with a relationship.
i imagine most guys who view porn do not have access to a performer, let alone a performer interested in reciprocating that interest.
i also love another assumption that has been asserted earlier here… that porn is responsible for objectifying women as well as the impetus of all sorts of voluntary cosmetic procedures.
right, because Hollywood has never shoved certain body type images down our throats (er, eye sockets)…
at no point in time has any director uttered the phrase “Lose 5 pounds or get off the set”, nor any actress required, by contract, to remain a certain weight, etc.
i imagine you’ll find a much greater variety of body types in the adult film industry than amongst leading ladies than on tv shows or regular Hollywood flicks.
Why did Jesse James want a ‘good girl’ like Sandra Bullock to marry and yet cheated on her with the opposite type of women. What is it about men wanting to marry the good girl and cheat with the supposed ‘bad’ girl?
Perhaps women should be praised for being slutty rather than denigrated.
Wouldn’t you men all be much happier if women were hot, horny and did multiple males?
Think about it! FUN for EVERYONE and no SHAME or GUILT!
“Wouldn’t you men all be much happier if women were hot, horny and did multiple males?”
Paternity. Men are sexually attracted to overtly sexual women but at the same time they want to know their kids are theirs. Hence the virgin-whore syndrome.
Why did Jesse James want a ‘good girl’ like Sandra Bullock to marry and yet cheated on her with the opposite type of women. What is it about men wanting to marry the good girl and cheat with the supposed ‘bad’ girl?
Perhaps women should be praised for being slutty rather than denigrated.
OK! Sandra Bullock is wonderful … because she schtupped Jesse James when he was married to someone else! Good on ya, babe! And what a big, honkin’ surprise it must have been to her to discover that if he’d do it for her, then he’d do it to her, too …
wow…fun reading here today
my 2c..nothing wrong with porn. Anyone who blames it for there marriage falling apart is kinda sad. I would bet there were a LOT of other factors. I think in general porn is good but like all things in MODERATION. Some do get addicted, and only they can help themselves change it.
Trying to stop it is pointless, except letting young children see it, not good. That being said, way back in the olden times…couples would have sex in the same room as their children and they(children) learned early on that it is a normal behavior. Nowadays…kids are taught(mostly indirectly)that sex is bad, BUT they see it everywhere so they are big time confused. Sex is fun and TOTALLY normal…so get over it…
Anywhoo..I love porn and the wife is fine with it and knows that i masturbate to it and its no biggie. In fact she is on her way home now and we have had some good sexting going on! Ill be waiting and rdy when she gets here..so gotta run
What country/century are you posting from? Where are children taught that sex is “bad”?
he left her because she treated him like a wallet with legs. he left her because she, by choice or design,stopped being the sensual being he married. he left her because she used her witholding of sex to control him. he left her because he thought she loved him, and when the children came along it became apparent that she had gotten what she wanted and his needs/ desires/ dreams were a distant secondary to her plan. he left her because he was willing to be enslaved to alimony/ child support/ societal demonization to have a sliver of a chance of redeeming his manhood. God bless him.
From my own experience as a woman, often times wives don’t want to have sex as often as their husbands because physiologically they don’t feel the need for it. If you are not “hot,” you are not “hot.” Period. Having orgasms is hard for many women via conventional sex, which diminishes the returns a woman gets from having sex. Imagine if you men only had orgasms 20% of the time, or not at all. How would that change your interest in sex overall?
Also, bringing a woman to orgasm takes work and most men just want to get off and not have to actually satisfy a woman. He expects all the pleasure, meanwhile she ends up faking it to protect his fragile ego. lol
If that stops you, you had best not be married. Period. There are many many women who should not be married- put the old boy out of his misery. Now.
I see a lot arguing against Anonymous with either:
1) Your husband left because of problems that preexisted his turn to porn
or
2) I love porn because it helps me fix/ignore the problems in my marriage
But it would be more interesting to me if the people arguing 1 and 2 got in a room and duked it out with each other.
Problems –> Porn –> ?? obviously doesn’t work for everybody.
Dr. Helen, I can speak from personal experience that while it is certainly not the cause of all problems in marriage (divorce statistics show that disagreements about family finances cause more divorces), porn has an absolutely chilling effect on marriage. The reasons are many and varied.
The more active a man becomes in his use of pornography, the more his need for greater and more significant contact becomes. Let’s be absolutely real here…a man who is sexually satisfied with his partner will have very little need for porn. On the other hand, a man who isn’t having his needs met for human intimacy with his partner will seek to have those needs fulfilled through other means. Looking at a magazine is fine for a while, but it’s not nearly the same experience as watching a video, which isn’t the same experience as seeing someone in a “live” setting, which isn’t the same experience as actually connecting with another “live” human being. It’s an incredibly dangerous and slippery slope.
Personally, I was exposed to porn at a young age. I was in the 8th grade when I found my first magazine. From there, it wasn’t long until I got my own mailbox in college that the subscription to Playboy started. After that, I needed to increase the intensity by moving from Playboy to Penthouse, and from Penthouse to videos. It was at that point that I had a life-change experience and realized that porn wasn’t helping me in my relationship with my then-fiancee but was actually hurting. As a man in my mid-30′s, I started having performance issues that I couldn’t overcome, issues that would lead to my wife and I pulling away from each other sexually when we should have been at the height of our sexual relationship with each other. These are issues we’re still dealing with right now, issues that have created a distance in our relationship that we must battle daily to try to overcome.
What I’ve realized through talking with other men, through the books I’ve read, and from attending men’s conferences is that our experiences with porn, because they’re tied to the powerful life-giving force that is sex, form indelible images on our brains that are difficult to near impossible to erase. The sexual act creates a bond between two people that’s as tough as duct tape to remove. As a former porn addict, I’ve still got images in my head of sex scenes that I masturbated to that I can’t erase.
Another area where porn hurts men is in the reality of day-to-day relationships. In porn, the woman NEVER says no, never has a headache, never doesn’t want to do it. She’s always available, always ready, always willing. Real life doesn’t play out that way, and because of that, our real-life sexual experiences can pale in comparison to our sexual experiences with porn. Real life bodies can’t compare, real life conversations can’t compare, real life situations can’t compare to the world presented by porn. For the woman with a porn-addicted husband, there’s got to be some hurt for her when she realizes that she’s not enough to meet her husband’s needs.
Other men aren’t as fortuante as I was to realize the hold porn has over them until it’s too late, and eventually move on from computer images and videos to affairs and paying others for sex. Here’s a great example of that:
http://www.iamsecond.com/#/seconds/Nate_Larkin/
I realize there are men out there, men reading this that watch a little porn here and there, or who subscribe to Playboy or dabble with different internet sites, who feel like they’ve got this under control. I can only speak from my experience, and from the experiences of other men that I know that deal with this same deadly attraction, that there’s no such thing as a “safe” level of porn. Once it sinks its teeth into a man, its nearly impossible to overcome it. If you’re a man reading this, and you struggle with an addiction to porn, I highly recommend checking out a book called “Samson & the Pirate Monks.”
I used to read and comment occasionally on a marriage-enhancement community board, and there was a category for dealing with “porn addiction”. The most common comment was by a wife who had just “caught” (that word suggests some issues about the relationship all by itself) her husband looking at some on-line picture or video. The most common line was “I was just DEVASTATED, now I don’t know if I can ever think of him the same way again!”
Um. So that’s the big problem in your life, huh, lady? He isn’t a drunk, he’s not gambling away all of your assets, he goes to work every day and brings home food and housing money, he doesn’t chase the neighbor women around and have affairs. He looked at a video of people fooling around, and they were naked. Gawlee. Tell that to the woman in Haiti or Sudan or wife number 4 in Yemen.
Well. I certainly can see how that would be a big blow, given that there isn’t much else to complain about. This author referred to in Dr. Smith’s piece seems to me to be a bit like that standard reaction. And my standard counter-reaction is, “Why would he have the strength to stare at some picture or video if you are actually taking care of his sexual drives the way you promised to when you got married?”
And the response to that is, of course, that she isn’t. She has really important things to do- her job, the kids, maybe the girl friends, golf, even the health club (if she hasn’t gained 50 pounds since the wedding). Killing an hour a week (e.g., twenty minutes on each of Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday evenings, pick your own days) on something so difficult and unpleasant as making love to your husband just doesn’t rate on the priority list. The one pastime that historically first made marriage unique and committed and different from every other pairing isn’t worthy of attention. You prioritize and make time for what you believe is important. For a lot of porn “Devastated!” wives, wanna bet that this priority doesn’t really show up on the radar screen?
There are two basic types of married porn viewers. First, those who have a real issue with compulsiveness, and they are likely to show the OCD in other ways as well, unless they are among those who have a true sex disorder. The second category? I would bet that this is the vast majority of males. They are regular guys who don’t get enough for whatever reason. Their wives tend to fall into two broad classes as well: either they don’t care that much about sex unless they want a baby- they may also have been taught (often in church) that sex is sort of dirty unless you are procreating. Or they are oblivious to the differences between men and women due to repression or gender feminist-driven popular culture that says that a couple should have sex when both parties “feel like it” or are “in the mood”. With most couples, that frequency is about every day for him, and once every week or three for her, because of pure biochemistry. So if she isn’t in the mood, he should stifle it till she gets to that, if ever- after all, she can control her lust.
I will bet that this is exactly the category where the writer of that article fits.
I would happily predict the results of an anonymous survey of husbands to say that “in the mood” means about 10% or 20% as often for her as it is for him, and he wants more more more. For an average male with an average testosterone level, it builds up after release, and after about 48 hours he is again feeling quite itchy, that preoccupied driven sensation trailing only the needs for food, and avoiding pain/discomfort, and tied with the need for sleep. After a week, he’ll find Ethel Merman sexy. Do you see that this is a more basic uniquely male drive than any of the social interactions that motivate women? That is why he can be aroused by almost anyone, certainly not the case for her. And that, in turn, is why the massive majority of erotica is delivered to men. Chippendales is a novelty; “Sex World” is ubiquitous, and 95% frequented by men.
Regarding the very religious, go read the Song of Songs, then Proverbs 5, and then 1 Corinthians 7. St. Paul recognized that men would be preoccupied and “burn” unless they were married- and Paul then told the couples to Do It as much as was necessary to take care of the burning. Martin Luther said the same thing. A primary reason for marriage is to take care of the sex urges, and if they are there, you ain’t doing it enough. Husbands who are taken care of by their wives gravitate toward alternate choices because biochemistry pushes them that way. They can control it, sure. They should not have to, and really can’t, according to Paul, barring some actual pathology- which is a lot less common than, perhaps, Daphne, might admit- because they are simply made this way. The legalists disagree, of course. Mark Driscoll, a prominent evangelical minister in Seattle preached 10 weeks on the Song of Songs, and Philip Johnson of John MacArthur’s “Grace to You” broadcast basically accused him from the pulpit of being a sensationalist porn artist. Well, OK. I know who I’d listen to.
I may be nuts, but I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who prefers a two dimensional picture to a warm and willing wife. The only interest they usually have in bleach blonde bimbos like Pamela Anderson is the exciting idea that Pamela is Interested. The biggest draw for porn is not youth, long blonde hair, big chests, or odd positions- it is the fact that the female performers act like they WANT to participate- a bit of a change from real life.
Now, all men look. Period. We are built that way; we don’t know the objects of the looks. But we almost never touch, and usually don’t even stare, if we are not starving. If we are, we will peer intently and longingly at the meal that is sitting there. We’d prefer our own wives any day.
And the correct alternative takes one lousy hour a week for a willing spouse. And if 75% of the “porn widows” were honest, they would admit that they are mostly not willing, no matter what phony rationalizations they sell.
And of course, this applies equally to men. A woman has a right to experience pleasure from having sex with her husband. Now, it doesn’t have to be perfect every time, but you need to figure out a way to make it work.
AMEN, Kurmudge.
I read this article on NRO yesterday. What were they thinking when they published it? The writer, who I’ll call Anonymous wife, is creepy and disengenuous. I simply must perform a small Fisking. My emphasis is sparingly added with caps.
Okay…
“Imagine a drug so powerful it can destroy a family simply by DISTORTING A MAN’S PERCEPTION OF HIS WIFE.”
Based on the article, it seems to me that Anonymous wife’s husband doesn’t like her very much, doesn’t trust her, and maybe even thinks that she’s a jerk (I’m trying to be nice.)
I’ve never met Anonymous wife, but if my wife wrote an eloquent, yet vacuous internet appeal labeling me as a drunken, hapless, alcoholic-whore-chasing, internet-addicted pervert, I’d probably say she was a jerk. What family good can possibly ever come from irrevocably trashing the father of your five children on the internet? That stuff stays out there forever. Please don’t say she’s protecting him behind her anonymity. Any estranged Dad within a five-mile radius of anywhere with five kids is going to get squinted at, and she’s probably already put the link to her NRO article on her Facebook page so all of her friends and family can see it and commiserate. So… …hubby probably perceives her as a jerk. She comes off as a jerk. Sorry, no case for distortion there. And it has nothing to do with sex.
“Consider a narcotic so insidious… …thriving instead under the ever-expanding banner of the First Amendment”
It would be really easy for Anonymous to get away from that nasty, ever-expanding, First-Amendment (and probably porn, too) by moving to China or Saudi Arabia. Ah, but on the other hand, the world might then also be deprived of HER literary excretions. And that would be unfair.
A few snippets that go together “…my husband of 13 years and high-school sweetheart” and “…the home he shared with me and our five young children”, and “he began to reject my sexual advances outright, claiming he just didn’t “feel love” for me like he used to, and lamenting that he thought of me “more as the mother of our children” than as a sexual partner”
IMO, in a best case sexual scenario for hubby, the young children would differ in age from oldest to youngest by approximately eight to ten years (allowing for about a year between pregnancies to recuperate). That would mean that Anonymous wife has been pregnant or recovering from a pregnancy for nearly a decade. In the worst case sexual scenario, she’s been pregnant or recovering for the entirety of their thirteen year marriage.
Consider the time she’s been spending having kids, hubby’s sexual perspective of Anonymous wife as the mother of his children is pretty much spot on, and has been reinforced continuously throughout their marriage. Consider that sex during and following pregnancy is far from a sure or regular thing. Consider the strain that caring for baby-> infant-> infant-> toddler-> toddler puts on any marital sexual relationship. Couple all of this with the fact that Anonymous wife is a psychologist. Depending on whether she has a PHD or not, she has spent between 6 and 11 years since high school earning her undergraduate and graduate degrees, and hubby –her high school sweetheart– stuck with her through all of that (with possibly even a pregnancy or two mixed in). Any way you look at it, Daddy would have had to continually step up. Anonymous wife’s article doesn’t offer any information on that score for or against hubby. Wonder why?
I just have to ask. Have to. Have to. How many of the five pregancies were planned by both Anonymous and her husband, and how many were just “whoopsies”? To stave off the argument that it takes two to tango, I will emphatically state that MEN NEED TO TAKE CONTROL OF THEIR REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES. If the husband didn’t want that many kids, he should have taken control. On the other hand, I have overheard too often from women chatting with their friends that “I thought a second (third, etc.,) would be nice, so I just got pregnant”. If Anonymous was making the reproductive decisions unilaterally, hubby might have been having trouble rectifying the dichotomy of maintaining continuing blissful sexual relations with her vs. more mouths to feed and take care of (maybe even while she’s off doing some post-graduate work). Yum.
“In retrospect, I believe he succumbed to the allure of the secret fantasy life he had been indulging since his adolescence.”
Unfortunately, his “secret fantasy life” included living away from her in the basement. Some fantasy. Judging by Anonymous wife’s article, it probably improved his life. If she had manipulated him previously into having some of the children, he may also have been afraid of her getting pregnant again. It seems to me that when she felt her control of him slipping away, she began taking steps to re-establish control of the relationship. When that didn’t work, she looked to position herself for the courts to appear as though she were trying to repair the relationship (and he wasn’t). Too bad that the kids will be the ones who will pay the steepest price for both of their parents’ indiscretions.
Thank you Ms. Smith! That anti-porn article made it sounds like our wives are dying to have sex with us, but we just can’t pull ourselves away from the computer. That is not the case. “Not tonight honey” is a common phrase in many a household. Porn, to the contrary, is making alot of relationships bearable.
And since when does NR allow articles by anonymous writers?
I agree that there are probably few men who develop porn addictions who start out with a vigorous sex life with their wives. But unfortunately, I’ve seen a marriage collapse where what started out as looking at whacking material turned into requests to the wife to dress like a prostitute–then dress like a little girl. Yeah, it freaked her out real bad. The marriage was already in bad shape. (Of course, she was busily having steamy IM conversations with some guy in San Diego.)
LMFAO! Clayton, you iz nawty! Steamy IM conversations? *innocent look* bahahahaha!
I think it depends on the man, and all men, like all women, are different.
Most men can’t make themselves look away when they see something sexual.. but also, most men respect women and love their wives and would never degrade or objectify a woman.
Visual sexuality is male, period. ONe can spend too much time and energy watching that stuff, certainly… but it’s wasted time and distracted energy, not a runaway train to psychosis and misery.
THis woman has an axe to grind, clearly.
I really doubt at this point that our country is a great risk of suffering a cut-off of opportunities to view porn, and I don’t take the question of women trying to control men’s sexuality seriously. Of course they are. Nothing new here. But it is a bi-lateral struggle, don’t you think?
My question is this: don’t people have something better to do than look at porn? The problem with reading or viewing porn is that there are so many better ways to spend one’s time. Porn is not worthwhile just because we should be free to look at or read what we want. I think it is a serious problem simply on the basis of the time it displaces. I don’t advocate banning it, if that were possible, but I certainly think it is a waste of the time that men devote to it.
Oh lordy.
Men can’t have it both ways.
If you want Mom/Sister/Daughter to be ‘pristine’ and ‘pure’ and then you want to marry a woman who is a sex-crazed maniac, uh…hmmmm.
I have a sex-drive stronger than my husband’s, so should this give me license to fantasize about other men? What if ‘he’ finds pictures of naked men with unrealistically huge schlongs on my computer and gets upset? Should I tell him to suck it up because he doesn’t pleasure me even when he does get it up?
You guys that complain about your wife not wanting it much do realize you’re giving yourselves away as sh*tty lovers, right?
If you can find me a male who has complained about his wife “fantasizing” about other men, let us know; I’ve never encountered one, and I am not young. Most men would love it if their wives were that interested, and stared, or masturbated, etc.- it would at least give hope that they were actually interested in sex. I’ve never in my life heard of a male who complained that his wife watch porn or was jealous of her noticing a guy. It may happen- I’ve just never heard, read about, or seen it. I have, however, seen/heard/read of many women who try that argument. It tends to show that they have no real clue about the biochemical differences between men and women. Go read Prof. Steven Rhoads’ “Taking Sex Differences Seriously”.
We take you at your word that your sex drive is stronger than your husband’s, but pardon us if we are just a little bit skeptical of such anecdotes. Most cases where they Do It, because the wife initiates most of the time, are because he got tired of being rejected or persistently encountering the “cold shower subtleties”, that is, “leave me alone” body language. So he simply doesn’t initiate any more. Why lean into the punch? Now, if you are rubbing against him every other day and striking him through his jeans and he pushes you away that often, yeah, we might- might- buy it. After all, there are a few women who have higher than average testosterone levels (women make less but use it more efficiency, the net result is still not even close for most couples). But not as many as people pretend.
You’ve never even heard of insanely jealous men? Come on. I’ve known women whose husbands have a problem with them hanging out even with their female friends. Granted, that sort of control-freakism is not as rampant among married couples as it is in high school, but that’s not saying much.
That said, I personally never had a problem with the half or so of the women I’ve dated who have gotten excited by porn. But if they frequently spent hours with it in the basement, I’m pretty sure I would.
The other possible explanation is that there are a lot of women who are exhausted from working full-time, then coming home and doing nearly all the household chores. What a surprise that they lack energy for sex!
‘Unless there’s some trauma in her past, how many women are that completely uninterested in sex?’
More than there are men. Sometimes it’s for medical or psychological reasons, but sometimes her (or occasionally, less commonly, his) natural libido is just low. The former can be treated or sometimes dealt with, the later is not really ‘fixable’, because it isn’t a malfunction. It may be inconvenient, or troublesome, but it’s not something working other than its ‘supposed’ to.
This can sometimes wreck a marriage, if a high-libido person (not always the husband, but that’s more common) is married to a low-libido person (again, not always the wife but that’s more common). The ‘high’ one tends to be frustrated all the time, with emotional ramifications, the ‘low’ one gets sick of the constant pressure and starts to resent it. In some cases, there’s no real solution, either they find a way to make it work or they break up, but in the cases when the difference is just hardwired it rarely changes. (In cases where the low libido is treatable, that can be different, but sometimes there’s nothing to treat, just a natural low interest).
Nature plays a nasty little trick here sometimes too. A normally low libido person sometimes termporarily develops a high interest in the early stages of the relationship, and in those cases s/he can be just as dismayed as the partner when it fades away and s/he goes back to ‘normal’…and the other one doesn’t.
As for porn, almost all the comments here so far are true, or half-true, sometimes, for some people. Religious prohibitions against porn are inarguable, either you believe that it’s wrong or you don’t. The ‘pragmatic’ arguments for and against are debatable, most are valid at least in some cases or some of the time.
It’s unquestionably true that the popular-culture images of male/female relationships pushed through porn, romance novels, comic books, fairy tales, etc, _are_ damaging. Real life is _NEVER_ like the movies, something most of us realize when talking about car chases or the like, but too many of us forget when watching romantic comedies.
Too often married couples get together with heads full of ideas of how things are ‘supposed’ to work, only to reach with anger, frustration, resentment, or puzzlement when the reality is different. This can involve sex, family ties, money (a common one), attitudes, just about anything. Often it’s just a shock of discovering that your spouse is simply not the person you _thought_ s/he was, and in fact never was.
Is this avoidable? Not 100%. But our modern popular culture has become so poisonously toxic, in ways that include but go far beyond the nasty side of porn, that’s it difficult to avoid being zapped by it, it comes at you whether you zig or zag.
What about studies in Japan? I remember reading how they have quite a huge porn industry, especially with graphic novels (anime). Moreover, being able to access all this porn served as an outlet for “sexual energy,” such that there were less sex crimes in society.
There’s also a lot less sex in Japan period. Don’t know whether porn is a cause, symptom, or either or both. Their birth rates are at record lows. There are enough lonely singles that there’s a market for girlfriend robots and boyfriend-shaped pillows.
You might want to look into the actual statistics. Japan is, after all, the home of the Love Hotel.
Well, I have and here they are:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-06-02-japan-women-usat_x.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/30/japan
http://www.japantoday.com/category/kuchikomi/view/sexless-in-japan
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/15/health/main2572925.shtml
Rapey/tentacle cartoon porn genre is very popular in Japan. I would not be surprised if viewers of that genre have an even harder time relating to a real-life partners than those who watch porn with real-life actors.
I will tell you what I think Helen. I enjoy people who bring a keen analytical sense to a conversation as you have done. Years ago I started doing what you do here, turn things around and look at different slants to see what that feels like. It is an excellent strategy for getting out of the stereotypical frames we are handed everyday.
One thing I have always marveled at is the “Visual Male” meme. This sexist nonsense is in utter disregard to reality.
I’m not so sure if it’s so much about controlling men as it is about allowing women to maintain their sexual boundaries. What are you supposed to do when your partner begins consuming porn and desires to reenact porn fantasies that fall far outside your comfort zone?
Anyway, porn users often prefer to keep their usage a secret to keep a wall of separation between fantasy and reality. My husband became a rabid consumer of porn after a layoff and hid his usage expertly. I watched him morph from a patient, kind, and devoted husband and father into an emotionally distant prevaricator. He became miserable to live with because he preferred his secret fantasy world to his real world. He would pick fights with me just so he could withdraw into his office undisturbed. Making your reality more miserable may make your fantasy world more pleasurable and justified I guess.
