A
female
age
30-35,
anonymous
writes:Okay, so in the recent past I've had some troubles with my bf of nearly 2 1/2 yrs looking at porn and having explicit pictures of girls on his phone. For ages I knew and didn't say anything. Until one day I asked does he watch porn and he said no. I followed my gut and checked his history and I was right. I let it go on for a bit, until I realised it was happening daily. I decided to tell him I knew the truth and he's got to stop. He was pisses about me snooping but I knew in my heart he was lying. He apologised and said he swears he will never do it again. And that he will delete all these pics off his phone. A few weeks later when checked his history is was clear he deleted it everyday. Once again I tell him I know and he said his phone automatically deletes history as it's jailbroken. I didn't believe him at all. I researched it and it's a load of shit. One night I sat him down and said look I'm not gonna have it, it's make me feel horrible. He confessed that he lied to my face about it, and he was deleting his history. I couldn't believe he would do that. But And after that every time I check his history it's all there no porn. I finally felt i got through to him. Then, today which happens to be my 21st birthday we are on the train and he was showing me something in his photos and he scrolls past recent explicit pics again! I was like don't talk to me, and ignored him till he got off the train. What more can I do!? I feel so betrayed and like my feelings mean nothing! He has wrecked my birthday with his lies and made me feel worthless. Does anyone have any advice on how to handle this?
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reader, anonymous, writes (15 November 2011): Well there's a lot I can agree with on both sides and the fact that porn while in a relationship decreases your satisfaction with your partner's appearance, sexual curiosity, and the frequency of sex, well then yes, leave the man if he doesn't see you for your beautiful self. Find someone who is compatible, just as the dude a few comments above said, " Men that don't look at porn need to be with women that it bothers. " and I strongly agree. I feel the same way as most women do. Sadly, I haven't stepped up to how I feel about it to him. I'm a very insecure person so obviously him looking at porn does bother me. I've been trying it out lately though. There's some pretty good porn sites out there for women and they are filled with lots of hunky men lol. But it just isn't my thing. Everyone and every couple are different. You just have to find that someone who feels the way you do. I'm probably being a hypocrite since I've been watching more porn than usual and him watching his still bothers me. Ehh giving advice is a lot easier than taking. But do what you gotta do girl. Maybe you looking at hot guys with huge nicks will make him feel the way you do, there's always the walk in my shoes thing. Who knows, maybe you'll even grow a liking to watching porn on your own ;) good luck hun.
A
female
reader, person12345  +, writes (21 October 2011):
 Also the idea that men are hardwired to spread their seed has been debunked by sheer mathematics. Any random sexual encounter has only a 1% chance of producing a viable offspring (including the chance of fertilization at a random time in her cycle, the chance of miscarriage, etc...). Add to that the incredibly low population density while humans were first showing up and it makes no sense that males would go running from female to female because they probably wouldn't even find one and many males would be killed traveling those long distances. Also when we look at the behavior of other apes, if a female has an in infant and another male wants to mate with her, it's common practice to murder the infant to make room for his own. From an evolutionary perspective mate guarding makes infinitely more sense because if this running from one female to the next occurred, our species would have died out a long time ago.
But evolutionary psychology STILL doesn't matter because like I said, every biological urge on the planet is routinely overcome with willpower. Sometimes people get angry and want to punch other people in the face. The existence of that urge does not justify acting on it. I'm very tired of the male libido being used as an excuse to hurt women.
Also women are not inherently better at responding to babies than men are. Girls are given dolls to play with as little girls and taught to treat them like they can feel pain. Boys on the other hand are given toys of inanimate objects and taught to treat them as such. In studies where they measure distress levels at a crying baby, men and women were equally distressed.
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reader, person12345 +, writes (21 October 2011):
As someone who has dedicated roughly a year of my life to researching the topic/volunteering on this, interviewing people, reading through every study I could, talking to every expert in the field that I could, writing numerous articles for publication, I think I "understand" porn use better than roughly 99% of the population. I find it highly condescending for you to claim that because I disagree with you that I must not understand it. It's not as though I have never used porn myself, I used to watch quite a lot of it.
Also it's extremely privileged for you to make the claim that porn is fantasy. Do you also believe that your clothes were created in a dream rather than by sweatshop workers? At the worst end of the spectrum, many women and children are trafficked to make porn. There is no possible way of knowing if the porn you are watching involves trafficked women. Even most of the "amateur" stuff is actually made by companies to cater to a certain market. Even among women who "choose" porn, the working conditions are often considered horrendous and women are sometimes forced into acts they didn't do either by threat of a lawsuit or by other means of coercion/manipulation. Not to mention condoms are used in fewer than 10% of all porn scenes. The physical and mental toll is so difficult to deal with that the average length of time a woman is in porn is only 3 months. It is only from an extreme place of privilege that anyone can claim that porn is fantasy when there is so much suffering involved in some of its creation.
