I don't entirely understand women who get jealous when their boyfriends look at porn. I understand strip clubs being more of a problem and hookers more still, but outside the health/ethics issues with a hooker these things really never bother me. They're not competition. A pornstar will never take him home and a stripper will never go hiking with him. They might get his cock, but they're no threat to his heart.
Unless he gets obsessed with them, but then your problem is less "that thieving slut" and more "that psychotic man."
My theory is that men tell women that they are teh most beautiful thing evar and no one else is worth looking at or being with. Or at least a few do, and it's held as a romantic ideal, and sometimes women who weren't told any such thing still imagine that their man thinks this. But when the new relationship energy [tm] wears off, the man realizes that other women still exist, but at that point even looking at them is a betrayal of that romantic ideal. Even if he's not aware of it. Or something. There have been art and comics depicting men staring at attractive women and then his wife bashes his head in since at least the Victorian era. So it's not anything new.
ReplyDeleteOr maybe they're just jealous because there's not much that's equivalent to porn and prostitutes for women. Even trashy romance novels don't come very close, because the men in them are fictional text constructs. Thus the chance of actually getting it on with them is less than zero.
Dunno, I don't really understand jealousy anyway. If I had a wife who had the hots for some other guy, my response would be either "have fun" or "think he'd be up for a threesome?"
I don't need whoever I'm dating to tell me I'm the most beautiful woman alive, but I do need to be his physical type and I want my sex to be among the best he's ever had. Therefore if he's consistently watching blonde chicks with giant silicone tits doing acts that I won't do, it'd make me insecure. I'd feel like he "settled" with me and now he's watching all the stuff he's missing out on, like a beggar with his nose pressed to a restaurant window.
ReplyDeleteIf, on the other hand, he favoured strap-on porn featuring cute non-plastic women with tattoos and punky hair, that's fine by me.
There's a cultural myth that one's single partner should be All One Desires In All Ways and that if there's a sign of any kind of interest in anyone or anything else The Relationship Is Doomed.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that this is idiotic doesn't, unfortunately, mean that many people aren't infested with it.
I used to get jealous when my boyfriend looked at porn because he wasn't that interested in *me* -- and over time, he tended to be more and more caught up in the endless novelty and variety of the porn actresses (OK, honestly not so much variety, but they were different women, and that excited him) and less and less interested in the one boring real human woman in his house. My solution was to open the relationship, but that just shifted our unequal footing in the other direction, since even a porn addict can see that it's not the same as a real person.
ReplyDeleteNevertheless (belatedly trying not to make this comment All About Me), I think it's a valid concern, if someone doesn't have endless sexual energy and they're choosing to direct a bunch of it away from their ostensible monogamous partner.
flightless
I think I agree with the entire first paragraph from perversecowgirl's comment above. If I'm a short girl with big boobs, and he's constantly looking at tall athletic types, I'm going to worry. And, I think the line she used about how my sex with him needs to be at least close to the top he's experienced, is absolutely important.
ReplyDeleteOK, given that I'm a man, but I don't understand this "well, he's only having sex with her, I still get to go on hikes."
ReplyDeleteMaybe that works for you, or maybe you're thinking in terms of more casual boyfriends and I'm thinking in terms of husbands and wives, but this separation between sex life and real life gets a lot of marriages into trouble. To me and a lot of others, the sexual relationship is the part that sets my relationship with my wife (or girlfriend, I guess) apart from my relationship with the other people I love just as much. I'd run in front of a freight train for my parents, my sister, my niece or my children. There's no more or higher love to offer my wife . . . but we have a *kind* of love I don't have with anyone else (and even if you have an open relationship, presumably you're both into it, right?) Without the sexual part, what separates us from a pair of close friends or a brother and a sister?
If something happens to us and makes sex impossible, we'll deal with it, but if you'd rather be with someone else, even someone you pay, I'm not interested anymore.
I predict you're going to get a wide range of responses here if only because you've lumped pornography and strip clubs in with prostitution, and there is a difference. That's two forms of fantasy and one form of actually going out and having sex with someone else . . . not in the same ballpark.
I would guess that most women who have a serious problem with their men viewing pornography have one of two situations, neither of which is really comparable to a guy who just looks at porn every so often and fantasizes:
1. Their man is obsessed with porn to an unhealthy degree, where he's watching porn when he should be living real life, and the porn is more important.
2. The woman in question doesn't approve of pornography for her own reasons (personal, religious, whatever) regardless of whether her man is the one looking at it or not. Doubleplusungood if he shares or says he shares her hangup, but then turns out to be using porn.