My point is that porn addiction, like any addiction, is surrounded by deception and emotional withdrawal. I believe the author when she says it was the root cause of her divorce. It was the reason I almost left my husband.
I was more fortunate than her, however. My husband chose his marriage and family over porn. The man I married has returned to me.
I figure the other side in this debate constitutes two types:
1. Those who don’t view porn and thus don’t understand what its really about and
2. Those who frequently use porn and are desperate to justify it.
Human beings are rationalizers: we can always find excuses for bad behavior. Pity is the best attitude to have towards them – and a careful exposition of just how utterly nasty the “industry” really is. Its not like high minded, dedicated professionals gravitate towards getting 19 year old girls – who like they’re 12 – to have sex with middle-aged me on camera.
We’ve made a terrible mistake this past 40 years or so in allow pornography to come out of the gutter and in to our living room – we’ll be at least that long shoving it back down in to the sewer.
You know, that’s funny. I kind of got the impression that other side of this debate consisted of:
1. People too sexually repressed to recognize the pleasurable effects of sexual material, and
2. People so damaged by a sense of shame about sexuality that they desperately search for an external basis on which to blame their internal conflicts.
Yeah, that’s it – we’re just sexually repressed. And we need to be liberated – by using porn!
Seems I heard this before…back in the 70′s.
You know, the most amusing part about being subtle is how rarely the target catches on.
At least you were kind enough to see the illness of the man. Considerate and compassionate is virtue beyond this world. I read my story in your lines. I was the one left behind. Never to see his love again. Never to see the ones he thought friends. Kids and grandkids no longer here like a lone cry of the nights hoot owl. Never to see the grandkids walk, no plays, no recitals, gone and totally lost. Hate is the wound left where excitement once lived. The huge empty hole, a distruction in whole. No life is worth the five minutes of fun, when a life time of distruction is nothing but an empty lost soul. Porn is the posion of Satan for those who chose to sip the wine.
Glenn is a lucky man. He did a lot better choosing a wife than he did with his adopted daughters(Althouse,McArdle).
I probably would be addicted to pornography, but I’m too busy playing video games.
That was one of the funniest things I’ve read all week!
The insecure always want to force others to adapt to their insecurity rather than confront it and grow beyond it themselves.
“What about studies in Japan?”
Let’s not. Surveys show that the Japanese have less sex than darn near anybody, at least in marriage.
They are at least as conflicted as we are, despite being basically non-religious. The porn is pervasive and weird, but at least it’s wrapped in plastic and not easily accessible to kids anymore. (The beer machines are locked at night as well.)
I’d take the claim of fewer sex crimes with a grain of salt as well. For example, if anyone recalls the Mike Tyson rape case, my wife says there would never have been a prosecution in Japan. A single woman going to a man’s hotel room without expecting anything to happen would strain credibility.
If that doesn’t convince you, we could talk about the young lady who was raped by four Marines in Hiroshima. The Japanese police wouldn’t prosecute, because the girl was drunk and a girlfriend of one of the guys and her story was inconsistent. To their credit, the Marine Corps tried and fried the guys.
News flash: We’re all over-sexed. It’s absurd really. I suppose it all really started to go round the bend when man started living in cities but the last hundred years the curve has gone off the charts. It is not natural to see sexually charged images dozens of times ( at least ) a day and it starts at childhood now. It’s a great way to cause societal decay. C.S. Lewis thought it was all about breaking down our sale’s resistance but its a lot more than that. It may be a plot but it is definitely sick sick sick.
Reflections-
Background:
I ended up in a marriage that was sexless, and little affection also. She really didn’t like it so even when we did it, there was the sense of “lets go quick”. Besides for feeling devalued and worthless myself even though I had a successful career, I was very frustrated. I turned to porn more as a release, then strip clubs. Yes they were female bodies, but it felt cold and raunchy. I felt desperate, not attractive and approaching 50.
On a business trip to Reno, I went to the Sagebrush house, didn’t do a lineup but went to the bar. Started talking to a smart and fun lady – decided to give it a try. A fantastic night – she was a real woman. I’ve seen upscale internet escorts off and on for the 8 years since. At least the ones I see are not the pornstar type. I got to sample different cultures, ages, attitudes, styles, body types, enhanced bodies, athletes, and couch potatoes. I found that most of the women I was seeing were very smart and educated – at least college grads, often more. They were all there willingly and were often single mom’s that needed a job that paid well. The sexiest part of them was their brain! The good ones delivered intimacy as well as great sex.
I endured a year of marriage counseling, although a skilled psychologist it seemed like there was a lot of “how did that make you feel” Babel. Pretty useless. Later, I found a Life Coach that performed erotic massage; she was a former nurse that was also into new age, very smart and incredibly beautiful (and yes 41 years old). Best thing to happen in my life – 3 or 4 times a year keeps me tuned up and very positive about life, women, relationships, and sex that my partner enjoys.
I am now comfortable with who I am, happy, respectful of women, love intimacy, foreplay, cuddling, and quite in tune with women as friends, equals and partners. Interestingly, I’ve gone from most of my friends being guys to being friends with women. In contrast to the Hollywood and Porn industry stereotypes my preferred women are either 40+, size 12 dress, brunette Irish type professional or Asian 30+ with their small slender bodies. It is the rare woman that I don’t find something attractive with.
My points:
1. Sex / intimacy is the only area where we do not get hands on instruction by a professional (except underground as I did).
2. Couples should be working hard to have a healthy intimate relationship including sex. That relationship should take into account the differences in sex drives.
3. Porn has a place in society, but it bothers me how it has crept into the mainstream. Ie why did Titanic need a sex scene with exposed breasts.
4. Our society imposes monogamy onto a marriage when poly could be healthier.
5. I’m actually impressed how K-Lo broached the subject and followed up. It got a lot of discussion going that might not have otherwise.
There are two types of people in the world: 1) the type that masturbates/looks at porn, and 2) liars.
Porn is a good scapegoat for lifeless marriages though.
I didn’t know that conservatives have sex?
Of course they do. They spend all their time screwing the working people.
Really? Conservatives make the jobs, libs spend the tax money generated on social welfare programs. We’re the ones getting screwed.
I think you should give classes in deadpan sarcasm. Dang my sides hurt.
Where do you think little conservatives come from?
If porn is what a man/woman wants to do, who am I to stop that individual?
BUT, I will contend (from observation and experience) that it has the powerful ability to dehumanize individuals. Like it or not, men were created as instinctive visual creatures. “Men got needs”. But any man playing that game also needs to accept, “Women got needs too.” (And woman’s needs are no less important.) Like it or not, women were also created to have an emotional need to be treasured highly above any other women. Which this explains why an attractive woman will settle for the ugliest man as long as he makes her feel like she’s the most important and only woman for him.
Unless one accepts God’s creation of man and woman and His plan for them, one will never understand this. I know some will guffaw at this, but ALL the women I know (and yes, I know many including non-Christians) seem to emulate the “church” (Christ’s bride) instinctively. They have a natural need for one man to give up himself UNSELFISHLY for her. . . protect her, cherish her, willing to die for her, and even protect her from himself and his selfish ways. (It’s selfishness and disrespect ultimately in the details of a destroyed marriage. And sorry, folks, but porn is a selfish hobby that destroys. It’s not the only selfish hobby BTW.)
Ultimately, it’s not he PORN itself that consumes its victims and destroys marriages, families, and even the individual (married or single, young or old, rich or poor). It’s SELFISHNESS.
Okay, okay. Some men and women are not bothered by it. Or at least, they have soothed themselves with the idea that it’s culturally normal and accepted. I’d love to see the number of women, afraid to take a stand in public, actually come out in private and admit, “Yeah, I try to accept it, but it’s hurt me.”
It amazes me the number of women who say in public they are okay with it, and in private, they are hurting so badly and trying to cope and accept it.
Nonetheless, I wouldn’t impose my morality onto someone else. And again, SELFISHNESS in all forms, regardless of the gender exercising it, can hurt others. The issue is about respect really.
If you are okay being in a relationship with a porn addict, go for it.
If you aren’t okay with it, DON’T GET IN A RELATIONSHIP with someone who would disrespect your feelings. Set your standards, and don’t put up with anything less.
And yes, there are some mighty fine, decent males (and females too) who are not into porn. Not everybody looks at it, contrary to what culture will have you believe.
By some of the comments here you’d think a guy wouldn’t be able to pull one off without porn. lmao
Man, I’m appreciating my husband more than EVAH!
I completely agree: the core problem in just about every marriage is selfishness. It used to be that it was largely a man thing–because women were socialized to be obedient little helpmeets. But in the last several decades, I’ve seen a disturbing side effect of both liberation and the collapse of Christianity in the U.S.: widespread selfishness among both men and women. In traditional America, a selfish guy would just drive his cheery little wife into depression, then alcoholism or prescription drugs. But in post-Christian America, two selfish people can’t make a marriage last. I can only hope that they get the divorce before they have kids–who really get the shaft from a divorce.
There’s another consideration in the way men and women relate to each other, and that is that we’re attracted to the same people, over and over. By which I mean that very often, if you look at the various members of the opposite sex that someone has been attracted to over the course of their lifetime (whether anything came of it or not), the looks, personality, etc, are similar. Sometimes this is harmless, but sometimes it’s a problem, like the abused spouse who finally gets away from the abuser, only to get together witih the same kind of person next time, _because something about that sort of person attracts them_.
Often, when we hear a woman say ‘men are such-and-such’ or ‘women do such-and-such’ in a sour or bitter way, we find a person who is drawn precisely the sort of man or woman who does the thing s/he hates. In this case, self-knowledge can be a (very painful) source of freedom.
Sorry, Helen, you are full of more crap than a Christmas goose. I really don’t care about “controlling men’s sexuality.” Men are so afraid that somewhere Mommy’s going to come back and tell them not to touch lil’ willy anymore. Honestly, are there any real men left anymore?
I can verify Anonymous’s experience. My husband got more and more into porn to the point that it took away his interest in participating in family life, and certainly took away his interest in sex with a wife. He said he didn’t want to make the effort to relate to a person. It was too much trouble (and no, I’m not demanding; anything but). And no, I’m not 300 pounds and ugly.
When I put pressure on his addiction, because it was violating his marriage, he took up with a mentally unstable woman who promised him he could have his porn. According to what she said to others, the addiction grew, and he was masturbating to it.
Helluva example to the kids. You guys can justify this all you want, and I feel sorry for your women. There are lots of studies out there that back up what I’m saying. Read them.
Now he’s got no woman at all, other than the pictures online to masturbate to. And I learned that sometimes breaking up is the happy ending.
Enjoy.
Now, let’s rescue our sons and daughters from the cultural lies that porn is okay before they buy it.
Ahead of us lies an entire generation who will greatly benefit the therapy industry if we don’t at least get the message out.
“And I learned that sometimes breaking up is the happy ending.”
I’m sure I’d feel that way if I were in his shoes, too.
The anonymous writer claims that porn “produces more annual revenue — $97 billion worldwide in 2006 — than all of the leading technology companies combined.”
In 2006, Hewlett-Packard alone had net revenue of $91.7 billion.
The anonymous writer was playing fast and loose with reality.
You do know the difference between net revenue and profit margin, don’t you? HP spend an awful lot of money to make that money champ. Porn is more profitable than HP by some order of magnitude.
Not that I really care. Porn is freely available and I don’t care what people do in their own homes.
Original said “revenue” though, not “profit”, so the complaint stands from my reading…
I agree that pornography is not the disease, but merely a symptom of it. Married men wouldn’t be turning to it (and, of course, relationships with other women) if they had any integrity.
I don’t know what kind of “doctor” this Helen quack is but she must’ve got her PHD thru Cracker Jack’s or saving enough cereal box tops for a certificate.
There is MORE THAN ENOUGH scientific PROOF and FACTS that porn is one of the most dangerous ‘drugs’ in the world. If you cannot see the effects of porn and violence and how it’s shaping out culture,lives,history then you yourselves have been blinded,duped,and controlled by it.
May God–Who resurrected Jesus roughly 2000 years ago to free us all from these sins–open your eyes and set you free.
You’re right! We need to return to traditional Biblical values to discover the true meaning of marriage.
Now: On your back, Rachel, and give me a son, or else I’m sleeping with your maid Bilhah tonght. Or maybe I’ll do your sister Leah, or Leah’s maid Zilpah. It’s all good.
Umm…It was Rachel who was angry at Jacob for not giving her a son. She was frustrated that Leah was able to produce sons, but she could not. So she asked jacob to sleep with her maidservant who would produce a son on her behalf. Leah did the same.
Put up or shut up. Lets see some “facts” that porn is a dangerous drug.
With porn, the pill and masturbation aids being widely available without social stigma, it’s a wonder we have any birth rate at all. Those too dumb to have sex without getting someone pregnant are probably lowering the general IQ.
I’m not really sure what your title means. “Men’s sexuality” or just the term “sexuality” just seems like a vague buzz word to me. Is there such a thing as “inflatable woman sexuality” or “magazine/porn site sexuality?” Sex refers to the mixture of genetic material from a male and a female partner, no? In that case, everything else is just eroticism. A self-sustaining society needs more than just eroticism. It needs sex and, being human, it needs an arrangement for raising and socializing its young. Sorry to be so clinical, but those basic facts pretty much answer the assertions about pornography being either neutral or positive. If personal satisfaction or orgasm becomes the most important part of eroticism, why bother with “relationships,” which these days seem to be almost universally condemned as ill-fated or very difficult to maintain, at best?
Has any study been done on how mass media portray marriage vs. “hooking up?” How broadly accepted is the preference for life-long marriages any more? Is it even concurred in by social scientists? They always seem to tell us that such things are hang ups to be shed in order to be mentally healthy.
As far as feminism goes, I don’t believe that anything about it is healthy. It perpetuates the view of the sexes as a competition for power, an application of Marxism to sex roles.
Helen, you are pulling to the left.
A libertarian/leftist would only speak of porn in such fond terms.
Considering the incredible explosion in porn availability over the past few decades, the huge story here is the LACK of obvious social consequences. However, attempts to control other human beings by declaring them sinful or pathological are as old as the hills. I think Dr. Helen has it about right.
I think there is a big difference between someone who looks at hard-core, BDSM porn 3 hours a day vs. someone who looks at a Playboy once every couple of weeks. I think the former is a sign of a deviant, the latter just symptomatic of a normal, red-blooded male.
I read the article on the day it was posted. Then I read Dr. Helen’s, who seemed to be writing about a different article. I re-read the original and decided Dr. Helen was misrepresenting it. “My main problem with this piece is the insinuation that porn is to blame for an entire generation not being able to form lasting marriages. . . .” I didn’t discover the insinuation, nor did I leave the article with the distorted conclusion. There are plenty of studies that demonstrates what Anonymous was arguing for in the article. Dr. Helen’s dismissive attitude toward an arguable public health threat does not seem to line up with either the facts or a sanctified form of common sense.
Dr. Helen is quite correct.
Anything that is “forbidden” or has excess control from someone else results in the behavior going “underground”.
My favorite example is prohibition.
Speak easies flourished, illegal alcohol was rampant.
Prohibition did not make people see alcohol as anything other than an illicit thrill.
The same can be said for many drugs. Marijuana for instance.
Men are visual creatures, and have been going to see “porn” for hundreds of years.
Burlesque, saloon dancehall girls, peepshows all go back many hundreds of years and have been called many things.
Most of the people that seek to “abolish” porn are well meaning, but totaly unrealistic.
I am staring 50 in the eye, have been married 26 years, and dearly love my wife.
I will accept the abolition of porn, if it includes “romance novels” ,those stupid “valentines day movies”, and lifetime television.
If you want to take mine away, you can’t have yours either.
Dr. Helen, I agree with you. There are women who have never grown up, who think that sex is dirty and can’t have a sexual relationship without guilt, even with a loving and committed partner. These women then try to stamp out all sexual feelings in their partners. Yep, it’s a control issue.
I feel as bad as the next person that her marriage didn’t work out, but isn’t it possible that she….
– kept putting on the pounds and made no effort to get back in shape
– became frumpy and uninterested in sex
– wanted her husband to see her give birth, emotionally blackmailed him to be there, which not only caused him to stop seeing her in a sexy way, but also lead to other underlying emotional issues
– flat out completely refused to let him even try to put it in her poopslot
– didn’t even once try to watch some porn with him, instead used it as a cudgel to increase the emotional division in their marriage even further
Porn didn’t ruin her marriage, it just gave that poor bloke a chance to try and recapture what she would not do anymore. Maybe he was only looking into the loving eyes of Ashley Blue, Amber Rain, or some other young woman, as opposed to other parts of their sweet nubile anatomy.
Oh I was quite open sexually with my younger ex Guy. I was and still am in great physical shape (even when he had a pot belly) and I wore the purple penetrator strap-on and had guy take it like a man because that is what turns me on and he should accommodate my sexual needs right? If he refused I retreated into my pornorama room to masturbate in frustration or had my pool boy walk around on a leash for me or I’d hire some of my male dancers to strip tease for me. I also liked watching men on men having sex in pornos which is more realistic than men on female porn but Guy become uncomfortable like a little priss who couldn’t handle such beautiful acts of lovemaking between two hot men (much hotter than those hideous troll men in hetero porn) and we eventually divorced and I moved on to greener pastures and greener men who were willing to experiment. I guess I’m just more woman than most men can handle but I’m still on the prowl.
Hell! I wrote the SEXbook for heaven’s sake! I’m all about SEX!
I need a man with an open mind, a passion for gay porn and a ready and willing anus so that I can pound his a-spot. Is that too much to ask? I think not.
He’s out there somewhere. . . Oh yes, he’s out there somewhere. . .
Sincerely,
Madge
Thank you for writing this. I couldn’t stomach to read the entire article you are responding to, a fine example of the kind of “social conservatism” I was hoping had been left behind in the early 90′s.
It is this kind of nonsense that leaves so many among the young vulnerable to the siren song of the left. The leftists portray themselves as liberators, and conservatives as tyrannical fuddy-duddies. The leftists are NOT liberators, but that doesn’t mean that their depiction of (some) conservatives as would-be social tyrants is incorrect.
Pornography is in the mind of the beholder. Reactionary opposition to sexually arousing materials is not based upon a careful contemplation of their costs and benefits, but upon irrational feelings of fear and disgust about sex itself.
Sex is not evil, but some people feel that it is. The reasons some feel this way are steeped in flaws within the culture of America that come to manifest themselves as flaws within the psyches of some Americans. In other words it’s irrational nonsense that these people have been carefully conditioned to believe by others who were equally irrational, usually when they were quite young. Sex = bad becomes a reflex for them. How they are able to marry and have children is still quite surprising to me.
Sex is good, but only when it is handled with wisdom. An automobile is good, but in the hands of an incompetent driver can lead to death and destruction. Sex is the same way.
No sane person has a conniption at the sight of a car, or of people driving cars. Yet when the subject is sex it seems that all sanity goes right out the window for these people and they begin acting like paranoid schizophrenics.
Crazy is as crazy does.
I’m just thankful that I’m not one of them.
As for me, I don’t really like porn. I don’t watch porn for the same reason that I don’t watch wrestling: It’s fake. I don’t think it is damaging to anyone, I just don’t think it is worth watching. It isn’t interesting because it isn’t real.
Show me a video in which a woman I’d want to have sex with is truly enjoying sex with her husband or boyfriend and I’ll be interested in watching that. Unfortunately that isn’t what the people who make porn actually produce. What they do make seems to cater to adolescent males, or at least males who never matured past that point.
In a world where the left is attempting to create a Marxist dystopia here in the United States, we don’t have the luxury of indulging the neuroses of “social conservatives.”
I disagree.
Any woman knows that guys who look at a lot of porn are lousy in bed. And in regards to rape, a few years ago my psychology textbook reported that the areas with the most porn purchased per capita were also the areas with the highest incidents of rape, and that in my hometown a police psychologist reported that every rapist was heavily into porn.
As for “all men look at it”, well, you may be right, many struggle to control their addiction to it, it is very alluring to us guys. We have all succumbed at one point or another – but many of us are trying to muster the self control to turn away from it, just like we muster the self control to go to work every day to earn for our families.
Common sense tells us that married men who look at a lot of porn are probably not servicing their wives, and that looking at porn can make wives seem unsatisfactory (who wants go to all the trouble to be romantic when you can just quickly and quietly masturbate to some sex scene?). And do you really think that even when those guys sleep with their wives, the way they have been programmed to jerk of quickly and quietly makes them great lovers?
Porn is bad for relationships. To note that is not to take away anyone’s rights, it’s just a statement of fact.
On reflection, it seems strange that the Americans expect men and women to defer sex and family, or at least family, for a decade after puberty. That seems to be the characteristic perversion of this time, the one so widespread and customary that most consider it virtuous.
Kralizec, I’ve often wondered about this. We have a situation in which the age of consent has been going up for some time, while the age of puberty has been going down. It would seem there is a real conflict there.
I love how the media and society tries to cast pornography as a “male” problem even though a recent study in Australia found that 1 in 3 women watch porn: http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national/one-in-three-women-watch-porn-study/story-e6freooo-1225828848899
Here are some more details statistics about the viewing habits of women and pornography: http://internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/internet-pornography-statistics-pg6.html
The truth is that pornography is just as much a female problem as it is with a male problem. The only thing is that we’ve attached stigma to men watching it.
Porn in marriage is mostly about difference in sex drive level. Or its about lack of attraction. You still love your partner but 50 lbs is 50 lbs and no amount of love makes it attractive. Porn is obviously natural. It’s been around as long as civilization has. Prostitution would almost certainly be much more prevalent without it. I’d venture it saves far more relationships than it severs.
You can take anything ‘natural’ and make it ‘disgusting’ and ‘unnatural’.
Eating is ‘natural’. Obesity and overeating to the point of gluttony is ‘unnatural’.
Masturbating is healthy (especially for men’s prostates) but, you don’t need ‘porn’ to go there.
Example?
If you’re stranded alone on a desert island without any porn, I can guaranfreakin’tee you that you’ll be fine and dandy using your imagination.
Just as Prostitution needs ‘Johns’ to keep going so too does Porn (the other ‘P’ word).
But, hey, keep the smut industry rich with your dependence on it.
Men don’t need porn to masturbate huh? You know what else men don’t need? Women trying to tell us what to do. Buzz off and stay out of our private lives.
If you don’t grow-up and continue to be the 15-YO boi whacking off, I could care less. I just feel bad for any female you might encounter that you haven’t given full disclosure of your porn addiction to.
If you’re so ‘proud’ of it, tell every girl you date that you’re a porn-freak.
At the very least, be honest about it.
I agree with the Insta-Wife. Porn is an outlet for male sexuality in a world where women increasingly control which males get to procreate. I know many women look at porn and cringe, but they should not be afraid of it.
Porn is far safer than prostitution.
Porn is prostitution. The line is so blurry as to not exist. The only difference is that one is legal and the other not. Prostitution is sex-acts for money–so is porn. Check out the stories of some women who’ve ‘escaped’ porn at http://www.thepinkcross.org/
Make sure you’re not feeling queasy when you do.
It needs to be pointed out – apparently – that Helen Smith’s essay neither advocated for porn nor against it; she was addressing the more specific and much narrower topic of the over-the-top and wildly inflated claims certain people make about the harm it causes. In the same way that demurring in the face of someone’s assertion that spitting on the sidewalk will cause the plague and result in millions of deaths doesn’t make one an advocate for spitting, people can disagree with some of the more outlandish claims made about the harm caused by porn without in any way advocating for porn.