Vibrators and porn are not comparable. Female sex toys and male sex toys are comparable. Porn and porn are comparable. Also we are discussing porn here, not vibrators. You can't bring up an argument I never made in order to try to paint me as a hypocrite. I have never told a woman to lie to her partner about her vibrator, to hide it, or to continue using it despite knowing it hurt her partner.
I got my 70% number from the Kinsey Institute. A number that is backed up by numerous other studies and polls that all came to roughly the same number, with the largest poll including more than 12,000 data points. You're welcome to speculate on what the actual statistic is, but it's your speculation against thousands of data points.
Porn has nothing to do with keeping a high sex drive in check. Masturbation does. They are not synonyms. Porn is product manufactured by a large corporation to exploit basic human desires to create a profit. It is about profits, nothing else. People been masturbating without porn ever since they had genitalia. It's only in the past decade or so that porn has become so common. Even as recently as the 60s and 70s only around half of men had even seen it, let alone consumed it regularly. I know this seems impossible, but it's perfectly easy to masturbate without porn. Or to ask your partner for pictures to use.
Also while many feel porn is great for keeping a high sex drive down, it almost always has the opposite effect (which you couldn't know unless you stopped for an extended period, since most men started using it before they even had a chance to get their own sexuality). It creates sexual preoccupancy where you feel that you need to masturbate far more than normal hormones would cause. It also causes you to think about sex more. As far as satisfactions go, porn creates a very hollow level of satisfaction compared to not using porn, causing you to want more of it and therefore think you need to masturbate more (brilliant business plan on their part). The urge to masturbate frequently when you are using porn habitually is much stronger than any urge from hormones could ever be.
Also the idea that men are more visual than women is completely false. Men and women when shown porn are equally aroused. Also the idea that porn doesn't affect how you feel about your partner has been as close to proven as it's possible to get in science to be false. As I stated before, the most repeated study on porn use ever done showed that without question using porn decreased your satisfaction with your partner, with your partner's appearance, and with your partner's sexual curiosity. It wouldn't be possible to know this if you started out using porn.
Also as I've stated before the majority of that amateur stuff you say you watch is actually produced by corporations. That woman could have been trafficked. True amateur stuff is sometimes worse than mainstream in that often times the woman didn't know she was being filmed.
None of the biological stuff holds water about being hardwired to need porn. No one evolved to need a product produced by a large corporation. Even if somehow we evolved to need something that wouldn't exist for thousands of years, we have something called willpower where every other biological urge in existence is routinely overcome just through willpower. It's even possible to change your heartbeat. If people can frequently overcome the need to eat and to drink, I don't buy that masturbating without porn is any kind of hardship. It's the same as learning to eat without McDonalds.
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male
reader, anonymous, writes (21 October 2011): Happy Place,
Calm down, friend. Men ARE visual by nature. The blind are very small portion of the whole compared to those who are not. They are the EXCEPTION.
And Porn is far more eclectic then you seem to realise. Some men LOVE the airbrushed, fake boob, brazilian look on a woman. I and a great many others do not.
Amateur porn is massive, in fact it is probably the most popular because it is easy to access and far more real then professional pornography.
Most guys lie about porn use because we know that no matter what we say or do, it will be condemned by the women we love. You are fighting a losing battle in your prudish attitude.
Men, most of us at any rate, have been watching porn from the second we felt the first pangs of testosterone begin to thunder through our bodies at the onset of puberty. It is so ingrained in most of us, it would be like asking a woman not to care for a child if she is like the majority of the female sex... who it almost genetically programmed into.
Men are biologically wired to desire sex far more than could ever be reasonable for our partners to live up to... and because it isn't socially acceptable to impregnate any fertile woman in sight (and it hasn't been since we were cavemen and we boned our way to the top of the food chain) then we have to find other more logical ways of keeping this desire in check, and masturbation is pretty much all we guys can do without coming across as creepy. And we find it quicker and easier to get off this way with visual stimulation. That's all.
We aren't monsters. We aren't criminals. It doesn't mean we want it from you any less. It just means we don't feel comfortable asking you to live up to how much we want to do it.
-Anon
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female
reader, HappyPlace  +, writes (21 October 2011):
 So men are visual are they - what if they are blind??? What about your other senses?? Taste, smell, touch etc. You are limiting yourself if you say you are "visual" only!! Women shouldn't have to put up with this sh**! If you don't like your man watching porn, then ask him to stop. He's proved himself to be a liar and that is a complete no-no in a relationship. If he lies about that, then what else does he lie about? Tell him if he doesn't he is history!! If he continues, then fire him out the door as the loser he clearly is! At the end of the day, if he doesn't want to give it up, then he can leave. Deal done! What a sad state of affairs that men choose airbrushed images over their significant others! Again, just trying to reverse the situation. If I saw a man with pec implants, hair implants and a bald never region, I would think he was the biggest a-hole ever! Someone to be pitied really. But these unenlightened men see false titties, and an oh so willing to do anything attitude on screen, and they thinks it's real life! They want a slice of it. Clearly these men have never been in love because they are inherently selfish, and love is NOT selfish!
