Letters to the Editor

Pornographic persuasion How to make your girlfriend OK with your porn habit. Rebecca Traister [2006-02-27]

• pass the popcorn

  Not wanting to watch others have sex doesn't mean there is something wrong with you - some feel that sex is a private activity, and aren't interested in porn any more than they would be interested in spying through someone's bedroom window.

  Have we now decided that not wanting to watch others (or strangers) copulate is abnormal, and a matter calling for therapy, or at least derision and a dismissive label of 'old-fashioned and repressed'? Next will we decide that everyone should be happy and willing to watch strangers use the toilet, or else they are maladjusted and prudish?

  I don't have anything against porn, or against prostitution, for that matter. However, I don't think that anyone has a 'right' to expect a partner to be okay with porn use. Those who view sex as a private matter, whether it's their own or someone else's, have just as valid an outlook as those who like to watch others have sex as entertainment or stimulation.

  If your partner doesn't feel comfortable with your using porn, don't lie or hide it from them - look for a compromise. If that doesn't work, decide which is worth more to you. If it's the porn, find someone who feels like you do. But in either case, at least be honest about it. Sneaking around and hiding something that you know would make your partner unhappy or angry is disrespectful and cowardly.

  I know someone who's husband became addicted to porn. He started out watching a few times a week, and she sometimes watched with him. Within a year, not only was he spending 300 dollars a month on cable porn, (in secret, late at night) but he became increasingly unable to enjoy 'regular' sex, wanting them to watch porn to get ready for sex, then to have the porn on during sex (a virtual orgy, apparently) and so on, until it became obvious that porn had taken over his life, and his expectations for their sex life became absurdly unrealistic.

  Naturally, this is an extreme case. However, it is true that with overuse of porn, the pleasure centers of the brain tend to develop a 'tolerance' for that stimulation level, just like drug stimulation, thus the brain needs increasing levels of stimulation to reach the same 'high' or pleasure level - doubtless the mechanics behind his addiction. He needed not only more porn, but more 'intense' porn as time went on.

  Weird.

  Have your boyfriend watch D/S porn where the male is submissive, and see how much he likes porn when it's the man being used and subjugated and posed with a dildo up his butt...a rough equivalent of what is done to women in 'regular' porn films. Insist on this type of film becoming part of your relationship because it turns you on, and there is nothing wrong with it.

  Let us know how it turns out.

  -- watsonian
  Permalink Flag Tuesday, February 28, 2006 11:32 AM
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