I'm still pretty busy getting everything in order for my move at the end of the month, so I haven't had much time for blogging. But I wanted to check in and share an article that a reader who is going through her own porn addiction-related divorce recently sent me. It's
a 2008 opinion piece from The Atlantic titled "Is Pornography Adultery?" by Russ Douthat and it's, hands down, the best article I've read about why watching porn--especially Internet porn--not only feels like infidelity, but
is infidelity. It also addresses the "all guys do it" argument in a particularly brilliant way. I recommend reading the article in its entirety, but here are some highlights:
- Over the past three decades, the VCR, on-demand cable service, and the Internet have completely overhauled the ways in which people interact with porn. Innovation has piled on innovation, making modern pornography a more immediate, visceral, and personalized experience. Nothing in the long history of erotica compares with the way millions of Americans experience porn today, and our moral intuitions are struggling to catch up.
- Start with the near-universal assumption that what [Elliot] Spitzer did in his hotel room constituted adultery, and then ponder whether Silda Spitzer would have had cause to feel betrayed if the FBI probe had revealed that her husband had paid merely to watch a prostitute perform sexual acts while he folded himself into a hotel armchair to masturbate. My suspicion is that an awful lot of people would say yes—not because there isn’t some distinction between the two acts, but because the distinction isn’t morally significant enough to prevent both from belonging to the zone, broadly defined, of cheating on your wife. You can see where I’m going with this. If it’s cheating on your wife to watch while another woman performs sexually in front of you, then why isn’t it cheating to watch while the same sort of spectacle unfolds on your laptop or TV.
- The whole point of a centerfold is her unattainability, but with hard-core porn, it’s precisely the reverse: the star isn’t just attainable, she’s already being attained, and the user gets to be in on the action. ...So yes, there’s an obvious line between leafing through a Playboy and pulling a Spitzer on your wife. But the line between Spitzer and the suburban husband who pays $29.95 a month to stream hard-core sex onto his laptop is considerably blurrier. The suburbanite with the hard-core porn hookup is masturbating to real sex, albeit at a DSL-enabled remove. He’s experiencing it in an intimate setting, rather than in a grind house alongside other huddled masturbators in raincoats, and in a form that’s customized to his tastes in a way that mass-market porn like Deep Throat and Debbie Does Dallas never was. There’s no emotional connection, true—but there presumably wasn’t one on Spitzer’s part, either.
- When apologists for pornography aren’t making...appeals to cultural transgression and sexual imagination, they tend to fall back on the defense that it’s pointless to moralize about porn, because men are going to use it anyway. ...In the name of providing a low-risk alternative for males who would otherwise be tempted by “real” prostitutes and “real” affairs, we’re ultimately universalizing, in a milder but not all that much milder form, the sort of degradation and betrayal that only a minority of men have traditionally been involved in.
8 comments:
The internet has unleashed a lot of things that were presumably restrained before. I appreciate your sharing the article. Regardless of the medium, there is something inherently troubling about obsession with porn.
Syd--Yeah, that's a good point. I think this article did sort of minimize the use of porn via magazines or public venues, like skeezy movie theaters. There are plenty of people who had serious porn addictions before the Internet came along and used these mediums. But I think the author did a good job of showing why the Internet has contributed to it being a much more widespread problem.
YES! The author gets it.
Really good post. It's my belief that until someone understands the nature and physiology of their chosen toxin, they are always going to stay in the hamster-wheel of self-destcruction, when you view it as outsider armed with knowledge of addictions, addicts appear both predictable and dull
I read this article in the AM when it came out. I think the author is right to point out that one of the biggest arguments is that Porn keeps Men from straying. In my classes when porn comes up this is one of the biggest reasons that people support pornography use. It always leaves me shaking my head.
You should check out the Witherspoon Institute report http://www.socialcostsofpornography.org/ I read it and thought it was spot on.
I parse events differently and arrive at the same basic conclusion.
Rather than considering whether more-than-rare use of porn is cheating, the part that I give more emphasis is that people who are frequent users -- and if you catch him even once, odds are astronomical he's a regular -- it acts to drive a wedge between the user & his partner.
One great take-away from the book LONELY ALL THE TIME (a great one for addicts AND partners: gives each equal time which is rare for S addiction books) is that acting out --> shame --> desire to avoid people --> more shame. I've been paying close attention to my food binges, and I agree with the authors. Acting out, in effect, drives a wedge between the addict (of any type) and every single other person in their life.
Porn use pushes away from emotionally connected relationship closeness by creating shame, objectification, betrayal, & deleterious neural pairing (to name just a few). This pushing away applies to everyone: neighbor, co-worker, & children, not just the partner. S addiction recovery literature is clear & repetitive on this topic.
Perhaps he said to you, "You caught me using porn, it didn't hurt, it wasn't a betrayal." Your gut says differently. Our guts have important information that need listening to, whether or not others validate them.
Oh, hey, that's me writing the same lesson I'm working to acquire myself.
Compelling stuff, Margaux. I'm glad I stopped by. I struggle with how to view my addiction, and this gave me some more pieces of the puzzle. I am glad (proud?) that I haven't had sex with another woman through prostitution/affairs/massage parlors. Somehow I need to hold on to this fact, while at the same time keeping a perspective on how damaging the computer porn has been.
As the girlfriend of a recovering porn addict, I totally agree with this article and if you don't mind would like to link to this post on my blog too. To say that porn is acceptable because it stops them from 'actually' cheating... it just makes me laugh. It feeds the addiction, makes it stronger, leaves them needing to go further and further to get the high they crave... I can't believe that anyone who says that has never been emotionally involved with a porn addict. I still don't think my partner sees what he did as cheating, but that would mean so much more shame for him... he's getting there one step at a time :) I wonder whether future generations will look at this era of internet porn & porn in media like we look back at smoking in the 1950s?
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