Dear Dana: My Boyfriend Has To Watch Porn While We Have Sex

Dear Dana is a bi-weekly advice column for humans who engage in romantic relationships. Please send your dilemmas, issues, conundrums, assumptions, conflicts, anxieties, worriments, obstacles, complications, predicaments, queries, questions, and any other synonyms for “problems” to deardana@rolereboot.org.

Dear Dana:

My boyfriend and I have been together just over a year now, and I think we have a problem. We’re both in our early 20s and when we first started having sex, we’d occasionally watch porn together first to really get things going. We’re both sexually adventurous, so we’d also watch it to get ideas. It was fun and made for some really exciting evenings. But a year into this relationship, he still needs to watch porn before having sex with me. Sometimes he has to watch porn DURING sex with me. It’s making me feel unsexy, unappreciated, and used. Like, basically I’m just helping him masturbate. I’ve asked him to stop, but he says he needs it and won’t stop having it around, since I didn’t mind before. I love him and want to stay in this relationship, but I’m not comfortable continuing to have sex like this. What should I do? 

Signed, 

Sick of Porn

Dear Sick of Porn,

You should dump him. You’re young, he’s young, you’ve asked him to change something and he’s refused. The porn itself may not be a deal breaker for you, but his refusal to engage with you on this topic should be.

I can unpack your boyfriend’s use of porn, why he relies on it, if he may be addicted to it, what it indicates regarding his feelings toward women and his own sexuality, but I don’t really want to. I don’t have a problem with porn as long as everyone involved are consenting adults and those watching porn are viewing it through the same lens you would use to watch a Transformers movie—this is fake, but it can be fun to watch, but we also all have to agree that giant alien robots/perfectly white assholes do not exist in real life.

The thing I need you to know is that his use of porn has everything to do with him and nothing at all to do with you. If you were thinner/sexier/had bigger boobs/had smaller boobs/had more muscle/had a bleached asshole, would your boyfriend still use porn while having sex with you? Yes he sure would. Because he is using porn to replace himself, not you. He wants to be someone else, disassociated from his own body, detached from his own sexuality. He wants to be an avatar in someone else’s carefully curated fantasy—in this case, some porn production company’s idea of what his fantasy should be.

People forget how frighteningly intimate sex can be. You are naked, with another person, all of your moles and your stray hairs and your skin that bounces and moves and ripples in full view. He wants to experience pleasure from a safe distance, by pretending that he’s someone else and you’re someone else and sex is always perfectly performed by well-lit professionals.

I don’t know what kind of porn he is watching. I can assume its some basic typical straight man porn where the gaze is always on the woman, the man is a detached dick, the woman is moaning with pleasure no matter where or how she’s touched, the woman is on the edge of orgasm all the time to the point that it’s never clear if she reaches climax or not, but it doesn’t matter because she’s not fully satisfied until her face is covered in semen. You know, basic, boring, fake male gaze nonsense.

If he was willing to talk to you about this issue, I’d want you to ask him some clarifying questions about his porn habit like: Do you masturbate to porn? Can you get an erection without porn? How does it feel when you’re engaging in sex without porn? Through these questions you’d probably discover that he always masturbates to porn and has for years. You’d probably discover that when he first started watching porn he felt transported to a magical, sexual universe where all of the men and women are always beautiful and sexually compatible and sexually compliant and able to orgasm instantly and/or have sex for hours at the peak of ecstasy. You’d probably discover that he has trained himself to respond to these heightened images so real life, with its abundance of actual, flawed human bodies, and actual, physical touch, and actual miscommunications, and actual work required to achieve sexual intimacy seem horrific in comparison. You’ll probably discover that when he has sex without porn he feels vulnerable and small, his mind constantly yelling at him that he’s doing something wrong, or you’re not responding the way he hoped you would, or that he smells, or that this is uncomfortable can’t we go back to the hairless ladies with the big smiles and ability to make him feel that he is good at sex no matter what he does?

But he’s not willing to talk to you about this issue, so you should dump him.

You two aren’t just having a disagreement about your sex life—you’re having a disagreement about whose feelings are important. Being in a relationship means that you have to account for each other’s feelings. For instance, if he was willing to talk to you about this, you could work on compromise positions such as trying to wean him off of porn while you two are having sex. You could choose the porn, you could move from live porn to static images, you could move from static images to sound recordings only, you could get him to close his eyes and imagine what he wants to see, you could get him to practice moving his focus away from his pleasure to yours and then back again. You could go away together to a place with no TV and no wifi and get crazy and naked in the woods. What you’re asking for is reasonable—it doesn’t mean he has to change, but it does mean he has to engage with the conversation.

But he won’t, so you should dump him.

It’s so easy for me to say “dump him” over and over again because, first of all, you really should dump him, and, second of all, because I’m 38 and I’ve dumped people and I’ve been dumped so I know that dumping him is a gateway into a better future where you’re with a new boyfriend who is willing to engage with you when you have a disagreement. But you’re in your early 20s, this may be your very first love, you’ve been with him a whole year, and dumping him seems like it might be equivalent to ending your world. Leaving someone you are in love with is hard, it’s so hard, but it’s also a key part of being an adult. Being in love with someone doesn’t mean that you’re obligated to make it work with them. Being in love with someone doesn’t mean that you owe them anything, and it doesn’t mean that they owe you anything. Love is just love, not an obligation, not a guarantee, and when you leave someone that you’re in love with it’s not because you failed. It’s because you have to, at some points in your life, choose yourself. You weren’t put on this planet to change this man’s porn habits, so if they really bother you, which they do, and he really isn’t willing to change them, which he isn’t, your ultimate obligation is to yourself. Your boyfriend isn’t required to talk to you about this, just as you are not required to stay with him.

Allow yourself to break up with this man who you have a fundamental incompatibility with. Sex is enormously important in a relationship and the fact that he is wholly discounting your position, arguing that because you were cool with him using porn a few times before, you, therefore, have consented to use it for the rest of your sex life with him, is such a huge pile of bullshit I can barely take it and neither should you.

Porn solves a problem for him, but only he knows what that problem is and he isn’t willing to discuss it. So dump him. He’s choosing porn, so you get to choose yourself.

Dana Norris once went on 71 internet dates, many of which you may read about here. She is the founder of Story Club and editor-in-chief of Story Club Magazine. She has been featured in McSweeney’s, Role Reboot, The Rumpus, and Tampa Review and she teaches at StoryStudio Chicago. You may find her on Twitter at @dananorris.

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