Few reasonable people would argue with a straight face that pornography – depending on how one defines it – is good for society. (The – inevitable – men who make such a claim are basically saying, in a proudly recalcitrant and vaguely prurient way, “I like it” – an entirely unnecessary assertion, because no one on earth would dispute it.) On the other hand, over-the-top claims that “porn destroyed my wonderful marriage” and so on will – and should – always run into reasonable doubt. The urge to claim that one’s marital problems are entirely caused by some outside agency – porn, in this case – rather than the husband’s personal psychological problems is understandable, but not necessarily reasonable. While it’s obviously not conducive to a sound marriage to have one’s husband obsessively consumed by porn, it’s highly doubtfulthat self-loverboy would have been, you know, a really Tom-terrific husband if only he hadn’t stumbled across some online porn one day.
I sometimes wonder if some of the more over-the-top over-reactions to porn might be a subconscious, practically genetic-level, and justified reaction to the low-level pornification of the public sphere, which is so much more beyond personal control. Popular music specifically marketed to teen and pre-teen girls often shows women dressed like hookers performing squatting gyrations and making sexual-pleasure faces; rappers who are wildly popular with young people often refer to women, in violent terms, as disposable and worthless sex toys.
Such public behavior, on a mass-marketed, social level, has a greater negative effect on far more families and children, by many orders of magnitude, than men’s private viewing of naked women does. For 99 percent of men – or, if you question them directly, about 12 percent – the old adage “once you’ve seen one naked woman, you want to see them all” is true at a limbic level. The fact that some men’s brains light up like a Christmas tree covered in klieg lights that won’t shut off is a different problem altogether, but it’s not a new problem, and it’s not caused by images of naked women. Across the centuries and around the globe, long before there was online porn, a certain subset of men have had problems with violence, despondency, obsessiveness, depression, incommunicativeness, etc. It’s understandable that some concerned and sincere women who see the rather pointed, modern, time-bound visual manifestation of these tendencies in their husbands and loved ones might convince themselves that removing the visual evidence will enable them to control the tendencies of the such inevitable outliers, but sadly it’s just not true.
I’m beyond speechless right now. I’ve found PJM to be quite entertaining and informative regarding issues of economics, but this is absolutely ludicrous.
1) As my name suggests, I choose not to masturbate. I also reject any claim that “All men” masturbate. They don’t. Some men, believe it or not, experience real sexual freedom.
2) Freedom in our sexuality is not about being able to have access to many different experiences or partners. Freedom in Sexuality is about being able to direct all of our sexuality in an authentically human way. This is primarily in a human’s ability to sacrifice itself for the benefit of others – a total gift of self. A total gift of self is a uniquely human ability. It happens in war, when a soldier sits on a grenade and saves his fellow soldiers lives. In the sexual act, the gift of self occurs not in seeking your own fulfillment sexually, but in seeking your spouse’s fulfillment. That is why masturbation is ‘wrong.’ It is a less than human act, because it is about self indulgence rather than self donation. Not only that, but there is nothing more pathetic than sitting in front of your computer screen with your pants around your ankles, looking over your shoulder to make sure your spouse/girlfriend/roomate/children don’t see you pleasing yourself.
3)The author is correct that there are problems beyond pornography that affect marriages, but it is ignorance on her part to say that pornography doesn’t have a particularly harmful effect on them (though I include romance novels as a type of porn).
Eliminating pornography is is not about controlling men’s sex lives (would we say that eliminating prostitution is controlling men’s sex lives)? . It is all about helping men act more like real men… men capable of true freedom… capable of self mastery and self donation so that their wives can have a wonderful sex life as well. In this gift of self is where men find a fulfillment deeper than an act of masturbation.
Don’t buy into the lie that this type of freedom isn’t possible for you or your spouse.
Now procede to mock this post.
Good post. I skimmed the bulk of the posts and was surprised at the lack of self discipline and the emphasis on self-gratification. My wife and I are very happily married, even though sex is limited due to illness. But when we have it, it is very good, and very normal. No kinky stuff needed. What seems to be missing in the vast majority of posts I’ve seen here is the recognition that there is more to sex than the physical. My wife and I enjoy that non-physical aspect immensely, and that is why neither of us will stray or turn to porno. Like “The Man Who Chooses Not To”, we have real freedom, real happiness, and really good sex.
I won’t mock it but alluding to self actualization or having a spiritually deep relationship through sex with your spouse in a thread about masturbation and porn is asking for attack. You are a man who has taken sexuality to the place where it was intended to go in a way that fully integrates body, mind and spirit. I’m sure there will be those who want to shoot the messenger.
Porn has taken the place of moving forward in relationship. It’s a way of standing still. It serves a need, but just like donuts are not a meal, visuals are not a relationship.
You hit the nail on the proverbial head when you speak about giving. It’s so easy for people to speak about needing something, but responding to a partner and giving them what they need seems to either be low on the list or non-existant. If both parties are willing to move forward, and both are giving, then they both end up receiving.
Porn, romance novels, romantic movies, all of those things are narcissistic. Singular, insular, solitary activities. The anthesis of interpersonal relationship. At the same time, it’s just a symptom of the refusal to give, to be involved, to ask for what you need and to give what is needed.
A man barks, ‘eh she’s demanding and doesn’t give me what I need’. A woman retreats, he doesn’t want me, he won’t give me what I need. Two solitary beings walking around without getting their needs met and blaming the other.
People have to be willing to move past the ego or it won’t go anywhere. And so much of the time the answer is not what is that person willing to do for you, but where are you willing to go in your head?
Aw forget it, click click click is just so much easier…
Will you marry me?
Anna – Sorry. Can’t marry you. I’m taken, so to speak. But there is an observation a very smart man once made that I found extremely profound when I was in college and still ponder today:
“Pornography is not ‘wrong’ because it reveals too much of a person. It is wrong because it reveals too little of a person and reduces them to an object.”
If this is true, and I believe it is, the consequences should be obvious. If he objectifies a particular woman he will very likely objectify other women, including his wife. The Witherspoon institute research supports this, and if anyone here hasn’t already, I really recommend that you give it a visit.
One thing I found interesting from the report is how it shapes the users brain to determine what is ‘normal’ sexual activity. As the porn user continues viewing, he becomes increasingly exposed to fetishes or other forms of gratification. Consider anal sex… men who watch porn believe this occurs much more frequently among married couples than it actually does. If this is research is true then it can be expected that these men will expect their wives to engage in the act even if it is repulsive to her. Pornography, of course, never shows the damage that this does to the body of the receiver (whether the receiver is a woman or a man) since the actor always pretends like she enjoys it.
Next time a man wants his wife to engage in anal sex, I would ask him to consider whether or not he enjoyed his last prostate exam.
Suicidal Idiot sez: “…You should be grateful that he’s looking at porn….” *********** Why should I be grateful that my husband is looking at porn?? When he masterbates over Internet porn, he doesn’t want to do me. He will hold pleasant conversations with me, but dodges a goodnight kiss. And he views porn and masterbates 15 minutes before we leave to go see our grandkids. How is that a good thing?? It interferes with our sex life, and our sexual intimacy is non-existent.
A man that chooses not to masturbate (1:41):
First of all, I assure you that you’re neither speechless nor ineloquent. I do feel compelled to point out, though – once again – that neither Dr. Helen nor any commenter in this thread advocated masturbation or porn-watching, nor suggested that either activity, either singly applied or in combination, is either commendable, recommended, or finally rewarding. That being said, the general tenor of your comment entirely corroborates the good doctor’s point, which is that the spectre of particular women blaming porn itself for the behaviour and attitudes of their husbands/spouses is a misdirection, because it drives the blame away from the husband or spouse and in the direction of the inchoate harm known as “porn.” Inasmuch as you positively claim your own sexuality with an iron grip, and in the name of causes far more noble than porn, you clearly understand that your sexual offerings, being a gift to your spouse, are borne on a force far greater than the otherwise dominating force known as porn, and that this personal choice/responsibility is a godsend of sorts to the woman in your life.
By honorably putting the onus for your listed potential behaviors directly upon yourself – in a quite enlightened fashion, to be honest – instead of blaming “porn” for any past or potential fall from grace on your part, you actually make Dr. Helen’s specific point, which is that those women who blame “porn,” rather than the potentially stalwart men in their lives, are engaging in a form of spiritual misdirection; your evident inclination to own up to your own behavior reflects, in a roundabout way, the root of Dr. Helen’s post, which is that individuals’ choices – including wifey’s choice of spouse – carry more weight than does the blaming of some inchoate category of societally-available pleasure – “porn” – for any consequential shortfall in life satisfaction.
You wrote eloquently of your own personalized decision to not waste the special gift that you have specially reserved for your special loved one “in front of (a) computer screen with your pants around your ankles, looking over your shoulder to make sure your spouse/girlfriend/roomate/children don’t see you pleasing yourself.” Doesn’t this sacrifice on your part, and the reasoning you’ve provided for making it, at least suggest that you understand that if it ever comes to pass that your wife or the listed others ever find you in such an awkward position it would be entirely reasonable for her or them to blame you, and solely you – and more to the point, your judgement, and perhaps your general lack of wherewithal – for that uncomfortable scenario, rather than blaming it on the rather inchoate catch-all phrase known as “porn”?
The point you make, A man who chooses not to masturbate, is, in a nutshell, Dr. Helen’s point. Your iron grip on your own sexuality is admirable, and if you knock away the surface differences with appropriate vigor, your comment and Dr. Helen’s post are actually not so very far apart.
I think there is such a thing as men, or women, becoming obsessed with porn, but it’s a symptom of problems in the relationship. I met my first husband when we were teenagers. He was afraid and embarrassed to buy his own porn magazines and I would buy them for him. I was a cheerleader in high school and considered myself to be quite cute. He had come from a very strict religious background and being the only boy (because his father had left), he did not have a lot of male modelling in handling relationships. I wasn’t threatened by the porn and didn’t object to it until years later when we had kids, then I asked him to just keep it where they couldn’t find it. After the birth of our first child I became aware of his need to masturbate a lot. Still, I wasn’t concerned. I don’t believe that he was doing anything any differently, just that I became more aware of it. When our second daughter was about three, I asked him to move his magazines out of the hall closet, because the girls might find it. He failed to do that, so I burned the entire collection. That seemed very harsh to him and he felt like I had changed my viewpoint. I hadn’t, but I had two small girls in the house and I didn’t want to explain why Daddy liked to look at naked women. I was still a lean, trim and pretty woman, so I wasn’t threatened by the porn. In fact, often before I would leave for work, he would want to watch me get dressed or see what kind of panties I was wearing. Eventually, he was unemployed and I was working three jobs to keep us alive. I became less available in the marriage and he began to feel powerless. He seemed to have become obsessed with porn and with masturbating, and being more open about looking at other women. When he did finally go back to work, he had an affair with a co-worker. He decided he wanted a divorce and I left. At times, I think he preferred porn to a real woman. To me, porn doesn’t seem any worse than a fantasy, the biggest difference being that you can turn off the TV, PC or you can close the magazine. Most of the images are already in a person’s head anyway. Women have fantasies, too, but they often won’t admit that they enjoy masturbating while remembering a past lover or an imaginary lover, or that they enjoy fantasies about doing sexual things that they would never actually carry through. We women are afraid to tell our men that we might think of someone else when we have sex with them, and rightfully so. They will probably accept it in the moment, but like us, when they examine the idea they can’t be objective about it and think they aren’t measuring up in some way. Let’s think about a common fantasy that both men and women share. Every man believes that a bigger penis means he will be a better lover. He thimks sex will be better for both him and his partner. Every woman, at some point, may wish that her partner’s penis was bigger. The woman’s idea of a bigger penis is probably very different than a man’s idea of a bigger penis. A woman is usually thinking about a little bit bigger while a man is thinking about a lot bigger. of course, this is my own POV, I have no idea what other women imagine, but I do know that when I was presented with a monstrous penis, it was just a physical impossibility and incredibly frustrating for both of us. Needless to say, that relationship didn’t last long. I thought I was weird for not being physically able to accomodate my partner, and maybe that is true. But there are lots more guys out there with average-sized equipment, so I’m not too worried that I can’t find someone. I think the biggest thing for most people, whether you’re a man or a woman, is feeling secure in the relationship. We often treat marriage like it’s the end of the relationship, but it should be treated as a time where we will concentrate and grow together with another person, in many ways, especially sexually. I don’t approve of how available porn is but once a boy becomes a teenager, sexual fantasies are normal and looking at pretty (or whatever you like) girls are normal.
Reminds me of a quote….
“One school would allow man no flavor for his fare and the other would have us all on a straight pepper diet. We want to stay out of this controversy. We do not want to be the arbiter of anyone’s sex conduct. We all have sex problems. We’d hardly be human if we didn’t. What can we do about them?…..”
I guess if you are interested and can find the quote you could read their suggestions.
I found your article interesting.
I notice everyone in the comments seems to be attacking porn as awful and men who view it as disgusting pigs, but totally ignored your superb point about the expectations romance novels and sappy movies give women. Many of those romance novels women read are just as trashy as hardcore porn, without the stimulating pictures.
Porn isn’t a cut and dry issue. There are COUPLES who view it together as a way to get through a libido low, etc. Many men watch it without raping anyone or messing up their marriages. If it works for you to not watch, more power to you. But not everyone is some lecher going to hell for discriminately choosing to view it.
The problem is not that it ‘shows’ too much of the sexual act but that it shows too little- of THE SOUL.
God bless.
Erotic images in the mind of a man can be an aid when having sex with a wife or long-term girlfriend. The brain acts as a sex organ, a stimulus. If the partner is all the man needs for stimulation, that’s great. If images in his mind, however, can add to his intensity or supply something that’s lacking, it’s also good. Of course, re. assessing porn, it depends on what kind of porn, how much and in what way the guy uses it, etc. A normal male looking at pretty ladies is not a problem we have to worry about. A psychopath looking at sadistic porn–is. It can make him worse.
Perhaps when Anonymous was writing this article, she should have taken a look at both sides of the porn issue. Had she been less emotionally distraught, she might have seen this study that found “all men watch porn” and that porn did not change the men’s perception of women or their relationships:
The study found that men watched pornography that matched their own image of sexuality, and quickly discarded material they found offensive or distasteful.
Prof Lajeunesse said pornography did not have a negative effect on men’s sexuality.
“Not one subject had a pathological sexuality,” he said. “In fact, all of their sexual practices were quite conventional.
“Pornography hasn’t changed their perception of women or their relationship, which they all want to be as harmonious and fulfilling as possible,” he added.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I quit reading when I got to that part. If you truly think that all men watch porn, and these answers are accurate for all men, you are delusional.
The woman who wrote that article obviously knows more about the dangers of porn than you do. I don’t know that she is 100% accurate, but I know you are starting from a 100% faulty premise.
Perhaps when Anonymous was writing this article, she should have taken a look at both sides of the porn issue. Had she been less emotionally distraught, she might have seen this study that found “all men watch porn” and that porn did not change the men’s perception of women or their relationships:
The study found that men watched pornography that matched their own image of sexuality, and quickly discarded material they found offensive or distasteful.
Prof Lajeunesse said pornography did not have a negative effect on men’s sexuality.
“Not one subject had a pathological sexuality,” he said. “In fact, all of their sexual practices were quite conventional.
“Pornography hasn’t changed their perception of women or their relationship, which they all want to be as harmonious and fulfilling as possible,” he added.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I quit reading when I got to that part. If you truly think that all men watch porn, and these answers are accurate for all men, you are delusional.
The woman who wrote that article obviously knows more about the dangers of porn than you do. I don’t know that she is 100% accurate, but I know you are starting from a 100% faulty premise.
I wonder if this woman ever thought that the main problem was that she is a psychologist?
Most men detest getting analyzed for everything they do and say, and somehow she strikes me as the type that just *has* to offer her opinion on everything.
He has probably told her that “I watch pr0n because when *she* opens her mouth, it’s not to shrink my head”.
In other words, the problem is likely not pr0n, but *her*.
I think the problem lies not with adult men who grew up sneaking their Dad’s playboy magazine, but with the generation who spend their formative years self-gratifying in front of the computer. The computer then becomes the thing that turns them on.
The fact is, that the human sex drive IS powerful. There’s a reason! Without it, the population would die off. It’s not the responsibility of government to limit or regulate porn, it’s the job of parent to teach their kids about their sex drives and how to manage them.
I usually like Dr. Helen’s point of view, but here she just does a shoddy job. Her rebuttal is to site a study? Oh, yeah, that settles it.
Everyone knows, deep inside, that porn has a deleterious effect. It divorces men from reality. Too much daydreaming does the same thing and it ain’t good.
There are an awful lot of things that “everyone knows, deep inside” that turn out not to be true.
Here’s an idea. Dont get fat, look hot, and act sexy. Profit.
I think the author of this article is a liberal and it is so obvious. Leave it to a liberal to cover up and help satans evil influence continue to rot societ’s last few morals away. This is the mindset of all seculars so it is to be expected. I for one know how addicting porn is, because I myself am addicted to it. I know it is evil but I DO NOT CARE ENOUGH TO STOP. You would have to be a moron to think it is not sinful. Anything that is this fun has to be wrong. Anyways I know one thing, if you doubt porn is a cancer in society just ask yourself why so many males enjoy homesexual sex and love to masturbate on their webcams. Communism seems to have won. Nations fall not from war but from a lack of morals. America lasted 200 years plus now, it will not be long till we collapse at this rate.
I think the author of this article is a liberal and it is so obvious.
You’re new here, aren’t you?
I believe this article misses a major factor in porn – what it does to women, and NOT just the wives. Sure, porn can destroy a marriage, however I believe porn can be like alcohol. Many people can handle it, but others cannot. I avoid porn for what it does to women. http://thepinkcross.org/
Thanks for linking to the Pink Cross. Shelly is doing amazing work, and reading the stories of women who have been abused is truly powerful.
I think the underlying issue IS being missed on this discussion. It’s called “the human condition”, which is fallen and depraved nature. We incline to that, many philosophers have observed for thousands of years.
Porn is yet another selfish indulgence; erotica have been around many thousands of years (that doesn’t make it right) – look at Soddom and Gommorah – but now, it’s available in your own living room, your office, your iPhone….you no longer have to even go out of your house to see it!!
Porn didn’t invent sex – God did! In Genesis, God said that all He had made was “good” and “very good.” However, when it is twisted and perverted and used inappropriately (outside the bounds God designed for it to function in and be good within), it always will hurt you. Every time.
If you struggle with porn, the way out is through Christ. He is the only one that can transform your mind and heart. Just ask Him.
btw, there have been studies PROVING that porn literally changes the brain waves in those who are addicted to it – it goes from being mental, to actual physical changes.
I can speak for myself specifically on this issue. I filed for divorce from my husband of 19 years. We have 3 kids and this was a grueling decision. Pornography was the issue, sort of. It had more to do with the choices he made. I often said people would be more understanding of my plight if it was booze. I left, and it didn’t stop. I came back, and it didn’t stop. He lost his job, it didn’t stop. His 3 daughters were one room away in broad daylight, and it didn’t stop. In this sense, it is an addiction for him. When a grown man cannot resist something so destructive on his and his family’s life, it’s an addiction. It could have been drugs. No, I’m not the perfect wife and it seems misplaced to put the blame on the object rather than the person.
2 Questions:
1)
Did his watching pornography directly lead to him losing his job, or is it more a case of his sex drive didn’t die when he lost his job?
There is a huge difference between the two.
I gather you hate pornography.
Many men watch too much wrestling, or visit too many political blogs, or maybe even spend time at a local slowpitch league.
In theory, if they took that time and used it to make swashbuckling real estate deals, you and your family would be multi-decamillionaires, but that isn’t really a realistic standard.
So how did porn cause him to lose his job or is it your position he should cease all interest in sex until he’s back at work? (Because, you know, all available evidence shows low testosterone males are the ones who achieve the greatest business success).
2)
You say your daughters were in the next room, not in the room. Do you not see an important distinction between the two things?
Now full clarity. If he took no steps to ensure his daughters could enter the room and see him masturbating (or having loving hot sex with his soon to be divorced wife, which I suspect was a rare occurence, and not entirely his fault) then, yeah, I would fault him for that.
But if a person lives with others (including kids) it doesn’t make sense to think they will have no sex drive or activity unless the kids are x hundreds of metres away.
Moving away from your situation, how many people masturbate despite other people being home? Parents, siblings, for example.
They’re doing so as privately as the circumstance exists and I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts they’d just as soon be alone and then could really let loose with some aural expression.
But they have to make do.
Are you saying your ex-husband exposed your daughters to sex? In which case, he’s a criminal. Or are you saying your ex-husband privately masturbated without exposing your daughters to sex, but you not so slyly implied he did?
In which case you are despicable.
Cokie Roberts must have read and agreed with this:
Cokie Roberts Blames Raquel Welch for Celeb Cheating (VIDEO)
In case the link didn’t go through:
http://insidetv.aol.com/2010/04/02/cokie-roberts-blames-raquel-welch-for-celeb-cheating-video
We need to stop confusing fantasy with wishes. My wife enjoys reading murder mysteries. It’s fantasy (as in, “not reality”), and I’m sure she doesn’t really want to find herself in the middle of a murder investigation, threatened by the murderer because she’s the amateur sleuth that knows their identity. Similarly, I look at and read sexually explicit material as fantasy. I do it for the same reasons. It’s entertaining AND SAFE. That doesn’t mean I want to seek out such experience. I watch it because I can enjoy it at a safe distance.
Many of the women on this thread, starting with Dr. Helen herself, are intelligent, rational, understanding, and excellent. I won’t speculate about whether they make better lovers than the other women with whom about to address in a second.
Except to say, “Yes.”
“I’m absolutely sure you are.”
Now let me move on to addressing the other women here, many of whom seem quite bitter and unhappy and rather than expect the world to change to make you happy, you might consider changing some of your own internal attitudes and tastes in order to bring more of the best parts of the world to yourself, and keep them.
My comment:
You notice that many of the comments from women on this thread are about how awful the men are for having outside sexual desires and how the men should be totally satisfied with their one woman, and it’s wrong for men to look at porn, desire other women, pursue them, etc?
But you notice how LITTLE of those same women make any mention of efforts on THEIR part to SEXUALLY satisfy their lover’s mind and his C*CK?
Agree or disagree?
I took some sexy [nude and semi-nude] photos of myself for my husband as a gift for when he wants some ‘visuals’.
One thing men have to understand is that if a woman is having ZERO orgasms during sex/foreplay/afterplay, the idea of sex for her is going to be pretty low on her wants/needs. If a man is premature that’s going to make it near impossible to enjoy love-making.
Just as relationships take actual WORK, so does satisfactory sex. You can’t expect your wife/girlfriend to be doing every nastyass thing you dream up to get your rocks off when she barely has lift-off herself. Get it?
Delia said “I took some sexy [nude and semi-nude] photos of myself for my husband as a gift for when he wants some ‘visuals’.
One thing men have to understand is that if a woman is having ZERO orgasms during sex/foreplay/afterplay, the idea of sex for her is going to be pretty low on her wants/needs. If a man is premature that’s going to make it near impossible to enjoy love-making.
Just as relationships take actual WORK, so does satisfactory sex. You can’t expect your wife/girlfriend to be doing every nastyass thing you dream up to get your rocks off when she barely has lift-off herself. Get it?”
You have a wonderful approach, pics of yourself for him. Satisfactory sex is very important, our society should accept &/or encourage sex training for couples, as we do for sports. A good man makes sure that his woman is very satisfied be it with finger, tongue, or c**k. If he’s good with his tongue, she won’t care if he is premature.
My girlfriend of 7 years knows I look at porn, she doesn’t feel threatened because I show her that she is special to me. Like many things in life, giving is better than receiving and makes intimacy very good. With that there is little want for “nastyass” things. I think a lot of couples miss the boat in making and keeping a good sexual relationship – the key to the whole thing.
Communication is the key! SO RIGHT.
Anything done for $$$ for an ‘audience’ is a performance.
Something to remember though.
The above almost three hundred comments need to be put into book form and read by every mature teen and young adult. Maybe everybody above the age of 13 should read it.
It tells more about human sexuality and psychology than any book I have ever read on the two subjects. Some smart and savvy publisher, who wants to improve human understanding and make some money will jump at the chance.
