WWYD.....Porn again.......

[MeelooMouloo]

Confession first, DH out at friends house, forgotten phone, curiosity got the better of me after it rang twice in quick sucession (was another of his mates, nothing dodgy), looked at his "gallery" & found LOTS of porn.

I know for some women this is no big deal, all men look at it right??? but for me it is a big deal, DH knows it's a big deal, has always known it's a big deal. Happened few months back when found stuff on the shared laptop. Explained very directly that I find it offensive, degrading and very upsetting. He made lots of excuses ("mates just send it me" etc), I argued that he could just view it & delete it rather than save it alongside photos of the DC.

I have very low self esteem & pretty serious body issues all of which he is aware and which have become worse since having DC3. Receiving counselling as a couple at the moment which is looking into some of these things but next session not till the end of the month.

How to I approach DH about this again? Feeling very upset and angry right now, not sure I can be objective, just want to tell him piss off & take his fucking big titted, size 6 women with him.

Ok as you still won't answer the question, I'm going to conclude that you have no idea whether the men referred to - either on here or in RL, used porn before or after they started having sex and relationships and this was just forum bluster, where prejudice gets stated as fact .

Liking men who use porn is, I suppose, a subjective issue too. As is disliking men who are anti-porn and stereotyping them as religious zealots who were raised by misogynist, dysfunctional families. Maybe on meeting people, you have a prejudice against liking people who are anti-porn and a bias in favour of porn users?

Therefore, perhaps you've just never met and got to know a kind, secular, feminist man who was politically opposed to porn - and wouldn't want to, lest he got you to examine your prejudices and confront your stereotypes?

To bring this back to point - I guess I just wanted to de-construct this statement of yours, Solid and your subsequent assertions about which came first...

" they were sexist, entitled, unpleasant arseholes before they started looking at porn":

I have genuinely never met a guy with a porn habit in his twenties or thirties who didn't start looking at internet porn when he was a child or young teenager - a few were as young as 10/11. I'd never label a child of this age a "sexist, entitled, unpleasant arsehole" but it was certainly my observation that consuming a regular diet of women being abused on camera, might have gone some way to producing men, who became those things.

For the record my exH has had a liking for porn from a early age as soon as he could get away with stealing the mags from the local newsagents where he had a paper round at about the age of 13/14, I found this out from his father when I finally spoke to his parents about our marriage problems,

And as for some people describing some men as LOOKING at porn that is a novel way of putting it, some don't just look, they use porn to wank and get a rush of what ever hormones it gives the brain and like most addicts who start off with something small and mild over time the addict needs more of it and stronger stuff to get that same high/ rush that they crave, which in my exH case meant more extreme stuff, which he used more and more frequently and in the end a 'normal' 'loving physical relationship was nigh on impossible for him to attain, as unless it was replicating the porn senarios he craved he couldn't manage to make love at all, which then caused ripple effects of unhappiness throughout the whole relationship for both of us!

My first point, for clarity, is that I am 40 something bloke. I don't look at porn all that often, perhaps 4 or 5 times a year. I'm married (15 yrs). To me, it is merely an extension of using my imagination for fantasy. It doesn't in the slightest impact negatively on my sex life, as neither does using my imagination for fantasy.

However, the OP has clearly indicated herself that her relationship is breaking/has broken down. The porn issue is a red herring in my view. The issue of taking holidays away from the family is, frankly, odd.

I do get the impression (although obviously I can only go on what is written by her) that there is quite a controlling element here. Autocratic springs to mind. "You will/will not do such and such". How would the usual MN'ers react if he was making autocratic demands of the OP?

The no storing demand would be reasonable on a family pc/laptop etc. His phone was his and is private. Why should he be expected to have his own content controlled in this way? If it doesn't interfere with OP's life, this was always going to be an expectation that would be impossible to fulfil.

The snooping is another symptom of a breakdown of trust and confidence. I presume the OP has private matters that she might not want DP to see and if he did without consent, OP would be entitled to be livid.

The more important issue "Betty" is , do you use porn (however infrequently) with the knowledge and acceptance ( or even indifferance) of your wife?
Does she know what kind of porn you like and why you like it? If the answer is yes then it's obviously not a problem in your marriage, which is fine. If the answer is no , on the other hand....

I don't understand this attitude of privacy in a marriage at all , I have a phone and laptop, as does DH, we are both free to use each other's, my kindle is linked to his phone so he knows exactly what erotic reading material is on there.
Would you still use porn if it meant your wife losing all respect for you for doing so and not even wanting you anywhere near her , because she had absolute views that it was harmful and degrading?
I'm not against all porn, there is some non-coercive and well made stuff out there but it's not on the likes of any of the free porn sites like redtube etc.
Do you really think that men using porn in secret (when they know that their wives have huge issues with it) is perfectly fine and acceptable?
Secrecy in a marriage is corrosive and highly damaging, whatever the secret is.

