Tell me your views on partner using porn. My head is mashed.

[DarkSideOfTheLoom]

With dh seven years, three kids, usually really happy.

Straight to the point, every so often I will find evidence he is looking at porn. I hate it. I think it's degrading to women, and horrifically exploitative and psychologically damaging, my views are rather strong. On previous occasions he has said that he won't access it etc as I find my feelings are hurt by it, and I hate the sneaking around aspect of it.

He uses the football 365 forum which I presumed was about football?! Transpires its really not just that, there's a lot of porn and page three type stuff. He was using my iPad and my address bar shows he has been looking at these threads. I told him that if he insisted on doing it please don't have the face to do it on my iPad.

Further investigation into the more advanced history setting revealed a number of porn video sites.

My questions here are... Am I being unreasonable to ask my husband to respect how I feel about this? Is it ok to regard the 'men need it' stance as bullshit?

Can you even concieve how it would be if this whole thing was flipped around? If hoards of women were going online and watching perfectly honed men engaged in sexual acts, and all the men were told it was so normal because we are all doing it?

Quite "Dark". But other people only say that to justify their own behaviour.

"I don't think watching porn is actually normal or healthy."

There is no such thing as normal. That's got nothing to do with the OP though. I think it's the lying to each other, people lie to their DPs all the time, its just what he might consider a white lie you might consider more serious

Does he know what happens in porn and the making of it? Women's pain and exploitation is a high price to pay for curiosity. Would some facts help?

He knows :(

I think it's about the buzz of doing something he's not meant to be doing

It's not the sex or the 'honed' bodies that bother me. It's the passivity of the female role, the focus on male orgasm, women being reduced to a selection of convenient holes that exist solely for the pleasure of men pleasure and the impact of that on a society where woman are already underpaid, patronised, valued on their attractiveness to men an in the extreme raped and murdered because of their sex.

Then it's probably not about the porn per se. It's possibly about the thrill of doing something he knows you disapprove of and because he knows the facts about porn, something he feels ashamed about and cannot justify ethically. Does he lie to you about other things too, do you think?

psychomonkey, do you know the meaning of the word 'compassion'? or are you just a cold hearted, entitled person who doesn't care a damn about causing emotional distress (if say, your partner found it upsetting, to which you said you would ignore)? Compassion to both your partner and for women working in porn.
do you understand that sex is an emotive issue (not just for women, many men can also enjoy sex only within a relatioship if they trust and like the person). Marriage is about monogamy, and wanking to other women is not LOYAL is it? Unless both partners are happy with non-monogamy, it's not keeping your promises. that's apart from the exploitation issues and as Just pointed out, the passive role of women as 'dolls' in porn. No wonder that regular porn users do lose any emotional understanding and compassion just as you demonstrate. It's not all about logic, we are humans.

I'm with Gertrude and with badinage's last post. So many reasons to do something self-destructive - I could justify my comfort-eating for hours, but in the end it comes from a fairly dark, angry, insecure place inside which I won't bore you about. I think finding a good couple-counsellor when things get tricky is really helpful in getting to the core of problems which as Gertrude said might be a different problem altogether.

Darkside and Bandinage, I wasn't trying to say you should be trying to compete with these girls in porn or anything, I was just trying to give advice as someone who has experienced the same and what worked for me.

Lots of comments since I was on before so not read everything and looks a bit heated, but did you mention you recently were pregnant? did the "Porn usage" show up around this time or has he always been looking at it?

allaflutter - Talk about sweeping generalisations!

On the contrary, I'd have said allaflutter absolutely nails it! Brilliant explanation of why OP has every right to be upset by this behaviour.

does you need an English degree to be able to spell GREY?