Am I being moderated because of “doubleblack4?” It is a skiing term for level slope difficulty. I live in South Lake Tahoe, which is ski country. If you have never skied Heavenly or any other of the great ski resorts here, you are missing a great experience.
“I think the underlying issue IS being missed on this discussion. It’s called “the human condition”, which is fallen and depraved nature. We incline to that, many philosophers have observed for thousands of years.”
You are so wrong it isn’t funny.
We used to be a species that hunted down our fellow humans and, according to the Bible, slaughtered them to a man, woman, and (male) child (while keeping the female children to grow up as sex slaves). All ordered by Moses and approved of by God.
Lovely.
Now we’ve reached the point where the great United States Army defends people around the world from terrible oppression. Women in our country are allowed to vote, to decide who they wish to sleep with (thankfully), or whether they want to do so at all.
We have adequate quantities of food and generally excellent health care. While people commit crimes, there are hard working police, courts, and legal officials working to ensure a modicum of justice.
There are SO many instances where we have come A LONG way morally and ethically over our primitive ancestors.
Getting rid of the often religiously approved of slavery, for example.
Yeah, don’t tell me Christians opposed slavery. I know that. They also supported it. And the Bible itself condoned it in many instances.
It isn’t man’s “fallen nature” that’s the problem.
The issue is much, much simpler.
WE ARE PRIMATES!
We’re a branch of the great apes.
A cousin of chimpanzees, we share many of their warlike (and sexual) instincts. I wish we were closer to those lovely, mild, passionate sexual and loving creatures, the bonobos.
You’d hate them, Racquel. They have sex, openly, a lot. Homosexual sex, heterosexual sex, friend sex. For pleasure and bonding.
And they hardly ever hurt each other, and have never, ever been observed to kill each other.
Unlike our branch of primates which has murders in any town of any size… or our cousins, the often genocidal chimpanzee.
So stop with the “man’s fallen nature” shtick. The reality, is we are slowly raising our nature, and it’s an uphill climb.
In the meantime, males will (at a minimum) want to do females. Multiple females.
Shocking, huh?
Whodathunkit?
“btw, there have been studies PROVING that porn literally changes the brain waves in those who are addicted to it – it goes from being mental, to actual physical changes.”
So does anything you think about. What the heck do you think “brain waves” are?
But seriously. Someone looking at a member of the opposite sex, fantasizing about coitus, and having an orgasm. Do you think it’s remotely possible to do such a thing without affecting your brain waves?
C’mon!
I want to say you’re smarter than that. I don’t actually believe it. But I want to say it.
I cannot believe the justification regarding pornography WAY TOO many posts contain. Simply put, it’s a disgusting objectification of anyone portrayed in the porn-whether it’s the usual women, or men, or horribly, children. Where’s the proof re: Ted Bundy’s specific porn? There is no way to prove that his type of porn was all in his head, and anyone who believes that fairy tale is incredibly naive. Also, I’ve worked with sex offenders and ABSOLUTELY they have a porn problem. They have MANY PROBLEMS- they could get aroused from a fly, if that were one of their problems. It’s INSANE to think a SEX OFFENDER doesn’t do porn, for any of the idiots out there that want to believe that.
Too many of you are refusing to put the responsibility of a porn problem on the men. Exactly how does a wife bear blame for her husbands choices of getting addicted to porn? How could it be that a 300 lb frigid woman somehow forces a man, TOTALLY AGAINST HIS WILL, to seek out and get hooked into pornography? If he had problems with his wife, and she has problems being a 300 lb frigid woman, address the problems, but don’t make the WIFE the fault of HIS ADDICTION. I also know people, including a close family member, whose marriages broke up over pornography addiction. It truly is an awful practice and degrades families and societies as much or more than drug addictions.
Last, I am simply STUNNED that there seems to little consideration to the horrifying logistics of producing the awful smutty porn. Consider that it is you, or your child, who is being filmed faking crazy sex with who knows what- other women, men, ANIMALS, objects, dead things, etc. This is repeated ad nauseum for hours during filming, and then replayed ad nauseum to infinity over the internet. Can someone with a brain and a human conscience somehow explain to me how this is not DEGRADING and DEHUMANIZING to mostly women, but to the totality of humanity? I am absolutely not a prude and I’m shocked at the level of justification of too many posts. Though I was never a fan of Jerry Falwell, he once said, years ago on Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect” show that there was simply NOTHING redeeming about pornography. Hang out with a hooker for a week and see what joy is in her life. Go to the sets of pornography production and see how “wonderful” the “actors” lives are. I DARE YOU. Then tell the world what a wonderful thing this is for all human kind.
The sex in porn is fake?
“Last, I am simply STUNNED that there seems to little consideration to the horrifying logistics of producing the awful smutty porn. Consider that it is you, or your child, who is being filmed faking crazy sex with who knows what- other women, men, ANIMALS, objects, dead things, etc.”
Men? Women? Sex with those disgusting entities is bad enough. But…
Objects! Oh no!
Not sex with the dreaded ‘objects’!
And as Charlie Martin pointed out, I’m pretty sure they’re not ‘faking’.
Speaking of logistics… does it occur to you that some people like having sex, and like earning large paycheques, and like showing off their sexuality to others (flaunting it)?
The Truth Behind the Fantasy of Porn
by
Shelley Lubben — Former Porn Actress
Dedicated to all the porn actresses who caught HIV, died from drug overdose and committed suicide.
Sex-packed porn films featuring freshly-dyed blondes whose evocative eyes say “I want you” is quite possibly one of the greatest deceptions of all time. Trust me, I know. I did it all the time and I did it for the lust of power and the love of money. I never liked sex. I never wanted sex, and in fact I was more apt to spend time with Jack Daniels than some of the studs I was paid to “fake it” with. That’s right, none of us freshly-dyed blondes like doing porn. In fact, we hate it. We hate being touched by strangers who care nothing about us. We hate being degraded with their foul smells and sweaty bodies. Some women hate it so much they can be heard vomiting in the bathroom between scenes. Others can be found outside smoking an endless chain of Marlboro lights…
But the porn industry wants YOU to think we porn actresses love sex. They want you to think we enjoy being degraded by all kinds of repulsive acts. The truth, porn actresses have showed up on the set not knowing about certain requirements and were told by porn producers to do it or leave without being paid. Work or never work again. Yes, we made the choice. Some of us needed the money. But we were manipulated and coerced and even threatened. Some of us caught HIV as a result of that coercion. I personally caught Herpes, a non-curable sexually transmitted disease. Another porn actress went home after a long night of numbing her pain and put a pistol to her head and pulled the trigger. Now she’s dead.
It’s safe to say most women who turn to porn acting as a money-making enterprise, probably didn’t grow up in healthy childhoods either. Indeed, many actresses admit they’ve experienced sexual abuse, physical abuse, verbal abuse and neglect by parents. Some were raped by relatives and molested by neighbors. When we were little girls we wanted to play with dollies and be mommies, not have big scary men get on top of us. So we were taught at a young age that sex made us valuable. The same horrible violations we experienced then, we relive as we perform our tricks in front of the camera. And we hate every minute of it. We’re traumatized little girls living on anti-depressants, drugs and alcohol acting out our pain in front of you who continue to abuse us.
As we continue to traumatize ourselves by making more adult films, we use more and more drugs and alcohol. We live in constant fear of catching AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases. Every time there’s an HIV scare we race to the nearest clinic for an emergency checkup. Pornographers insist on giving viewers the fantasy sex they demand all the while sacrificing the very ones who make it happen. In other words, no condoms allowed. Herpes, gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, and other diseases are the normal anxieties we walk around with daily. We get tested monthly but we know testing isn’t prevention. Besides worrying about catching diseases from porn sex, there are other harmful activities we engage in that are also very dangerous. Some of us have had physical tearing and damage to internal body parts.
When porn actresses call it a day and head home we attempt to have normal healthy relationships, but some of our boyfriends get jealous and physically abuse us. So instead we marry our porn directors, while others prefer lesbian relationships. It’s a real memory making moment when our daughter accidentally walks out and sees mommy kissing another girl. My daughter will vouch for that one.
On our days off we walk around like zombies with a beer in one hand and a shot of whiskey in the other. We aren’t up to cleaning so we live in filth most of the time, or we hire a sweet foreign lady to come in and clean up our mess. Porn actresses aren’t the best cooks either. Ordering in is normal for us and most of the time we throw up after we eat because we’re bulimic.
For porn actresses who have children, we are the world’s worst mothers. We yell and scream and hit our kids for no reason. Most of the time we are intoxicated or high, and our four year olds are the ones picking us up off the floor. When clients come over for sex, we lock our children in their rooms and tell them to be quiet. I used to give my daughter a beeper and tell her to wait at the park until I was finished.
The truth is there is no fantasy in porn. It’s all a lie. A closer look into the scenes of a porn star’s life will show you a movie that the porn industry doesn’t want you to see. The real truth is we porn actresses want to end the shame and trauma of our lives but we can’t do it alone. We need you men to fight for our freedom and give us back our honor. We need you to hold us in your strong arms while we sob tears over our deep wounds and begin to heal. We want you throw out our movies and help piece together the shattered fragments of our lives. We need you to pray for us so God will hear and repair our ruined lives.
So don’t believe the lie anymore. Porn is nothing more than fake sex and lies on videotape. Trust me, I know.
This may have been true for some but certainly not all actresses. Further, that porn industry is in trouble financially, because the most popular porn now is the amateur produced porn posted by the couple producing it. These amateurs are doing it for fun and pleasure and that’s why it’s in such demand. The stereotype big boobed blond porno is going away – the internet and digital cameras are killing it. Sorry, but millions of wives and girlfriends are participating and enjoying it. (Yes, some men and women will always be unwillingly involved, but there will always be alcoholics, drunk or poor drivers etc. but most people engage in drinking, driving, sex responsibly.)
Re: First Amendment rights for porn. Let’s accept for sake of argument that porn is not and should not be regulated by the govt. To my mind, that INCREASES the need for intelligent discussion of the issue. People cannot make responsible decisions about anything, without being informed. We have no business dismissing other people’s experience out of hand. The 13 year old girl who walked in on her father masturbating, the women who have tried to get and keep their husbands’ attention, the guy who says he doesn’t masturbate, the guy who calls himself ex porn addict: they deserve to be taken seriously just as much as those of you who say masturbation and pornography are harmless.
You just might learn something you couldn’t have learned otherwise. And that is all the more valuable, actually, in a First Amendment environment where you must make your own decisions.
Putting it another way, Racquel.
Now we travel the world taking in Tiesto concerts with people of other races, religious backgrounds, and nations. And enjoy doing so.
Not too many thousands of years ago, we were constantly trying to conquer our neighbour and enslave them before they enslaved us.
Not long ago at all we bought and sold our fellow man on this very continent.
If man’s nature has “fallen” since then, I’ll take the trade.
Meet Christoph. The face of porn.
‘Nuff said.
lol
What a particularly classless ad hominem attack, Delia.
I’m disappointed that the moderators allowed it since it’s clearly against the guidelines.
However, I’ll live.
I notice is this is exactly as intellectually lazy as these cheap shots you took on “Godwin’s Law” below rather than seriously disagreeing and debating an idea:
And then this one:
You’re not only not classy, you sound like you’re unable to discuss concepts here with the calibre of people here. Not only myself, but with other commenters too.
[I'll cross post this at the mini-thread below so the commenters you were mindlessly attacking there can get another example of your debating "style". I use that word loosely.]
Delia is the face of misandry.
If it’s a choice between porn and Delia, porn will win every time.
Thanks a lot. My “liberal” friends saw this place and are content that they have proof that conservatives are jerkoffs, having now “come out,” crossing the barrier of vague suspicion.
Raquel — btw, there have been studies PROVING that porn literally changes the brain waves in those who are addicted to it – it goes from being mental, to actual physical changes.
Indeed. Anyone with impressive forearm musculature is probably a conservative, and sagging forearm skin is indicative of them being born again.
Confession time:
I did some soul-searching and I had to reach back to a time and place when I first encountered porn. I was a 9-year old girl home alone after school and my mom’s boyfriend had left a Hustler magazine out which immediately caught my keen child’s curious eye. Instead of being shocked I became embarrassed over being titillated by the images and wanting to see more. So, every day after school when my mom and her boyfriend were at work I searched his bedroom and finally found his stash of magazines. Hundreds and hundreds. I poured over them and couldn’t get enough.
When my mother eventually broke-up with her boyfriend I was cut-off from my new addiction. So, being an artistically inclined child, I began drawing my own sexually explicit drawings. By the time I was in my mid-teens I was making my own homemade ‘mags’ and bringing them to school to shock all of the girls. Eventually I got caught by my mother who went ballistic and I got in huge trouble in school as well and that ended my love-affair with porn imagery.
To say only males are visual is a lie though. I paint, sculpt and work in computer/graphic art so I’m as visual as they get. Yes, a man who is out of shape, saggy and badly aged in the face is a turn-off for me but love (real, genuine love) is not just about having the most sexy, handsome, studly, buff looking guy in town. Sure, I would have liked it if my husband would have lost his gut and would have taken better care of his skin and not look old enough to be my father even though he’s only six years my senior but I didn’t marry him expecting him to stay eternally youthful. Me? I’m lean, fit, beautiful and young looking because I expect that of myself because I have set high standards for who I am both inside and out, but even that can’t last forever and I’ll eventually have to become an old lady too (albeit, hopefully a fit and trim old gal).
I like sex, I like to masturbate, I encourage my husband to masturbate in the shower for his health and so that he can last longer when we make love and porn is not necessary for that.
Anyway, if I had turned my husband down every time he physically repulsed me we would have never hardly had sex. Sometimes you have to look beyond that and remember the person’s heart, soul and mind inside the meat package.
If I were on my death-bed tomorrow, I wouldn’t want any other man but the one I married there by my side and if I had only 3 months to live I wouldn’t want to masturbate those months away just because it ‘feels’ good or eat every cupcake and donut in sight just because they ‘taste’ good.
Natural urges do need to be kept in check for our own health and the health and happiness of our families and relationships imho.
Making real, lasting love has much less to do with sex and a lot more to do with growing up.
Now, now, Hejsan, I’m sure Dr. Helen, and many others, would tell you that any attempt to rein in the porn industry, or prevent the abuse of young women exploited by it, would be trying to control men’s sexuality, and we certainly don’t want that! No sireeeee! To them, male sexuality = Porn; therefore, any criticism of porn is bad, and just a mean ol’ feminist plot, to make men unhappy.
Anyway, it’s all the fault of those bad women, who watch Life time T.V., and read romance novels. Women must not read romance novels. It gives them unrealistic expectations. Men, as has been scientifically proven, are always grounded in reality, and never have unrealistic expectations of the women in their lives.
In fact, it might be better if women didn’t read at all; they might get ideas, and might even start questioning their menfolk. Even worse, they might question experts like Dr. Helen! Worst of all, they’ll take away all that wonderful porn! Waaaaaaaaaaaa!
What’s the world coming to?
/Sarcasm—what else?
I agree that porn hurts relationships. Some men use porn even if their wives are generous with their bodies because 1) they are into perversions that their wives won’t accommodate, 2)they want a ‘variety of women’ even the substitutionary kind, 3)they believe that they will learn something new – very unlikely, 4) maybe it’s just a bad habit from years before marriage … etc.
Women tend to be generous when they are having good sexual experiences – and good emotional experiences. If she is upset, foggetaboutit – so just do what she wants, AND LISTEN! And help with the chores. But don’t become a wuss just for sex – it’s undignified!
Premature ejaculation (PE) is a killer. Many women want the physical act – not just oral manipulation which can sometimes be unpleasant/undesirable for one or both. Here are two methods to prevent PE:
1) most men think the muscles that you use to stop peeing is the same one you use to prevent ejaculation. Not true. The best way to describe the method is ‘anal breathing’. If you pretend to be trying to draw air into your anus, you will feel the muscles that you need to apply. Strengthen those muscles by practicing tightening and holding them for a few seconds while sitting. If you are doing it right, your lower stomach muscles and lower back muscles will tighten too. If you overdo it during sex, you can kill your erection so practice is needed.
2) using more than one condom during sex can help
Many years ago, when I was newly married, I would go to the local bookstore each weekend. While there, I noticed many men looking through all the magazines of semi-nude women with nude center fold-outs, totally concentrating on that.
All the while, beautiful young women were walking through the store, probably unattached, and just as pretty as any of those in the magazines. But the men didn’t notice. They had their faces in the magazines.
When you detach from reality, it is NOT a good thing. It is an escape mechanism that indicates an unhealthy preoccuption with childish things..and selfishness.
Sorry, but time to grow up, men. Looking is fine, but stepping into the mirror is infantile.
Wow. There’s one thing that amazes me every time, how women have no understanding how difficult it is for men.
You see men looking at magazines at beautiful women, and you cannot *possibly* comprehend why they don’t talk to the women in the store.
Because they’ve done that. They’ve tried. They’ve tried all their *life*. Those women have no interest in them. Most likely you’ll get a screeching “Did I give you a sign that I wanted to talk to you?”
Amazing. The answer is sitting there right in front of you and your first instinct is to turn around and blame the Man.
Funny that it’s Christianity that is blamed by so many for “prudishness.” Mao’s China and Communist countries in Eastern Europe were officially atheistic. They were not famous for being hot beds of eroticism, unless you’re turned on by baggy unisex pajamas and frumpy dresses(with the possible exception of Cuba. I understand that lovely young women hang around the hotels frequented by tourists in Havana. However, my guess is that they’re driven less by lust than by a desire to put food on the table.)
I have very little interest in either porn or romance novels. I have a great deal of interest in sex, and my husband and I have a very fulfilling sex life – he satisfies me and I never pull the “not tonight, honey, I have a headache” business. However, he used to travel frequently on business trips and he confessed to me that on those trips, he would frequently settle in with a drink and watch porn flicks. Well, I couldn’t bring myself to care, really. He was stuck in Atlanta or Charlotte or Akron for a couple of days, didn’t know anybody and didn’t have much else to do. Better that he spend it watching a little porn than on picking up some woman in the hotel bar. I’ve never seen it at home, have never worried that our kids were going to walk in on him with his pants around his ankles. If he was addicted to the stuff, I’d feel quite differently.
However, I do find it disturbing that young kids have easy access to very hardcore and perverse acts and I think you’re fooling yourself if you think it doesn’t effect how they perceive women and relationships. Or how it effects young women, who now feel that they have to act like porn stars to get attention from men.
A while back, a male relative who used to be fond of going to strip clubs every so often told me that one day he realized the young woman gyrating in front of him was younger than his own daughter. And that permanently wrecked the fascination those clubs had held for him. My husband told me the same thing began happening to him when our daughter grew up. When he watched porn films, instead of thinking, “God, that’s hot!” he started wondering “where’s your dad? Does he know you’re doing this?” Totally ruined the fun for him, to start thinking of that person as a person, and not someone who existed just so he could get his rocks off.
The anti-sex stance of writers like St. Augustine were a reaction against the extreme sexual permissiveness of the Roman era. Victorianism was a reaction against the sexual hi-jinx of the Regency era, when a great percentage of the babies born in London were illegitimate. The pendulum will eventually swing again – it always does. The problem for humans is that it never stops at the Golden Mean, it swings back to another extreme.
Perhaps the problem is more fundamental for marriage than people are willing to confront. Woman want to control EVERYTHING about their man- and if he lets them, the woman will take it all.
It is all about expectations – women may want to tell men “looking at those other women is wrong as it skews what you will start to expect from me – and I don’t want to have to work meeting an artificial standard just because you are seduced by it..”
Then men can respond by saying – “Well, OK. However I don’t want you consuming images and attitudes that are harmful to me as they seduce you with a standard that is not related to who I am – no hanging around with other women who live fancier lives than we do – no reading or watching media that glorifies a standard of living that we currently do not live. In fact, if I am to be a grown up and not even “look” then we also need to have a discussion about you being a “big” girl and not assuming I will be “Daddy” and provide for you. We can split the expenses 50/50 for everything and you can work.”
To which – I suspect, the woman will respond : “Why don’t you love me? Why do you have to say such hateful things….?…”
Solution – Don’t get married – ever.
On porn and infidelity: I think that the feminist movement in this country has far more to do with the downfall of marriage than any other single entity. This movement seeks to emasculate men and then expect us to still somehow continue to be men. We are asked to get in touch with our feminine side as though we have vaginas and estrogen in our blood. We are asked to teach our children, especially our boys to be “sensitive” and then when they grow up to have homesexual tendencies we wonder why (please if you are gay I’m not attacking you, just making a point). My brothers and I have been watching porn since we discovered the magazines and then later the beta movies in our dad’s collection. None of us are rapists, child molesters, infidels and the like and our marriages are all healthy. Porn allows men to act out their fantasies in a safe environment and porn is “what men do”. I have met very few women who openly admit to liking or watching porn. Contrary to popular belief, porn may be more healthy for marriages because the abilty to act out a fantasy in cyberspace or through a movie negates the need for real life experiences. On the issue of morals and morality, I for one believe that in a marriage sex should not be relegated to simply puritanical sex or sex for the sole purpose of child bearing; afterall when one gets married one forsakes all others and his only recourse for sex legally and morally is in the context of his marriage (I speak of physical sex and not fantasies acted out though cyberspace). Married people should be allowed to engage in whatever mutually consentual sex they want to w/out fear of judgment. Yet, many women come to the table stuck in the 40s version of sexuality but strong post feminist idea of a man’s sexuality. How dare you! We see the hyprocracy of the Religous Right railing against porn and all it’s ills only to discover the “decadent” behavior they themselves engage in when they think no one is looking. In marriage, it is not uncommon for some women to “let themselves” go and to “change the game” after the marriage. Before, you would make sure you wore your victoria secret lingerie and you would cater to your man. You pulled out all the stops and kept him happy in bed and even indulge some of his fantasies. After the “I do’s” you stopped doing. When the children started coming instead of working hard to lose the weight and get your figure back you took it for granted that your husband will not lose attraction to you because you were married and that he loved you. Love is love and physical attraction is physical attraction. How much enthusiam do you show in bed? or do you just lie there and pray for the act to be over quickly? Many men leave their wives for reasons that has nothing to do with porn as the writer suggests. It is not uncommon for a man to leave his wife for a younger woman who caters to his ego and gives him greater control of his sexuality. Marriages disolve over financial issues and sometimes issues with the children and overall compatibility. To blame the decline or the destruction of marriage on porn is ludicrous at best.
Yes, control over porn really is about control over men’s sexuality, and the author has my utmost admiration for stating what myself and other men’s rights campaigners have been arguing for some time.
One thing to make clear is that feminists and government have no right to control porn, whether or not it does cause husbands to dump their wives for pornstar lookalikes, or whether or not young men decide that masturbating to porn is safer and easier than seeking a relationship.
If irrefutable evidence linked porn use to greater incidences of rape or violence against women, then possibly. But when laws against porn are used to effectively coerce men into having relationships with women then feminism is little more than the rape of the male. Men have the right to control their own bodies, just like women do.
Where does the woman’s sexual pleasure play into all of this or is it all about YOU?
Men? Bueller?
What you’re missing is perhaps the ability to understand that just because something might not be in your personal interests as a woman, it doesn’t mean it is wrong or something that you can criminilize men for.
I don’t particularly care if porn is or isn’t in your interests. That you would be more likely to attract men into relationships if porn was illegal is not a valid reason to make it illegal.
The sale of realistic dildos (castrated male erections) might decrease my chances of meeting women in nightclubs, but that doesn’t give me the right to go out and ban such toys (which, of course, many feminists openly proclaim give women sexual independence from men).
What can’t you understand?
Actually, dildos without clitoral stimulation are for amateurs:
http://www.eroscillator.com/
Women need pleasure on the outside (like a man) more than on the inside.
In fact, the eroscillator is one of the best gifts you can buy your woman!
Masturbation is NORMAL for both sexes.
