by Pamela Paul
Katie Couric: We’re back with more of our special Today’s Woman series and answers to your e-mail questions…. Let’s go to JW. “My husband likes to look at pornography and it makes me feel inadequate later when we’re in bed. How can I compete with this?”
Dr. Gail Saltz: This is also a very common scenario…. [Y]ou need to talk to your husband and tell him how it makes you feel. Now, it could be that he would curb it somewhat, but hopefully, what he would do is actually say to you, “But this is what I love about your body.”… [I]f he really likes that kind of more in-your-face sort of sexuality and you’re comfortable with it, you too can put on sexy underwear, you know, do a little striptease.
Katie Couric: But, but, I mean, I—I’m not really into pornography, I just, but, but a lot of, I guess a lot of couples are and why not say—
Dr. Gail Saltz: Just do it together.
Katie Couric: I mean, isn’t that what some people do?
Dr. Gail Saltz: [M]en tend to like sort of harder-core stuff than women. Women like sort of softer, romantic, sexy films. So you might say to him, “Let’s get something that we’ll both enjoy,” which is probably going to be a little different than what he’s looked at.
Katie Couric: All right. Let’s move on, shall we?2
Still, discrepancies between what’s urged by pornography advocates and sex therapists and what the average American wants in her sex life persist, as reflected in Couric’s ambivalence. This is also demonstrated by conflicting poll results. In the Kinsey Institute online poll, which recorded the opinions of a self-selecting group of respondents, 55 percent of Americans professed to believe that pornography can improve relationships. But such polls, despite the attention they generate, likely exaggerate the truth. In contrast, the nationally representative Pornified/Harris poll found that only 22 percent of Americans believe pornography improves the sex life of those who look at it. Indeed, only one-third of respondents to this book’s nationwide poll believe looking at pornography won’t harm a couple’s relationship.
Nevertheless, many consider pornography to be fine in a committed relationship as long as a couple uses it together. People in their thirties—members of the so-called Generation X—are most likely to believe pornography improves one’s sex life, even more so than people in their twenties.3 Nina, thirty-two, and Sam, thirty-five, both lawyers, are happy to talk about how pornography works for them. Married for a little over a year after a yearlong courtship, the two occasionally watch films together to “spice things up.” Usually, they save their pornography for travel. “It’s always available in hotel rooms,” Nina says. “That makes it something special—part of being away as opposed to just having sex at home. Or we’ll watch if we’ve been working a lot or haven’t had as much sex as we’d like. It’s almost an aphrodisiac; it gets you going a little faster.” Sam agrees: “It’s a jump start. In fact, we usually only watch for about five or ten minutes. It’s like drinking a martini instead of three glasses of wine.”
Sam thinks pornography is just a part of life. “As a guy, you’re used to this kind of stuff,” he says. Poll data back Sam up. Nearly three in ten men think pornography improves their sex lives, compared with only 17 percent of women. “Guys always look at nudie magazines or whatever it might be. You’re likely to hang out at a guy’s house and have a beer and pass porn around, or surf the Internet for porn. We like to show each other the good Web sites, that kind of thing.”
“You do?” Nina interjects, with a startled laugh. She apparently didn’t know that Sam looks at Internet pornography on his own, but quickly adds, “I’m not threatened by it or anything. There’s something that’s so removed from reality about pornography. With women like Jenna Jameson, everything is so perfect, it’s beyond the everyday.” Nor is the comparison necessarily negative. “On the other extreme, there’s porn out there where I feel like I look better than those women,” she says. “If I had a lower self-image or if I were much heavier than I am, I might be more sensitive.”