Psyco if her DH watching porn makes her feel insecure and have low self esteem then why is he doing it. Why would you want to make your other half feel this way? Is that not a problem? You can hardly compare it to watching X Factor. The lying and sneaking about is bound to make her paranoid and insecure and porn can make a woman have low self esteem. If your biggest insecurity is stretch marks and having a mum tum for example (I speak for myself) and my DH is watching younger thinner women who have never been through child birth then yes that is going to make you feel like a pile of sh*t.
If it was the other way round and I was watching it and my DH was upset about it then I would no longer do it as I would hate upsetting him over something that simply isn't necessary.

honey is spot on, if my DH asked me to stop doing something that made him feel insecure or inadequate of course I would!

But why I would be doing whatever it was in the 1st place that made him feel like that is another issue entirely, it's the saying "it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt" we'll the OP is hurt and her partner should support her in feeling better, even if that means making sacrifices himself.

There is a reason we say partner - the idea is that you are a team, he's only playing for (and with!) himself.

I have some sympathy with the comparison of buying clothes from sweatshops. Both industries are producing consumables based on the exploitation of people without a voice who are considered somewhat less than human.

I don't see why saying there are other things to get upset about means that you can't dislike porn though.

I dislike porn. I have no problem with people watching other people have sex, whether that's in person or on a screen. If it's real, consensual sex.

But most of it isn't. Most of it involves women who even if they haven't been trafficked or coerced into it, will be doing it from a background that has already destroyed any ability they had to act with self-respect and preservation. The 'happy hooker' or 'happy pornstar' may not be a myth but it's a meaningless minority and not at all representative of the whole.

Enjoying watching sex and disliking porn are not polar opposites.

Fantastic post Dahlen - totally agree. However, on this:

"I don't see why saying there are other things to get upset about means that you can't dislike porn though."

Would you not agree that if you do present your objections to pornography as being based on the exploitation of people, it is highly hypocritical to not apply those same standards to other decisions or things that feature equally prominently in your life?

That is different, in my mind, to being "upset" about a thing that directly invades your sphere of consciousness and not about something else that you wouldn't necessarily come across unless you actively went about looking for injustice.

psychoticmonkey - yes but no.

Yes, it is hypocritical to boycott porn but buy clothes regularly from Primark, but how many porn objectors buy their clothes from Primark?

And if you boycott everything you disagree with, you'd probably die, since industrialisation nearly always means that someone, somewhere is suffering for your consumer choices.

Furthermore, clothing and feeding oneself is pretty necessary for survival, whereas porn isn't.

When asked to sponsor someone for a cancer charity, for example, do people say "only if you also care about raising money to fight cardic disease?"

Cardic = cardiac

Putting the rights and wrongs of the porn industry aside and looking at it from a personal point of view I would be upset if DH was using porn behind my back. I am not sure I object to it completely but maybe I find it slightly odd as the insecure part of be thinks I should be enough for my husband.

If I knew he used porn I have no idea if I would be ok with it or not, until in that situation I cannot really say (that is not to say he doesn't but I don't know and he is never on the computer so unlikely I suppose) however it would be the lying that bothers me. DH has a tendency to omit information if it would mean confrontation even something completely innocent and pointless and we talk about this a lot.

I am not sure I believe that all the people objecting to porn are only doing so because of the awful industry issues, I would personally feel jealous and inadequate, especially if maybe our sex life was infrequent.

I have never seen any documentaries about porn as it is not the sort of thing I would watch, the impression given on here is that no one doing it actually wants to really but I am not convinced that is actually true. A friend of mine did it and loved it, she was in a relationship also and she was completely normal (for want of a better word), maybe she didn't really but I knew her pretty well and she was very secure in herself and only ever agreed to do things she was comfortable with, it wasn't really grim stuff and she would rather not take the job unless she was 100% confident it would be ok.

Interesting to read this thread and all the over-views, but wanted to say that for wives/partners in the OPs position, the issue is not really the greater picture of the porn industry and all it entails/personifies.
Its very very personal.
Obviously I can't generalise, but think I was fairly 'normal' in the emotional response of feeling un-attractive and obviously not sexy enough/ 'good' enough to satisfy him.

That's a very rough place to find yourself.
OP