BTW to guys with frustrating sex lives, i had an article a couple years back that might interest you. It was called “Sleeping in the Basement.” Here is a quote from something I said in 2006:
” OK Ladies, Can we Talk? …I wish I could give you the Three Steps to Marital Bliss, and your husband the Five Secrets to Driving Her Wild. But I can’t. … It would be foolish to presume to tell you in particular, what you should do to get your husband back in the bedroom and your heart, where he belongs. There are ten thousand different ways to do this right.
Unfortunately, there are probably fifty thousand ways to do it wrong. If your husband is sleeping in the basement, literally or metaphorically, you’re doing it wrong.
I would just ask my women readers to do this. Forget your own feelings for a moment. Think about how unhappy your husband must be if he is sleeping in the basement.”
Read the whole thing here: http://www.marriagelibrary.org/2006/05/sleeping-in-the-basement/#more-39
Here’s a real dilemma. I take Parkinson’s Drugs for obvious reasons. The problem is that these same drugs are libido
enhancing and strongly so. To add to the problem I have prostate problems which make urination difficult and sometimes painful. The only remedy for both conditions is ejaculation. I’m a married man and love my wife. However, she can not physically take the pounding resulting from my conditions. Being I’m not into torturing my wife, I have to resort to pornography and masturbation. I want to point out that I don’t cheat on my wife and probably never will. Life doesn’t always have easy answers or pleasant ones.
You can take my porn from me when you pry it from my sticky, wet fingers.
I’m inclined to agree with those who believe that porn is more the symptom than the cause. I suspect that most men, if they had the choice of porn, or their wife being passionate and sexually aggressive (or even just sexually available)…well, that’s not a difficult choice, is it? If it is a difficult choice, I suspect that there are much deeper problems in that marriage that need resolution first.
However: I am quite concerned that a whole generation of young men (and to a lesser extent, young women) are growing up with grossly unrealistic expectations because so many of them have grown up looking at porn. There was a time not that many years ago when, before Napster, studies of downloads on university campuses found porn was far exceeding in volume all other downloads. (Admittedly, mpgs and jpgs gobble up bandwidth like crazy.)
Just like reading romance novels, or watching food ads on television, or political advertising, continual exposure to almost any set of ideas will start to influence your perceptions of reality, especially if you don’t have a lot of real world experience in the subject area. Maybe the decrease in rape has something to do with increased porn–but why did murder and robbery rates also fall during the same time? There’s more going on here. I have noticed a disturbing number of cases where elementary school boys are being arrested for raping their classmates. Is it a big fraction of rapes? No. But I am inclined to wonder if continual exposure to porn in the lower grades is creating unrealistic expectations or assumptions.
Clayton, it would seem the obvious implication here is that repeated exposure to excellence in anything leads to dissatisfaction and should be avoided. This is, of course, an issue that had been noted long before the Internet.
Charlie, I hope you are not conflating women faking orgasms whilst being treated like a stroke-toy in pornos with exposure to ‘excellence’.
Well, no, I’m not.
“Excellence” is probably a bad word choice, but it’s the weekend, I’m off the clock. How about “exceptional skill” or “unusual diligence”?
On the other hand, there seems to be an ongoing notion here that women in porn don’t actually enjoy sex. What I understand from the porn world is that in fact neither sex is really having that great a time much of the time, it being difficult to sustain the mood while waiting for lighting changes, camera set ups and such. Having done a little acting in (traditional) movies, I can certainly understand that. But I’ve also been assured that its at least sometimes quite nice, and all orgasms are not faked.
Women (and men) exposed to venereal diseases, ruptured anuses and AIDS for on-camera sex doesn’t sound like much of a good time to me (personally) and definitely unnatural.
I don’t think many men care that the women in porn aren’t really enjoying themselves. They are the same men who don’t care if their wives or girlfriends ever have a real orgasm. If a guy needs to convince himself the woman is enjoying it to get off then he’s more delusional than most. *shrug*
Pornography as excellence? You probably thought Star Wars was a documentary. How often in the real world do knockout secretaries rip off their clothes for the hunky UPS driver that they don’t know and do it on the desktop?
Not nearly often enough.
When I was about 7, I found a pen in my dad’s workbench drawer that displayed a curvy lady in a one-piece bathing suit. When you turned the pen upside down, the ink that formed the suit ran down and the lady was naked. Well, this was an entertaining toy to take to school! Except a teacher nabbed it, called my parents and my mom gave my dad an earful about leaving such things around where the kids could find it.
That was the extent of the “porn” I was exposed to as a child, in a blue-collar urban area. Did my old man, and all those other WWII vets, lack libido? I highly doubt it. I don’t think men (or women) are any more highly sexed now than they were 50 or 100 or 200 years ago. What has changed is that not only is it not “a man’s world” anymore, but that porn is just about the only area in life which still can be called “a man’s world.” My dad won the pen at an all-male poker party, where, I have no doubt, a lot of dirty jokes were exchanged. Once or twice a week, he went for a few beers with the guys after work. Now, not only is work not a male domain, very few areas of life are. Poker, beers with the guys, hunting and fishing trips – how many men still do that? How many women complain or insist on coming along when their husbands try to do something that involves just hanging around with other guys? Really, I’ve noticed that most men are not dying to come shoe shopping with us or asking to attend bridal showers, but many women insist on integrating male get-togethers.
So porn has become sort of the last frontier for men – it’s solitary, not social, but it’s territory most women don’t like, don’t understand, and don’t care to enter. (Yes, yes, yes, I know there are women who enjoy it, but if they were the rule and not the exception, there wouldn’t be 100 plus comments on this thread.) I suspect that’s one reason why men defend it so voraciously. To the men of my father’s generation, being a man meant defending the country and providing for one’s family. Now that most don’t serve in the military and women have careers and have crossed the lines to become firefighters, cops, and VMI grads, the test of masculinity, to many men, is having sex with many partners. If they can’t do it in real life, they’ll do it in the fantasy world of porn. And they’ll see any attack on it or criticism of it as yet another female attempt to henpeck them into reacting and behaving like women.
Believe me, I see the porn critic’s side on this issue, I really do. Porn holds no interest for me whatsoever. But I’m also trying to understand the reaction of many men and I don’t think that one side screaming “Filthy pigs!” and the other side screaming “Prudes!” at each other gets us anywhere. I don’t think porn is really the issue here, I think it’s the whole question of how the role of men has changed in the last 40 years. And there are no easy answers to that one, because we can’t just go back to 1957.
Men, men, men.
If you’re whacking off to a woman faking enjoyment in a video, the woman is still controlling your ‘sexuality’.
If you don’t want a woman ‘controlling’ your ejaculation, stick to gay porn or better yet, become gay!
And, if you want a woman who is as perverted as you are, then be sure to give full disclosure as to what you desire and what you ‘expect’ BEFORE you get married. Save yourself and HER a lot of grief.
Some of you men sound like you use women’s bodies to masturbate with rather than make love to which is even more disgusting and pathetic.
Here, I’ll help! Get a realdoll:
http://www.realdoll.com/
Proposition:
Any time a discussion of a sexual issue in marriage includes an implication of “it’s all his/her fault”, it’s not.
At least you didn’t make an uncompromising proportion. It’s all good, Charlie. I like jerking…er chains!
er ‘proposition’. Yeah, I can type…with one hand. heh
Everyone of these stories about a guy who found porn and then went off the deepend, seems to involve some guy who was treated like a poodle by his mother and then treated like a poodle by his wife. Then he found porn and the inner wolf awoke and he got approval, acceptance, and affection without the neutering and leash. Any wonder anyone in such a situation headed for the nearest open gate.
That one of the Siegfried and Roy tigers finally attacked is not an argument for more strict taming its an argument against putting tigers in cages, neutering them, and forcing them to do tricks to get every tiny treat. Men who wish to be tamed and live a domesticated life must be free to make that decision for themselves.
“Is Control over Porn Really about Control over Men’s Sexuality?”
Yes, of course it is. Porn doesn’t lead to rape and feminists know this. What it does do is lessen women’s power over men, just like prostitution and strip clubs, hence it must be done away with.
You’re not in control of the porn industry, Porky.
Anna,
Ever thought it possible that your ex was always a selfish dork, and by the time you finally noticed it, you also noticed the porn? Perhaps the dorkish behavior was always there in other ways, and you just did not see it.
the inner wolf awoke and he got approval, acceptance, and affection without the neutering and leash.
Approval, acceptance and acceptance from whom? The porn stars? They don’t know he’s alive. The strippers at the club? You’re just a walking wallet to them.
I’m trying to understand the male POV here, but don’t kid yourself that the sex industry is about giving you “approval, acceptance, and affection.” You empty your testicles, they empty your wallet. That’s it.
You empty your testicles, they empty your wallet. That’s it.
Yep. Porn addicts allow their male/female sexuality to be controlled by a well-orchestrated ‘sex industry’ which is not saying much for their vaunted ‘liberation via porno’.
People pay for porn? There are thousands of free sites online. If you pay a dime for porn, you are a fool.
I applaud your column. The Church that I attend is big on humiliating men for pornography while ignoring their wives complete sexual and emotional abandonment of their husbands. I am married to a woman who hasn’t touched my for over 5 years, yet she lurks in the shadows to “catch” me for using porn to cope with my normal male sexuality.
The church brings in ‘experts’ who spout lies like the NRO author that “pornography leads to rape” despite the fact that rape has fallen 75% since the advent of VCR pornography. The practical result of the Church’s hysteria has been an elevated hysteria in Church matrons which leads the wives of men who are ‘caught’ (I love the criminal justice tone) to withdraw what limited sexual favors they allow their husbands with predictable results.
Look, I’m a Christian, i believe that pornography is wrong and a sin. I would love to be fulfilled from my wife but she’s chosen to turn me into a cash, semen and service ‘bot’. That’s her choice. And the Church has chosen to drive off humiliated, frustrated men like me. That’s their choice. But with the matrons getting more and more hysterical and the porn getting more and more real all they are doing is setting themselves up for family disaster after family disaster.
They are such cowards.
Wow. Have you thought of reminding her what Paul had to say about abstinence?
All men watch porn? Really? I don’t, and I know many other men who avoid it. Looking upon a woman with lust is a sin, according to the Greatest of all psychiatrists. A man who is serious about avoiding sin won’t watch porn-plain and simple. This is a dingbat article, and quite divorced from reality.
Ted Bundy’s checkout-line interview with Dr. James Dobson has the force of a deathbed confession: no turning back, no incentive to lie, a man about to meet his Maker. He obviously found something wrong with porn. There are countless others, including some I have prayed and counseled with. I worked with a married man who held a very responsible position in the company and lost it because he couldn’t stay away from porn long enough to keep it off his office computer, and who by the way also terrorized some women in the office with clear and persistent sexual harassment. No link between the two activities? Come on.
I’m not touching on the First Amendment issues here. The intent of the Founders was clearly in the areas of political and religious speech. I’ll just say this: children should not have access to porn. Adults should know better. I’m not interested in porn raids for material that does not involve children, either as models/actors or as end users.
But this article, and the foolish one it cites which claims that all men watch porn, do a real disservice. On the other hand, it’s pretty comfy to those who like to kid themselves about pornography.
Check the phrasing, Jim. They were looking for men who had never looked at porn, not men who didn’t look at porn.
@Donna V.
So a similar dynamic to romantic comedies and romance novels then?
Donna. Here’s my take on the “inner wolf” comment. Most men spend a huge amount of their lives wanting and not getting any sex. It’s not about approval, acceptance or affection. They just want sex. Many men have entered into relationships with women with sex being a HUGE motivating factor. If that turns out not to be working, this has been an a let down of nearly unfathomable portions. I don’t think women understand this. But now, in a relative short time, porn has become so available and so varied that large numbers of men have found out -hey, I’m able to satisfy this desire without even having a relationship. This isn’t the end of relationships, it’s the beginning of the end of relationships based on sex. A good thing.
I read somewhere that homosexual sexual cultures (both gay and lesbian) demonstrate what the innate male and female sex drives are like when freed from the constraints of pleasing the opposite sex. Gay men opt for visually stimulating, frequently anonymous and varied sex partners. Lesbians prefer monogamous long-term relationships which end in”lesbian bed death”.
Three guess as to who is wining the battle of sexes in the straight world.
I can’t speak to Anonymous’s situation as cause and effect, but I can say this:
If as Christians we’re going to accept pornography as harmless, we’re forgetting a a certain segment of the population, the pornstars themselves.
By paying for porn, directly or indirectly, we’re subsidizing sex outside of marriage by these folks.
Is that how we want to roll?
Secondly, I can’t speak for anyone else’s relationship with their spouse, but if I’m burning up my sexual energy on images, there’s less of that energy left for my wife.
Am I being fair to her?
To quote the immortal words of Steve from the BBC comedy, “Coupling”
Jill: [about the film Lesbian Spank Inferno] How could you possibly enjoy a film like that?
Steve: Oh, because it’s got naked women in it! Look, I like naked women! I’m a bloke! I’m supposed to like them! We’re born like that. We like naked women as soon as we’re pulled out of one. Halfway down the birth canal, we’re already enjoying the view. Look, it’s the four pillars of the male heterosexual psyche. We like: naked women, stockings, lesbians, and Sean Connery best as James Bond. Because that is what being a bloke is. And if you don’t like it, darling, join the film collective. Look: I want to spend the rest of my life with the woman at the end of the table here. But that does not stop me wanting to see several thousand more naked bottoms before I die. Because that’s what being a boy is. When Man invented fire, he didn’t say “Hey, let’s cook!” He said: “Great! Now we can see naked bottoms in the dark!” As soon as Caxton invented the printing press we were using it to make pictures of – hey! – naked bottoms. We’ve turned the Internet into an enormous international database of… naked bottoms. So, you see, the story of male achievement through the ages, feeble though it may have been, has been the story of our struggle to get a better look at your bottoms. Frankly, girls, I’m not so sure how insulted you really ought to be.
So what’s to be done? Banish porn? Pass laws to prohibit it?
Sure, why not! That’s worked so well at prohibiting . . .demon rum. And marijuana, the killer weed, is impossible to find since it’s been prohibited by law for seventy years. And the laws that prohibit gambling and prostitution have a perfect record of success.
Since we’re prohibiting things that are bad . . . let’s also prohibit romance novels and home shopping network and QVC. Let’s also prohibit tobacco and fatty foods and sugary drinks.
Being a selfish jerk will destroy a relationship. Well, uh, yeah…
Answer: Don’t marry a selfish jerk
Banning Porn from a selfish jerk, won’t change them from being a selfish jerk.
A percentage of people can become addicted to many things (alcohol, chocolate, porn, etc…), should everyone be denied something because some people will become addicted to it?
Being selfish all the time…negative. Not allowing a partner to have any selfish time ever…controlling. People complaining about porn being selfish, they’re probably not as concerned about the selfishness of a hunting & fishing trip, or the watching of a War movie alone, or a hobby of personal enjoyment.
My personal experience is that women who are “devastated” to catch their guy looking at a naked woman, are not quite as devastated when catching their guy reading an erotic novel. It takes a few cycles of analysis before they presume that since he’s reading an erotic novel, he must also be looking at naked pictures somewhere at sometime too…and then they get upset. In the end, it’s the pictures, not the porn. This is experience, not a study….so I do wish someone would do such a study examining if there is indeed a difference in emotional response in women if they catch a significant other reading an erotic novel, or viewing a naked woman.
At the end of it all, the woman fears the comparison. Even many comments here, complain about the “addiction” when they themselves are not “fat” or they’re still “hot,” or don’t weigh “300 lbs.” If the comparison fear wasn’t deep in there…they wouldn’t even think to make that kind of statement.
If all you put into a relationship is a pair of boobs, then don’t be surprised with what happens when a better pair come along. If what your offering to the relationship is so much more than the visual or financial, then your partner will still be there if your disfigured in a fire, or paralyzed from a fall off a horse, or you lose your job.
When I travel a week away from my wife, the first day is fantastic. I watch whatever TV show I want. I eat whatever I want. I go to bed whenever I want. I wear whatever clothes I want. By the third day, I’m bored with myself. By day five…I’m lost. An important part of me is missing. I’ve no one to share the real me with. All thoughts are about getting home…and making that first day back HER best day ever.
Dating is about finding out if your partner is a selfish jerk (not impressing your friends). If porn is/has made your partner a selfish jerk…dump them. If computer games, talking to friends on the phone, or any other thing is/has made them a selfish jerk…dump them. If your partner thinks 100% of your time should be spent meeting their needs when they’re offering little in return…then they’re a selfish jerk too.
I think you are right on. It is the “who”, the soul of the person that is your partner that makes the difference. It takes both giving to make it really work. Yes there are selfish and controlling tendencies in everyone, keeping a balance is important.
After being apart it is wonderful making the first day back “the best day ever”. You have one that is working.
“any moneyed interest, be it libertarians”
Whoa there. When did libertarians become a moneyed interest? Where’s my money to use to sway scientists and swing elections?
Excellent article, Dr. Smith.
Way way too much free stuff to be paying for it…
Following up on Donna V, when it come to sex, it is not only the sex industry that empties your wallets. Look at the other industries like art, publishing, fashion and every other institution that abuse it to their own selfish ends. Here is an interesting read about what appears to be the largest pinup genre art fraud against an artist and collectors in the last 50 years:
http://knol.google.com/k/art-sorayama-v-tamara-bane-gallery-and-robert-bane#
Search: Sorayama V. Tamara Bane Gallery
So true and don’t even get me started on the ‘make-up’ and ‘youth-in-bottle-scam’ industry.
We are all suckers at one time or another! The point is, do we eventually out-grow being a ‘mark’?
Watching porn and not having sex with your spouse is a symptom of a larger problem in the relationship.
Anything can be destructive if addictive. Golf, shopping, sex, eating, sleeping, gossiping, and so on. Addiction in the difficulty. Not the porn. Does anyone think that someone who is addicted to porn would not be addicted to something else (strip clubs, prostitutes, swim suit competitions) if he/she were not addicted to porn?
You can outlaw everything. Declare a police state. But it won’t stop addiction.
Drink? Don’t drive drunk!
Drugs? Don’t burn your neighborhood down with your meth-lab!
Porn? Marry someone who will make homemade ‘pornos’ with you!
Glutton? Marry a chef who likes fatties!
Golly, I feel all cerebral and stuff. lol
Can only say after reading other comments we’re #@%&ed.
Porn is part of taking over thr U.S. Tha and sports to take us away from the real issues such as politics ..the way we live. This is a calculated industry to take down the U.S. as we know it!
Amen! There are a lot of weak men who justify their lack of self control but self control is the secret to happiness. I challenge a man who uses pornography to introduce me to his wife and family and let’s see what they say about this. I find Dr. Helen to be a pathetically sad person.
Arthur C. Clarke wrote a short story many years ago, back when Playboy was risque, in which a Soviet agent explains their plan to bring America to its knees: beaming porn directly to American TV sets. The Soviet agent goes on and on about how Americans will completely lose interest in anything more important. Of course, Clarke’s reason for the story was to make fun of such a ridiculous idea. But what do you know? It turned out to be closer to true than Clarke realized.
God….I love porn!
At least you know who your ‘God’ is.
A great many women believe that their only responsibility is to strip off, fall on their backs with their legs spread, and submit to it. BUT, sex is a participation sport. That’s what makes humans different from chimpanzees.
No man will long be satisfied f**king a “potato sack.”
If she’s doing that it’s probably because she’s never had an orgasm with you and has probably given up trying after your minute-man thrust-dump, doofus. THINK about it.
WHY does a woman not want sex as much as YOU? If she was having orgasms she’d WANT it. THINK, dumbass.
No. She always has an orgasm (there are unmistakable, unfakable ways to tell). I know what I’m doing.
‘Moisture’ and a few ‘moans’ doesn’t equate ‘orgasm’. Many women don’t even know what an ‘orgasm’ is except for a ‘tingle’ down there.
Dayum. Sad. This is what happens when men are encouraged to ‘explore’ their sexuality and women are ‘stifled’.
man o’ war,
DUH. I can attest to the fact I didn’t have a ‘REAL’ orgasm until I was 30 years old and finally bought the toys that ‘got me there’ and I was like, “WOW!” THIS is why my husband likes sex so much!
Delia you seem entirely obsessed with the female orgasm or lack thereof and assume that all men approach sex in an entirely selfish way. It seems to me that you are projecting personal issues into this discussion.
1. Did you marry someone who regarded sex that way? If so, why?
2. Unless there’s some trauma in her past, how many women are that completely uninterested in sex?
2. Did you marry someone who was an active participant, and something has changed? What, do you suppose? Are you sure that she changed? Or did you?
I know of a lot of marriages where the wives have seemingly lost interest in their husbands. But I know of a lot of marriages where the husbands treat their wives like potato sacks. I suspect there’s a connection.
Clayton as to your point no. 1.
I didn’t know how she regarded intercourse, although she did like to have her breasts rubbed. We were both virgins on our wedding night. In the 1960′s, graduates of single sex Roman Catholic universities knew more about planetary rotation than sex. That’s why I’ve never sent a child of mine to one of them.
I wanted to learn, she didn’t. I wanted counseling, she didn’t. I married her for “better or for worse,” so I stayed and didn’t stray. After long enough, you can get used to anything.
Wow. It sounds like part of a subculture that I’ve read about, but never actually met. I’m sorry for both of you. So it really is true that Catholicism teaches that sex is bad, except between celibate priests and choir boys?
Clayton, I don’t know about priests. None ever came on to me (or, that I knew of, to my friends).
But sex education a la today’s middle school was nonexistent in the RC system. I got all the “education” that I received from watching dogs do it in the back yard. I knew nothing, she knew nothing, and no one we knew talked about it. Bravely, I got some VHS porn once to see if we could get some ideas. She refused to watch it with me. I’ve learned more in the past 5 years from Glenn’s ocassional links to The Frisky or my web surfing discovery of JustAskMen than I learned in the previous 50.
Note for Catholic parents: Keeping knowledge of sex (beyond insert part A in slot B) from your children doesn’t stop masterbation or even pre-marital sex. It just guarantees clumsey people with low expectations who are denied God’s greatest gift to the human race. If you think 15 is the highest score and you rate your sex as a 14, are you cheated when you later find out that the sex scale goes up to 100 and you never sampled 85% of the available range? I think so. You can’t get those years back.
Those good times never happened, and never will. I think it’s sad.
@Donna V.
So a similar dynamic to romantic comedies and romance novels then?
Of course. When I was 12 and a reader of “Tiger Beat” magazine, I dreamt for “approval, acceptance, and affection” from Bobby Sherman and Donny Osmond, but I kinda got over it. I don’t read romance novels. From time to time, I watch a romantic comedy, but I understand that it’s a Hollywood movie – a movie, as in NOT REAL – and I’m looking at actors.
“anonymous writer claims that porn “produces more annual revenue — $97 billion worldwide in 2006 — than all of the leading technology companies combined.””
And making money from porn is becoming more and more difficult. It’s being created by mobile phones and dispensed freely on Facebook.
Kinda like the Cisco commercials from a few years ago: “companies are spending millions of dollars to figure out how to give you phone service for free.”
Remember, man is the only animal that eats when he is full, drinks when he is not thirsty, and makes love in all seasons. Is it no wonder we are so difficult to ourselves and others in our immediate vicinity.
If anonymous wants to know the reason for her failed marriage and her husbands loss of interest in here, she should examine a mirror first. Most men I know who have strayed, had affairs, etc. did so because of lack of satisfaction at home. Either a lack of interest in sex, a lack of interesting sex, or coming to a turning point in their lives remembering some feminist mantra from their college years about “all sex is rape” launch a unilateral embargo against the sex with their husband.
Anonymous would no doubt prefer to submit her husband to some Ludovico Treatment that would cure her husband of all his carnal pleasure and desire (even or especially for her)\than she would dare inconvenience herself by being what relationship columnist Dan Savage terms a ‘GGG’ lover (ie, good, giving, and game).
