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5 Myths About Porn That Hurt Anyone Who Believes Them

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5 Myths About Porn That Hurt Anyone Who Believes Them Photographee.eu/fotolia

It seems that everyone is talking about porn: politicians, anti-porn activists, the media, and both consumers and their partners. Is porn harmless fun or dangerous for society? Does it drag consumers away from their partners? Does it lead to sexual problems? Is it a slippery slope that ends in watching child porn?

After three decades as a sex therapist and marriage counselor, and two decades researching the content and effects of pornography, here are my comments about the most common myths about porn. Unfortunately, these myths prevent honest communication while helping couples avoid talking about sex—reinforcing the very problems some people attribute to porn.

1. Myth: People watch porn instead of having sex with their mates.

Almost everyone watching porn does so to enhance masturbation. There’s nothing wrong with masturbating - indeed, it’s almost everyone’s primary form of sexual expression.

In my experience, nobody leaves a robust sexual relationship with a partner for the pleasures of masturbating to pornography. When people end up with porn and little partner sex, it’s because there are problems with the partner sex or the relationship.

The partner sex may be boring, frustrating, or demeaning. The relationship may be filled with chronic conflict. Couples may be stalemated about the logistics of sex: time of day, lights on or off, room warmer or cooler, whether to whisper or moan, whether and what kind of birth control to use. (Such stalemates are generally about more than the details of the sex.)

When one partner feels sexually abandoned by the other, it can be very painful. Blaming porn for “stealing” your partner rarely gets at the truth of the situation - meaning that the painful situation won’t get it fixed.

2. Myth: Most porn is violent, woman-hating stuff.

Porn is an anthology of human sexual fantasy. Therefore, it’s filled with images variously emphasizing beauty, power, conflict, submission, intimacy, lust, violence, and the impossible. These images may surprise, shock, dismay, confuse, frighten, anger, or sadden anyone who doesn’t find them exciting.

Most consumers do not desire violent porn, and so the amount of violent porn is small. Some consumers like portrayals of dominance and submission, so there’s plenty of porn with such scenes. Much of that porn shows people pretending to dominate and submit, which is a very common game to play during real sex.

Critics who say that porn is overwhelmingly brutal are focused on a slice of porn and then generalizing to all of it. Critics who say that porn is focused exclusively on male pleasure are simply not paying attention to the vast majority of porn, which shows smiling people doing things most people find pleasurable.

3. Myth: Porn encourages men to commit violent acts.

The data on this is in, and it’s pretty reassuring.

For starters, the rates of sexual violence against both adults and children has decreased since Broadband Internet brought free porn into every American home. And this has been true in most countries where the availability of porn has increased dramatically, such as Denmark, Hong Kong and Croatia.

The one area of concern, according to experienced, world-class researchers such as David Finkelhor of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, is aggressive or psychotic individuals who watch a great deal of extremely violent porn more or less exclusively. Such unusual individuals watching such unusual porn in such unusual amounts are a perfect storm.

While Finkelhor notes society should be rightly concerned about this, he also notes that this configuration (individuals, type of porn, amount consumed) occurs very infrequently.

One wonders why some people dramatically exaggerate the danger that porn use poses to us all.

4. Myth: Women have to compete with the actresses in porn.

No.

Porn actresses are professionals. Their performances are prepared ahead of time, scripted, and done with other actors who are unusually enthusiastic, totally available, and amazingly strong. Actresses are not limited by needing to be in the mood (no one is always in the mood to work), needing a complex relationship to be conflict-free (is anyone’s real-life relationship always perfectly smooth?), or the accumulation of disappointments that clutter up every couple.

So they have a lot of advantages over civilians. Why would you want to compete with them on such an uneven playing field?

Most of us have learned that competing with professional performers is a mistake. We don’t expect to emulate LeBron James, Meryl Streep, or Adele. We enjoy watching what they do, and it’s fun to imagine doing it, but no sane person tries to do what they do as well as they do it. Put Rosie Cheex and Candye Kisses in the same category - and do not try to do what they do for a living.

If there’s a way in which a reasonable adult man wishes his partner were more like a porn performer, it’s not in the way she looks - it’s in the level of enthusiasm. Unlike the perfect body of a 24-year-old, that’s actually something anyone can intensify if they want to. Typically that requires communication about what could make sex more enjoyable, which is a great thing to do under almost any condition.

5. Myth: Watching porn is a form of infidelity.

Infidelity is a contract violation: you promised you would do this, you broke your promise, that’s infidelity. For example, you promised you wouldn’t have sex with anyone else, you had sex with someone else, you’ve broken your promise, and that’s infidelity.

Of course “wouldn’t have sex” is pretty vague. Does that include slow dancing with someone else? Facebooking your ex? Flirting at the airport? A massage with a “happy ending”? No one specifies these, or the dozens of other erotic situations in which adults find themselves in a normal year. The only time we find out what our partner considers over the line is when we’re already over the line, and our partner is angry.

And so some people want to claim that their partner’s porn use is infidelity. As one patient recently told her husband, “You’re experiencing your sexuality without me. That’s infidelity.” When I asked if the problem were the porn or the accompanying masturbation, she said “Both.” And when I asked if she’d be angry if he were masturbating without porn and not imagining anyone, or were fantasizing about, say, Cleopatra, Martha Washington, or Snow White, she said “I just don’t want him getting excited and climaxing without me.”

