Discussion effects of porn on your relationships / interactions with men

Despite stating and being pretty clear about that I don't accept the use of porn, men in my life have always agreed in the first stages of the relationship. Then, eventually, I'd hear or see them watch it. Every single time. My last relationship actually went to watch porn while I was sick in bed, unable to do anything in the midst of waiting for an important update from the doctor.

I found that you can tell how much they have consumed because their version of intimacy will mirror what they saw in the videos. They will handle you weirdly and mirror the actors, even saying similar style lines. It's totally unnatural and offputting. They always push for "anal" as well and even leave you when you don't want it because there are so many girls who absolutely "love it" (according to them). Then you always get chastised for being a prude or too vanilla, because you don't want to engage in something else. My last relationship would also start slapping me, it was pretty gross but they saw nothing wrong with it.

Any guy I meet nowadays (not even in a romantic setting, just casual conversation, friendship etc) will tell me about his porn use as if it's something to be proud about and impress me for some reason? In a way, I'm glad because I immediately cease contact with anyone like that because it's a waste of my time. I have given up to find any males in this day and age who does not consume porn because it's so readily available and has been normalized by society, not like in the 70s or 80s where men had to make extra effort to go into a sex cinema or rent some 18+ vhs. So I'm pretty much done with guys altogether, I am a lot more happy when I don't serve as someone else's fetish.

I haven't had to deal with any revenge porn but I have received countless of unsolicited nude photos of males who think it's okay to randomly send photos to a woman to control her.

As a straight woman, I just want to say this shit feels like it's destroyed my chance at relationship happiness. I haven't got a chance at sexual or romantic fulfillment with women (even if I wouldn't mind living with women as a single person.) While it affects all women, straight women have to feel this part of it. Porn is eroding my hope of ever finding "love" again the way I wanted. I was lucky enough to have a boyfriend before the pandemic who wasn't pornbrain but I honestly feel like it might be over for me.

I don't find myself losing interest in men physically, not that my drive is strong to begin with, but I do find fear that prevents me from caring. I know that even my male friends, who I love like brothers, who I love more than my blood-kin brothers - even the ones who are sexually shy, reserved, loyal and devoted still watch porn. Even the ones who say "i'll watch amateur because it's more ethical". And I'm not sinless. Like okay I read erotica and often that doesn't model the best relationships. But I do that like once a month. It's so wildly different than the people who watch porn for hours daily. The saddest thing is seeing how many women are addicted to it now. It's not just men. It's suicide for us.

I remember one time telling my friends at college (this happened like 7 years ago) that a girl from my high school had become a big time porn star. I found a picture of her on the red carpet for some thing and the guys recognized her. It made me sick to realize. One guy wanted to watch her on my computer. I didn't hang out with him much after that and it was hard to explain why I didn't want him watching porn of someone I knew in my own fucking house.

I try not to be a doomer. I try not to let anger control me. I try to believe in love. I just don't like the idea of getting cheated on with a telescreen. Every man needs this they act like. It's benign like food and water they act like. Then they act like something is wrong with you. You're too uptight if you don't like it. Sorry I can't be the sick image you'd like me to be.

Yeah, I'm angry. Yeah, I'm sad. I feel like it's slipping away. I want a husband and children. It feels impossible. I want to know what men got off to in the 1600s. I don't care if it was old manuscripts of the kama sutra or whatever. It's not the same as the audiovisual content fest tailored to the body type, race, and transgressive roleplay scenario you'd like to have today.

Being Christian doesn't help me either. If i act like porn is bad then they just think i believe that because it's a "conservative Christian belief", not because I have hardline scientific evidence that it lessens the activity od your brain, and not because it abuses and exploits the vulnerable. Oh and I'm allowed to have preferences. Men can prefer anything they want right? They can prefer spicy chicken sandwiches to regular. They can prefer apples to oranges. They can prefer blondes to redheads. But how dare a woman prefer no porn to porn? I know I sound upset and I feel like I need to apologize for sounding upset, and I know that the urge I feel to apologize is a symptom of this same problem. I shouldn't feel the need apologize for being mad at something that is going to hurt me and is hurting others. And yet here we all are. all saying the same desperate things. Outlining the ruin it has caused. I want to be constructive about fixing this but don't know how.

Luckily I have never experienced revenge porn.

I'm a lesbian so luckily don't have to have one in bed or near me, but two things strike me when considering men and porn. Basically, I liked some men who were non family members, and respected men a lot lot lot more before these two things happened:

The first thing is about widespread it is. This may not be a surprise to many women on this site, but I can see some comments saying that 'older men aren't like this' etc. That is bullshit. A few years ago I worked in a technology shop where I would fix primarily phones, but also iPads and tablets. Every single man had porn on his phone/tablet/iPad. Every single one, and I served probably between 8-12 men a day. I worked there a year, and this is the reason I quit. I felt like I was developing PTSD from it. Around 80% of them roughly had it downloaded on their phone, rather than just open in a browser or it was OF THEM. Two instances stand out in particular, one where a grandfather - very middle class, nice clothes, lovely wife, 3 lovely grandchildren - came in. He was all smiles, seemed a nice guy. Gave me his phone, said he was taking his wife and grandchildren for lunch, could I fix this issue, which was something to do with all his files duplicating, and appearing on his homescreen as icons. Sure, no issue.

