I needed to mourn the loss of my relationship as I knew it and thought of it, and of my sexual self. I needed help in knowing how I – we – could rebuild a relationship with someone who could view and talk of women in those terms and still hold respect for him and for myself. To some extent I’ve managed to live with that dilemma, not as I would have liked it by his reflective and remorseful analysis of what has happened, but by trying to understand the process myself whereby affectionate, intelligent, kind and thoughtful men can become hooked, for want of a better word, in this strange, isolated, distorted world.
In the end I found a confidential online counselling service dedicated to women whose partners are involved with habitual Internet porn the most helpful. My long screeds of email message would be carefully responded to with insightful understanding and practical suggestions. Whoever you are out there who wrote replies to my emails, often frenetically tapped in the small dark hours, I thank you.
I have no time whatsoever for those who see pornography as liberating or empowering to women’s sexuality as this is absolutely not my experience at all. The distress caused sleepless nights, lots of crying, a constant feeling of being on edge, an anger that was all consuming.
A while on now, is it better? Carefully reassembling a relationship, mourning and accepting what has been lost, trying to make some parts anew, takes much time and patience. I still have enormous anger. Anger at him for, as I see it, being so easily drawn in to it. Some of my anger has, as I come to understand the psychology of porn viewing more, moved on to the industry. Yes he was responsible for his actions, but the industry is so slick at inveigling its way in. It toys with the masculine mind as our culture has made it. It quickly becomes a habit, desensitising, a siren pulling men in to dare to look at increasingly edgy images. Secret, exciting, elicit, nefarious. All the elements necessary to relationships – care, respect, responsibility, empathy, are not only deliberately negated in porn, but alternative reassurances and flatteries are subliminally implanted in their place.
Yes, my partner promised not to view again, and has kept to that. But only after a long period can I relax and trust him again. In the early days of abstinence, although he declared he did not need porn, and invited me to search his Internet history any time, the hidden cache files still told the truth of glimpses at porn here and there. So shifting the habit was not as easy as he had declared. The topic is sensitive and raw still. If it resurfaces in our conversation, he often has another newly minted justification to offer that is supposed to convince me of the innocuousness of the porn and his viewing of it – never the real acknowledgement of responsibility or the harm to our relationship. I wait for the day he’ll say he thinks he understands and that he’s sorry.
PART ONE
Pornography Cultures
“Each time I found porn photos on his PC or his iPod I would begin to feel less and less attractive and more worried that I was never going to be good enough for him.”
“There is no glory in trying to make love to men who only know how to f**k – man after man after man after man raised on porn… A lot of guys have come to expect P.S.E. [the ‘Porn Star Experience’] as a common thing… A few [women] might enjoy it, but for most it’s harrowing. I think there’s a fear that if they can’t make it happen, their boyfriend will retreat online.”
“The fact that I trusted him with my physical and emotional self has left me shattered especially when he did not deny my body DISGUSTED him because I did not look like the internet [surgically enhanced and airbrushed] females he spent every night with…”
“I was completely shattered. I felt disgusted and also ashamed, like it must in some way be my fault. Clearly I, his wife, was not satisfying him sexually. Worse than this, was the betrayal. He had lied to me for years. How could I trust him again? I started to think about times when he was in his study and I was somewhere else in the house. Had he been looking at pictures of naked women when I was there? Did he wish I looked like them, would do what they did? I felt sick.”
Gail Dines
(USA)
The New Lolita: Pornography and the Sexualization of Childhood
In 2008, Miley Cyrus was photographed for Vanity Fair wearing a bed hairdo, a provocative gaze, and not much else. She was 15 years old. Even though these photos caused a stir at the time, just a year later – when she appeared in Elle sprawled across a table wearing S&M gear – barely a voice of protest was heard. These images, together with the thousands of others that bombard us daily, are part of what media scholars call ‘image-based culture’[23] a term used to describe a society in which images have replaced the spoken or written word as the major form of communication. From billboards to 24-hour television, the staple of this image-based culture is the youthful, sexualized female body. Advertisements, movies, TV shows, music videos, and pornography are just some of the ways in which this image is delivered to us, and as we become more desensitized to such depictions, the producers need to ramp up the degree to which the female body is sexualized as a way to get our attention. This has led to an increasingly pornographic media landscape, where the codes and conventions that inform pornography filter down to such a level that the images we now see in mainstream media are almost on a par with those that were found in softcore porn just a decade ago.
As pop culture begins to look more and more pornographic, the actual porn industry has had to trend more hardcore as a way of distinguishing its products from those images found on MTV, in Cosmopolitan, and on billboards. Often called ‘gonzo’ by the industry, this subgenre is made up of acts that are designed to dehumanize and debase the woman with cruel and brutal sex that includes gagging with a penis and multiple men ejaculating onto her face and body. The problem for the pornographers is that consumers are becoming increasingly desensitized to such hardcore porn and are always on the lookout for something new and fresh. Porn director, Jules Jordan, who is known for a particularly violent brand of porn, said that even he is “always trying to figure out ways to do something different” since the fans “are becoming a lot more demanding about wanting to see the more extreme stuff” (in Jensen, 2007, p. 70). So one of the big challenges pornographers constantly have to grapple with is how to keep their customers interested.