So, let’s talk about love and sex and addiction. Not that anybody is going to dig down this far into the post and actually see this.
Love is in fact a chemical addiction. The chemical is manufactured in your lips and it is slyly “injected” into another person with every KISS. This chemical is not just a very powerful opiate but it’s a very powerful opiate with YOUR NAME ON IT. This is what’s responsible for the mechanics of bonding. The molecular structure has an uncanny resemblance (your signature not withstanding) to CHOCOLATE. The commodity of love, and Hershey’s called ‘em Kisses! What a coincident. This chemical also triggers phenyl ethylamine “PEA” – a naturally occurring amphetamine in the brain.
Music is full of euphuisms and antidotal testimonials: ‘I Want a New Drug’ Huey Lewis and The News, ‘Addicted To Love’ Robert Palmer, ‘Your Kiss Is On My List’ Hall and Oates, and on, and on.
Lip Stick creates a barrier to this chemical exchange, it was first used by Egyptian Prostitutes to help keep them from becoming ‘attached’ to their clients. The best way to wean yourself off of a man who is not good for you or to you, is simple Chapstick.
The left brain is larger in women and the right brain is larger in men. Guess where the Love circuitry is. Now where do you think the sex circuitry resides. How about some simple math. If you two exchange 100 molecules of ‘Love’ and she has 100 receptors available to fill vs. his 90, who gets the most out of every kiss. Bingo! Now do the same math with sex. As a man I can say that I literally know what love is, but I still prefer sex. This doesn’t mean that I am incapable of bonding or caring, but the machine can only work as designed, sorry.
Now here is the real rub, the sex chemistry is totally self-contained. You manufacture it, your brain summons’ it, and you can manipulate it’s glorious release. However this bonding chemical comes from somewhere unbeknownst to you (until now). INTERACTION with that other person MUST occur. There simply is no substitute, or work around. If that interaction breaks down or becomes inaccessible you both will experience horrific withdrawals.
Or it might all just be rainbows and unicorns.
Whoo, I was worried; for a second there, I was worried you were going to recommend taking away my chocolate after some of the other commenters here take away my porn…
I think “sexuality” is a tired buzzword, especially since most of what we mean by it has very little to do with sex any more. Sex is the joining of two gametes to create a new organism, and we seem to spend all of our money, thought and energy on how to prevent that from happening. How about “eroticality” or “orgasm without insemination.” I think feminism has never been about being feminine. More like “the male role is where all the power and money are and so women need to get in on the action.” It’s like Marxism seeking to replace capitalism, but without any evidence that Marxists are better at managing capital.
We seem to assume that we all know what will make us most happy. Freedom is essential, but it doesn’t mean that whatever we choose is what’s best. I don’t trust psychology on such questions, because it seems that these days what passes for therapy is to discard the standards one isn’t living up to. It seems a bit like saying get famous and rich and you’ll be happy.
I don’t think that real intimacy can be based on fantasizing and that’s pretty much all that pornography is.
“Maybe we should discuss the many social institutions that are giving women unrealistic expectations of men and a sense that they have the right to control men, and men’s sexuality, in their own interest.”
I think this is correct, but also sort of beside the point. The presence of other ills in the world is no defense of porn.
I’ve noticed the debasing of my own sexual desire and romantic feelings due to porn in the past. Gave it up for that reason–I found by experience that, as in other cases, the prohibitions of my Christian faith were not put there to take away happiness, but to protect me.
Influential forces in our society are trying to feminize men, and I applaud Dr. Helen for taking them on. But in this case critics of men may be right. We have a strong desire for sexual relations–virtual or in the flesh–with many young women. This is perfectly natural, but not necessarily beneficial.
The problem with trying to discuss this is that it’s almost impossible to know what commenters mean when they say, for instance, their wives don’t like sex. Is it because the women really are cold potatoes, is it because the husbands aren’t good lovers, or is it because men want to try things they’ve seen in porn films that don’t appeal to women? Anal sex has zero appeal for me, for instance, and yet it’s routine in today’s porn. (Many gay men enjoy it, but remember that the act of penetration can stimulate the man’s prostate gland. Even given that fact, most straight men would not like being on the receiving end of anal sex. Well, we women don’t have prostates. Remember that the women in porn flicks are being paid to engage in it. As an earlier commenter said, how much do you enjoy getting a rectal check?) So are women being condemned for not liking sex at all , or are they being condemned for not wanting to engage in certain practices or fetishes that are common in porn movies? Probably both scenarios are common, but there is no way of telling from what people say in the comments.
I’m trying my best to be even-handed here, so I’ll say the same is true of women. You might keep the weight down and keep up the hair and nails, but there are other ways of making yourself unattractive. I know a woman in her early 50′s who looks terrific for her age but she belittles her husband in front of others relentlessly. It’s painful to listen to; he can’t do anything right, did this or that stupid thing, is all wrong about X,Y and Z. I wouldn’t be surprised if that man has a huge cache of porn stashed away. Again, you just don’t know – and can’t know – what the situation is from reading blog comments.
I’m not saying that all women who are anti-porn fall into that category. (Like I said earlier, I understand the anti-porn side of things better than I do the porn fans.) Nor am I saying that every guy who likes porn is ticked off because the missus won’t dress up like a schoolgirl or engage in a threesome. My point is that it’s a bit more complicated, on both sides, than he’s a pig and she’s a prude.
From the start: “And no, I’m not 300 pounds and ugly.”
Considering the documented and oft repeated assertion that men are “visual”, her post is academic without a picture. And yes..generally..the escape valve role seems very plausible when the other oft repeated issue of unequal needs of males is involved. To take it to another level, it may also explain hetero inmates turning to homosexuality to meet needs. Ooh..that’s crazy talk. Here is where I mention my “toothpaste theory”. With pressure on the tube, you can open the cap and have it come out in an orderly fashion..or watch it burst out the seamed end. It’s coming out either way. Is there a web counter for how many I’ve offended? Oh, c’mon. Is that all?
Fortunately, I have the ability to satisfy my wife’s emotional needs at all times by sparkling in the sunlight, flying with her in my arms through the trees when the mood strikes, defending her against all external attacks by werewolves and evil vampires-in-law.
I do this by being idle rich but having no visible means of support; owning the coolest and biggest modern house deep in the woods; being 400 years old yet forever young and virile and, finally, by thinking about her 24 hours per day because, as I do not sleep, I simply watch her…to bask in her remarkable attractiveness.
I would never expect her to offer her body to me in a crass sexual relationship based on any need I may have. Oh, no. Never. We are way Deep Soul Mates. Gazing into each others’ eyes while strolling through the woods is sufficient.
I prove my love to her by walking into death traps. Oh, and by turning the subwoofer down when we watch a movie together.
My guess is that you are making a snide remark about the Twilight series and how romance novels are porn for women. And you would be completely correct. I knew a couple where the wife read romance novels for the same reason that some men watch porn–and the husband tolerated it because it was the only way to get her interested. (The wife did a splendid elephant impression, and alas, it was because there was more than a certain similarity in body structure.)
Romance novels are dangerous to a marriage for the same reason as porn: regular use is likely to lead to unrealistic hopes and expectations.
Just as things would change real fast if men were the ones getting pregnant and bearing children, things would change pretty fast if women starting viewing porn videos on their computers and their hubbies and BFs found out the ladies were servicing themselves looking at hot, buff, young men giving women orgasms. Men would be up in arms, jealous, incecure, would pry and snoop, bitch about it and suddenly we’d have millions of men filing for divorce on the grounds that their wives seemed more interested in porn dudes than in them.
Never forget to reverse the situation on theory. If you do, many arguments will collapse like house of cards.
I’m female, hot, not young, not old. I sometimes watch RedTube.com if I need a quick fix when single. It keeps me from going on a dating site and looking for a man whom I can imagine kissing and maybe even having sex with. (not many of those online sadly.) I don’t watch porn however with a BF sleeping three feet away like an ex of mine did. And I don’t ogle other guys when I’m out with a partner. And I don’t cheat on my partner either.
So, guys – how would you feel if we started watching a whole lotta porn when you’re asleep, out of town or you ran to the store for half and hour?
“… [I]f men were the ones getting pregnant and bearing children”, they would be women.
If you had me constantly satisfied sexually, I’d say “fine go watch it”. If not, I’d say “fine let’s watch it together and play together.” Redtube is alright, but seems to trend to manufactured porn – try some of the amateur sites if you want good honest porn by couples enjoying themselves.
I LOL’d so hard over this post I almost involuntarily O-faced. bwahahahahaha!
*ahem* (Trying to compose self after fit of giggles).
I don’t think men could handle bleeding 7 days out of month and most certainly not birthin’ baybayz.
And that’s just part of it!
It’s TERRIFYING for some of us women to think of an unplanned pregnancy happening during what is supposed to be ‘enjoyment’, couple that with a guy who thinks a woman’s body is for ‘his’ pleasure and yeah, there is not going to be a lot of “Happy Happy JOY JOY” in the sack.
One of the best gifts my husband ever gave me was a vasectomy. I was finally FREE to love him and go crazy sex monkey-girl on his arse. haha
“things would change real fast if men were the ones getting pregnant and bearing children”
“Men would be up in arms, jealous, incecure, would pry and snoop, bitch about it and suddenly we’d have millions of men filing for divorce on the grounds that their wives seemed more interested in porn dudes than in them.”
I think your theory might hold if the socialization came with the biology. Do you think it is purely a matter of who bears the children that dictates the monogamy vs variety equation? Maybe there’s more to it.
I have read most of the comments on this thread, and I guess it is time to throw my hat into the ring.
First, for the author of the anonymous post at NRO: It is a shame that your marriage ended the way it did. The children are really the innocent victims in this. You are a psychologist by admission, so you (hopefully) can see why people conclude that you are attempting to rationalize what happened. Seeking out poorly designed and articulated studies to bolster your position actually hurts your cause (see Climategate). The direction of causation is indeterminate in most of these types of studies, unless they are carefully crafted.
Second, to the author of this blog post, please do not quote more poorly designed studies as a response to an article laden with poorly designed studies. Remember the phrase often attributed to a well-known conservative: “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” It distracts people from the rest of your argument (which is valid) unless your point was to mock the anonymous author.
As to the thread of comments, I have enjoyed reading them. I have drawn a few conclusions, most of which are probably non-controversial. First, none of us are beyond personalizing this topic, as we are all invested in the subject matter. Second, most of the posts are not much different from the original anonymous story, rationalizing and personalizing via anecdote or first-hand observed behavior. The battle of the sexes is alive and well. It seems to me that, as in most things, the reality of the situation probably falls somewhere between the extremes. Relationships, as others have mentioned, are hard work, and it seems everyone wants to take the easy way out now (divorce). Trying to keep a fulfilling sex life while both partners work and try to raise five children is unfathomable to me.
All of that said, people all have different motivations for viewing pornography. Like any leisure activity, moderation is key, and “moderate level” differs from person to person. Some seek it to relieve stress, some because they are unfulfilled in terms of frequency or particular acts, and hundreds of other valid reasons. Like alcohol or video games or reading or romance novels or golf, some people abuse it. Once pornography viewing becomes a problem in a relationship, assigning blame is less important than figuring out how to repair whatever damage is done. He said/she said, pointing fingers, and seeking public support for your position are not steps on the road to reconciliation.
I also think it is overblown to equate all pornography with the more specialized variants (i.e. fetishes) that exist. The long tail effect of the internet and the need to differentiate has affected the pornography industry as it has all of the others; in fact, they have been much quicker to embrace and capitalize on those realities than, say, the book publishing, music, or movie industries.
To all those who have posted in the thread with relationship problems, I wish you all the best. To Anastasia in particular, I hope you seek some outside help.
I think we know why Anna’s husband needed the porn. I’d prefer a porn site to her hectoring any day.
Charlie- I went by her first short pull quote from the cited article: “all men watch porn”. Having read that, I decided to skip the linked article, having rejected its premise, as Dr. Helen represented it, as silly and wrong.
At first it bothered me that he didn’t want sex with me anymore, tuckered out from jacking off to porn for hours daily while I was at work. When I complained, he said I needed to learn the difference between love and sex. So I learned. Now I don’t want sex with anyone. He’s decided after years and years of jacking off to porn that it might be nice to have sex with a real person. I went along but am totally bored with the whole thing now. YAWN. He’s furious that I am willing but not eager. WTF??? If I had maintained my desire all these years while waiting for him to get ‘real’, I would have cheated to stay sane.
The woman’s problem stemmed fro Wall Street and farms.
That is where those nasty ideas start. It all starts with the Bulls. Oh. No. Chicago is afflicted too.
This is thread is so sad, its hilarious. Controlling frigid women are wondering why men find greater comfort in front of a colder computer monitor watching porn. Hey ladies: you need to compete with the porn! And I thought porn was a “victimless” crime.
To be sure the men need to mature, and realize how cold and empty that porn is. Like most addicting substances, more and more is needed to get the same thrill, and after a while thrill is gone and what is left is an emptiness which only grows in its enormity.
Men who believe that men should be the head of the household, and provide for their wives and families, earn more than men who have bought into woman’s liberation.
Television and movies are full of men who are inadequate jerks, and who have women in their lives to help them get through the day, in spite of the man’s best attempts to totally screw up their lives. Men are the butt of the jokes.
I saw a posting from a fellow on a thread discussing misandry. His plan was to have a live in girlfriend for a few years. Then she would discuss marriage, and he would discuss commitment issues, and she would move on and he would find a replacement. Sorry ladies, he is always going to find a replacement for you.
I thought the Super Bowl adds portrayed the men poorly, but here is another take on that problem.
http://www.military.com/entertainment/television/why-are-those-super-bowl-ad-execs-so-mad-at-women
Hey ladies here’s a little hint for you. Step away from the romance novels and screw your husband’s brains out. He won’t have time to look at porn. Less crudely, if you want to be interested in then be interesting.
BINGO!
Romance novels? Never read one. My taste runs more to Rand, Asimov, and Michner. Hard to screw someone who outweighs you by 150 pounds and is repulsed by you because you have pubic hair. I know it is possible for a woman to rape a man, but not in this case.
So leave him. Do I have to think of everything?
I gave up romance novels once I started having real orgasms. lol
The good thing about something that leaves something to the imagination is nobody can catch AIDS/HERPES/GENITAL-WARTS/Torn-Rectums/Esophageal-tears/Rectal-Prolapse et al by just thoughts in your head.
‘THINK about’ it.
I think society would be a lot healthier if we had “hands on” instruction. I was in my 40′s (8 years ago) before I learned how to truly satisfy my woman with quivers from head to foot. A good sexual relationship I think leads to more intimacy and less rough or deviant sex.
My first wife never allowed herself to enjoy it, which made it miserable and rare. Porn was a big release for me when with her, much less now unless she is out of town.
I think so many women have not had strong orgasms, it really crimps their desire for sex. Men – it is up to you to put your partner into orbit. It has wonderful returns.
Affirmative, Kitsap!
I swear to freakin’ Holly Golightly that women are not that ‘wired differently’ from men, we are just raised differently from the getgo about our sexuality!
Men are given ‘playboys/sex-mags’ by their Dads and told that ‘masturbation’ is ‘a-okay’ (which masturbation IS) but, women as girls are told to ‘save themselves’ for ‘Mr. Right’ or their sexuality is ignored altogether!
I gave my daughter a clitoral stimulation toy for her ‘coming of age’ birthday present. I’ve always brought her up to never be ashamed of masturbation or her sexuality and now she is a very sexually healthy and happy individual. *phew*
My childhood was rife with childhood traumas on top of being a ‘girl’. Once I came out of my shell (sexually speaking) I realized how wonderful and intimate making love could be. I’ve even helped design some adult toys for both men and women.
Unfortunately, men don’t always understand how sexually repressed women are. Women are ashamed to even admit they can’t orgasm through ‘penetration’ alone and feel somehow inadequate if they can’t and on top of that, they are terrified to tell the man they love that they aren’t satisfied for fear of hurting his feelings. It’s a lose-lose until men can have empathy and interest in helping his woman orgasm.
I’ve been on a crusade of sorts for women. I even bought my mom and sister toys once I had the big ‘o’. I wanted to shout it to the rooftops and I wanted every woman I loved to experience what their body could achieve with the right stimulation.
God bless every guy out there who honestly tries to help his mate get there!
Dahlia-
As my marriage was falling apart, in desperation I saw an escort expecting some good sex. What I didn’t expect was a lot of intimacy and really fun sex. From there I came across a 40 yr old hot woman that had been a therapist that loved being a life coach and instructor. It got my head back together and also got me to appreciate woman and adore them.
I also found that I am poly, I can be the responsible partner in the relationship and do well, but really need to “go out” for a meal 3 or 4 times a year. Yes it does not fit any society norms but it really reinforces for me how good my partner is and to be quite happy with the “menu” she wants to offer at home.
It is sad to see so many couples that had little prior experience struggle on the beginner slope, never making it to the great runs and sights at the top of the mountain.
I think a lot of guys think they are better at sex than they are, never realizing how important good foreplay, listening, and learning what their partner needs. They never give their mates a chance to learn what turns them on and relate that. Before long the woman has gone cold as it is a lot of hassle with little fun for her.
-Kitsap
No one here is advocating for any of those activities. If you’re so scared then go ahead and live your sex life in your head. But don’t complain when the guy from whom you withhold everything starts looking elsewhere.
Yes, just remember! Porn is a victimless crime! All those girls really are bored housewives, or college coeds who study nuclear physics in their spare time! There’s no such thing as porn made by runaways, drug addicts and abused, third-world women! No, indeed! No, indeedy! No siree-babaloo!
And, ladies, stop reading! Right now! Romance novels are warping your little brains! In fact, it would probably be better if you didn’t read at all. You might find love realistically discussed, or encounter male characters who are likable and admirable, which might make you a judgmental feminazi. Unlike porn (which is absolutely true—they really are super models who study medieval history when they’re not starring in “Dulcie Does Detroit!”) reading rots your mind, and robs you of your femininity. Read too much, you’ll get ideas, and do something horrible, like disapprove of porn. Spend your money on botox, and breast implants (the bigger the better!) so you can compete with the drugged-out, 15 year old teenage runaways in the porn flicks your significant other finds so attractive.
(Beware Jane Austen! This “romance” writer will give you ideas! Do not read her! Get plastic surgery, instead!)
/Sarcasm. What else?
If we could just funnel all of this masturbatory energy into saving our country!
Hello;
Once I was going to write my Graduate School thesis on the History of Porn, however I decided against that topic because I came to realize that women were going to negatively peer review my paper and I knew they were definitely going to assault my motives. Nevertheless, here are some observations generated by my study on the History of Porn.
1) How do feminists deal with the statistic that all female porn actresses are lesbians, but not all male porn actors are homosexuals. May one conclude that the pornography boom since the 1970s is due in part to the contagious freedom felt by proud queers to publicly engage in homosexuality. Interestingly the feminist movement is not taken seriously by men because they regard feminism as a non-issue due in part to male perception that lesbians have taken over the feminist movement (feminism is a Lesbian movement), while in contradistinction Males, Men do not want anything to do with homosexuals, frankly men do not want queers lurking around us. So Ricky Martin thinks it great to be taken like a women eh? And Perez Hilton is a serious creep who needs to hang around Andy Garcia to feel he is acceptable to his own people?
2) Everybody is a pervert, quit blaming porn for the break-up of marriages. Also men won’t leave a real life sex partner for a virtual lover. If two people leave each other it is because one of them doesn’t like each other anymore. The reason that men view so much porn on the internet (web page channel hopping) is because watching other people engage in sex is really quite boring, and all men and women are doing is trying to find something that interests them – so they have to keep going so until they find something they like (pornography is niche driven). Also men are genuinely surprised that so many beautiful women would expose themselves psychologically and physically in film as flagrant delicto! Men are looking for role playing models (cheerleader, nurse, whatever)who reminds them of their girlfriends. After humans achieve orgasm through manipulation of their genitals from viewing pornography, they are generally embarrassed that they behaved like they did. Humans would much prefer a partner, however, since relationships are painful if not prohibited (there is evidence that lesbians are writing all the sex laws to prevent men from obtaining sexual gratification), the lack of sexual freedom encourages the use of artificial sex toys. Dildoes are proof of the lack of freedom among humans to make sexual choices.
3) virtual sex is the future of physical relationships between men and women, due to the male perception that feminist laws that have to relationship to reality have made it illegal for men to have sexual choices. Prostitution is illegal. I mean really, if men want a sexual encounter a lot of them have to sneak around the city to buy it. It used to be illegal to exhibit homosexuality in public and now they have open sex clubs, (Pelosi is the elected House of Representative from Sodomania San Francisco in Congress is she not? Whereas national feminist laws are legislated to prevent real males, men -from finding a sex partner, for example prostitution is illegal. Pornography is merely a platform for releasing that sexual frustration and masturbation is completely normal when a man doesn’t have a woman to sexually satisfy him. As an aside, men have the largest sexual organs in the animal kingdom and medical-wise Male masturbation helps prevent prostrate cancer.
4) All of these sexual predator laws that list men on a data base are stupid. Listing a man’s name on sexual predator’s list is locking him into a virtual prison. Feminists are using the 1% statistic of men who rape and murder little girls to demonize all men who have relationships with younger women. And since when did all this sexual predators start happening? Only after the teenager was invented by Hollywood in 1958? No I am wrong; deviant sexual behavior was first listed as a sexual perversion on newly created statistical data bases by the Nazi regime in Germany in 1936.
The freedom of homosexuals to popularize sodomania is in direct relation to the historical rise of pornography. Will the feminists respond to this statement?
I think porn is a bad influence on young people also, but I feel that NGOs are attacking the nasty subject for the wrong reasons. I offer a simple solution to porn addiction; make it illegal for women to take off their clothes, and porn will be eliminated. It is the women who produce porn- not the men.
I was wondering if Godwin’s Law was going to rear it’s inevitable! lmfao
Dude, you’re a moron. Seriously. Go masturbate to a shiny Corvette.
That’s why it’s a Law, Delia.
It’s unfortunately become a common feature of internet debate to assume that invoking a logical fallacy (or even an informal fallacy like Godwin’s Law) is the same as refuting an argument.
Not to say that I agree with the post you were replying to, but really, is that the best you could do?
Burkas don’t stop rape, phucktard.
NEXT!
What a particularly classless ad hominem attack, Delia.
I’m disappointed that the moderators allowed it since it’s clearly against the guidelines.
However, I’ll live.
I notice is this is exactly as intellectually lazy as these cheap shots you took on “Godwin’s Law” below rather than seriously disagreeing and debating an idea:
And then this one:
You’re not only not classy, you sound like you’re unable to discuss concepts here with the calibre of people here. Not only myself, but with other commenters too.
[Cross posted from the mini-thread above so the commenters you were mindlessly attacking here can get another example of your debating "style". I use that word loosely.]
Wiley Gomez writes:
+1
@DookieStain:
“isn’t it possible that she….
…..
– wanted her husband to see her give birth, … which not only caused him to stop seeing her in a sexy way, but also lead to other underlying emotional issues”
This sounds about as groundless as the notion that “seeing” porn causes a man to stop seeing a woman as a human being.
So many of my married buddies are in a kind of sexual prison. Their wives have them on the Twice-a-Month sexual maintenance plan, and even that pittance is denied if the guy doesn’t cave in on every argument. At the same time these wives would consider porn marriage-jeopardizing “cheating”. So the de facto rules of the house are, no sex and no “release valve”.
These are solid husbands who love and support their wives and kids, but whose sexual outlets have been reduced to sneaking quick, guilty jerk-off sessions to contraband porn like a 14 year-old boy living in a nunnery.
If these wives only could see what I see every day: Hot waitresses flirting with them, young secretaries finding excuses to be alone with them, women all day long signaling their availability because they see proven, Top Grade husband material compared to the losers they’re dating. This is the environment these men enter every day, and their clueless wives send out into it sex deprived and horny as hell.