Mal, no its not a problem for us. She is indifferent. It's not her thing, but understands that I do very occasionally view. I just don't rub her face in it.

I disagree with you on privacy. I think many people have certain things, however minor, that they may wish to withhold. I would be most surprised if people didn't.

I also disagree with the concept of 'absolute views', whether on porn or anything else. I wouldn't expect absolute views on any subject as much as she would from me. It gives the impression of imposition and 'I'm right, you're wrong'.

'she is indifferent, its not her thing, but she understands', does she have any choice in this??

Susie, are you suggesting I need permission for masturbation? She understands and consents. Is that better?

The privacy issue is obviously different for different people, you married fairly late if you've only been married 15 years and are in your forties - I'm 45 and have been married for over 25 years, we've been together since we were 16 so there is nothing that we don't know about each other, I suppose that's why I find it so odd that people have privacy/secrecy within marriage, I defintely wouldn't like it.
I have absolute views on a lot of things, DH isn't as black and white on things as me but he respects my strong views and there isn't much that he actually disagrees with - we do agree to disagree sometimes but on important issues I think a couple have to hold similar views.
I certainly don't think that a person needs a partner's permission to masturbate ( although some relationships do function very well like that, some folk do have a chastity kink) ) but if my DH was masturbating rather then wanting sex with me I wouldn't be very happy. I'm very open on here about the fact that he doesn't , at all, that's not to say he never has, of course he has, he used to work away but, quite simply, he prefers sex, even if I were out of action for health reasons etc. I would still want to attend to his sexual needs because I know he wouldn't do it himself.
If he was wanting privacy to go off and wank to porn it would upset me a great deal, but that's because I would rather he came to me instead .

Nothing to do with when and if you mastabate , it was the use of porn, and the choices available to your dw that I was enquiring about.

Darius: and all you're doing is showing your prejudices - that porn is this immensely powerful stuff that can turn any nice feminist man into a slobbering prick on legs (yet funnily enough it doesn't have this effect on the vice squad or the BBFC). There are no facts to back up your assertions. (and please don't waste your time or mine by trying to quite Zillman, Donnerstein, Malamuth or CHeck at me as all their studies have been discredited for 20 years). You don't know, any more than I do, the exact numbers of men who do and don't look at porn and when and for how long (reliable figures are hard to come by as those figures that get published are doubly distorted by both the tendency of research subjects to lie and the tendency of those reporting on the research to manipulate the figures for the most pants-shitting headlines they can think of).

Agree with solidgoldbrass. Lots of assumptions made on MN about porn namely:

• It becomes an addiction and people crave increasingly hardcore stuff (no proof of this)
• It is corrosive to relationships. You could argue that it helps relationships acting as a safety valve for a partner who otherwise might have an affair
• It leads to lying/deceictful behaviour. Perhaps so but only if people get silly and uptight about it and force partner to look at it in secret.

More generally, if you cant have the odd wank without your partner wanting to dictate what you wank about well, ffs, surely nothing is sacred? I mean, how much sodding control do people want over their partners???

- Solid you really are showing your ignorance if you think that any modern-day vice squad focuses on internet porn, but you perhaps haven't taken into account that people who work in this field are the subjects of rigorous Health and Safety risk assessments and regular psychological interventions, unlike the average porn punter.

But hey, I've just seen another thread where you say you are proud to work in the porn industry, so I can see why you would be so pro-porn and therefore so biased - and also why you evade questions that you don't want to answer.

Didyouseewhatshedid you seem to be yet another poster who confuses wanking with porn. Have you seriously never wanked without using porn?

didyouosee your getting masterbating and porn use confused two different subjects entirely, IMO, the op original gripe was the hiding of porn on his phone,

@ DYSWHD

A further odd claim about porn you might have added to your list is that there's a trend in it for shaved genitals, silicone implants and anal sex that, according to some MNers, reflects male objectification of women.

The trouble with this is that if it's true - and I've no idea, I don't study porn myself - then women in porn must have looked and acted more like real women in the past, when they had fewer rights and enjoyed less equality, than they do now. So how does that work, exactly - more rights = fewer pubes?

Are we sure that women are doing this - if they are - to please men? Or are they doing it because they want to? Did men invent the Brazilian wax or did womne invent it to wear smaller bikinis?

I was recently looking with some horror in Smiths at a magazine called "Urban Ink". It features photospreads of otherwise attractive young people who seem to have completely depilated themselves in order to have better and more photographable tattooes across their, er, loins. What is that all about?

Darius, you have stated that you met some men who probably looked at porn from a young age and who are therefore arseholes. This is a supposition. It is not a fact. Anecdote is not data. Your anecdotes are certainly no more valid than mine.
And, FWIW, the porn industry is not monolithic. There is a lot of porn which is transgressive, radical, ethically produced, etc, (which for some reason is always the first and the hardest hit in pro-censorship campaings.)