We can’t control our partner’s sexuality, and certainly can’t control their sexual fantasies. Trying to do so creates enormous problems in relationships. If someone has a specific complaint - during sex he calls me the wrong name, won’t look at me, tries to end it as quickly as possible, never remembers my erotic preferences - those should be aired, investigated, and if possible resolved.

But trying to ban a partner’s porn use merely on principle is asking him to resent you, to lie, or both. We fear infidelity because we fear it means our partner will have less attention and less affection for us. This is something two people can discuss cooperatively. Trying to eliminate a partner’s solo pleasure without discussing your own fear, or any complaints you might have, will just lead to conflict and distance - exactly what you’re trying to prevent.

Dr. Marty Klein is on EmpowHER’s Medical Advisory Board. For more helpful information about dealing with pornography, see his new book: His Porn, Her Pain: Confronting America’s PornPanic With Honest Talk About Sex.

Add a Comment1 Comments

Dr. Klein,

I respectfully disagree with your opinions about porn. Please allow me to balance your perspective as one man with my perspective as one woman and that of the women who I know well. I find it offensive for a man to say that Empower's audience of women shouldn't feel threatened by porn. I think you've used your title as medical or PhD doctor to justify the money that is made by porn, the women who are ill-used in the making of porn, and the over-valuing of male fantasies that under-values female fantasies. Masturbation is one thing. Watching porn to masturbate is a different thing entirely.

It seems unprofessional that you haven’t cited references to back up your statements. One-third of rapists and one-half of child sexual abusers report using porn as prep before the committing the abuse. 38% of prostitutes reported having had sexually explicit photographs taken of them as children for commercial purposes and/or the personal gratification of the photographer, leading to a normalization in their attitudes of the sex trade as a legitimate business. There is a significant link between organized child sexual abuse and subsequent participation in porn and prostitution whether as the pimps or as the prostitutes. (Itzin, C. (1997). Pornography and the organization of intrafamilial and extrafamilial child sexual abuse: developing a conceptual model. Child Abuse Review, 6, 94-106.) I wouldn’t want to be in a relationship, sexual or otherwise, with someone who normalizes the kind of attitudes and business practices that lead to pornography, sexual abuse, or prostitution. Itzin (1997) describes the women participants as victims of a history of male-female power abuses who need rescuing and help to make a fresh start. I wonder how many porn actors are human trafficked.

In contrast, a healthy sexual relationship is reciprocal and balanced, valuing the contributions of both male and female hormonal/brain structure tendencies, leading to a beautiful, evolving, surprising, exciting sexual relationship. The woman's needs, preferences, and fantasies are just as relevant to both people as the man's. Men who don’t yet understand their women’s preferences in speed, aesthetics, and conversation will NOT understand their women better by watching porn. Anything (i.e., sex as business venture) that values one person's experience and needs over the other is unhealthy.

A person who watches porn chooses to spend that time being influenced by the porn producers’ values and world view instead of by the person’s partner. Watching porn validates men’s fantasies of what women should try to be like. Porn over-values male needs and power and devalues female needs and power in the general relationship (including the sexual part of the relationship) of the man who watches porn. Porn is on the same power continuum that includes abuse. Porn validates the man's wishes at the expense of open communication from the woman about what she wants.

Having a significant other who watches porn would be a libido-killer for the women I know, so porn is counter-productive for a healthy sexual relationship. Porn is not going to be sexually exciting for anyone who acknowledges the abuses toward women that must have taken place for a woman to want to cheapen sex by participating in the making of porn. The emphasis on the male-domination and on male fantasies alone is enough to make a man less open to a woman's fantasies and sexual needs, and so to make a woman less willing or able to share her needs and fantasies.

A good sexual relationship is relational and emotionally intimate. The women who I know well fantasize about their men cherishing them relationally, emotionally intimately, and affectionately physically over time in ways that naturally flow to physical intimacy. The depth of relational intimacy that leads to female-fantasy-sexual intimacy has nothing to do with videos of strangers being physically intimate. Porn feels like the opposite of a non-abused woman's fantasy imho.

Porn, not porn myths, keeps couples from talking about sex. Porn sets the bar too high, higher than is normal for women, increasing a man's expectations, and decreasing a woman's ability to meet his expectations. The smiles and experiences of porn actors are not any more real than of tv actors; they get paid. (Or maybe not in the case of trafficked porn actors.)

Women need to sort out together how to respond to porn in a way that women don't continue get hurt. It is offensive that you have watched enough porn to know the content, and that you are using your status as "Dr." to influence women into settling for porn. I respectfully submit that a man who watches porn does not have authority to talk to women about how they should feel about porn. Your article feels inappropriate to me; I'm surprised it was allowed to post. I will be unsubscribing.

September 30, 2016 - 6:35am
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We value and respect our HERWriters' experiences, but everyone is different. Many of our writers are speaking from personal experience, and what's worked for them may not work for you. Their articles are not a substitute for medical advice, although we hope you can gain knowledge from their insight.

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