Let me spell this out for the women who don’t get it: If a man’s gone more than two days without ejaculating, his subconscious is in overdrive seeking a sexual outlet. YES, EVEN THE GOOD GUYS. This is how men are wired, if you can’t accept that, don’t marry one.
‘Sexual Prison’
Here’s a sexual prison for you to ponder, Grasshopper:
A woman who’s man has no idea how to bring his wife/girlfriend to orgasm and doesn’t want to actually try to find out! A woman who has NO idea what an orgasm even IS. A woman who is petrified of becoming pregnant when she isn’t ready. A woman who was brought up to be ‘a good girl’ and suddenly marries and is expected to be a ‘bad girl’ in bed. A woman who ‘fakes’ an orgasm to ‘please’ her man while she is left feeling utterly devoid of sexual pleasure.
Please, guys. Have some empathy and compassion for your women and you will open up a whole new world of pleasure to them.
Women don’t ‘hold out’ because they are trying to ‘control’ you. They have lost interest in sex because IT DOES NOTHING FOR THEM!
Can you imagine eating cake and not ‘tasting’ it and being forced to eat ‘cake’ on a continual basis despite the fact you can’t even enjoy it and it might make you ‘fat’?
MY GOD, men. THINK ABOUT it!
We women aren’t bad people trying to CONTROL YOUR sexuality! We have barely found our OWN sexuality!
Help your women BLOSSOM rather than denigrate them!
The next time you compose a rapier-like riposte to a dumb, foul male, you might consider a bit more carefully whether you are actually proving his point.
I don’t at all see what your reply had to do with his post. Try reading it again without the agenda.
I hate to break it to you, but nobody handed me a dirty mag when I was 13 and said “go to it”. I had just as much shame as you did, from years of church and feminist dominated-class, distant father, etc. Men don’t get a free pass. Believe me, I spent many years bitter over this, looking for someone to blame.
But you know, in the end, it wasn’t anyone’s job to figure out my own sexuality but my own. I had to figure out how to attract the opposite sex and take rejection, despite constant feminist pressure that I was somehow attempting rape by merely by saying “hi” to women. This is not hyperbole, I felt this way, and I could only medicate it away with alcohol. Women usually don’t have this problem, but you *do* similarly have to figure out what pleases yourself. And it’s *your* job. We can help, but we can’t do it for you if you don’t want it to happen.
We both were in prison — but only we can let ourselves out.
Anna –
“Now he’s got no woman at all, other than the pictures online to masturbate to.”
Which has to be ten times better than having to put up with a shrill nag like you.
In reply to you Dr Smith; a question? Are you married, and if not, Why not ? and also how do you discern any value (meaning, one’s internal moral compass making choices and decisions, that our typically difficult to the extreme, as regards to controlling our lustful appetites) composing in our minds eye, internal and external judgements as to the value of marriage being played out in a pornographically affected society. Gentlemen don’t throw your hands up at the word “lust”. All of us, men and women are subject to “it”. We’re human!!! When Pajamas conjures a thread like this all need to contribute their 2 cents. Pajamas Media introduced me to Diana West the author of “The Death of the Grown-Up”!!! Everyone on this thread should own a copy, read it enthusiastically, and pass it on to the world. Pajamas reading males (this blog site), preoccupied with Islam, Jihad, feminization of our nation. Please read Mrs. West’s insights and come back to this thread and consider your choices. And it does not matter where you stand on the pornographic scale of for or against. It’s how your enemies discern you and your judgements. Quick aside: Middle-eastern men owned and sold most of the pornography in the New York City peep stores from the 1980,s right up until contemporary times. Erzatz (freaky logic) Women in general admire and are more likely to form relationships with pious and stable strong men who are enthused to make families. Islamic men fill that bill, not infantile American men pining at loathsome images of Jesse James’s leftovers.Excuse me, that does not include his present wife. Here’s another curveball to those on this thread. Recently finished Randy Taraborrelli,s biography of Marilyn Monroe. Not the best biography, but again revealing in how Women are ultimately “the prize”, in this so called showdown between these two diametrically opposed civilizations. Western Civ. Marilyn in the ” 7 Year Itch”. Eastern Civ. Burqua clad eternal virtuous virgins. This will be a bumpy ride if we don,t remember to put away our toys and become men squared.
Regarding the “Christie Effin Brinkley” comments I’ll refer to an old saw that, in my experience, is as true as it gets: “Show me a beautiful woman, and I’ll show you a guy who is tired of f*cking her.” Men are NOT wired to be monogamous. It doesn’t matter if you’re a 2 or a 10, before 10 sessions have passed the guy is picturing someone else during the act. Deal with it, ladies!
Monogamy is a joke for both sexes.
Women are finding themselves and wondering if they even want a man?
Men are in perpetual ‘mental midget masturbation mode’ expecting the women they encounter as ‘porn skanks’ in the bedroom.
I’m more than ready to switch teams to the Lesbionic side. If my husband croaked tomorrow I’d be a full-on Lesbian. No shame.
I assure you I had women pushing the edges with me sexually long before it ever occurred to me to push the edges with them sexually.
Were they “skanks”?
If so, merci. Merci beaucoup.
Delia writes:
Well, no, no we aren’t, and no, no we don’t. You know what I picture when I daydream about women I admire? Kissing, dancing, being close, sharing time together, and having her smile at me. Yes, I want sex as much as the next guy, but I don’t think about doing the nastiest, filthiest things I can imagine. OK, well, at least not all the time.
I’m one of those guys on the “starving” plan, feeling guilty about being attracted to other women, unwilling to cheat on my wife, and certainly not wanting to set a bad example for my boy. I drop more than hints at my wife all the time, but she’s in bed asleep not long after the boy is asleep. I stay up later, and there’s ample opportunity, but she seems to be less willing to make time to “make time” than I am.
And no, Delia, before you go off on another of your rants, there’s no issue here about sending her into orbit. I can hold out more than long enough to make sure she’s been there several times before I get there.
Right on Delia! Kidding aside, I think your earlier comments re the nearly inevitable effects of lack of investment by many men in figuring out how to make it fun for the gal were “spot-on” — pun fully intended!
‘Women don’t ‘hold out’ because they are trying to ‘control’ you. They have lost interest in sex because IT DOES NOTHING FOR THEM!’ — Delia\
This is one of those general statements are are too broad to be fully true. Are there woman who use sex as a means of emotional control? Of course. They aren’t necessarily typical, but they exist. It’s also true that many women gain nothing from sex, it’s just a chore, sometimes because their husband doesn’t know what she likes (or care), sometimes because she’s just wired that way (a few men are, too).
And many in both sexes have heads packed with nonsense from popular culture and the people around them, too.
Is it too much to ask for people to learn the differences in meaning and application between “whose” and “who’s”?
If you can’t work this one out, why should I heed your logic on matters involving sexuality and God?
“Maybe we should discuss the many social institutions that are giving women unrealistic expectations of men and a sense that they have the right to control men, and men’s sexuality, in their own interest.”
And get burned at the stake? No thanks.
“It is well that porn is so terrible, else we should come to love it too much.”
It is a given that men look to many women to satisfy their one need; and women look to one man to satisfy their many needs. The whole sexual hardwiring is cross circuited from the get-go. This has bedeviled human kind for millennia, and the issue of porn is one of many cards in a very large deck.
The world’s oldest profession began with a man’s unsatisfied need and a woman willing to fulfill that need for a price. It seems the same thread runs through the exchange between porn viewer and porn subject. The viewer, having internalized his need, seeks out either masturbatory or mental satisfaction by viewing either a woman who is advertising herself as available, or other humans willing to display themselves performing sexual acts for either money or a vicarious thrill.
What is different now than in past eras is that after 50 years of the Playboy philosophy, 40 years of Women’s Liberation and the development of an overbearing matriarchal social structure that will not tolerate “incorrectness” or deviance from “accepted norms”, men have been relegated to the computer screens to live out their fantasies and “connect” with their imaginary lovers.
The repression of male aggression, the de-masculation of young boys to reject traditional hero types in favor of more antiseptic and less “barbarian” role models has neutered the male species.
Why try to satisfy the real wife who has made it clear that no matter how much groveling one does or how often one “listens” to endless problems without solutions that the male will not be excused from his failings? Why continue to try to understand the complicated needs of female emotions, where an act of innocent omission almost is worse than an overt act of commission against them? His ill-timed comment and her look of resentment unnoticed in time to correct himself, condemns the man to an outer Hell he doesn’t understand nor can comprehend why the wife sent him there.
Why bother, especially when one can dial up his dream girl on one of a million websites, all willing in different formats, from .jpg to embedded videos, and connect to a woman who appears to have the same level of the primary urge as him? Technology allows man to create his own reality without the conflicts and unresolved problems of the real life relationship. Time stops as he projects his own ideas of what type of personality the image in the screen has, more often that not the antithesis of his home life companion.
The worse the real relationship becomes, the greater the allure to the world of the imaginary, to the world where there are no consequences to actions taken, or thoughts expressed.
The matriarchs will, in their tyranny, attempt to suppress porn. But, the goblin is out of the bottle. There is too much money in it, too many willing participants and too strong a common agreement among men on its intrinsic value. Women and sexual actors will continue to ply their trades, and as long as a group of women flash their tops at the beach, there will always be a place to exhibit their assets on the web. Suppress porn? Not likely. Not with what has been put in motion.
“Why continue to try to understand the complicated needs of female emotions…”
To me the obvious answer is so one can succeed as a man and enjoy different relationships with different women, from a position of respect, masculine power, and playfulness.
And various mixtures of love, desire, and affection.
What other men tend to do with such knowledge (if they even gain such) is up to them.
Hint: Women like men whom women already like. You don’t have to stop at just one woman. (You can, but it isn’t mandatory.)
“Why continue to try to understand the complicated needs of female emotions…”
To me the obvious answer is so one can succeed as a man and enjoy different relationships with different women, from a position of respect, masculine power, and playfulness.
I don’t know what kind of dollies you run with, but the women in my life have been nothing but yammering balls of confusion who emotionally drive themselves and all around them to total dead ends.
If the characteristics were confined to one of them then you could say it was an isolated incident. For a string of them to reveal themselves as psychos taught me a lot more about them than I wanted to know.
I don’t see where my personal success has been dependent on “understanding the complicated needs of women.” Maybe I am not as hung up on masculine power as you are but I never demanded respect from anyone and learned from my parents and neighborhood to act in a respectful way and it would be returned.
I am not a disciple of Tom Lykas or see myself as the playboy of the western world.
Your answer isn’t so obvious, and on its face, it seem rather spurious. If it could all be summed up so easily, you could put it in a box and sell it. As is, I’m not buying it.
“I don’t know what kind of dollies you run with, but the women in my life have been nothing but yammering balls of confusion who emotionally drive themselves and all around them to total dead ends.”
Oh, it’s pretty much the same with me.
I’m half serious, half joking.
Women are people. They’re emotional and they’re not always rational. That describes most heads of state — not just say “college chicks” to use one demographic.
Women are even more emotional than men on average. And it can be self-defeating, etc.
But you know what? I LOVE female energy. And I love women on different levels.
Some are fun to be with for a while… some are amazing for long term friendships with… and some are great for love. Or any or all of the above.
There’s ups and downs… not just with women, but with me.
Sometimes I’m doing one thing, sometimes I’m doing another (no pun intended… although I was at a wedding in Australia early this year for 2 Pentecostal virgins (yeah, they were) and the best man gave a speech which concluded with, “The bride and groom are tired, so give them some time to go upstairs and put their things together… before coming back for the dancing.”)
Nice.
Anyway!
I think women’s emotions, etc., SHOULD be noticed by men. And men should pay vastly more attention to what women do than say.
Oh what they say is important. And if with a given woman you notice a strong correlation between “do” and “say”, then awesome! That’s a great woman. Go with that.
But it’s often the other way… and as long as a man hasn’t put absolutely all of his eggs in one basket… they can still be enjoyable and good friends.
I am not saying you have to sleep with every woman… a man can even be monogamous, although I would say that’s always going to be a bit of a struggle (which may still be worth it).
I’m just saying a man should have female friends, attractive female friends (inside and/or outside), and he should NOT let his wife call all the shots for him sexually and otherwise. A man should have options in order to maintain his self-respect and happiness if absolutely necessary.
Even if the option is simply to be able to talk to members of the opposite sex… I believe EVERY man should reserve that right for himself… and so should women.
“masculine power”
I do like the word masculine mostly because it’s a counterbalance to the “feminism” and related concepts that are popular and persuasive.
I just mean male. Being a man and not being ashamed of it or of what you want. You can still be an urbane metrosexual with thick-framed classes.
The “power” part of that phase comes from decision. I believe there’s no more masculine quality than decisiveness.
* I meant pervasive, but maybe persuasive was the ultimate in Freudian slips!
Lynn wrote:
“Certain pornography is legal, yet that does not mean that all should be forced to accept it as “normal” for them or acceptable for their partner to engage in. There are those who truly feel it is immoral and want no part of it in their life or in their home. It’s a choice, and that means someone who does not want to engage in watching pornography or be partnered with a person who watches pornography, certainly has the right to object and than could truthfully cite it as a reason the breaking up of that relationship.”
Well you’d think this would be one of the things that you’d want to discuss/address before getting married right? That would then be the fault of the couple not the porn, they didn’t bother to communicate before getting married. That too issue that is not factored in here, “Men go into relationships hoping the woman will never change, but she does. Women go into relationships hoping that the man will change (or thinking they can change him), but he doesn’t.”
Porn is an inanimate object and thus cannot break up anything. It is the individuals involved in the marriage and their choices that destroy said marriage, blaming external factors is just a convenient excuse for both parties involved.
Getting married to the “right” sexual partner is also important. Everyone’s tastes and likes are different…i think its important that we marry someone who has closely the same sexual wants/desires. Couple problems is sometimes it takes us a while to know what we like…because in many instances we are told(verbally and non verbally) that sex is bad when we are young,leading to scared to explore when we are old enough. Then there are some who think we should wait for sex till after marriage. How can you know if your compatible without having sex and talking about it?
This takes communication from BOTH sides! Women…speak up and ASK if he isn’t telling. If you like what you hear then that’s great, if not..maybe move on. If he wont answer then move on. But ask and make him feel like he can tell you his desires and wants. Yes, you shouldn’t have to ask, but many men have trouble opening up about sex.
People need to explore with their partners early and often, then see what they are both into. If there on the same page then good, if not..time to move on.
Sex is not the most important part of a marriage..but it much bigger than people realize, so being on the same page is important before you get married.
Obsessive use of porn can be a problem for men. Another problem for men is women who do not care about their sexual needs. Being in a relationship requires the other person to consider the needs of their partner. If either person tells the other that they have a need the other person should do as much as they can to fulfill this need. If what they ask for is too much then a compromise is in order.
A wife’s declining sex drive is a common enough story in the history of humanity for us to be able to say that it is the norm. (If any woman responds to this by saying, “…but I am not like that,” I will find you and beat you with a a statistics text book. /joking) I know my wife works hard but she does endeavor to please me and I almost always do the same for her. Not to be too gross but a HJ every once and a while or even lying next to your man and breathing into his ear when he takes care of himself is a hell of a lot better than porn. So if you have a problem with porn and you are too tired for sex then offer to be the object of his fantasy. Trust me, your mate will appreciate it.
One more thing. Internet porn is just the beginning of what I believe will be a revolution in the way humans interact during the 21st century. Starting with ever more sophisticated devices hooked to the internet men and women will be able to have cyber sex with women around the world. (see Fleshlight, Real Touch) In the not too distant future men will have safe, reliable, and non-pleasure reducing birth control. With birth control men will have a say in when they become a parent.
But that will be nothing compared to the artificial uterus. Driven by the desire to have children past their fertile years, women will have the ability to use their own tissues to create a uterus outside the body that will carry their children. When this becomes common I suspect some men, perhaps gay couples will start this phenomenon, will have children without women.
By mid-century and certainly in one hundred years and man and his androids will be raising children not of woman born. Technology has been the driver behind the sexual revolution and the move towards equality for women and tech will profoundly change relationships as the next wave of technology will help men become autonomous, free from the need to find a woman to start a family and pass along his genes.
Bill C – You said, “Technology has been the driver behind the sexual revolution and the move towards equality for women and tech will profoundly change relationships as the next wave of technology will help men become autonomous, free from the need to find a woman to start a family and pass along his genes.”
Unfortunately, technology is working towards eliminating the need for sperm rather than the need for a uterus.
Sperm is already cheap. Bing the cost of sperm and you will find it ranges from $200 to few thousand dollars for enough sperm to impregnate.
A uterus plus egg is much more expensive and it still is impossible to grow a fetus outside of a woman. That will change. Experiments on animals for this purpose are already talking place.
Technology is working towards eliminating the need for both sperm and uterus.
This will ultimately benefit men more than women, since it is currently women who have a monopoly on reproductive rights.
Bill C: I believe the common term for what you are describing is HELL …
I’d rather rule in hell than be ruled (by women) in heaven.
I much prefer porn to actual sex. porn involves fantasy: large penis and other physical attributes, interacting with thin, young, flesh having no wrinkles or other imperfections. real sex involves performance anxiety, and the acceptance of a whole series of indications of “averageness.” also, have to mention this, but one’s hand is a whole lot tighter, and more physically stimulating, to a penis (especially when accompanied by these images of perfection) than your regualr 50 year old vagina.
i’m being honest here, but do i agree that my attitude is really sad, that i’m really losing out in other ways? yes, i do. but there is nothing i can do about it at this point.
A wise woman once told me “All men are natural voyeurs, and all women are natural exhibitionists”. I think one could add that anybody who thinks otherwise – or tries to make ‘porn’ any more complicated than that – is deceiving themselves.
But this is not really about ‘porn’ . . . this is a ‘debate’ as old as humans (and sex and the ‘cost’ of babies).
No woman ‘loses’ her husband (mate, s.o.) to ‘porn’. By the time that symptom is evident, she’s lost him a long time before than to an inexpensive alternative to the high cost of being in relationship with her, a cost that she herself has set as too high for him. This is pointed out so clearly in Simon Sheppard’s online publications “The Science of Sex”, and “The Tyranny of Ambiguity” available here: http://www.heretical.com/
However, this is also a symptom of the entire human society’s lack of understanding and awareness of the higher purpose of sex, beyond that of merely continuing the human race(s). We have been f***ing like bunnies for millennia but have rarely been truly satisfied. That’s simply because we have forgotten the OTHER purpose of sex – to maintain our physical (and spiritual) health – and HOW to ‘do it’ to achieve this.
See here: http://www.health-science-spirit.com/heal-sex.html
Thank you Dr Helen for this sweet, albeit too short, article. I am, however, disappointed that it did not reflect your tittle. I would love to see an academic comparison of the effect of porn vs feminism on the stability of marriages.
Was tittle a typo or a freudian slip?
It’s all Obama’s fault! Higher unemployment leads to more free time…ergo, more time for a mind to wander and find porn when you’re alone and bored. Really…this economy is a boon to the porn industry!
Real men do not need pornography, it is that simple. That being said frigid, religiously repressed women, feminazis and emotionally damaged women need to get help if they are not helping men fulfill their sexual needs. I think the reason that a lot of Christian marriages break up and men are driven to affairs, prostitution, and porn is because their women will not educate themselves about how to pleasure their husbands and how to acheive a mind-blowing orgasm. My husband is a fantastic lover and hates it if I don’t have an orgasm every time. He is a very considerate lover and very masculine in that “Gladiator” sort of way. Women: Read books on how to acheive orgasm, how to enjoy sex, get it in books or Cosmo every month. Some of the men in these comments sections are pathetic. My husband would think this is one of the greatest concentrations of sorry, pathetic men ever recorded in a comments section on the internet. Not knowing how to give your woman a good orgasm means you suck as a lover and better get some help yourself by reading a book or two instead of staring at some fake Barbie Doll! A lot of you men obviously don’t have daughters,or you would re-think your position on this matter. Still, in order to avoid a situation like prohibition we can’t just ban porno, it wouldn’t work. It would be nice if this war of the sexes would cease but most women would have to stop acting like bitches and would have to stop feminizing men and go back to more traditional gender roles and stop raping men in the court system and taking their beloved children away for their own selfish desires. God help us all. Men and women are acting so damn childish I could just puke. People act like adults, grow up and realize that life is more than just about you!
Tell that to the soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, and coast guardmen. Including the married soldiers who are actually monogamous.
I really object to your attempt to dehumanize women.
That will totally end the sex trade because it’s worked so well in the past. As long as a man has one woman (or not if he’s single and/or can’t find a mate) he will lose all interest in sex with women, plural.
As is well known, there was no such thing as male sexuality, before “Deep Throat” and the San Fernando Valley dirty movie industry—in short, before porn itself!
No, in past eras, there was no masculine sexuality, no romance, no boy-meets-girl, no “Moon-June-goon-tune” ballads. Babies appeared via the stork, or in cabbage patches. Men and women stared at each other in bewilderment, sometimes pointing at each other and grunting, “Oooh, ooooh, what’s dat funny lookin’ thing?” Then, Ta-dah! Porn is invented, and men finally have sexuality! (Sexuality being defined as not actually having intercourse with another human being, but watching pictures on film—because that’s what porn is! Male sexuality was created by the movie industry? Who’da thunk!”)
Unfortunately, there were a lot of evil feminazi womens out there who didn’t like porn. There were also a lot of other bad people, who were so cruel as to suggest that porn might have some bad effects on society! This is just a vile attempt to control male sexuality, which, apparently, consists solely of men having unlimited access to films of abused and drugged out runaways and/or third world sex slaves being exploited on screen—not, say, actually relating to real women, having a family, etc.
Anyway, evil womens read romance novels, which is just as bad! Ban Jane Austen, an uppity, feminazi writer!
/Do I really need one?
Ban Jane Austen indeed! The whole thrust of “Pride and Prejudice” was that the way to make a man love a woman is by relentlessly attacking him. He’ll love her because she’s “different”. Does that sound modern or what?
I am not a regular reader. But my husband is a reader of a site that provided the link to this article. He was the person who told me of this article.
I have not read all of the responses so if I repeat points, I apologize.
I want to speak up for the addicts & their loved ones who are honestly dealing with this issue. For some reason, SA/PA (Sexual Addiction/Pornography Addiction) is a very polarizing topic. And, honestly, I become more & more in awe of the way some deny it. Doing so tends to enable people to stay in the dark & in denial about their own experiences.
First, it does not have to be addictive to all people in order for it to be a real issue of concern. One’s ability to use without adverse consequences to their lives & the lives of their loved ones does not negate the fact that some do have this problem. Those with this problem can seek help without that implying all have this issue. Not all drinkers are alcoholics. But those who need the help should be allowed that aid without the stigma of being wrong for seeking it. As it is the same with drugs, food issues & gambling, SAs should receive the same opportunities.
Second, lack of sex with ones spouse does not “make” a person turn to porn or “make” a person commit adultery. That is a choice some people make. And that can be about living against your values and/or bad coping skills. A healthy reaction to “not enough sex” would be to communicate with your partner about your feelings and/or seeking outside help. The fact that many partners of addicts are made to go without sex – because their addicted partner turned to self-sex first – proves that “absolute” to be nothing more than an opinion & some people’s experience.
Third, looking at porn rather than having sex with your partner is not always about no longer finding your partner attractive. When my husband was still active in his addiction, he used images that looked a lot like me. Some were so similar in appearance to me that they scared me. This is yet another “absolute” that is nothing but opinion & some people’s experience.
Fourth, and this one truly upsets me, this is not a “man’s issue”. It’s a human issue. There are women too have this as an issue to face. I myself have had to deal with my own SA issues in life. Porn was not my preference. It had an affect on my nonetheless.
We have become such an overly sexualized society at such a rapid pace that it scares me to hear “the experts” say porn is “harmless”. We are only beginning to be in a position to see what sorts of effects it has had on our quality of life as a whole. And from my POV, it is too soon to say absolutely it’s one-way or the other. As my husband said, exposing people to things on a regular basis before they are mentally capable of processing it affectively can do damage to the person. And personally, I do have a problem with my children being exposed to sexual images at an early age.