Nina believes pornography has improved their sex life. “If we watched it all the time, we’d probably end up stopping,” she says. “I don’t think we’d get the same benefit if it were just an everyday thing. And I’m sure if I told Sam it bothered me, he would stop.” She doesn’t completely disagree with those who oppose pornography, which includes many of her friends. “There are a lot of things in our society that could be improved, particularly in the realm of people being objectified. It’s probably not a great industry. That being said, I think it’s possible for consenting adults to use it in a positive way. We’re certainly using it for a good reason. But I would give it up if it meant the industry would be cleaned up.” Sam takes “a more First Amendment stance” on pornography. “I don’t see anything wrong with it all,” he says. Besides, “Nina and I have such a good relationship. Lots of people we know wouldn’t allow pornography in their relationship. My friends and I will go out for a bachelor party to a local nude bar and certain guys won’t be allowed to go in—I mean, they’ll choose not to go in—because it upsets their wives. But Nina and I agree it’s human nature to look at other women.”
Sex therapists and couples counselors are often behind the move toward mutual acceptance of porn. Sometimes they recommend couples view “erotic” films together, suggesting that, particularly for couples with low sexual desire, such images can generate new ideas, increase tolerance for each other’s predilections, and enhance arousal. If a woman is upset or confused by her male partner’s interest in pornography, therapists often suggest that perhaps she’ll better understand her husband’s desires or needs if she explores them as well. Perhaps she’ll learn how to better please him or will share in his extracurricular pleasures. And if she finds she enjoys pornography herself, the two of them will have found a bonding mutual interest. In this view, pornography is not an obstacle to the relationship unless a woman allows it to be, and for a woman to judge pornography as anything but positive is considered a condemnation of her man or, at the very least, his sexual life. Discomfort with pornography also becomes a woman’s discomfort with her own sexuality.
Some therapists, however, insist certain guidelines be followed. Lexington, Massachusetts-based psychologist and sex therapist Aline Zoldbrod says a close emotional foundation must be in place before they introduce pornography into their sex life as a couple’s activity. In the best cases, both people are equally interested. When one person isn’t turned on by a particular kind of pornography the other agrees to turn it off, and it’s always consumed together. Moreover, Zoldbrod recommends erotica over pornography, though, she admits, some “perfectly normal” couples enjoy raunchier fare. “But you get on a real slippery slope,” she cautions. “The majority of porn out there is degrading to women and it’s only gotten worse. The women are plasticized; there’s no longer as much diversity or naturalism as there was two decades ago.” Many people find themselves humoring their significant others through movies specifically selected with their partner’s enjoyment in mind. Women will rent slightly more hardcore films in order to win over their men; men suffer through flowery erotica or softer videos to appease their women. What appeals to him rarely appeals to her and vice versa. Nearly all the men interviewed for this book scoffed at the idea of erotica, which they see alternately as “boring,” “stupid,” “pointless,” or a figment of women’s imagination. Moreover, given the plethora of edgier choices online, many men prefer looking at Internet pornography to watching movies, but sidling up beside each other at a computer screen hardly sounds like a sexy evening together to most women. And anyway, most men prefer to keep their computer pornography private. Watching pornography as a couple almost becomes a diversionary tactic: If she thinks they’re using porn together she’s less likely to imagine that he looks at it alone. If she thinks what they watch together is what he likes, she’s less likely to be curious about his real porn preferences.
What starts off as sexy sometimes ends up disruptive or alienating. Thirty-thre
e-year-old Nathalie, recently married, recalls a turbulent four-year relationship during her twenties in which sexual exploration played a major role. Her then-boyfriend, a musician, was interested in openly watching pornography and re-creating sexual adventures. She was curious and wanted to be a part of his life, so the two watched retro porn from the 1970s together, mutually excited by some of the scenes as well as intrigued by the scenarios in vogue during the early days of home video. One Christmas, the boyfriend bought Nathalie a dildo, which they played with together.
But Nathalie was also curious about her boyfriend’s private sex life. When he left her alone in his apartment, she would spy on his computer to see what he looked at when she wasn’t around. Porn sites clogged his browser history. As time went on, her boyfriend’s private practices seemed to overtake their mutual enjoyment. Toward the end of their relationship, he was looking at what she calls “ridiculously bad porn movies with Robin Hood plotlines.” Nathalie felt estranged from the women she saw in these new videos—girls with long nails and cheap hair. “When he started watching these things alone while I was at his place, that spelled the end of our relationship,” she recalls. “At about the same time, he bought me a vibrator. It was as if he were saying, ‘Here’s your toy. You don’t need me anymore.’ I felt like it cheapened everything.”
