Should I be concerned about the type of porn my DP watches? (*MNHQ warning: distressing content, concerns violent porn)

[DanaScully83]

My DP was looking online for holiday properties to rent. He passed his laptop to me to have a look at one and I noticed that he had several other windows open and one was a porn site. When he left the room I opened the window to see what he had been looking at. I should say at this point I don't have a particular problem with porn. I'd rather my DP didn't feel the need to watch it but overall I regard it as private and not really any of my business. We have a good sex life and so it certainly isn't causing any problems in that department. So why did I look? Curiosity I guess!
The problem is the video he had been watching was called 'Young asian babe exepriences nasty group sex'. I am neither particularly young (mid 30s) nor am I asian. However, the bit that really concerns me is the 'nasty' bit. I watched a few seconds of the video and at times the girl looks like she is crying and in pain. It is horrific and I am really really shocked. A quick look at DP's search history reveals he has searched for asian group sex many times before.
I just don't know what to do - I know I shouldn't have intruded but it is done now and I cannot unsee what I saw. I'm struggling to reconcile my kind, loving DP (and father of our 2 sons) with someone who enjoys watching a young girl being subjected to what looked like violent and unpleasant sex. I am shocked by how upset I am - I can't even look at him and feel sick at the thought of him touching me again. What should I do? Is this normal? Should I be worried?

There is no way i would want to be with a man whom gets off on abusive shit.

Absolutly no way.

I feel for you op, what a horrid shock

Getting off on degradation of women is fucking awful.

Absolutly a deal breaker

This isn't making too much sense. Stumbling across it is one thing, as I've previously said he could've came across it & shut it off, fine. If he's searching gang rape to masturbate to, that's entirely different

Op said he'd searched for "Asian Gangbang". So we're clear, that has nothing to do with rape, it just means one woman with more than one man (in this case, it looked like one woman and two men).

@TheChampagneGalop

I read it but I'm not sure what I can say here. 200 out of 20,000 actresses surveyed felt they had been at least coerced. 1% of the actresses shouldn't have been doing it and a percentage of that 1% were probably victims of crime.

That's horrible, obviously, but it also means that more likely than not OP's partner was not watching footage of a crime or coercion take place.

Tiny I don't know if you're deliberately overlooking what violent porn depicts or if it's ignorance. It would be nice to believe that these videos are always someone pretending to be hurt but that just isn't the case & the title is never going to mention "rape".

I think you're missing my point. It seems like you're equating "gangbang" and "gang rape". They're two different things.

You can type OPs title into a search engine and there is a video with a very similar title that sounds like it's what OP saw. There is no violence whatsoever. There is a woman making the noises commensurate of most Japanese-produced pornography which is 100% a cultural style.

Tiny, what’s your point exactly ? We get that you are ok with porn and the ethics don’t bother you, they do OP, so are you telling her it’s no big deal because to be frank she is feeling pretty repulsed by her partner and whether or not you don’t have an issue with it, the OP does. Just so you know I have 4 main friends, aged 35 to 55 , we discussed this, one has no issue at all with porn of any kind , 2 have no issue in moderation, ie not more than a couple of times a month, and nothing involving abuse or rape or animals or gangbangs etc , 1 has a very big issue with it full stop. I appreciate that some women watch it too , fine, it’s unlikely many will have partners who have a big deal but the simple fact is many women find it offensive and by normalising it and implying we all have to accept its all hunky dory gets away from the fact that in some cases it’s destroying relationships.

At this point it's literally just how Chinese whispers have transformed this from what I suspected was an actress who is making sounds typical of Japanese pornography (which seems to be the case of you Google the title) to a video of some sort of triple penetration gang rape.

These are different things.

People can ditch people for whatever reason they want, there's no need for the hyperbole. Wanting to dump a partner for watching porn is fine but it doesn't make him a closet rapist.

I think you're missing my point. It seems like you're equating "gangbang" and "gang rape". They're two different things.

No, I'm not. I don't believe any of my posts have suggested that & I've even clearly stated group sex where everyone is enjoying is not the issue here. I'm unsure what makes you think I have the two confused. I'm talking about what op described she seen and I have no reason to believe she's lying.
You seem to deliberately be overlooking that point. I've said time & time again whether the woman is pretending to be abused or is being abused (the latter worse of course) it's the fact that this abuse is sexually arousing that's the concern. I really can't be any clearer.