I do not have a list of statistic to back my words up for those who would be inclined to pick them apart. All I have is my ability to recall what I have learned & experienced over these past 3 years of therapy & lessons learned. My husband recently finished his 2+ years of therapy & 12-step work for SA. (We are not religious so the 12 steps were written specifically for him by his therapist.) Myself, I belong to a support group, have read many books & done the work within them as well as attended therapy over the years since my husband began disclosing & I realized I too had SA issues to face. We both have had this issue from early childhood. But today we are now living strong & loving lives, lives that have never been this full & joyous before. And what our marriage has become today is better than ever.
This is a legitimate concern. Pornography use is a problem for those who have a problem with it. It is addictive & the addiction does bring Hell to Earth for those who are in it.
Ann, I feel for you. I hope your healing recovery was not upended in any way by the truly uncalled for reactions your posts received. You know the truth of your experiences even if others are unwilling or incapable of validating it.
My best to you.
That’s right! Men can only love women who are all exactly alike—kinda like Barbie dolls, straight from the factory. Women should all think alike, dress alike, talk alike, behave alike. Also, they should off themselves, once they reach the age of 25, because that’s when they become ugly and unattractive, and their oppressed men folk are forced to turn to porn.
Women should NOT be different! Different is BAD! Being different is oppressing male sexuality. Reading is also bad. Jane Austen is too modern Furthermore, the only thing you can possibly glean from her novels is that she hates men, and wants women to attack them relentlessly. Yes, that’s what “Persuasion” and “Sense and Sensibility” are all about! Attacking men relentlessly!
If women absolutely must read, they should read only porn—or, maybe, the incredibly wise musings of the incredibly wise Dr. Helen.
/I don’t need one, but I think BobH does.
What the heck are you talking about?
Speaking for myself and one heck of a lot of men… men like… variety.
Your entire comment was nonsense. Bitter nonsense designed to soothe yourself into feeling superior to other women (and men) regardless of all available evidence or simply common sense.
Oh — and lots of sub 25 year old blonde women… are friendly, smart, intriguing, sweet, and genuine. And some of them are very decent people indeed… up to and including such values as honest, courageous, and loving.
I notice a recurring theme here.
Less than attractive women, or older women, demonizing and dehumanizing young attractive women as “fake barbie dolls”, etc.
Regardless of what they may (or may not) have looked like at the same age… or what their daughters will look like at the peak of their sexual attractiveness.
It’s a sick, angry way of looking at the world and it is disgraceful to undermine the humanity of your fellow human beings because they might be attractive and even highly desired by others.
I know people who aren’t classically the best looking in the world, but they have wonderful personalities and characters. They actually form friendships with a wide variety of people some of whom are very good looking. And they manage to do so without feeling insane jealousy that some woman is pretty. They look beyond that and treat others like people.
These women (and men) often “punch above their weight” in the romantic/sexual relationship sphere because they have so many attractive internal desirable qualities.
You ladies, the ones I’m referring to in this comment, who’ve identified yourself by your spiteful thoughts, unfortunately do not immediately on the surface seem to have particularly beautiful personalities and characters: That is likely a huge part of any relationship problems you are facing.
But everyone has relationship problems. So it goes a lot deeper than that.
These attitudes have got to be undermining your own happiness. Which I’d care a lot more about if you weren’t trashing your fellow human beings (women first and foremost).
Probably too late to post…but I don’t think this topic has been addressed yet and I’d LOVE to hear from some men on the topic.
What about the girls who can’t get their men interested? Even the ones that know:
1. It’s the girl’s job to orgasm, with her partner’s help or on her own if he’s working too hard
2. It’s great to ask what your partner would like, and if safety is not an issue, even better to share it with an interested partner
3. It’s a compliment to your partner to stay height/weight proportional keep your hair done, and wear the cute underwear
4. Men need variety. And porn and even strip clubs can provide this without diminishing his attraction to you
As a girl with a high sex drive, I never thought I’d have to worry about keeping my partner interested, but found that even this can be wrong.
As someone who has experienced a relationship where the guy kept me safe, warm, and cuddled – which actually made it harder on me, as the better he treated me the MORE I wanted him – but just really didn’t seem to need or want sex (at least with me, see #4) is there anything else I could have done?
And are there any guys out there who are on the other end of the problem? Stuck with a female partner who just can’t get enough? And if so is there anything she could do to get your attention, or are you as they say, just not that into her?
That is the concern about porn for us ladies, gentlemen. As one male respondent said earlier, “If you were keeping us satisfied, we wouldn’t care if you watched porn.” I agree! It’s when the porn becomes a replacement for your girl that it becomes a problem.
So let ‘er rip..what am I missing here?
Your man was an idiot. It is the dream of all men to be wanted by their wives. It is the lament of virtually all of us that we want our wives far more then they want us (if they ever did). If that difference gets too great than the marriage becomes nothing but a manipulation – the woman used her sexual favors to get a money, semen and service ‘bot’.
I believe that breaks up more marriages than anything else. Dennis Prager and Dr. Laura Schlesinger have the right perspective: just as a man’s job is to ensure the mother of his children’s security – security being a wife’s greatest need, the woman has the obligation to meet the father of her children’s affection and sexual requirements – sexual security being a husband’s greatest need. Wife expects husband to jump out of bed and go to work every morning without complaint. Husband should be able to expect the same proactive attitude towards his sexuality out of his wife as he shows towards her security.
And it doesn’t happen. Not by a long shot. The result: devastation.
A second man?
Or a different one?
On a serious note*, how long have you two been together? Most
people’sI don’t have a cure for that fact of biology.
I might suggest though that relationships would be better of they were based more on love and less on copulatory exclusivity… since the latter is often self-defeating for both partners anyhow.
* another one
We were together for a year. There was no two year or seven year or whatever year itch involved.
Hmmm…as for non-exlusivity, that wasn’t for me. I wanted him specifically because I loved him. It seems as though, culturally, the privilege of multi-partners is reserved for the males of the species anyway.
I think you might find more unhelpful but accurate information here, GGG.
Summary: By thoroughly sexually satisfying him, you diminish his desire for you quicker.
Anyway, GGG, it depends what your goal is.
If your goal is a lifetime of hot sex with one man you love, frequent enough to satisfy your high sex drive, I think you’re out of luck.
You can come close to satisfying (and maintaining) your high sex drive by mating with more than one man, either concurrently or serially, and that strategy can work for decades.
Or you can build a relationship, possibly a monogamous one (you can’t necessarily control him, but he may share the same goal), with one man where love is built up over time and mutual pleasurable experiences are shared and stored up… but, primarily, non-sexual experiences.
In other words in a strictly monogamous relationship, your sex drives are excedingly unlikely to stay in sync for decades and if they do, they’re likely to both be very low.
The website which I faecitiously referred to as “unhelpful information” actually has quite good information on it for achieving that second goal. Remember if you choose this route and are fortunate enough to find the right person to travel it with, you can always pleasure yourself whether he’s matching your sex drive or not.
I just frankly don’t believe there’s a way to combine goal 1 and goal 2 long term, except perhaps by the sheerest of luck. I’ve rarely, if ever, heard of it. But I HAVE known people to enjoy a rich and varied sex life, and I HAVE known people to enjoy amazing beautiful long term monogamous relationships.
Just never both simultaneously. YMMV (but I doubt it)
Thanks for those articles, btw.
Your response regarding being too available, is one I had thought of, but as it was never a problem in the past, I guess I wasn’t prepared for this relationship hiccup.
This sums up my concern perfectly:
“The sad truth is that if your spouse isn’t having orgasmic sex with you as often as you’d like, he or she could be preserving your union by preventing you from satiating yourself sexually too frequently. This is not an ideal situation, however, because without frequent affectionate contact, the emotional bonds between couples weaken, and, unfortunately, many couples drift into engaging in conscious affection only when pursuing orgasm.”
And then of course, it begs the question for those men who just wish their wives would give it up already…maybe their holding out isn’t such a bad thing?
As for me, maybe I am just not ready for the long term monogamous experience, then.
Thanks for the feedback!
You’re welcome, GGG.
I liked your attitude, by the way, right from your first comment. You’d be a catch. Probably as a friend and not just as a lover.
“As a girl with a high sex drive, I never thought I’d have to worry about keeping my partner interested, but found that even this can be wrong.”
I’ve mostly been involved in relationships like you describe and i can think of two points which might be relevant:
1) In a relationship where the woman is keen on sex all the time i think it’s pretty certain they’ll have more energy for sex than the man as a man’s body does physically need to recharge before the urge comes back. In my 20s i could keep up with daily or multiple daily sex but from 30s onwards it gradually headed more towards every couple of days whereas the women stayed the same. I found the solution to be less frequent but longer.
2) There are other factors involved in this which are completely divorced from the relationship itself or the woman herself. Worries related to work for example were often a killer for me. If i got fretting about that kind of stuff then almost nothing could snap me out of it – something no doubt very common in the current economic climate.
Someone said “lack of sex with ones spouse does not “make” a person turn to porn or “make” a person commit adultery” to which I say “Bull!!!!” Here is a summary of a guy who has been through the trenches.
We all hear about finding the “one” and having a lasting fulfilling relationship including sex. But for some reason your wife slowly looses interest in sex and starts using it as a bargaining tool. Then it becomes one sided.. She is really doing you a “favor” by laying there once in a while for you. So the man becomes bored with his spouse… She has become a partner that tolerates sex with him but won’t initiate it or do anything to spice the relationship up. So porn is an outlet…. Pretty soon you get sick of porn and want a real woman to do things with so you have an affair or get a divorce or both. Then if you are lucky you find one with the same interests as you do (both in and out of bed) and live happily ever after. Once you have a real woman in your hands there is no need for the porn anymore. It worked for me. The only other alternative is to stay with the cold fish and watch porn…
So all those woman (and men for that matter) that blame porn for affairs, relationship troubles etc… Maybe the problem is you and not the porn. A couple should be able to do anything ( Well almost) they see on a porn depiction with each other behind closed doors. Even if its not your thing it may be your partners…. This is where the “giving” in a relationship comes in. One you stop giving, you stop getting and the relationship is doomed. The key to avoiding affairs is not stopping porn but in being your partner’s lover. The problem with modern relationships is the lack of giving…. Not giving what you want but what your partner wants.
Christoph, I was addressing BobH’s comment, wherein he talks about the “evils” of Jane Austen. Go back and read it; it’s the one that begins “Ban Jane Austen indeed!”
It’s not me who’se been doing the dehumanizing here!
A person is free to watch and read whatever he or she wants. This also goes for their genitalia. The problem is that porn is addictive. Make no mistake about that. And like drugs, alcohol, gambling, etc, any addiction will eventually have very negative effects on the addict and the people around him. And let’s mention the men women who are photographed and filmed. Sure, it’s easy to say they chose that line of work. But if you can step back for a moment and consider that one of the reasons we are here is to be kind to one another, do you really want your relationship with them simply watching them perform sex acts? Is that what you want for yourself? Could you make eye contact with any of these people, or do you basically discard them after you have ejaculated? Life is short. Please don’t say I’m full of s–t. None of us are. Thanks for listening.
The premise for the article is interesting and, I believe, very true. Which, truth, though? That if we blame porn for all the evils in our society, we’re going to fail to see a LOT more evils. One need not defend porn to see or understand that MANY factors in our society contribute to the breakup of families. If we blind ourselves, by simply focussing on just one, or pick one to be our pet hate project, then we have failed ourselves, we’ve failed society, and we’ve failed our families. So, for those of you who insist that porn did every bad thing… You’re wrong. There ARE other things to blame, AS WELL. Truth matters, not just a witty argument. If you don’t see the whole truth… You see no truth at all.
I’m sympathetic to the argument that porn is not the cause of family breakdown, but I think some of its defenders go overboard when they suggest it is a victimless crime. The production of porn has often involved victims and still does.
I also think it is a stretch to fail to note a connection between porn and the sex trade, which is chock full of victims worldwide. Notice I am not saying the two are the same thing or equally destructive, only that they are not non-overlapping magisteria either. Some of the victims of “victimless” porn are simply being tallied on other balance sheets.
There are that many comments already that I’ll keep this brief.
(1) I object to the idea that pornography is the exlcusive domain of male sexuality. I watch pornographic videos, view pornographic images, and pornographic stories – and I assure you, I’m female and happy to be so. Lots of women watch porn. It’s a human thing, not a male or female thing.
(2) Porn is not, in itself, a problem. Porn doesn’t do anything our imaginations can’t do already. Relationships fail, and that’s a sad thing for the people involved, but blaming pornography for failed relationships is like blaming the photograph of a gourmet meal for the fact that your sponge cake sank.
(3) I think that a person must be both insecure and have a poor self-image if that person can be jealous of a paper or video image. If your husband leaves you for another woman, I very much doubt that being willing to put up with his pornography collection was a big part of the reason – but being enthusiastic about sex, and making him feel strong and virile.. that could do it. Paper and video do that without forcing the husband to choose between them and the wife. Isn’t that a good thing?
I just have one thing to say. And I say it after stating that I am a very regular reader of PajamasMedia blogs. Pajamas Media is great when it comes to political discourse and analysis. That being said, I have to disagree with this piece, Dr. Helen. I am a man, and I do not view porn. That debunks the “academic study” you brought up as proof. Porn is a vile, filthy thing that many have correctly pointed out is addictive. It makes you introverted and selfish, (two qualities not conducive to a healthy relationship.) I appreciate what you say about “trying to control men’s sexuality” but personally I would love it if porn became banned. Liberties are one thing, but the exploitation of these “stars” in different countries and the poisoning of the souls of men are another thing. I cannot support the right for porn to exist.
You are a fundamentalist crackpot who doesn’t believe in liberty. However, you live in a fantasy land in a great many respects so you will remain disappointed now and you’ll really really be disappointed when you kick the bucket.
Disappointed figuratively speaking.
Now you have no experience with porn, so you know less than anyone here whether it’s vile, filthy, addictive, makes you introverted, and selfish.
Or do you have past experience with porn, however minimal, and no longer use it? If so… you haven’t debunked anything, because the study showed all the university students contacted had experience with porn, not that they were all currently enjoying it.
Porn has definitely warped my view of sex and sexuality. You’re exposed to every kind of sick niche fetish in the world every time you look at porn on the internet. When I first started looking at porn on the internet in the late 1990s in my early teens it started out innocent enough. I’d look at Playboy type websites with beutiful nude women. I tried to avoid hardcore porn sites because I don’t like looking at other dudes junk. But to no avail. As soon as you tried to search for porn you’d get picture and video galleries of the most sick and twisted porn that you can possibly imagine. Fecal porn, porn that seems to depict underaged people, incest, beastialty, fisting, torture, rape, pregnant women, violent rape, homosexuality, bukake, etc, etc, etc.
Out of boredom and curiousity I started to look at more hardcore porn which has permanently warped my view of what good sex is. I used to view sex as something two people did when they were in love. But after growing up on hardcore internet porn I now see it as nothing more than a challenge to convince my sexual partners to do the most taboo sexual acts that they’re comfortable with. It also made me much more sexualized at a younger age and I’m now really only interested in sex in my relationships with women. And I doubt I’m alone in that regard. It seems that the internet has opened the floodgates as far as pornography is concerned and I worry about the effects it will have on our society.
Pornography used to be somewhat hard to come across when I was growing up. Beyond the occassional softcore porn flick on late night cable channels and the rare porn magazines that one of your friends managed to get somehow, you really had no exposure to hardcore porn at all. And I think that was a healthy thing for me growing up. But now that the internet and computers are so widespread these days I imagine that kids still in elementary school must be exposed to the most perverted porn available on a nearly constant basis. Which must warp their views of sexuality as well and encourage them to have far more sex and far more raunchier sex at far younger ages than previous generations.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it lead to much higher rates of unhealthy and even illegal sex. Something really needs to be done about hardcore porn on the internet. I honestly wouldn’t be upset if it was banned. In fact I support exactly that.
Marsh, that you can put “homosexuality” on the list of “the most sick and twisted porn that you can possibly imagine” alongside child porn (porn which appears to depict “underage people”), torture, and violent rape… and somehow has pregnant women having sex on that same list (as if pregnant women don’t have sex)… is SO bizarre.
A certain amount of homosexuality in a population is natural.
Homosexual people are people to and can enjoy love, companionship… and sex.
You say the porn you were into leads to “much higher rates of unhealthy and even illegal sex”. So you call for porn which leads to sex you judge to be “unhealthy” should be banned?
Are you a good judge of what is healthy and unhealthy?
And so it is. Among other things. People who aren’t in love have sex to.
You can consider that super-perverted — I just call it part of a natural continuum.
Sex is a biological drive designed to produce children, and also serving other functions such as bonding and… well… pleasure. Stress relief. Et cetera.
Lots of the porn you were into sounds like some sick stuff to me.
Personally, I prefer images and video (or audio, text) of people who seem to at least like each other, treat each other with respect, and love having fun… which includes a wide variety of consensual sexual activities. A lot of people posting videos online these days are amateurs.
Not the best filmography, but some really excellent moments in time captured for others to enjoy.
Or not. As they wish as free people.
No one FORCED you to watch “fecal porn”.
Gee.
Did you, in your comment somewhere, say you’ve stopped looking at whichever of these categories of porn you still look at (hopefully the ones you don’t consider sick, so in other words, no “evil” homosexuality or whatever)?
Helen you are wrong about porn, it really does distort our view of women, of sex, and our relationships. It creates a deeply psychological and physiological association between sexual pleasure and faces of women who we have no interest in getting to know. It’s like Pavlov’s dog without the food (albiet the “food” in this context being a health emotional relationship with a real woman, with her complexity, the bell is… oh you know the rest,) That famous line, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” comes readily to mind.
Incidentally the US birth rate dropped below replacement level again…
And you’re actually implying this is because of pornography and (presumably) the resulting diminishing quantity of sex Americans are having… because men aren’t relating with “women who we have no interest in getting to know” or something like that?
Have you heard of condoms? Birth control pills? Tubal ligations?
Abortion?
Talk about a hot topic. Given that some people are adamant that porn is harmful and have personal stories to prove it, and other people are convinced that its harmless, it seems like its probably different for everybody. This won’t be unusual – many behaviors like gambling, drinking, eating disorders, playing video games, etc are harmless for most of the population but have a select few in a mental death grip.
I agreed your discussion.Yes porn really control over men’s sexuality.
Kurmudge sez: “….He looked at a video of people fooling around, and they were naked. Gawlee….” ****** Uh, no. That scenario would not be a problem. The problem is when he prefers to look at a video of a woman’s P***Y that takes up the entire computer screen and ends up right in his face while he’s workin’ it. Watching a *couple* is conducive to learning some new things and then taking that new knowledge to your wife to practice with. Viewing womens’ P***Ys is conducive to not wanting to touch your wife, because she’s not airbrushed to perfection.
“Viewing womens’ P***Ys is conducive to not wanting to touch your wife, because she’s not airbrushed to perfection.”
Why not watch your wife’s pussy up close so that it takes up your field of vision.
So close you can smell it. And if you get bored with just watching, there’s more you can do … which your wife probably won’t mind at all.
Maybe close-up pussy isn’t the problem and men should experience it more often.
Great post! Anonymous’ vendetta against porn seems to work simultaneously as a vendetta against fantasy, scantily-clad women in public, and any other means of titillatory escapism from a faltering relationship. I wish her all the best, and hope she finds it in herself to stop politicizing the personal so publicly.
I am not married but from the married friends I do have and looking through their eyes I would view it like this.
Porn takes away the desire to do a bunch of things they don’t want to do that women want them to do for them to get sexual release.
Example: My wife wants me to do take her mother and other family members out. I don’t want to do this, but i know that the CHANCE that she’ll be IN THE MOOD is higher if I do this.
-on the flipside………
I’d like my wife to go out with my mother and family members. I know my wife doesn’t
want to do this, and I know the CHANCE of her being IN THE MOOD is higher if she DOESN’T have to do this.
Now the bottom line factor is as long as she’s happy and comfortable the higher chance of her being in the mood becomes. It’s about control.
or……
My wife gives me sex when she is in the mood and I accept her feelings. But on the off chance she is in the mood and I AM NOT at THAT time. Her ego is crushed and I am demonized for it.
I love to do things and please my woman but when you know you are being manipulated it’s a bigger turn off (and overrides any sexual function in my body, at least). I would rather keep my manhood, not be bothered with her warped attitude, and jack off looking at the screen and get a release then to be mentally manipulated and controlled by female sexuality. Or jack off to whatever “pornographic” thoughts I conjure up in my head.
Controlling one’s addiction to porn can reflect a control to one’s sexual drive. Sex is not wrong, it’s the mentality of the person that made sex wrong.
Consider: Women in the state of modern western society are the bourgeoisie, holding monopoly power over the distribution of sexual gratification, a commodity not just necessary for mental health but indeed the very continued existence of the human race. This monopoly of the specifics of distribution is legally entrenched in every industrialized country with massive penalties for breaching it, and even the statistics quoted by the most wild-eyed servitors of the bourgeoisie suggests that it is upheld in upwards of 99% of all sex transactions. The sexual proletariat, therefore, scratches just the tip of its yawning need by conforming to the edicts issued by the Wall Streets and Chateaubriands of the movement. These edicts are increasingly arbitrary, historically unprecedented and unknown in a state of nature – sexual equality, nonviolence, monogamy, and consent. And even these merely scratch the surface; there are also nebulous, contradictory and ever-shifting considerations of wealth, status, material possessions, social marketability, personality characteristics, fashion, and arbitrary matriarchal definitions of beauty decreed from on high as quite literal barriers to entry.
All bourgeois monopolies seek to protect their power base by attacking those who would undercut the source of their power, and here too we see the expected result. Strippers, porn stars and prostitutes are all derided by the reactionary mouthpieces and it is demanded that the State put them out existence. And why not? They are seen as scabs or bootleggers, responding to demand by distributing products of comparable value for a far lesser cost outside the traditional business model (this is to be seen in the claim that these professions are “debasing” to women, i.e. it literally lowers the value of their salable commodity.)
The pornography viewer, therefore, commits a revolutionary act, retaking some power from the oligarchy that in a coup d’etat gained quite literal control of the means of production, not of just ultimate commodities but labor-power itself.
This is the first time I have seen an article bring up women’s porn. Most romance novels are porn, it’s just written instead of photographic. Pastors will boldly preach on the evil of porn, but not against women’s porn; romance novels and women’s magazines.
Notice how over obsessed they are with male sexuality, while ignoring female sexuality entirely? There is no mention of how dildo’s and vibrators keep women from “seeking out men”.
Or how romance novels/movies skew women’s perceptions of men. Or how married women are more likely to be unfaithful then to try and be a good sex partner for her husband?
It is all about controlling males for the benefit of females. Feminist’s, traditionalist’s, same damn thing. They just hate and enslave/cuckold males in different way’s.
MGTOW!
I don’t understand how people can say porn was the reason for there marriage not to last.
Is it ever considered as why porn is looked at? Or do they include the spouse when they are looking at it?
What about the overall fantasy of different ways of doing sex and not the same ole, same ole. What if the person you are with turns boring in bed, but you still love him/her and want to be with them so you look to porn for relief.
There are so many things why people look at porn. When it comes to sex it’s always one dimensional. It’s always what the woman wants. I mean does the woman think about what the guy likes or dislikes? Is when they want it, at their convenience.
What if there is a fight that day between the couple and they still hold the grudge till the next day but their still horny…so they want to look at something that helps them out so goes the porn.
Really is porn healthy? I know some women think it’s some sort of an insult to women, but really aren’t they just a little over the top to where they are lucky to have sex life.
Just say’n, when I was kid my mother tried to scare me away from masterbating and said it was a sin to masterbate even though I showed her statistics that said that 99.9% of all men masterbate.