So I grew up in a pretty religious context, and was taught a lot of scary stuff about what would happen if you watched porn, e.g. erectile dysfunction, always thinking about it when with a real partner, interests getting progressively darker, etc. Now, obviously all of those things happen to some people, but the older I got the less they seemed to impact me, so I kind of stopped finding those arguments compelling.
Some would say that this was because I never had a true addiction, and I’m not sure that’s true. I certainly never, like, woke up at night to go watch porn or was so out of control that I had to do it in a public restroom or anything, but I used porn basically everyday for a very long time. I tried not to (e.g. religious context) and felt really shameful about it, but couldn’t bring myself to stop. But certainly, perhaps more compulsive behaviors would trigger more of these issues, I’m open to this idea.
I grew up and got married and generally didn’t seem to experience any of the challenges I was threatened with. If anything, I felt like understanding normal sexual progression and getting ideas for things to try that my partner might enjoy was probably even helpful. I don’t think I have nearly an active enough imagination to put another person’s face on my partner in bed, so I always thought that suggestion was super strange. Additionally, I found that a lot of the specific acts that I was taught people only did because of porn exposure (e.g. anal, facials, role play, lots of things) absolutely could be part of a loving sexual relationship in the right setting and with the right motive, so the argument fell apart even further.
Because of this, over the past decade or so (I’m 31, married 9 years), I’ve developed a pretty passive view of porn. I generally thought that most people who were into relationally destructive things (e.g. violence, non-consent, pain, pedo, etc) would have been with or without porn, and that how someone used porn was an indicator of what was already going on with them, not that porn made those things happen.
Recently, I’ve been talking to a lot of people who have had marriages or long term relationships fall apart, often due to lack of sexual connection, and I’ve started to see a theme that’s really incompatible with my own sexual experience. This will probably sound really obvious and dense, but I’d just never thought of it this way before.
IMO, the pinnacle of partnered sex is getting off to your partner being in ecstasy. I don’t mean simultaneous orgasm necessarily, but we are very clearly wired to want to see our partner’s bliss. As all good sexual partners know, this is something that takes work and has to be earned! Except on very rare occasion, you’re not going to stroke your partner’s thigh and have them scream out in orgasmic bliss; to really reach the peaks, it takes all day! Watching them really get off is a very primal reward and peak partnered sex from my perspective. Weird things happen during those times, including getting to experience a partner who, in an entirely primally sexual way (rather than out of kindness or selflessness) wants YOU to get off as hard as possible, regardless of what that takes. This is where the normal manifestations of those “porn-like” activities will often find their way into even very healthy and loving sexual partnerships.
What I noticed was how common it was for a partner, particularly a male, to want their partner to do things that they didn’t want to do. “Do it anyways!”, sort of. Additionally, I heard women report that their husbands were often frustrated that they didn’t like something or didn’t seem terribly into a specific session. Men saying things like “yeah you like that?” when they weren’t doing anything that nearly any woman would like terribly much.
Porn gives those hard-earned expressions of pleasure for free to a viewer who had to do nothing to see it. So we maintain this, IMO healthy and correct, internal motive to see a partner in ecstasy, but don’t grow accustomed to what it takes to get a partner to that state. Professional porn clearly tells the lie that a woman will have a mind-blowing orgasm after just giving a blowjob and then getting pounded for 30 minutes, and more realistic porn that shows a more natural progression can be fastforwarded. We’re give compilations where you see 30 women have an orgasm in a few minutes!
This feels like a big issue that I didn’t think about before. We should want to condition our brains to understand that an orgasm means all these foreplay activities, not that your partner’s pleasure is free or that you’re entitled to it or can fast forward to it.
Just some musings! Cheers all.