Porn?

[goodtimesroll]

I have been with my boyfriend for a couple of years now. Although we had quite a tough start to our relationship (he has a child from a previous relationship) things have been getting better and better between us. We love and care for eachother hugely and are both determined to make things work despite it being a tough situation. He is without a doubt the man I want to marry and to be the father of my children.

That being said there are some things I am struggling with - porn being one of them.We discussed porn a few months ago, he watches it on his phone. Without going into the rights and wrongs of it, I am 100% not happy/comfortable with it - both because it is utterly disrespectful to me and because of the obvious exploitation of women in that "industry". It makes my skin crawl and my blood boil. I explained to him how I felt about it and he seemed almost surprised... "all men look at porn".... "do you really think your previous boyfriends didn't" etc etc. I know all men don't look at it and I don't care what previous boyfriends did, that's not relevant now. He took what I said seriously and said that until now he had never connected looking at porn and being in a relationship - he didn't think one affected the other. To me it does, I find myself thinking about it far too much - when we are being intimate or anytime really. There is nothing I do behind his back and it feels strange to have this elephant in the room - for me it puts a distance between us and I hate it. As much as I do hate it it obviously isnt a deal breaker as I would have ended things by now - I dont want to throw away all the good in our relationship for this. So, do you just try and move on and ignore it? Although it was obvious how I felt I didn't ask him to stop doing it - it would be easy to continue to do it and hide it so there didnt seem much point in that. I feel like I want to know if he has actually taken on board what I said and whether he has changed his habits - guessing this is highly unlikely? Perhaps I need to be more confident talking/asking about it but I think I would almost feel like a chastising mother!

From what I've read on here it seems quite often that watching porn may develop into other online activities etc...web cams, chats etc. That for me would be an absolute deal breaker. Does one naturally follow the other? This modern age of laptops, ipads, phones, webcams etc etc absolutely terrifies me - it seems to be so easy to do things behind your partner's back. It seems somehow people justify it as it is online and if your other half doesn't know about it then it is fine. Is this something you would raise now? I wonder if I should make my feelings explicitly clear on how I would feel about that? To me that is cheating. In the same way getting a lap dance on a stag do or other such things.

Just wondering if anyone feels the same/ has any opinions on this?

Top tip for people who don't use porn - people can masturbate without porn. Healthy prostates all round

hereandtherex eh? why?

I watch porn and I've never felt the need to progress to other online activities.

PMSL at the poster who compare masturbation to a smear test as that's the most ludicrous thing I've ever heard on MN (and boy has there been lots!).

You have every right to set the boundaries of your relationship and set the consequences if your boyfriend breaks them.

You don't need to set your standards according to what is normal for everyone else, this is your relationship, not there's. Your boyfriend can either agree, or not, or hide it.

If he doesn't agree and porn is a deal breaker then the relationship ends. If he agrees and continues then it ends because of his porn use and because he's a liar to boot.

The science of the use of smear tests is undecided. Far better to have the human pap vaccine.

www.macmillan.org.uk/Cancerinformation/Cancertypes/Cervix/Aboutcervicalcancer/Prevention/HPVvaccines.aspx

There's an entire industry/legion living off smear tests. The money is probably best spent elsewhere.

The science of ejaculation + prostate cancer is emerging and pointing in one direction.

www.harvardprostateknowledge.org/does-frequent-ejaculation-help-ward-off-prostate-cancer

Maybe men should get porn on the NHS?

There's a name for it, I can't remember because I'm a woman, but when you make a false or illogical statement and then produce topical but unrelated facts as backup.

It's sort of like Lewis Carrol's logic problems. I recommend you look them up.

But to put it directly. Porn is not the same as wanking. Prevention is not the same as detection. And I'm fact, not only are they not the same, but they are only loosely related. In the case of porn and wanking, the level of relation you see depends greatly on how much you've been sucked in by what porn has sold you.

Honestly, I would imagine most men under the age of 35 have watched porn on the internet, not all would use it regularly, but most will have at some point. It makes it very difficult for women in that demographic to take a hard line view. It's very much about the fact that they grew up with the internet. That's why I wouldn't sack someone off straight away if they said they'd used it. It's freely available and most people don't think about the morality of what they're doing when they're having a wank.

What I personally wouldn't be ok with is someone who, having considered the morality issues, was still ok with using it in a relationship with me. I'd have to conclude that we were not compatible and move on.

And sorry but at comparing a wank to a smear test. Genuinely, fecking hilarious!

