Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry Read Free

with “no, no, you have that wrong, they are genuinely enjoying it.” He knew. So it wasn’t fantasy then? I was supposed to believe it was just a mild diversion, when for the women it had to be real. Any suggestion though of the reality that women were coerced or treated badly was dismissed. They were fine, they were well paid. Self-delusional and ambiguous arguments ran amok. He seemed to have gone to a different place; to comment about the women in porn and me in a cold and detached way, to say things about women’s bodies, about sexual acts which came out of his mouth with swingeing bluntness. A layer of empathy had been ground away. My man. The one I had promised to love and cherish.
There is social-wide acceptance that an affair for a monogamous relationship is wrong, or at least if not wrong as such, certainly not conducive to the continuation of a trusting relationship. But with pornography there is no such clear line, with many levels of self-justification ready-made in a male dominated culture that the man can summon up to avoid having to look at its real impact on a lovingrelationship with cold, hard honesty. The male discourse provides justifications, minimisations that enable the man to deaden any lingering doubts.
We attended counselling. To my initial relief the counsellor acknowledged my enormous distress, and likened it to the discovery of an affair. This is a familiar approach, but while it helpfully acknowledges the degree of distress and the similar elements of secrecy, betrayal, hurt, there are some important differences. While I certainly wouldn’t have wished my partner to have had an affair, it would have been one-person related sex (who would naturally have found him adorable), intimate, secret, warm-bodied in a form I recognised. What caused me immense distress was the considerable shift in sexuality brought about by the porn viewing, the nature of the sexuality that the porn represented and the thought that he had looked at probably hundreds of women engaged in the most intimate of acts – using them to harness his own desire, allowing it to romp through scenarios created out of the imaginations of the porn makers. The most intimate parts of myself that I share with him, and only him, now seemed worthless. Porn-centred sex is a selfish activity that denies and thus destroys connections with anything outside itself. The porn-viewing partner needs help in re-connecting and with being less obsessed by their own wants and desires. The partner of a porn-viewer needs help with the profound sense of being cast aside, not good enough, mixed with conflicting emotions of being degraded and defiled.
The counsellor, however, changed tack to frame our relationship as co-dependent. My partner was supposedly dominating, an addictive personality, and I was the weak, co-dependent partner. Her efforts focussed on endeavouring to convince me that the relationship was in negative territory. In a fragile, emotional state when the pieces of my relationship were broken and I needed help in carefully reassembling them, I took more than I should of what she said seriously.
We changed counsellors. The next took a different line. Men, I was to understand, were visual, wired differently. Implicitly they ‘could not help it’ poor things – a message of the biological imperative. I was to show compassion and understanding. Did he know before that ‘no porn’ was one of the relationship rules. No? Well, then, how could he know I would impose this restriction on him? Restriction? Restriction! Despite the fact that little compassion and understanding seemed to come my way, I tried. What I have discovered by hard experience is that run-of-the-mill relationship guidance has inadequate resources for dealing with the emotional fallout and relationship damage caused by today’s Internet porn. I asked one of my counsellors if she had seen contemporary Internet pornography – she confessed she had not – they are working