Porn

[Hmmiwonder]

What are people's thoughts on porn usage in a relationship? Is it a natural thing to do? Is it potentially damaging to the relationship? Does it have any reflection on how one might feel towards their partner? What are your thoughts on it? And do you watch it if you're in a relationship?

People live in such denial. My eyes are open to the horrors of the porn industry, it's sickening on so many levels. I find it hard to get my head around someone being turned on by it if they have even a base level of human decency.

As for the whataboutery, it's cringe to read to be honest, almost as bad as 'the porn actors love it/are raking it in/are really the ones manipulating the men'. Ugh.

*I personally think anyone making such unsubstantiated claims are doing it to justify controlling red flag behaviour with what their husbands and partners watch.

There is more slavery and trafficking involved in the production of the clothes we wear and the phones we use to scroll mumsnet*

First paragraph: don't make unsubstantiated claims

Second paragraph: wildly unsubstantiated claim

A 30 second Google confirms that most people are trafficked for sexual exploitation.

It's threads like this that make me wonder why Mumsnet is considered a feminist space.

I'm not OK with it.

Porn is a violent, exploitative industry. The only people really benefiting are the men who run the porn sites, raking in millions upon millions from videos and images of women and children being abused. Look up Laila Mickelwait. She campaigns against Pornhub and its parent company Mind Geek and exposes their disgusting, illegal behaviour. It's really unbelievable what they get away with.

How can you ever be sure when you watch porn that the woman in the video hasn't been trafficked or abused? What do you know about her life that's led her to this place? These are real people. Like prostitution, so many women in porn will say they find it empowering, that they love being paid to have sex. It's only when they leave that they're able to acknowledge the damage it's done to them.

Porn is becoming ever more violent and extreme. If you're not willing to perform those acts you won't make any money from it. How is it any different from prostitution, paid rape?

There's a huge amount of research on the profound impacts of porn use on kids and adult men. Use escalates and people become addicted. It affects men's ability to have healthy relationships with women. It causes impotence. Schoolgirls are being coerced into anal sex and experiencing traumatic injury because that's what kids see depicted in porn. It's also impossible to avoid it.

I find it thoroughly depressing that posters on a women's forum don't want to acknowledge any of this. Oh I'm fine with it, we get off on it together. It's fucking appalling.

Why has this thread been hidden in the Sex section now, can we not talk about the possible immoral implications of the sex industry on a bigger platform like AIBU? Should it not at least be in Relationships?

I don't understand. So are women allowed to have a choice or not? Can they do what they want with their lives and bodies or not? Do they have agency or not? Are they able to use their brain and make decisions or not? Do they have any influence/responsibility over their lives or not? Or are they ALWAYS victims.

There are plenty of women who came to porn/only fans willingly. And then we start: yea, but maybe she's not educated, maybe she's misled, maybe abused, maybe forced, maybe she's poor, maybe she misunderstood something, maybe exploited, maybe she had previous trauma, maybe isssues, maybe low self esteem, maybe something else, yadda yadda.

Traficking/forcing/revenge porn are police matters, so police should deal with that.

As for the rest, I'm not going to agonize over someone's life choices. Yea, she chose this line of occupation willingly. Maybe she regretted it later. Whose fault is that? Men's? Environments? Or maybe she should use her brains and take some responsibility for her actions, just a thought.

Ah yea, women are always innocent poor little flowers and everything is due to 'patriarchy' and is men's fault, obvs. They couldn't possibly think and make up their mind themselves.

Ah and here comes the fore mentioned mental gymnastics that people do to convince themselves that ‘sex work is real work’ and ‘the biggest misogyny is taking away the choice for a woman to sell her body for the sexual wants of others 🥺’. It used to be the cry of men who were twisting the women’s rights movement into their own wants, a toxic ideal of equality where men still get to use women, but so many (usually younger) women have been drawn into this twisted way of thinking and labelled it ‘liberalism’.

Seriously @mnhq why has this thread been hidden away? The discourse is beyond just general sex life discussion.

I'm not sure that anyone has any problem with women having the agency to choose how to earn money.

That isn't really the problem with the porn industry though, it's the thousands of men and women who are not provided with the freedom to choose, and the fact that their abuse is consumed at alarming rates as a normal every day occurrence.

It's that there is no way to really tell whether or not the actor was consenting.

It's that the product has saturated the market and been consumed at such a rate that it is becoming more and more extreme.

It's the fact that teenage minds are being warped by what they are seeing, and that future generations are going to pay the price for this destruction of healthy relationships.

It makes me angry, and sad.

I personally would find that pretty harmless

I have to admit I haven't thought too deeply about the whole porn industry thing that others have mentioned so can only talk from my experience.

Personally I don't have a problem with porn in general and started to watch it in my late teens, mainly just to see why others watched it. Probably like most, I found that watching porn turned me on sexually and most of the time this led to me needing or wanting to masturbate. So I've continued to watch it since, for this reason, usually a couple of times a week.

I've asked my boyfriend a few times before so know he watches porn regularly and for the same reasons. I don't mind him doing this either as long as it isn't affecting anything when we are together, which it has never seemed to.

@girlfromyorkshire Has the discussion on here changed your views at all?

@CurlewKate At this point no, I quite enjoy watching porn myself and what I watch seems quite vanilla so I don't think about it much beyond that.

Desecratedcoconut · Yesterday 17:05
**
No, no diamond on my wedding band, thanks

Here, neither. Definitely on nothing else. It’s the only piece of jewellery I own.

