P*rn is no one religion

Why is it damaging to the relationships? I have no doubt that it's possible for someone to look at so much porn that they neglect to carry out other activities. On the other hand, it's equally likely that there's a subset of women who find the idea of masturbation disturbing and take their partner's masturbation activities to mean that there is something lacking in their sex life. Instead of finding out how the woman's views on sex and masturbation affect how they perceive their partner's porn habits, all we hear from Horin are horror stories:

Men became [...] "lazy lovers". In the end they could not be bothered with real-life sex. In other cases, sex lives became porn-like, male-focused, extreme and lacking in intimacy.

This is based on the reports from female partners who believed that porn had negatively affected their sex lives. If this is a problem, it's alarming. It's alarming in the same way it would be if men started emulating the boys from South Park or Family Guy. Most men are perfectly able to tell the difference between fantasy, fiction and reality, just as most women are. What's harder for the public to discern is the bounds of the fantasy that exist within Horin's article when she quotes self-styled “experts” in the same breath as university researchers:

Women's self-esteem nose-dived. They felt they could not compete with the nymphs on screen. They did not measure up to the bodies or sexual performance of the women their men were watching. Connie, a 50-year-old graphics designer, whose former partner looked at pornography constantly, says: "After a while I started to feel worthless." Karen 44, whose eight-year marriage broke up over her husband's porn obsession, agonised over "why he preferred that to me".

What's happening here is an overgeneralisation about the sort of women you find in porn. Porn is a broad church. What don't these women measure up to? BBW's? Hippy chicks? Big booty? Big boobs? Small boobs? Leather-wearing? Hairy/Shaved? White/Black/Japanese/Indian/Latina chicks? One weird type of Japanese hentai where thumbelina-sized women (and probably men too) are molested by giant genitalia? Arms not hairy enough?

What kind of “sexual performance” is Horin referring to? The problem here is not the pornography, it's that the women start to convince themselves they are worth less than a 2D woman on a computer screen. We don't hear the perspective from the men - whether Karen's partner really did prefer “that” to having sex with her, or what Connie's husband thought about her feelings of worthlessness. What we have here is a failure to communicate!

The perspective that Horin is pushing here is that porn is a viable replacement for a real woman. That, given the chance, men will take porn in preference to the real thing. Is that true? While I can't quote any scientific literature to counter Horin's views, my guess is that if men who use porn were actually asked such questions, they'd probably laugh in astonishment. It would be a very abnormal man indeed who preferred using porn to having sex with a woman, and to my mind, women are better off with men like that taken out of the dating pool, because they're bound to have other strange issues as well!

A well-conducted British survey based on a representative sample of partners of regular porn users shows these feelings are widespread. Most partners are largely neutral about their men's regular pornography use, the survey, published in the “Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy” in 2003, shows.

But a significant minority - about one-third of the women - found it highly distressing. About 32 per cent said their partner's porn use had adversely affected their sex life, 39 per cent said it had negatively affected their relationship, 34 per cent had lessened self-esteem, 41 per cent felt less attractive and desirable since having discovered their partner's use, and 42 per cent said it made them feel insecure. More than one-quarter viewed it as a kind of affair.

The assumption here is that it's the “fault” of the male partner for viewing pornography and causing distress to the female partner. What's not addressed is that maybe some of the women have underlying issues with sex and masturbation that lead to their lessened self-esteem and feelings of being less attractive and desirable. The fact that more than 25 per cent of women viewed their partner's viewing of pornography as “a kind of affair” is what sets the alarm bells ringing; would these women also view their partner's masturbation in the same way?

Would their partner jerking off in the absence of visual stimulation elicit the same reaction? Why would they have that reaction? If a survey showed that 25 per cent of women felt less attractive and desirable because their partner masturbated from time to time, would we see articles from Horin on how masturbation, a perfectly normal and healthy behaviour, was “poisoning” relationships? Or would we say that the women's views perhaps reflected something fundamentally wrong with the way our society judges sexual behaviour?

The point that Horin completely misses in her article is that porn is simply a masturbation aid, not something that men use as a replacement for a sexual relationship. Men who do not want a real sexual relationship are a genuine minority. If they weren't we wouldn't see the proliferation of adult “dating” (great euphemism that) sites such as Adult Matchmaker, because men would all be getting their fix from porn. Clearly they're not.

Horin shares a few extreme examples, presumably real, to hammer the horror home: