Another Reason Men Like Porn
The click-bait headline is a complete lie. This account covers only two days of unrestricted sexing, it’s written in the style of erotic fiction, and we never find out what happens: For One Week I Decided To Have Sex With My Boyfriend Whenever He Wanted (Here’s What Happened).
However, early on there’s a brief discussion of why men like porn, that I think may have some wisdom in it:
Anyways, we watched porn together sometimes and I knew he watched it alone. I’m not like, “the cool girl” who’s totally okay with her boyfriend watching porn but I knew it was an uphill battle and one that wasn’t going to end well for either of us, so I tried to use it to bring us closer together. One night … I asked him what he liked about porn, and whether access to me or all the other women in the world (hotter ones, I even gave him) would be better, ideally.
His answer surprised me, it wasn’t about quality or quantity, but about availability. With me, (and he loved me very much, he clarified), he had to woo me, constantly. Sex was never a given, and this is a biological difference between men and women. He was trying, all the time, to make me think of him sexually and to initiate sex and even my higher-than-average female libido couldn’t keep up with him. As loving and as open and assuring as I was towards him, he was still getting rejected by me in this way, often (and even more often if he would be honest about how frequently he wanted sex).
And so watching porn made sense to me in a way it never had before. The fantasy, the real fantasy, was a world free of rejection….
In my experience and observation, even the most sexually generous women, in even the most loving and sexual relationships, are but dipping with a small spoon into the hogshead of available male proposition. I would be open to the argument that they need to be skilled at rejection and at preempting the propositions that make outright rejection (with all its costs and dangers) necessary. But it had never occurred to me that this project of ongoing rejection could become so automatic, as with breathing, that a woman might cease to be aware of doing it. And yet this author was, she says, surprised to learn how often she was rejecting her boyfriend.
That surprise? It surprises me.
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Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=12678
From a Woody Allen movie; don’t remember which one.
Analyst: How often do you have sex?
Wife: ALL THE TIME, two or three times a week!
Analyst: How often do you have sex?
Husband: Hardly EVER, only two or three times a week!
Isn’t that true for EVERY couple? They could do it every day, and he’d WANT more, even if he wasn’t CAPABLE of more.
I don’t really think this is entirely true, given I am frequently sexually rejected by my husband (he has a very low libido, etc) and I know he still occasionally watches porn and masturbates.
I suspect masturbation just requires dramatically less effort, and porn makes it easier.
Andy, remember that it could be true for some, or even for many, without being “entirely true”. That’s why I said it “has some wisdom in it” rather than claiming it was the universal fits-all Truth-with-a-capital-T.
I think there’s something in this, but not as simple as ‘porn use is related to actual rejection’. My partner has grown up feeling that women will automatically reject men, that men’s desire outstrips women’s, and that men are bad for making their desire felt. This means he will never initiate, even though my libido is higher than his and rejection is not a thing I do.
I can see that porn is attractive because it doesn’t involve any possibility of rejection or self-censorship, whereas in real life men may feel they’re having to hold back from imposing themselves on women all the time.
Misspiggy: “I can see that porn is attractive because it doesn’t involve any possibility of rejection or self-censorship, ”
Bingo. And because it is immediate and easy. We’ve been married for 30+ years. My wife went through a phase several years back of not wanting to be touched, and for a couple of years, rejected most of the times I wanted sex. Now, she wants it fairly often, but wants ME to be the initiator – even though I got “shot down” regularly for a few years. She doesn’t consciously see the “cognitive dissonance” between “she refused for years” and “she wants it now and I’m just supposed to KNOW when she wants sex”.
Up until very recently in the history of mankind, women (with good judgment), needed to reject men with whom it wouldn’t be wise to have children. Now of course, we have reliable birth control, and this paradigm shift hasn’t had sufficient time to fully catch up culturally.
In John Lennon’s song “Mind Games” (in which he gives the only direct instruction to his fans that I’m aware of), he sings “…I want you to make love, not war…” and elsewhere within the same song, also postulates:
“Yes is the answer
And you know that for sure
Yes is surrender
You gotta let it, you gotta let it go”
Personally, I’ve always felt this elimination of automatic rejection, was what he was referring to…
The number of women with which I’ve experienced sexual relationships is enough that I dare call it a borderline scientific sampling, and I would therefore further dare support Bacchus’s contention that there’s some “wisdom in it”.
I believe that those women who make themselves readily available to their partners, often experience extraordinary lives, compared to those whose men’s energies are constantly directed at attempting to seduce them. There’s a reason why so many men frequent strip clubs, and women rarely do.
Hmm, I think I see a slight bit of a split between men and women in the comments.
Personally, I don’t think it’s about rejection or differing libidos. I think it’s about ease. My husband watches porn and masturbates a lot. We also have a lot of sex. They serve two different needs. Masturbation is less pleasurable but easier. Sex has a higher pleasure level, but it means he has to put more effort into it because he has me to please as well. Which he chooses depends on his mood.
As for why women watch less porn/frequent fewer strip clubs, I personally think that has more to do with the fact that most porn and strip clubs cater to men’s desires, not women’s. Our culture is too afraid of women’s sexuality for us to see porn and strip clubs catering to women become as abundant as those catering to men. Harder to find means less ease, which is half the point of porn/strip clubs (instead of just fucking my husband) in the first place.
“Masturbation is less pleasurable”
Not always. For me, her orgasm is not a sure thing. mine is. So if she doesn’t climax, I still will, but it just isn’t great. Getting myself off can be VERY intense, or less intense – my choice.
Fair enough, justretired. I have no doubt that there is variation in experience here :)
[…] West’s earlier surprise discovery of porn being the rejection-free choice for men has Bacchus making a discovery of his own. After tipping his cap respectfully to the very necessity of women having to (often carefully) reject male sexual advances, Bacchus writes: […]
Techreader: Difficult, I know. Unfortunately a lot of women grow up with the notion that a woman who initiates sex is a disgusting slag. Which is why it crushes me to initiate most of the time, although the alternative is no sex.