Darious, Im not confusing wanking with porn. You can do it with or without. But, as an adult, shouldnt you have the choice? This comes down to partner control - nothing more, nothing less. Women/men who are basically so grossly insecure that they want to control every facet of their partner's lives - including what they wank to/over. The arguments where women say 'oh the porn industry is unethical/devalues women blah blah" are just a smokescreen for their own issues and insecurities.

Nope. I said that I had known and worked with men who definitely used porn before they were out of childhood, because they told me - and I can see no reason why they would lie about that. Real testimonies here, unlike your blanket assertion (that you ran away from because you couldn't back it up) that men only become arseholes after they have used porn.

Likewise, in your previous post, you wrongly asserted that I had said that porn use "can turn any nice feminist man into a slobbering prick on legs". I most certainly did not. It was in fact the reverse - that the people I've met with a porn habit in their 20s and 30s had used porn before they'd even had a chance to become "nice feminist men" i.e. when they were children.

I will say it again. If you think that men in this age bracket first used porn after they developed other horrible character traits, you are seriously out-of-touch and deluded.

It's ironic that you criticise researchers for putting their own slant on things in order to make sensational headlines, when you yourself seem unable to read a thread and the posts right in front of you, especially those that don't suit your pro-porn agenda.

should read: "unlike your blanket assertion (that you ran away from because you couldn't back it up) that men only become arseholes before they have used porn."

Unless you know every other factor in their backgrounds you can't claim it's porn and nothing else that turned them into arseholes. And it's not porn that makes men think that their partners should do all the domestic work and childcare and not complain about it, or that the man is entitled to pursue his hobbies no matter what, even when those hobbies put a massive strain on the family budget, is it? Nor is it porn that gives some men the idea that the worst thing they can threaten a woman with is leaving and rendering her single.
That's my point about entitled, sexist arseholes not having become that way purely through looking at porn.

Solid I have never said that porn is the sole driver in creating misogynist men. Just as you had absolutely no evidence for your earlier statement that arbitrary men (I'm still not clear who you mean or whether you have met them) were "arseholes" before they used porn, I have no evidence one way or another. If I don't have evidence, I don't state an opinion or supposition as fact.

Hence, I was very careful to post my observations about the male porn users I worked with. At no point did I describe them as "arseholes" - I observed two things: that I had never met a guy with a porn habit who regarded women as true equals, or who didn't put women into boxes marked "relationship material" or "wank fodder prostitutes" and secondly, that amongst those porn users, those in the 20-40 age bracket had all told me that they had started using porn when they were children and therefore long before they had sex and relationships.

You have never answered the question about how on earth you can back up your assertions that either the crap men you read about on Mumsnet or the ones you've met in real-life, were misogynists before they used porn. I'm suggesting you simply cannot know that, observing that in my experience exposure to and use of porn tends to occur long before people even get the chance to behave like an entitled prick in a relationship. I happen to believe that if you get used to seeing degrading and misogynist porn in your formative years and before you've had a chance to form relationships, this might affect your view of women and equality generally.

At no point did I say that porn use is the only problem. I happen to believe that there are all kinds of social structures that permit misogyny in men - and in women too, for that matter.

If we bring this right back to the OP, despite her saying that her partner had downloaded extreme porn having promised he wouldn't, had double-standards about the messages his daughter was absorbing and wouldn't take leave to look after his own children, yours and others' responses were to belittle the OP for snooping, you personally accused her of being controlling and of co-ercing him into a relationship and only when it was established to your satisfaction that this man was indeed a "selfish tosser" (your words) did you conclude that "these men" were like that before they used porn.

I am saying that you cannot know that. It might be what you'd prefer to believe, for your own reasons and defences.

Has the op got fed up do you think?

As with all threads that include porn the first dozen posts or so are helpful for the Op, the rest turns into a pro/anti porn discussion, not a criticism by the way.

Haven't got bored, just had poorly children.
Will come back and speak later as have cats to take to vets now. Just wanted let you know I am finding this very interesting.
One thing I will say, DH promised faithfully he would remove all offensive content from phone (made no bones bout him accessing it for his "needs" just please don't save it (never know when kids are going to mess). Taken his phone in to be repaired today and guess what, still full of the stuff inc. a simulated rape in an elevator.

And I thought I'd married a nice bloke. How wrong can you be??????

Not a happy bunny

Simulated (?????) rape

Your husband likes to watch (and save for later delectation) rape scenes ?

Is he aware that some of these may be real rapes ?

You said upthread your dc never touch his phone, but then in your latest post you seem concerned about them "messing" with it

When are you going to stop making excuses for him, and start having a very good think about the sort of man you are married to ?