You don't have to use porn to ejactulate ffs!

last tango. do you mean this:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense

That does NOT make sense

flipflaps- Wasn't the one I was thinking of but chewbacca defence is perfect so I'll take it! Ta!

what id also like to know is WHY so much online porn is of the nature Hooty described above - whilst i definitely think that most men like looking at naked women and people having sex of various flavours, i really struggle to believe they all secretly want those women degraded and abused whilst doing it. Do men really want that? what determines what sort of porn gets made - do people vote?!

"I have never been in a relationship with anyone who uses it" = I have never caught anyone I've been in a relationship with using it.

The poster who says watching porn is nothing to do with relationships for the vast majority of men is dead right. All the men I know - all of them intelligent, decent, educated and women-loving men, by the way - have used porn, and many still do. It's precisely the same thought process as women perving on male celebrities with their tops off (which many of my equally enlightened and lovely women friends have no compunction about doing on Facebook). It's just looking. It doesn't make them leave their husbands. If the sleb they're perving on knocked on their door would they drop everything and fuck them? No - because they love their partner/husband. But it doesn't mean looking isn't nice.

And I know porn is more than just nice pictures of famous chaps looking buff in a wet shirt, but the thinking is the same. Saying "it's not it's not" doesn't change that: it's looking with lust at something that isn't just unattainable, but something that even it were attainable, wouldn't be wanted.

Some of the more vehement anti porn people also make the unpleasant assumption that porn is a "man thing". It's not. What I said above about viewing habits is equally true of many of my female friends, albeit admittedly a much smaller proportion. Not vanishingly small, though. 20-30% at a guess?

Some porn is unpleasant and unethical. Some men are arseholes. Some women are neurotic. Lots isn't. Many aren't. Many aren't.

And as for "I've never seen any but...", well, sorry but you don't get to comment on the ethics. It's a bit like me saying I disapprove of the violence in professional wrestling without having watched a match.

Snakesandknives, how do you know what proportion of online porn is violent and degrading?

I like watching people fucking from time to time. Sometimes I like watching quite dirty fucking. Sometimes I like a bit of light BDSM, if I'm honest (also true IRL). I don't like women being shoved and pulled about and called names. I don't like coercion, even faked coercion. Despite having my kinks, the whole slave thing has never been a winner for me either in porn or RL. Most of the time the kind of porn I like is well-lit, well-shot, bright and pretty, and the people involved kiss a lot and look like they're genuinely really hot for each other. It's not hard to find and it isn't - in my honestly extensive experience - crowded out by horrible stuff.

As for why people like the stuff I find horrible: having had some quite kinky sex in my time, there are many, many strong empowered women who really get off on voluntarily surrendering that strength and agency to a sexual partner. The sub in a D/s roleplay is - again in my experience - generally the one holding all the power, but he or she has willingly surrendered it, within limits, for the duration of the game. That may not compute for people who can't see the appeal, and violent porn doesn't compute for me, but while i can't imagine why a person might get off on stuff I find repellent, I at least understand THAT they do. One's consensual sexual kinks are generally not correlated with one's moral status.

I do find it hard to think that you could be so unaware of the exploitation of which you are a part of if you view such material

Goodtime you say that upthread and although I agree that porn is damaging at a lot of different levels,
I, being a vegetarian am often shocked by how little understanding meat eaters have of the horrendous sufferings intensive farmed animals have to endure for the pleasure and convenience of "unaware", blind, meat eaters!
We can all be unaware and we mostly are of the misery we cause because we want to satisfy our selfih pleasures!

fulb I totally agree with you on many fronts.

However, I do think that there is an element of 'the lady doth protest too much' about a lot of the pro-porn/porn is harmless narrative. There are an awful lot of people who feel that watching porn HAS damaged them and their relationships. It's still only a small percentage, but claiming 'it's fine! it's fine!' is a bit like someone claiming alcohol is always fine, just because you don't personally have a drink problem. There is really no reason to jump around shouting for porns right to exist. It already exists. It has always existed. It will always exist. I'm sorry, but when people - several seen on this thread- feel the need to get so up in arms defending porn, I do tend to read it as fear. Which is a classic sign of addiction- an overreaction to even a slight threat to access.

As I've said- my problem with porn is largely about the massively unrealistic way most porn presents female sexuality. That's why I see it as a 'man thing' - because it is clear to me that the vast majority of porn is built for the male gaze- or someone's idea of the male gaze. Whether it's accurate or not, who knows.

