WARNING: Graphic and explicit depictions
I am from a normal, upper-middle-class American home. I was never abused sexually and had had a number of sexual partners (long-term boyfriends) before I met the boyfriend I will describe in this account. This boyfriend was someone I dated on and off for nearly three years, who told me that he loved me dearly, wanted to marry me and even have a family with me. I am REALLY glad I did not.
As a young woman in my late twenties in 2008, I met my boyfriend, a PhD student and engineer in his early thirties. I am mentioning his education to break the stereotype that major porn-users are all lower class and less educated.
I knew my boyfriend used porn because he let me use his laptop at times and I saw on his browser many different porn sites. He also got pornographic soft core pictures from other male friends, many of whom were doctors. I never watched this porn to see what really happened.
Though I believed at the time that watching pornography was probably wrong, my exposure to porn was dated. My last exposure was back in the early 90’s when I saw some Playboy and Penthouse magazines that my friend showed me from her dad’s closet. My belief was that porn was ‘silly’ and something men were more given to due to their sexuality. I had no real exposure to what people are consuming today and how denigrating this is to women!
Sex with this boyfriend was disturbing in many ways. I feel led to discuss this to warn young women and teenage girls, so that they will get away from a man like this as fast as they can.
For this boyfriend, sex was not about us responding to each other and bonding the way that sex has naturally been with humans for thousands of years, the way it was for me with other young men.
This boyfriend did not want to listen to me, but wanted to be in control because he was “the man” in bed. He did not do foreplay more than two times over the hundreds of times we had sex. He assumed I had an orgasm when of course, I almost never did. I was on birth control medication, but like in modern pornography, he never used a condom. We did not have any STDs when we initiated our relationship.
He asked me to watch a porn film with him on the big screen TV in his living room, and I refused.
He complained that I had too much pubic hair and told me that his previous girlfriend had used Nair for the bikini area and that I should too, to remove ALL of my pubic hair. I refused and he continued to complain, not listening to why this was weird for me.
Several times he tried to push me to have anal sex, something I refused to do and never want to do—which is very common in porn today. He liked to have sex in front of a mirror, next to his bed, and watch himself having sex, again removing the intimacy from our relationship. He often would pull out and would ejaculate on my breasts, face, even in my mouth after his penis had been in my vagina, which I really DID NOT appreciate—also common to porn.
He wanted me to dress up a few times as a child in bed, wearing pigtails. I thought, naïvely that this came from his own sexual fantasy; I discovered it was from pseudo-child pornography and have since seen depictions for such porn with young women dressed exactly the same as this. He never had the consideration to tell me that this fantasy was straight from porn he accessed on the internet. I feel so used.
He referred to having sex as “banging” me, rather than “making love” or “having sex.” I have since visited porn sites where they refer to having sex as “banging” a woman. Several times, when we were in public, he would tell me he wanted to “rape me.” Though this did not seem that offensive at the time, I now know that pornographers talk like this and have never heard any other man talk like that to me.
Psychologically and socially things were unpleasant as well. When I tried to communicate to him how sex with him was weird, he only half-listened to me. He really couldn’t change, saying that he had always referred to having sex as “banging”—or something even worse—even though he told me he loved me. I really could not understand how someone could tell me that they loved me and then do degrading things such as act out by ejaculating on my face. I felt shocked and surprised at the contradiction.
I now know, from listening to Dr. Gail Dines and Morality in Media that it comes from his reliance on pornography and that he was simply reenacting what he had masturbated to over and over again. Through masturbation, this material had become a part of him, the way he treated women, and how he had sex. He could no longer function sexually any other way, even with women he claimed that he loved.
In addition, he went into my Facebook friend list and looked at pictures of some of my friends in bikinis on their Facebook profiles and asked me about them. He would also look inappropriately at other women in public when we went out.
We broke up several times. At one point, he had other sexual partners while we had broken up. I came to visit him as friends for a weekend, not wanting to have sex, but he manipulated me. He did not wear a condom (exactly like in pornography!) and infected me with an STD. Many women in pornography also get STDs, partly due to the lack of condom use.
This pornography use is a major PUBLIC HEALTH problem. I will never have a sexual relationship with a porn-user like this again. I am afraid for teenage girls and young women in this culture.
Oprah and Diane Rehm say misguided things like, “Porn can enhance your sex life.” You can tell these women did not grow up in a porn-culture.
Porn ruined my sex life! I am so angry that I was basically used as a vehicle for this man to reenact the horrible things he had masturbated to in pornography on my body and I didn’t even fully understand how much of it just came from porn.
Porn is fake intimacy and misogynistic sex.