I opened his phone up and bam... hardcore porn. His images and videos on his phone were majority hardcore porn, all heterosexual or lesbian, in the same folder as his grandchildren playing at the beach. I handed the phone to a male colleague who thought it was hilarious and went out on a break and didn't come out of the backroom until he was gone. I regret not showing his wife, I still feel funny about it sometimes.

Next incident at the same shop was with a middle aged man, again very well dressed, has bought a new phone and wants all data transferred from one to the other. We have a funny little device that does it for us, but all the images and videos pop up on screen as they are being transferred. We have to watch the screen incase there is any file corruption so we can warn the customer. All videos of him masturbating to porn on a laptop. Maybe 60 videos of this. He came back and winked at me as I was, again, walking to the stockroom to avoid him. His wife was with him, these videos were AGAIN mixed in with photos of her and their children.

The other thing is when I went to university, as a lesbian I was given this weird 'one of the lads' status and they would talk to me in a way they wouldn't with some of the other female students. I absolutely loathed this and they stopped doing it pretty quick. I was sitting next to a 'friend' on a bench in my second week of uni, talking about class. He started laughing at something on his phone, I asked what it was. He showed me a WhatsApp group called something disgusting (i can't remember now), and it was with HUNDREDS of boys from university, and they all sent each other videos of them having sex with girls from behind (so the girls wouldn't know), and rating them, also sending nude photos that these girls had sent them. I was revolted and stopped speaking to all the boys immediately, and told a staff member about it. Nothing was done (as per usual) - before revenge porn as illegal.

I now have no respect for any man whatsoever.

I'm not interacting with men beyond the bare minimum required for survival because I hate those cumbrained freaks. Easy.

I'm going to repeat this here again as I get requests from younger women to share my past. I'm a Gen Xer and didn't marry until my mid-thirties. I dated a lot prior to my marriage, probably because I'm extroverted, wasn't terribly interested in marriage and was quite physically fit than for any negative reasons. With one, possibly two exceptions, porn was never a problem with the men I dated because it simply didn't exist in the easy-to-consume way it does now. I had one boyfriend who had Playboys locked in some briefcase which I hated. He had issues wanting to have sex frequently (which I blame partly on our long-distance relationship and his reliance on the porn mags but also on his depression), but our sex was loving and safe. With other men, sex could be awesome, awkward, dull or incompatible, but I was NEVER choked or asked for any BDSM. One guy (depressed Playboy) wanted to do anal and I said never again. My first sexual experiences were with high school boyfriends - and they were loving, sweet and we experimented together. There was no internet then, and one boyfriend's family didn't even have a VCR so it would have been rare for him to watch it if he had access to a video (porn videos were only available for over 18 rented or purchased). Both had strong mothers who would have destroyed any Playboys and likely punished them for it. I thank the goddess for these experiences - when you are young and know nothing but to expect healthy, safe, romantic sex, it shapes your whole life and it's easier to recognize toxic sexual relationships.

Later, when the internet was newer, I had one boyfriend (early 30s) who developed a porn problem and sex w/ him got worse and worse as his combined watching increased and the type of porn progressed from adult women 'lesbians' to pubescent looking girls. He was unable to focus in the middle of sex and would start talking about random things in the middle of it (like does the cat need a new type of food). Over time, he couldn't maintain an erection unless I was wearing some kind of uncomfortable and ridiculous lingerie or giving him oral. He soon progressed to wanting me to use dildos so he could film me. Eventually, he only wanted to look at me but not touch me. I eventually dumped him and guess who he later married? A very young immigrant woman (I have strong suspicions she was under 18 when he married her and helped her immigrate). He told a mutual friend, "She's a virgin so I can train her in what I like." Oh, and yes, he's a progressive Bernie bro. I worry about that poor girl, but I imagine his dick is useless now.

So, for all my experience in the late 80s and the 90s and early 2000s, I had 1 guy who had a porn problem and wanted lingerie/dildos/filming (this perv noted above) and one who had a possible too-much porn mag problem. The rest (and that number is over 25, under 60, so for an average let's say 2 out of 40 had a porn issue) only wanted natural sex with me - no props, no porn, no toys, no violence, no BDSM, no role playing, no video watching...that's a pretty tall number of men who wanted what now is considered vanilla sex. The same issues of men being clueless how to give a woman an orgasm or of them being dismissive of your sexual needs still existed back then, but there was no performance needed to simply have satisfying sex. As to cartoon/anime/furry/bizarre fetish, I'm sure it existed but it was hidden and considered freakish. All these changes point to what I see as a symptom of readily available, increasingly fetishized, online 24/7/365 porn consumption. It has reshaped a generation of men and I find that harrowing and disturbing for women and girls. I also feel bad for some of the men - they honestly don't know that better and meaningful sex can exist. Some of these men today will become fathers and I find that very disturbing.