The fact the title of this has been changed is case in point really. If you're supportive of men who find violence towards women sexually arousing then that's your prerogative. You can deny it exists in porn. It's a nice innocent place to be but it truly reflective of what goes on. That industry isn't as well regulated as we'd all hope. If it was always just people who loved sex and hadn't had experiences distorting their views on sex then it wouldn't be an issue, plus this type of pornography wouldn't exist.
A man's preference for this can be dressed up as some "fantasy" but every action a human makes starts off as a mere thought & this doesn't help tackling the issue of abuse.

It's a while upthread now, but can I just post an analogy re the "it's just acting, no worse than saw"

For it to be the same, say there is a film role where an actress is stabbed. To be on the same level, she'd have to be portraying pain while in fact she had been anaesthetised. She's still being physically injured.
The porn actress equivalent is still being penetrated, she is just acting the pain.

For it to be truly comparable to the actress who pretends to be stabbed, any sexual contact would have to also be synthetic.
Which it isn't.

This thread illustrates why I have never understood the women who say they are ok with their partners watching porn. So much porn is violent and humiliating (for women) these days. It is not just a fantasy, it is feeding a fantasy that didn't really exist a few years ago - and with that increasing violence towards women and girls. Porn is toxic.

What smemorata says!

From your previous comment:
If he's searching gang rape to masturbate to, that's entirely different. The latter is the one that's problematic & I'm not surprised she doesn't want that in a partner.

Op specified he searched for "gang bang" not "gang rape", that's why I thought you were equating the two.

To be on the same level, she'd have to be portraying pain while in fact she had been anaesthetised. She's still being physically injured.
The porn actress equivalent is still being penetrated, she is just acting the pain.

Surely that only holds if you accept that penetration is only ever painful?
Not the case in my experience.

If you've ever seen the "rip my stocking" scene in Lost in Translation, it's not a far cry from a lot of Japanese-produced pornography.

Op specified he searched for "gang bang" not "gang rape", that's why I thought you were equating the two

Searching for...I'm sure he wouldn't naive enough to be obviously searching for rape films but, if you say it's standard for Japanese porn to be that way in nature he wouldn't have to use the word specifically. The viewer knows there's high chance that's what they're getting.

Searching for...I'm sure he wouldn't naive enough to be obviously searching for rape films but, if you say it's standard for Japanese porn to be that way in nature he wouldn't have to use the word specifically. The viewer knows there's high chance that's what they're getting.

What's more likely?
He searched "Asian gang bang" because he wanted to see an Asian gang bang or that he really wanted to see a rape but didn't want to type rape and get what he was actually looking for?
That's the wild extrapolation that I'm not really understanding.

More likely than not he has a liking for Asian women. Japan is probably the biggest producer of porn involving Asian women, it just so happens they like their actresses to make different noises to western actresses (that a lot of men will self-report that they don't like, but put up with because they find Asian women attractive.

I think I'm done with topic now, but I appreciate everyone's engagement. It's been enlightening.

Been watching this carefully. I am someone who married a man who had explicitly told me he was not that into porn. As time went on not only did I realize he had a massive porn addiction, which he consistently lied about, but also his focus in porn was women who looked entirely different to me and largely teenagers and incest very specifically. This did spill over into our sex life in two ways: he had appalling death grip and literally couldn’t come vaginally, and, it was clear he was totally elsewhere and I was just the physical piece of flesh whilst he conjured up more exciting, more hardcore fantasies involving incest in his head. I left him. For those reasons and for many others, but if pushed I would happily cite the lies and betrayal and indeed the fascination with teenage incest as a reason I couldn’t reconcile being with him long term. I found myself being gradually coerced by him to believe there was everything normal about his clearly unpleasant proclivities. There came a point where he met my stepdaughter and clearly in the five seconds he saw here he had checked her out to make a fairly in depth physical assessment of her. A week later he was out of my house. I feel for you OP and anyone else who makes these unfortunate discoveries when you’re already deeply connected to a person. But I feel like a different person not being linked to that anymore and when I do meet another partner I will be asking them many more questions before he gets near me. I sadly think there is a growing epidemic of male dependence on hardcore and violent abusive imagery and why would any woman want to imagine her husband and father of kids spending a good long time, in a shared house, experiencing one on one, intense pleasure with something that is either making their female ‘life partner’ (forsake all others, love, honor, etc) feel not good enough, too boring, or revolted. Life doesn’t have to be like that. I for one found it intolerable.

