Whisnant, Rebecca (2007) ‘From Jekyll to Hyde: The grooming of male pornography consumers’, in Karen Boyle (Ed) Everyday Pornography. Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, UK, pp. 114–133.
Wosnitzer, Robert (n.d.) The Price of Pleasure, http://thepriceofpleasure.com/pdf/robert_statment.pdf.
Caroline
(Scotland)
The Impact of Pornography on My Life
I’m anxious about writing this. Anxious that although I know rationally there is no way you can know who I am, I am still afraid.
In one sense you will know me. I’m the woman behind you in the supermarket queue or sitting opposite you on the train. Middle aged, middle class, educated, professional. Ordinary. Yet there is something in my life I will hide from you, no matter how close we are.
When I first met my partner, way back when, one quiet afternoon on my own in his flat I came across 3 dog-eared copies of Playboy in the back of his wardrobe. Flicking through the images of women in silk lingerie reclining in misty boudoirs, I was held. I could breathe these pictures to life with my own sexual imagination. They were mysterious, partial, hinting. It was a brief encounter with pornography. We stayed together, the paper pictures long thrown out.
Fast-forward many years. It happened like this. I borrowed my partner’s laptop and as the cursor rolled slowly over the Internet history it revealed a trail of regular porn viewing. Panic. I clicked on to a couple of the sites. For someone who had never seen Internet porn, the sudden imagery of women displayed arse up, faceless, with orifices, raw, red and black, open and roughly penetrated was deeply, deeply distressing. These were explicit; viciously invading my sexual identity and choking it with images distorted, ugly, degraded. The click speed, the slickness of the connections revealed that this was no occasional or unwanted intrusion but a regular search on my partner’s part to view.
How can I convey to you the way the stomach lurches and sickens with the discovery? A long-term loving relationship is built on things that are shared, unspoken, gathering over time. Love and making love; intimate, hidden, soft, warm and lingering; ruddy and boisterous; funny and fumbled. Trust, a commitment, ways of relating, a sexual life that you believe – oh, but believed until now – you both treasured. To discover suddenly that your partner has been visiting a secret, voyeur’s world, and has sought out these other images of women for arousal; many, many women, is devastating.
I looked. Perhaps I shouldn’t have done. But I looked because I needed to know what I was dealing with. I needed to know how far it extended. Who is this person I no longer recognise? I confronted. A wild, visceral, rage. His first reaction was to lie; to lie about the extent and to downplay it. I wasn’t supposed to know. For how long? Three, maybe four years – three, four times a week. And maybe more than that when working away, alone in hotels. A rare few men may be so addicted that the viewing has become compulsive, but many more, much more insidiously across society as a whole, have become habitual viewers. Ordinary men, with ordinary partners. You and me.
I was repulsed. In this climate of permissiveness, we are not supposed to confess to repulsion. It sounds censorious, prim, prejudiced. We are supposed to be open-minded, extending our boundaries of acceptance. Rampant individualism, the free market, the liberal gods of freedom and choice, insist on each to his own by right. But where does another’s supposed right infringe upon mine? Values of equality, respect, social responsibility, ethical concern for others – these are tossed aside; indifferent to the distress of others. But what is thought to be a question of freedom and choice, is in reality far from being free but instead is rigidly determined by the dominant, masculinist belief systems of our own society.
Once discovered he sought to justify and minimise the situation by one-sided arguments that ranged from – “it’s just guys’ stuff, a bit of fun, all guys look at porn, hey, get real – it’s the way the world is now.” The implication being that I was a prude, over-reacting and out of date. “It was just ‘fantasy’”, he said, and therefore not related to the real sex that we shared. My reply: “it’s obvious fakery for the women – you can see that” was met with “no, no, you have that wrong, they are genuinely enjoying it.” He knew. So it wasn’t fantasy then? I was supposed to believe it was just a mild diversion, when for the women it had to be real. Any suggestion though of the reality that women were coerced or treated badly was dismissed. They were fine, they were well paid. Self-delusional and ambiguous arguments ran amok. He seemed to have gone to a different place; to comment about the women in porn and me in a cold and detached way, to say things about women’s bodies, about sexual acts which came out of his mouth with swingeing bluntness. A layer of empathy had been ground away. My man. The one I had promised to love and cherish.
There is social-wide acceptance that an affair for a monogamous relationship is wrong, or at least if not wrong as such, certainly not conducive to the continuation of a trusting relationship. But with pornography there is no such clear line, with many levels of self-justification ready-made in a male dominated culture that the man can summon up to avoid having to look at its real impact on a loving relationship with cold, hard honesty. The male discourse provides justifications, minimisations that enable the man to deaden any lingering doubts.
We attended counselling. To my initial relief the counsellor acknowledged my enormous distress, and likened it to the discovery of an affair. This is a familiar approach, but while it helpfully acknowledges the degree of distress and the similar elements of secrecy, betrayal, hurt, there are some important differences. While I certainly wouldn’t have wished my partner to have had an affair, it would have been one-person related sex (who would naturally have found him adorable), intimate, secret, warm-bodied in a form I recognised. What caused me immense distress was the considerable shift in sexuality brought about by the porn viewing, the nature of the sexuality that the porn represented and the thought that he had looked at probably hundreds of women engaged in the most intimate of acts – using them to harness his own desire, allowing it to romp through scenarios created out of the imaginations of the porn makers. The most intimate parts of myself that I share with him, and only him, now seemed worthless. Porn-centred sex is a selfish activity that denies and thus destroys connections with anything outside itself. The porn-viewing partner needs help in re-connecting and with being less obsessed by their own wants and desires. The partner of a porn-viewer needs help with the profound sense of being cast aside, not good enough, mixed with conflicting emotions of being degraded and defiled.
The counsellor, however, changed tack to frame our relationship as co-dependent. My partner was supposedly dominating, an addictive personality, and I was the weak, co-dependent partner. Her efforts focussed on endeavouring to convince me that the relationship was in negative territory. In a fragile, emotional state when the pieces of my relationship were broken and I needed help in carefully reassembling them, I took more than I should of what she said seriously.
We changed counsellors. The next took a different line. Men, I was to understand, were visual, wired differently. Implicitly they ‘could not help it’ poor things – a message of the biological imperative. I was to show compassion and understanding. Did he know before that ‘no porn’ was one of the relationship rules. No? Well, then, how could he know I would impose this restriction on him? Restriction? Restriction! Despite the fact that little compassion and understanding seemed to come my way, I tried. What I have discovered by hard experience is that run-of-the-mill relationship guidance has inadequate resources for dealing with the emotional fallout and relationship damage caused by today’s Internet porn. I asked one of my counsellors if she had seen contemporary Internet pornography – she confessed she had not – they are working with out-of-date ideas. The result is that it’s very difficult to get the kind of support and help that you need to recover – particularly if the relationship is long-term and loving and you are trying to repair after the crisis.