I have basically been single since I got peaked and discovered FDS. Not been with a man since cause no one is up to my standards so I'm building my single life best as I can. While it would be awesome to have a terfy boyfriend, it is not necessary that he be a keyboard warrior on twitter but he should have some respect and understanding of the issue. I will absolutely not budge on porn use and being against prostitution. And as you may know that is insanely rare to find.... Yeah it's a bit lonely sometimes, although not as lonely as I felt with a man who doesn't understand me and rubs his dick to raped women tho 🤷

There was a man I had a very big crush on. Once I finally gathered the courage to ask him out on a date, and he said yes ... he proceeded to tell me that he wanted to make his own porn movies because he thought mainstream porn was not good enough. I ... did not have the courage to ask what he objected to, and preferred to believe that he disliked the violence and degradation, but ... yeah, not likely.

That's the story of a big crush that ended in nothing, thanks to ... well not just porn, that guy only was interested in me for the potential of easy sex (at least that's what I suspect), but I think having my romantic fantasies of how lovely he might be crushed by that reality was actually worse than later finding out he was in love with someone else.

Losing him to another woman would have been sad in a romantic and tragic way and fit perfectly with my very Jane Austen character like personality, but losing him to porn and misogyny? There's no tragic beauty in that. I don't like having that in my biography.

I could have lived with being Eowyn, very well.

I don't particularly like being Marianne from Sense&Sensibility.

I don't wanna marry a Colonel Brandon, I wanna marry a Faramir. :(

(But considering how widespread porn use is among men my age, I guess dating a massively older dude is my best bet at happiness.)

While I was married it did lower my desire and respect for my ex-husband whenever I was reminded that he watched porn. I've been spontaneously strangled a couple of times by casual partners despite me stating that I was not into violent acts. When we discussed it afterwards they just said that's what they thought women wanted because they've seen how women "enjoy" it in porn and they didn't consider it to be violence(?!). I was also filmed from behind by a causal partner without knowledge and shown after the fact. He promised to delete it but later said he kept it after all and kept insisting that we should produce porn together. My desire for casual sex is non existent today due to the risks of boundary violations born out of porn sickness. I'm not really motivated to look for a partner either. If I stumble upon someone decent through mutual acquaintances that's one thing, but I won't go out there and look for one atm with the knowledge that so many men are damaged by porn.

I didn't realize what an issue it was until someone who, at the time, I considered to be my best friend confided in me that he had a porn addiction. He even went to therapy to get help (from a male therapist).

I found what he was telling me about the addiction pretty disgusting, but also the "recovery" honestly equally disgusting. There was zero reflection on what this might mean for the women involved, either the women he dated or the women in porn. It was 100% like "this made my penis break, how do I fix my penis?"

I think it made his virgin/whore complex so much worse. This was the beginning of the end of our friendship, for sure. There were even moments when I could see how the things he was saying about his porn addiction, clearly had affected me as his female "best friend", and just zero reflection. None.

It was scary to even prod him, because he had revealed how violent and gross his desires could be, and how he was struggling with those desires with zero sense of how he might be responsible for the pain of others, and I was very scared that "provoking" him could lead to bad consequences for me.

I'm all for men becoming more aware of how awful porn is, but it appears that behind every good conclusion men come to, there is a monkey's paw shriveling behind them.

• I do trust men less because they all consume porn. I assume most men are would-be sexual predators because this is how porn affects their brains. But I don’t trust men anyway. Not necessarily because of porn, but just because of their behavior and thought patterns they brag about.

• I believe porn contributed to the abusive nature of my ex. He was sexually coercive and obsessed with blowjobs, which are uncomfortable acts mainly focused on degrading the woman. Blowjobs, I hear, were considered taboo and very kinky before porn became mainstream, and I am bitterly envious of the women who got to experience that. Porn had ruined and destroyed all men by the time I came of sexual age (which, due to porn, is younger than ever).

• I’m not aware of any revenge porn of me yet.

• I have almost no desire for men because of their porn use. Men can prove to me that they are sexually safe people over a long period of time. I have not yet met a man who has properly done this. I was not a radfem and was deeply insecure when I met Nigel. He has since done a good job of appearing to shape up and be more sexually safe. I have no way of knowing how genuine or real this is.

• I actually see much less evidence of porn use in daily interactions with men. If they behave in a pornsick manner, it is noteworthy to me. However, I avoid men like the plague when I can so that probably helps. Also, I think men are getting better at compartmentalizing their porn use.

• The lack of men who don’t consume porn does create a scarcity mindset in women aware of the severity of this problem. I personally am bisexual so I am more worried about the rising pornsickness of women.

Yes, I've had multiple relationships ruined by porn. One guy I was really into turned out to have a feederism fetish and wanted me to be obese. Another guy had over 2,000 porn videos on his computer and he ended up cheating on me with a high schooler when we were in college. Yet another one was obsessed with fake boobs.