I agree that for many many individual people, porn doesn't have a negative effect. However, it is becoming more and more apparent, in a variety of ways, that widespread porn use is changing the way people have sex and consider sexuality. Maybe this won't turn out to be a wholesale bad thing. But in my opinion, a widespread change in sexuality that is rooted in the idea of constant female availability and porn style sex, is going to cause a great deal of dissonance in a lot of people's relationships. And for a lot of women's ideas about themselves as sexual beings. So yeah, as a woman I have concerns. But I also have concerns for men- because honestly I do believe that most men want to please women in bed, and I think that if your primary sexual input is from porn, you are going to struggle to do that, more than if you learned from real women.

LastTango, I suppose I've got a bit more faith in the average bloke. We're not that impressionable, generally: we know that real sex with real women is - for want of a better analogy - as different from porn as the real experience of being in a fight is from an episode of The A-Team. Escapist silly fantasy, and everyone watching knows it. A small minority will be impressionable and silly enough to have it affect them to the core. Most won't.

Many of us like pretty postcards but much prefer real travel.

FWIW, LastTango, I think the alcohol analogy is dead right, and a good way of thinking about it. Potentially harmful if abused, and some of it is just straight up horrible. The best porn can be a nice whisky; the worst is meths: undrinkable except by nutters and seriously bad for you.

Fulb, I suspect you didn't watch a lot of porn in your youth/teens, so you learned sex from real sexual intercourse. Porn was something dabbled in on the periphery. However, young boys are bombarded with it and I think their perceptions of real sex may well be tainted by the widespread availability of pornography and the language used to describe the women in it.

To use the alcohol analogy, if young people are allowed to drink alcohol freely and without consequence from a very young age, they're more likely to have unhealthy relationships with alcohol in adulthood.

Actually that's not quite true, Hooty, on two counts. 1) I was exposed to porn from my early to mid teens. A newsagent round the corner from us sold - presumably illegally at the time - European full-strength uncensored bongo mags. I saved my pennies and shelled out for many of those down the years in my teens: the joy of being 6ft tall at the age of 13! I didn't get my eager little mitts on a real live pair of boobies til I was 17.

Secondly, a lot of research suggests that learning about drinking in controlled supervised conditions as a child - as per France, where it's quite usual for parents to allow their kids to drink small quantities of wine - leads to a much less bingey relationship with alcohol in later life. Now God knows I'm not advocating supervised wanking, but I would certainly take a pretty dim view of a household in which kids have unfettered access to the internet. If you know what you're doing in terms of basic internet security/filtering and equally basic boundaries ("no, you're not taking your phone to bed") there's no chance your teenage boy is flogging on relentlessly.

I'm more worried about bloody page 3 (and social media e-safety) than I am about YouPorn, when it comes to kids being bombarded with horrible messages in mainstream culture.

Fulb I think you're deliberately missing the point.

1. There's a difference between looking at the odd magazine as a teenager and having free uncontrolled access to all the porn on the internet now. You might have seen some tits and ass in a magazine, but you still learned about sex from real life. You didn't have access to all the free porn on the internet whenever you wanted to watch it. There is evidence to suggest that when young men see porn on the internet (I'm not talking about images, but videos) before they have sex, it can cloud their understanding of real sex.

2. the alcohol analogy - I talked about young people drinking freely and without consequence. You talk of alcohol attitudes in France, which I believe are far healthier than in the UK, but young people aren't encouraged to drink whatever and whenever the want in France. I was thinking more of teens who are allowed to drink whatever they want whenever they want to because there's no healthy adult guidance.

Hooty, no, I don't think I am. Who says young people have unfettered access to porn? If they do, their parents are to blame. Locking out their access to this stuff isn't hard: a combination of technology and parenting.

You're probably right that unfettered access to porn would be bad for teenage boys. Your premise that they automatically HAVE that access is the faulty part. If their parents are that laissez-faire, I think what the kids are wanking to is in any case the least of anyone's worries.

I should add there's no way you can provide healthy guidance to teens and young adults over porn, or do you imagine parents should be watching over their kids saying "yes Johnny, you can watch PIV and blowjobs, but not anal, and make sure you leave enough time to do your chemistry homework."

Of course not. You should be making sure your parental controls are set correctly and supervising their internet usage. You should be making sure they don't have a laptop in their room (I take the same view of TVs and games consoles, for different reasons). You should be making sure their phones and tablets aren't taken to bed (and again setting locked parental controls on those devices). You should be making sure their mobile provider has enabled content filtering over their 3G/4G network to ensure the kids can't just turn wifi off to access adult content. This stuff is not rocket science.

Of course you shouldn't be having a conversation about what porn is or isn't ok for teenagers: none is the default position. You can't blame the corruption of your kids' sexualities on porn if you haven't done the basic parenting jobs.