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• Tuesday, February 28, 2006 07:27 AM

  Just how widely does this reasoning apply?

  Rebecca Traister writes:

  Look, I know a lot of men and women who enjoy porn, who feel like it enhances their relationships, who love watching it together and are more than OK with the idea of watching it separately. And I'm sure that there are lots of couples who start out uneasy about it and eventually find a healthy, fun place for it in their lives. But if you're in a relationship in which it's enough of a problem that one person is offended, threatened or made unhappy by her partner's viewing, and the person would rather come up with stupid tricks ("Don't let her know about the balloon fetish!" "Tell her it's only your fantasy to sleep with a mute submissive!" "Try to get it up for her so she feels better enough about herself that she'll let you keep watching!") than just have an honest conversation about how you both feel and what compromises you can make, maybe you should stick to the porn and get out of the relationship.

  (I've underlined two uses of the word person which at first seem to refer to the same person -- but then again don't. But that's a horse of another feather.)

  The underlying reasoning of the quoted (last) paragraph of this Broadsheet item seems to be that if one member of a couple feels offended, threatened, or "made" unhappy by the actions of the other, then anyone other than Traister's suggestions abou resolving things are automatically nonsense. ( In no way does anything suggest that the writer of the men's magazine article discouraged the reader from talking with his partner about feelings. On the contrary, it's clear that she was assuming this had happened and would happen some more.)

  Of course the Traister is right when she suggests having an honest conversation about feelings. She may or may not be right about investigating what "compromises" can be made; sometimes a person's objection to their partner's behavior can be ill-founded, naive, and controlling.

  (Suppose for example that a guy is uncomfortable with his woman friend's occasionally getting together with a male platonic friend of hers. Does this mean she must "compromise" ? I'd say, not necessarily. It may be better to (gently) enlighten the guy that opposite-sex platonic friends are OK, nothing to feel threatened by, and objecting to them is, well, Neanderthal.

  If there is valid reason to think that a person's behavior is a symptom or cause of an existing problem in the relationship, that's one thing. But if there's no reason for anyone to think it is either of these, if it's just something their partner objects to because it "makes" them unhappy, maybe something other than "compromise" is the best solution.

  In my own experience, one usually wonderful woman friend felt she needed to wake up at five a.m. and to immediately throw open the bedroom curtains (no other room would do). All this was fine with me, until I soon learned that she simply would not accept my using a sleep mask or earplugs to enable me to sleep a couple of hours later. I honestly thought (and think) the idea of my needing to "compromise" on efforts to be able to sleep until 7 was utterly ludicrous.

  —xylu Read xylu's other letters
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