Women often assume that when they use pornography with their partner, they’re satisfying all his sexual needs. That’s rarely the case. Judith Coché, a therapist in Philadelphia, tells the story of one couple’s spiraling experience. Leigh was an extremely attractive woman—free-spirited, sensual, a provocative dresser. She enjoyed watching erotic movies with her second husband, Max. Leigh thought she and Max had a great sex life—exploratory and a bit risque. But one evening, checking her e-mail on Max’s computer, she found hundreds of porn sites book-marked on his browser. At first she was taken aback. She told him what she had seen, but rather than get upset or angry, she said she would be happy to make his pornography part of their relationship. “Let’s look at it together,” she suggested. So they would sit by the computer side by side, exploring at his favorite sites.
Only Max didn’t seem into it. Then Leigh caught him looking at the same Web sites secretly. When she confronted Max this time, she was upset. After all, hadn’t she been open, hadn’t she been willing? Leigh asked Max to go into therapy with her and he agreed. They saw a sex therapist and things seemed to improve. Except for one thing: Max refused to stop looking at pornography on his own. Leigh couldn’t understand why. Ultimately, pornography created a wedge in their relationship, and the couple parted.
Leigh is not alone. A woman from Colorado writes to the advice columnist of a women’s magazine:
My boyfriend and I live together. Three months ago, I found him on the Internet looking at porn. I was shocked! We discussed it and decided that if either of us was going to view porn, it would be together and it would be a movie. I felt this arrangement was perfect. He gets his porn and his own porn star—me. Last month, I found him viewing Internet porn AGAIN! We talked about it, he said he was sorry, but I was so upset I couldn’t even bring myself to sleep in the same bed with him. He promised all porn would stop…. Then I came home last week, and guess what? He’s viewing porn on the Internet…. I told him it makes me feel that I’m not good enough in bed for him…. I love him, he’s fine in all other areas, but isn’t it time to move on?4
Despite the apparent shift among women toward accepting pornography as part of men’s sexual nature, the vast majority of women do not like when men look at it. In the 2004 Elle-MSNBC.com poll, nearly six in ten women believed their partner was using the Web for sex. Taking part in pornography themselves doesn’t seem to alleviate their concerns. Of women who consumed online porn, 37 percent admitted that as a result they worried they might not be able to sexually satisfy their partner. More than one in five felt they needed to do more to maintain their partner’s interest, 15 percent felt pressured to reenact scenes their partner had viewed on Web sites, and 12 percent blamed the Internet for the fact that they were having less sex.
Porn Apart
No matter how willing a woman is to participate alongside her man or how much she’s willing to compromise, many men do not like using pornography with women, and the vast majority do not want pornography to be an exclusively mutual activity. Some therapists suggest that under the right circumstances a man’s use of pornography on his own can still work. Provided, that is, the woman doesn’t object to pornography, the man uses pornography in moderation, and he is always emotionally and physically available for his wife. Rarely do all these factors line up. “Pornography is like an escape for men,” explains one thirty-one-year-old woman from Ohio. “The man just turns to that instead of his partner as a way of not having to deal with things or go through things with his partner. It prevents people from having intimate, vulnerable relationships.” Before she married, one of her boyfriends was an avid user and it showed. “He was obsessive about sexual things—pornography seemed to infiltrate his whole approach to sex.” If she were ever to discover her own husband using pornography she would feel hurt more than anything. “I would worry we would no longer be close.”