Not Me - Dunno, I don't really understand jealousy anyway. If I had a wife who had the hots for some other guy, my response would be either "have fun" or "think he'd be up for a threesome?"
ReplyDeleteI might do that, but my trepidation wouldn't be that the other woman would be hot or that he'd enjoy her sexually--it would be that he'd get emotionally attached. Deciding beforehand that sex won't get emotional isn't as straightforward as the sex-positive party line would make it sound. Sometimes "fun" turns into fun and a relationship, and sometimes that relationship takes away from the one he has with me, and that's when it stops being okay.
Like I said, I really don't care what my partner does with his cock as long as I'm still getting some, but I know that with a "real" (i.e., nonprofessional) person it's too easy to get more than the cock involved.
Don - To me and a lot of others, the sexual relationship is the part that sets my relationship with my wife (or girlfriend, I guess) apart from my relationship with the other people I love just as much.
ReplyDeleteTo me, the emotional relationship is the part that sets a boyfriend apart from a fuckbuddy. A guy fucking me, that doesn't mean anything, maybe I was just convenient; a guy going hiking with me (or whatever high-talk low-sex coupley activity) means a lot more and that's the part that I feel I have to be selfish with.
Even emotionally, in theory I don't care if someone else does sexy OR coupley things with him as long as I don't have less of him. But in reality I've found that guys can separate sex; when you get to coupley things, that's when I feel like I'm losing his attention.
I agree with most of what Don was saying.
ReplyDeleteCouples have all kinds of relationships and there's plenty of room in this world for all of them. However--to my way of thinking, anyway--once a relationship is established as monogamous, the idea of /actually/ having sex with someone else violates that definition. I understand on an intellectual level that monogamy may not be ideal for the human race (at the risk of sounding like Cosmo, there are a ton of examples in the animal kingdom of species that don't mate for life), but once I've made an emotional connection with someone, that's what I want the relationship to be--monogamous.
To me, that means that it's okay to fantasize (porn) or to go to a strip club (I don't have a problem with my girlfriend going to see the Chippendales or whoever) or to have friends with the same "down-there" parts as your partner, but it's not okay to have sex with those friends (or anyone else who isn't your partner).
Again, I'm strictly speaking about monogamous relationships here because it's all I've really known. And maybe I could be cool with a relationship that started out as an open thing, but I know that if I ever really connected emotionally with someone during that time, the open aspect would have to close or I'd be gone. And I think that if you're in a monogamous relationship where you or your partner is looking at other women or porn as something that they (or you) are missing out on, then maybe a monogamous relationship isn't what's best for them (or you).
Don and Brock already said just about all of what I would have. I understand people who can easily seperate "just sex" or "just his cock", but to me sex is intimacy, and I just don't do any form of relationship other than monogamous- and if my monogamous partner *actually* had sex with someone else (fantasy is just fine unless it becomes more important than me), then I think a hooker would actually hurt *more*, just because doing it for "just" sex would show how very little he understood or respected me.
ReplyDeleteTo me, the emotional relationship is the part that sets a boyfriend apart from a fuckbuddy. A guy fucking me, that doesn't mean anything, maybe I was just convenient; a guy going hiking with me (or whatever high-talk low-sex coupley activity) means a lot more and that's the part that I feel I have to be selfish with.
ReplyDeleteI've never had a fuckbuddy, and I guess I never felt the need to differentiate from that kind of relationship. Like I said, we come from very different starting points.
The hooker example: it might make sense if you're open or poly, but in a monogomous relationship it shows a lack of value for the committment. Not physically cheating was part of the original deal.
ReplyDelete-Ann
I watch way more porn than my boyfriend and nobody gets jealous. I must say it's been reading this blog that has made me thing on my feet about sexuality instead of going along with cultural assumptions.
ReplyDeleteI'd agree that it probably comes from the culture of Monogamy In All Ways, that your sexual attraction must be directed at the person you're with and not at That Person With Few Clothes On at the Local Strip Joint or Those Lesbian Porn Stars. Although they fulfil a different and much less significant need than an actual person.
Another thing I don't empathise with is people who get jealous of people their partner has previously had relationships with. You're the one in the relationship with them *now*, after all.
I've not been able to date guys who watch porn because it eventually seeps into the rest of their behavior - I'm pretty darn exciting in bed but name calling, hitting/slapping and other porn-based behaviors are Not Appreciated. Even when they stop, or watch different things, or try to change... it doesn't seem to change their attitude and approach to intimacy. Hell, it changes their behavior outside of the bedroom in troubling ways. So, jealousy aside, there are bigger issues afoot when porn is being used.
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