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A
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reader, anonymous, writes (21 October 2011): Person12345...Porn is only as damaging as you let it become. Accept it, understand it, and control it and enjoy it and it will do no harm.Secondly any decent man will consider porn to be something used discreetly. We are all entitled to our fantasies, and by and large they will probably not involve our spouses.I say this... you have a right to ask men to give up porn only if YOU give up vibrators, dildo and other sex aides. If we men cannot say shit about that, then leave us with our equivalent.If someone is using porn and is using that to replace actual sex with their actual partner... then you will have right for concern.But if he's only looking about it to keep a high sex drive in check that he doesn't feel is right to expect you to live up to... then you are making a mountain out of a molehill.And for the record, whatever statistics you choose to bring up... the ACTUAL number is more like 95 percent. The 25 you discount are just in denial. The other 5 just have no access to it.Look, I'm a guy. I know how we think. I have lived with testosterone pumping through my body my entire life. Thats 28 years so far. You have not.-Anon
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female
reader, So_Very_Confused +, writes (20 October 2011):
 you are asking him to change something rather fundamental to him. Men are visual. Most men I know look at porn, even very religious men are known to do it...
I would not ask my man to not look at porn. There are women that it does not bother. There are men that don't look at porn.
Men that don't look at porn need to be with women that it bothers.
Best to end it now. He's not going to stop. You will continue to demand he stops. HE will lie to you that he's not doing it... you will continue to catch him and he will continue to lie and you will continue to fight about it.
UNLESS you can accept that his looking at porn is NOT a reflection on YOU, let him go. Let him find someone to accept him as he is and not be trying to change him to be what she needs and wants.
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A
female
reader, person12345 +, writes (20 October 2011):
First myths below:All men use porn.70% of men use porn regularly. Not all. Anyone saying all men use porn is trying to normalize their own use and remove personal responsibility. As in, since all men use porn, no man could possibly be expected to control their own usage.All men lie about it when "forced" to.70% of men admit lying about their porn use, regardless of whether they think their girlfriend will be upset. Since when did being hurt by something give someone the right to lie about it? For instance I don't think cheaters try to justify their lying and sneaking by saying that they were forced to do it because their girlfriend would go ballistic if she knew.Porn doesn't change how he feels about you.Biggest myth that porn users spread around the internet is that it's harmless in relationships. In the most repeated study on porn use ever done it was found without question that viewing porn while in a relationship decreases your satisfaction with your partner's appearance, sexual curiosity, and the frequency of sex. Every user I've spoken to who gave up porn for their partner experienced the positive benefits of more and better sex.Porn is harmless/no big deal.Porn has been a main cause in over half of all divorces nowadays. That means 25% of marriages have been destroyed due to porn use. I hardly call that no big deal or harmless. It's also estimated that 15% of users are addicted, and rising.I always recommend couples struggling with this read the book The Porn Trap (together). It really helps shed light on both sides of the issue. It helps him understand just how much it hurts you and it helps you understand that his habit does not stem from anything you've done.
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male
reader, serenity80 +, writes (20 October 2011):
What do you mean you "got through to him" have you ever thought that you are trying to get him to do something that he doesn't want to do? Have you ever thought that you are wrong to snoop in this way, and that actually you can understand why he is lying to you?
Has he wreaked your birthday, and made you feel worthless, or have you done this all by yourself?
Does him looking at porn make you any less attractive in his eyes? No. Does it mean he cares any less about you, no. So why are you hounding him to stop something that he obviously feels isn't a problem?
Are you really going to hold out to find a guy that doesn't like porn? You'll be waiting a long time. Maybe you need to think about the real cause of this. It isn't that he's looking at porn, it's because you are insecure about the way you look and act in bed. This is what YOU need to work on, if you do, you won't care about him looking at porn any more.
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male
reader, olderthandirt  +, writes (20 October 2011):
 He's typical of all of us guys. We MUST lie or else we face ridiculous charges of being unfaithfull,etc. IF, our own sex lives were one tenth as good as those depicted in porn, we'd have no need for it but sadly, the real world is a wasteland of "let's share our feelings","i've got a pain somewhere." Or whatever else can be dreamed up to ruin a fantasy.
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reader, anonymous, writes (20 October 2011): a lot of people make a big deal out of this but in reality what is the problem? Yes he looks at porn its a "fantasy" but that does not stop him being with you you are reality. Your the woman he "loves" are you insecure in some way?
I know men and women who look at porn and have no problem with it in there relationships.
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