What makes them pick mes? The fact that they watch porn or other reasons?

I’ve already covered a response to this earlier in the thread, but I’m happy to answer again.

Visual porn, much like prostitution exists to feed male sexual needs and fantasies. Of course this doesn’t mean women (especially in the modern era) cannot watch not get gratification from porn (or prostitution) but it’s primarily purpose has always been to service male sexual wants. The industry is based on control of women for their sex, it’s symbolic of how men see women - as something to be used for sexually and nothing more. To dismiss a human as an actual human, to use their physicality for your own wants has historically been a male trait. So when women cannot see how degrading and disgusting it is for the males in their lives to be using a woman in such a way, treating her existence as nothing more than collateral damage for his want to orgasm, then actively encourage and engage in this behaviour themselves, yes I absolutely would say they are pick me’s. They see the male want for control of sex as more important than the welfare of fellow girls and women.

I think that’s a huge reach but fair enough, thanks for explaining. I watch and enjoy porn and I’m certainly not a pick me. It’s visually pleasing to look at and turns me on. Nothing more, nothing less

You can believe it’s a huge reach of you want. You will deny it simply because you want to continue to exploit people for your own wants. You continue to choose to use the people on your screen as nothing more than objects without humanity because of your own desire, and by engaging in it you continue the long history of using women for sex. Nothing I nor anyone else would reply to you would change that.

Thank you. Especially when you’re going on huge sites (I won’t name them) you’ll see that most of the women also have their own private sites to give exclusive contents to fans. This is their career and they certainly haven’t been trafficked. All you need to do is watch a few videos of them explaining how they got into the porn industry in the first place.

Now if you’re watching some backstreet video that you’ve found on PH then I certainly agree that you have no clue about who’s involved. Luckily I don’t watch videos like that so no I’m not contributing to women getting trafficked thank you very much

So are you saying that every woman involved in the porn industry have been trafficked and they’re there against their will? I see you don’t mention women that have started their own channel, what are your views towards them? Is it that women can’t enjoy something because it’s made for men, in the eyes of men? I don’t quite get your point but you seem to pain ALL porn watchers with the same brush which is crazy.

Do you know how many categories of porn there are? How many porn sites (including free sites and paid for ones) there are available in the world? People can make as much as an ethical decision as possible when it comes to watching porn. That means not going on PH and clicking on the first shoddy video that comes up

It's all very well saying some women choose to do it. But ask yourself, if your daughter came to you and said she wanted a career in the porn industry would you be happy? Would you proudly tell everyone "my daughters a porn star"? I doubt it.

Everyone who consumes porn is feeding the industry. The sheer demand is what leads to women being trafficked and abused. Even if you personally can say with absolute certainty you never view those videos. Its all part of the same thing.

With things like onlyfans, women sign up expecting to make easy money. Then find themselves doing more and more degrading things to keep making money or keep their profile up. It's a slippery slope. There was a thread on here a while back where a woman was asking should she sign up and the overwhelming response was no, for that reason.

So are you saying that every woman involved in the porn industry have been trafficked and they’re there against their will?

I did not, but statements like this show so much deliberate naivety about what constitutes ‘being there against their will’. Trafficked girls and women are only one aspect of the culture. Many women who seem to ‘actively participate and build a career’ from selling their bodies often have a history of trauma, abuse (sexual or otherwise), desperation for money, low levels of self esteem, cohersion from male partners or those with media ties and more recently, pressure from peers who dress up selling your body as ‘empowering’ and ‘a genuine career’. All further pushed by people like yourself who are willing to use people as your personal commodities and are happy to encourage the aforementioned type of people into selling their sex for a few moments of exhilaration.

As said before, you absolutely cannot tell in videos if a girl or woman comes under any of the above categories. She may spend years saying how brilliant it is on social media, you still don’t know if truthfully she was in the business because she was pushed or felt with little choice to do so. But it’s irrelevant anyway, as long as someone can find one person in the industry that says it’s wonderful and affirming, porn users will justify their behaviour to the ends of the earth.

Many women who seem to ‘actively participate and build a career’ from selling their bodies often have a history of trauma, abuse (sexual or otherwise), desperation for money, low levels of self esteem, cohersion from male partners or those with media ties and more recently, pressure from peers who dress up selling your body as ‘empowering’ and ‘a genuine career’.

The problem is, is you’re seeing woman who fit into these categories as ill informed women who are making the wrong choice due to their past. No one should watch porn because you don’t know if someone is only there because they were once a victim that’s gone down the wrong path.

‘Someone has a low level of self esteem so no one should ever interact with porn for this reason alone.’ Are women allowed to make choices for themselves or not? You’re looking at these women and generalising that they must be there because of their past. It’s ridiculous and judging people for interacting with porn is even more ridiculous.

It would have made more sense to say that certain categories of porn are highly degrading and view women has something only to have sex with. I’d agree with that because some categories are downright awful and probably shouldn’t be legal. Giving all these potential reasons as to why a woman would partake in porn is again, ridiculous. No point going back and forth with you, you have your views and I have mine

@MinnieL "So are you saying that every woman involved in the porn industry have been trafficked and they’re there against their will?"

No I'm not. But I wouldn't watch any porn unless I could be sure that the women involved weren't. And I would not want to share my life with a man who didn't t feel the same way.

Feel a little guilty now after reading some of this post but we both watch porn and I'm open enough to say I enjoy watching it. Most of the time we are watching it on our own and neither of us minds the other watching it at all so it works fine for us.