I grew up in an environment that had lots of sex, but no affection, and asking for any closeness was dangerous. Starting when I was around 11, I discovered porn and got hooked. For me, it's an addiction. Independent of its morality, I can't indulge in it without it taking over my life and work hard to be sober. The big problem for me is that the internet feeds a numbing click-click-click of endless consumption that is really, really effective at giving me a dissociative numbness that makes all my PTSD symptoms fade away, at the cost of taking over my life and freezing my emotions and senses. I've heard it phrased as, "This is not your grandfather's stack of Playboys that we are talking about."
Apart from that, here are some of our thoughts ...
Ultimately, porn is kind of deadening if it gets to that click-click-click chain of consumption. I learned this largely from my female parts. Their fantasies and sense of their body are way more intense and pleasurable than my response to porn. It's as if pornography hits only my visual sensors and my genitals. Sexuality still seems somewhat forbidden to my male alters, and that's what we're working on. We've made progress in understanding how real touch is different than porn. We've made progress in building affection into our relationship with Mrs. W. We've made progress in talking about sexuality. This goes kind of slowly, though.
There's no clear line between what is and is not porn. My therapist is fine with my reading romance novels. Modern romance novels often have explicit sex scenes. Some differences between that and most internet porn is that the sex is in the context of a broader relationship; there's a lot of emphasis on flirting, touching, and other gently sexual connections; and you don't need to worry about people getting exploited (although you do need to worry about getting unreasonable expectations of relationships!). Another example of a gray area is a site like Pinterest where you can find a lot of softcore erotica, and because of the way social media is engineered, there can be an endless stream of pictures designed to get you hooked on staying on. My therapist says that many of her clients who have a relapse take the first downward step watching YouTube.
There are questions about what content people are comfortable with. One thing that helps me to figure out a reasonable line of what I'm comfortable with is to imagine that I was in those videos/pictures/stories. If I would be comfortable admitting that I did that, then it doesn't seem hypocritical to be interested in it.
I think it's a little unfair to focus on the bad things in the porn industry and cast that as a universal generalization, but to not think about that is also problematic. It is clear that the sex industry can be traumatic for many. But there are a lot of industries that can be tough on people: e.g., doctors who work really long hours and neglect family, or musicians that get addicted to drugs, or models and eating disorders. We don't say to avoid listening to musical genres because there is a high addiction rate. And on the flip side, you can imagine a loving couple who mutually enjoy posting pics/videos of themselves, and nobody is getting taken advantage of. I don't know how you sift out the traumatic from the non-traumatic! This whole issue is difficult.
If I listen to my female alters right now, they would say about relationships and porn:
- Is the porn manageable, or is it taking over the consumer's life?
- Is the porn being used to manage a mismatch in sexual desire, or to give room for fantasies, or to relax in a reasonable way? That may all be good.
- Is the porn taking energy or joy out of a relationship?
- Porn can help us expand our sexuality and senses or it can give us narrow and unreasonable expectations of real relationships. Are either of these happening?
- Secrecy is tricky: on one hand, we all like to have fantasies that we don't share. But we'd like to have a core level of trust and know the general scope of what our partner is interested in. That's hard to balance.