There are reasons men prefer to keep their pornography to themselves; porn is their private realm in which they can do as they please. One of the major attractions of pornography is that it is dissociated from real-life pressures, emotional entanglements, and commitment. For many men, any conscious intertwining or overlap can feel unpleasant and even threatening. To consume pornography in the presence of a flesh-and-blood female, for whom one has feelings and with whom one has developed a relationship, seems disconcerting at best, upsetting at worst. Jonah, a twenty-nine-year-old religion teacher at a Jewish school in Chicago, tries to share some of his pornography with his live-in fiancee of four years, Stephanie, in the hope of improving their sex life. For the past three years, Jonah has had intermittent trouble during intercourse. For a few months, everything will function as it should, but this is followed by months of difficulties in which he is unable to maintain an erection or reach orgasm. Masturbation is an entirely different matter. When Jonah looks at pornography online, he ejaculates with ease. Though Stephanie usually understands, she gets frustrated and feels hurt or annoyed by Jonah’s difficulty with her and his pleasure without her.
Sharing Jonah’s pornography with her might help, they figured, but Jonah doesn’t feel comfortable. “I expect that somehow she’s judging me,” he says. “Even though we’ve talked about it and she says she’s not. Deep down I feel like she thinks I’m this lecherous or bad person.” Watching pornography in a woman’s company strikes Jonah as cheesy or ridiculous in a way that makes him want to laugh rather than get turned on. “I guess I generally feel inhibited sexually, and that’s part of the problem with having sex,” he explains. “I’m afraid of being in the moment because I’m scared of being judged.” With pornography, of course, there’s no performance anxiety; naturally, he looks forward to it on his own, about five days a week. “Porn is a way for me to celebrate my privacy. I have this space and time to find ways to make myself feel good.”
Some women resign themselves to their partners using pornography without them. Boys are raised on it, they figure, and should be expected to indulge. Even if a woman objects, there’s not much that can be done, especially if her partner seems unwilling to share the experience or the woman decides she doesn’t want to participate. Lily, a part-time secretary and student in Boston, expects her husband to look at pornography; he watches adult pay-per-view a couple of times a week by himself. “Men are visually stimulated and that’s what does it for them,” she says. “It’s like Harlequin romances—women masturbate to the same thing, just a more romanticized version.”
Growing up, Lily was exposed to the vagaries of male sexuality. “I lived with a dirty old man,” Lily says of her adoptive father. Married later in life, he and her adoptive mother never had a particularly sexual relationship; they
were more like roommates than lovers. They even slept in separate beds. Lily suspects her mother may have been raped or molested at some point; she didn’t seem interested in sex. Meanwhile, her father would frequently go to strip clubs; he would get so drunk, the club’s proprietor would have to call Lily’s mom, and the two would roll into the car late at night to pick him up. “I think my dad’s porn habit could have definitely contributed to their lack of sex life,” she says. “I know my own husband tends to watch more porn and masturbate more frequently when we haven’t had sex for a while.”
Lily explains, “I’m more tolerant of men’s sexual behavior as a result of my upbringing.” Some of her friends have criticized her for tolerating her husband’s forays to strip clubs. They get upset when their own husbands express their desire to take part, and the men retaliate with, “But Lily doesn’t mind when her husband goes!” Lily doesn’t think she’s being unreasonable. “It’s not like I would excuse everything under ‘boys will be boys,’” she says. “But I’ve come to expect certain things.” For her, lap dances are okay, and a drunken kiss with another woman could be permissible, depending on the context. The only thing she asks is that if her husband plans to cheat, he will divorce her first. Lily isn’t as particular as most women are toward the extent of her husband’s dalliances.
The Selfish Sex
Still, more often than not, women profess to tolerate men’s porn. Jessica says she’s okay with it. “I think it’s unnatural to expect someone to never look at someone else or fantasize about being with another person,” she says. “And doing it with an inanimate object like a porn star as opposed to doing it with a real human being alleviates the risk of becoming attached emotionally.” Jessica has had to get used to it. “My boyfriend has a lot of pornography. It’s like falling out of his closet and under the bed.” She doesn’t want to sound uptight. “I mean, most people look at pornography—I even look at it sometimes.” Like many women, she is eager to sound game.