Is men looking at Porn normal and does it mean...

[40notTrendy]

I'm not enough?
Have read through some threads on here about Porn but could do with some opinions. DH looks at porn on t'internet maybe once or twice a week but it could be a lot more as he works from home. It doesn't have any obvious impact on our relationship or sex life but it makes me feel uncomfortable. I'm not particularly confident, well, not at all confident really talking to him about sex but what we do together is good although I guess it could be more often!
I find junk emails from very dodgy websites from time to time and I worry that he's registered on some porn site or other. He's very computer savvy and I only know what he looks at coz he made a slip up once.
Do I need to have a conversation with him, where I would squirm and find it hard to say anything or can I just assume it's something he does and doesn't mean anything negative for our marriage?
name change as I think he knows my nickname (not paranoid at all then..)

SGB I've personally never had any lack of fantasies or any desire for 'womanly' sex (whatever the hell that might be! I know what you mean though...Mills n Boon style knee-trembling? :S) but I still found the level of disconnection in a fair bit of male fantasy-acting-out to be a bit disturbing. (As indeed with one female partner who was a total sex addict).

So completely agree with garlic. I find it particularly sad when men whom you know are good people who would probably quite like to connect with you, are just not doing so because the head-movie is running and you're now a 10 minute shag doll. I had a 'fuck buddy' who was like this who is now a friend (and fine with this, cos he is such a nice guy). I probably could have fallen in love with the guy, but the sex was dreadful as he became a different and completely disconnected person whenever it commenced.

its sooo normal OP.

Pick up any guy's laptop and there will be porn on it, barely hidden - and why should it have to be (aside from the dc's seeing it)? Its perfectly fine imho.

I was using DP's laptop last week and lo and behold, there it was! I just made me smirk tbh as every guy I've been out with has been the same.

It certainly doesn't mean I'm not enough for him (or that you aren't for your DH), its simply something some/most men do, a bit like some women having a thing for shoes.

I'm 33 if it matters, DP is 43....

What's PIV sex??

THeFlyingOnion that is quite the most sexist post I have seen on MN for some time

Have a Blue Peter Badge

TFO - it's only normal for some men, not all.
I could pick up DH's laptop/iphone or go upstairs to the pc and there would be no porn at all, not because he's careful/deletes his history/uses private browsing but because he is not a porn user and has no interest in it.
If you seriously think that all porn is "perfectly fine" I suggest you educate yourself, I don't think that all porn is bad/evil, there is some ethical and well made stuff if you know where it is but I'm under no illusions of what mainstream porn is in reality - horribly misogynistic, with women portayed as orifices not as sexual equals.
Of course it is going to affect a couples sex life if a man is sating his sexual appetite by wanking to porn instead of having sex with his partner.

I am not crazily into shoes and my DH doesn't go gaga over porn

Fuck me, we must be abnormal

I doubt that many women wank with their shoes somehow, although there's probably an app for it.

and handbags ?

they leave me cold

Teachermumof3 - PIV sex is penis in vaginal sex. HTH :)

I would say the majority of men watch porn, some are open about it, some are discreet and use it occasionally. And there will of course be those who have a problem with it but I have yet to see any activity people do en masse that does not have people who develop a problem.

We are abnormal too! And happily so!

So when and how does watching porn and not masturbating ( don't think DH does ) and him claiming it's nothing, just something most men do, turn into something more disturbing?

I didn't say all men, I said some/most

"Of course it is going to affect a couples sex life if a man is sating his sexual appetite by wanking to porn instead of having sex with his partner"

Of course it will Maleficence, but my DP isn't looking at porn instead of having sex with me. He's doing it as well as. Big difference, doesn't affect the relationship at all...

garlicnutter - I appreciate some of your earlier points, which I'll try and come back to. But this:

Masturbation, for men, is a very different sensation from sex. It's harder, faster, firmer and done at a different angle. A vagina feels pretty loose and squishy by comparison

is bollox, I'm sorry. Just as I would never claim to understand what it's like to have a vagina, you need to accept that I have a better idea than you what it's like to have a penis. I've had a fair bit of sex in my life and plenty of wanking. I've been in relationships where I've only been able to see the woman occasionally and have wanked the rest of the time, and it's never been an issue, ever. The only time I would find it an issue is if I wanked on the same day as having sex - then it would affect it.