What's more likely?
He searched "Asian gang bang" because he wanted to see an Asian gang bang or that he really wanted to see a rape but didn't want to type rape and get what he was actually looking for?
He would never search rape because he would know he'd be on a list.
It was you who highlighted what she seen was typical of Japanese porn, so surely it wouldn't take a genius to work that if he searched "Asian gang bang" he's more than likely going to get what he's looking for in a less incriminating way...
OPs descriptions put me in mind of Japanese porn. From what I've seen and read, it's a cultural thing whereby the women portray themselves as being non-sexual/innocent by acting as if they're experiencing discomfort in an extremely exaggerated manner

So much porn is violent and humiliating (for women) these day

Indeed. My first post on this had mentioned a director (don't want to put specifics) who was imprisoned for obscenity, mainly because the women were depicting someone under age although the fact they were legal & consenting was never disputed. One well known actress (in that industry) took a long time off and considered giving it up because she was so traumatised by him. There's no question that it's not always a safe environment for even the most experienced workers. Her experience wasn't related to his case at all. It's grim.

Mumandsome, you put it very well, it’s the deception for some of us in pretending they aren’t interested and then discovering they have a big habit and often on one particular thing and then suddenly a particular ‘activity’ they seem to always want makes sense along with the inability to get off without that activity

@Mumandsome78 that must've all been horrible & so uncomfortable where your stepdaughter was concerned.
When it gets past the point of just a curiosity, it's bound to manifest itself in some way through every day life.
It's just so easy accessible & a lot of it portrays criminal acts.

I think what shocked me was the amount of camming stuff that’s pushed— I’m sorry but to me this is just distance prostitution and I suspect a lot of men get sucked into it

I remember reading that Jenna Jameson, the most famous porn "actress" of the 1980s, once she had established herself, never did anal (she may, in fact never have done anal; it sounds unlikely, but these were different times) and only did scenes with women, the exception being her husband. The porn industry was always exploitative as fuck, but just compare that with the situation now. One of the most famous porn performers of all time, at the peak of her fame, did not routinely film scenes with a male performer, and never did anal. It's almost incredible.

The brutality, depravity and hate-filled violence being inflicted on women and filmed for entertainment purposes is the most depressing development of the Internet age. If it were being done to animals, there would (rightly) be global uproar. And to hear young, self-identified feminist women glorying in this as symptomatic of women's empowerment - well, there are no words. Our society has gone very wrong.

I mean, most modern porn is not even fucking; it's ritualised brutalisation and depraved hate-venting.

This thread is very over dramatic

Too right, SoftDay.

I've had a very frank conversation with my DH tonight about this thread.

He watches porn on occasions, which frankly I really don't have a problem with.

He says he can't bear the sort where a woman appears to be in distress and says he prefers just "an attractive woman pleasuring herself."

Not quite what I was expecting to talk about while making spaghetti bolognaise, but feeling a bit reassured in the context of this thread!

My ex of 10 years told me he never watched porn. He pressured me initially to have sex and I've come to realise I was sexually abused by him as he never took no for an answer. Thought that women were always up for anything and routinely came on my face when though he knew I hated it. He would get so angry with me if I cried and wasn't having fun. It turned out he was a porn addict and was into videos where the woman is stuck and the man takes advantage. She would say no stop then enjoy it. Finding this out explained everything.

I didn't split with him as I thought it was normal for men to watch porn and thought there was something wrong with me. Now I have left him I don't think I could ever be with another man the idea of having sex sickens me.

So my point is porn is not always harmless and fantacy it can spill into real life. It's up to the op how she feels about it. It's all well and good telling the op it's normal but if it makes her feel bad then she needs to talk the her dh about it. One person's pleasure isn't more important than another's feeling of disgust. It doesn't matter if it was tame by some of your standards it still upset the op and that's what matters.