Vaginas come in a glorious variety of shapes and sizes and yes, some are pretty loose and squishy. And of course that affects the physical pleasure of sex just as the size of a man's willy does. This however is massively affected by the woman's engagement with the process. It's not so much what she has as what she does with it. I should probably stop now...

What you're saying might be true of some extreme cases, but is likely just as much to do with not being used to sex as with too much wanking. I once knew a guy who was a virgin till he was 45. Then when he finally had sex, he couldn't come no matter what. Makes sense I suppose.

Men whose primary sexual activity is mastubation end up having a problem with PIV sex.

Yeah, OK. And did you know it also makes you go blind and gives you hairy palms? Sorry but that's about where this little nugget of medical wisdom belongs.

Porn use exacerbates the problem - the brain associates the feeling of sexual stimulation and release with the images, pretty much forgetting about the entirely different pleasures of sex with a warm-blooded human.

Again you're making the same mistake you made before, and that so many women make - assuming that there can only be one way a man's brain works in relation to sex, and if it's doing one thing on a Monday it can't possibly do something that apparently "contradicts" that on the Tuesday. But in this thread for just one example, the OP herself told us that her husband's porn use doesn't appear to affect sex between them.

I'm not making this up; it's a simplification of why porn addiction happens. You can easily find out about it on the Web.

Oh well it must be true then.

There's are a couple of questions that I think are being overlooked here, or maybe answered with too much assumption. Eg:

• Is it that men are made sexually dysfunctional by porn, or just that some men are completely crap lovers, always have been and always will be?

• Where does the bizarre underlying implication come from, that before porn was so mainstream, men were all totally sensitive and considerate to their wives, and all women lived in constant sexual bliss?

Is our historical memory so poor that we've forgotten what sex was actually like for the housewives of the 40s and 50s? If you really want to know about women as property and men with no idea that sex can mean anything but self satisfaction, then forget about teenagers watching porn. Just ask my parents' generation, they know all about it, and they didn't need the internet.

There's going to be little mileage in pursuing the points in the first part of your post, confidence: clearly we are of different genders and, also clearly, you're not a 'problem' porn user. Suffice to say, I see tugging and know it's not the same as what my (averagely squishy) lady parts do

The first of your two questions is a really interesting one that, as I've said, we can't resolve in a few forum threads. Chicken/egg/chicken ...

I do think some people are more predisposed to addicted, avoidant behaviours. It's evident that you're not one of them. I am, so have been in rehab with porn addicts and sex addicts. Both conditions are real and detrimental to the lives of sufferers, as well as those around them.

Your second question: Hah! As if!!

What we were discussing earlier was this proposition: Media owners have raised the 'hardness' of mainstream porn in order to keep addicted users searching for - and paying for - an ever-faster fix. That's not conspiracy theory; it's a perfectly normal marketing strategy. Y(our frustrated 50s housewife didn't feel her house had to be clinically sterile and dotted with fake sculptures that shoot out puffs of perfume. She does now, because that's what marketers do.)

Ever looked at Victorian porn? it's quite sweet, isn't it, to our eyes? And surprisingly (to our eyes) celebratory of real women's bodies, in real human variety.

Which I think proves the point of the second point :)

garlicnutter -

At the end of the day, I wouldn't have felt uncomfortable about XH's porn use if I also felt he was fully engaged with me sexually, would I? It would just have been an aspect of him, irrelevant to our relationship. As things were, I felt increasingly objectified and that he was investing more and more of himself outside our relationship. Towards the end, I caught myself saying "I may as well be a blow-up doll in designer clothes."

I think you've touched on something here at the root of a lot of the problem. Some men seem to see sex purely as using their partner for their own pleasure, rather than as a shared pleasure and connection. Personally I'm bewildered when I read about men expecting to be able to do whatever they've seen in porn, or worse still just doing it. I mean, if you're with somebody and you can't SEE that they don't like something, or don't even CARE whether they like it, then there's a serious problem going on. I don't know how much that is even about sex, or whether sex is just the way that a more fundamental inter-personal issue is being expressed.

"Objectification" is a difficult concept though. It's talked about a lot but I'm not sure people are really that clear what it means. People objectify each other all the time, whenever they WANT something from other people. I objectify my boss as the person who pays me; my children objectify me as the person who looks after them. Plenty of women objectify their husbands in all kinds of ways. That's kind of life really - we live in a world where people want things from each other, including sex. Relationships and marriages are often largely about how people negotiate their wanting different things from each other. We (including I) like to think of them more idealistically than that, but there's always a certain amount of that.

I can see how the most obvious and tempting solution would seem to be aspiring to a situation where men don't objectify women or sex at all. But I don't think it's going to happen, in general. And I'd add that the forces of sexual puritanism are often the most objectifying of all. It's generally the countries who have the strongest laws against porn who also have the most oppressive regimes re womens' rights. And guilt about one's own sexual "reality" makes it harder to discuss and negotiate these things effectively, or to respond openly to the sexual reality of your partner.

I think that sex, a shared act of great physical intimacy and vulnerability in all respects, is an inappropriate arena for objectification.

Apologies for quoting myself above: I maintain there is a world of difference between fucking someone who's enjoying fucking you and someone who's 'using' you as a prop for the movie in his head ... or, same actually, if he's only interested in his feelings to the point he's almost forgotten who you are.

I have been guilty of this myself at times; I have a strong imagination. My partners noticed and disliked it, just as I did.

I'm not pursuing an anti-porn agenda here, nor a puritan one. I am discussing the problems of porn in a relationship where one partner feels sidelined by the porn.

For all those who are sure it has no impact on relationships I beg to differ. Having been in a relationship with a porn user and doing a lot of research on the subject I found out that it is addictive and causes harm to normal sexual functions within relationships.
Wish I'd had mumsnet back then to talk to as I felt totally isolated and confused with this man.
I know now that my boundaries are that my partner dies not view porn as it undermines me. Those are my boundaries rightly or wrongly and my current partner is aware of that.
Good luck, Internet porn is like crack and not easy to quit.

if you're with somebody and you can't SEE that they don't like something, or don't even CARE whether they like it, then there's a serious problem going on. I don't know how much that is even about sex, or whether sex is just the way that a more fundamental inter-personal issue is being expressed.

Yes, what you said there :)

Ouch, FMF. Know what you mean about Mumsnet and feeling isolated/confused!

We've carefully kept the ethical issues out of 40's thread but, given those and the escalation problems, I no longer have the tolerance I did in the 70s and early 80s. There's too much wrong and not enough right, for me.

FWIW, I'm in favour of legalisation, regulation and taxation of all the sex industries. It wouldn't make the problem go away, but would bring about some boundaries - and revenues.

OP still here [waves]. appreciate and respect the ethical issues being kept out of this thread. But wow, how complex and how enlightening this thread is for me. Porn is an ethical issue, a personal one, a social issue, an emotional issue. No wonder it's hard to know what to think.

Confidence: Excellent posts.

They are, aren't they, SGB.

Glad you checked back in, 40! You seem, somehow, to have hosted a discussion that loads of us have been trying to have for ... er, how old is Mumsnet??

Quite bit for you to think about, maybe? I hope you'll be back tomorrow with more thoughts. I think you've got a worthwhile selection of Mumsnet's finest opinionators here.

You'll be relieved to hear I've got to work tomorrow
Thank you for the lovely thread.

No prob, no idea it would turn out so interesting and enlightening
Glad it's been useful to more than just me.