Reader layday had this to say in response to our post, “My Husband Won’t Even Try to Give Me an Orgasm”:
I am not a psychologist of any sort, but it does make me wonder if your husband [a man who doesn’t seem to take his wife’s orgasms into account] watches pornography? When a person watches porn it over time conditions them to only receive, and not give. This may sound unorthodox, but sometimes it is a sign of porn addiction.
Sometimes they cannot physically wait because the “foreplay” has been going on in his mind for a while already, maybe even a lot of the sexual fantasies, but they ultimately need that physical stimulation to finish off the mental state of pleasure.
Also, pornography tends to, and you may have heard it a million times, objectify women. Over time he may see those women as you, or you as them, without emotional and physical desires for yourself. Even if he understands that intellectually, his brain has taught him it has to reach pleasure for itself, since porn doesn’t ask for the same satisfaction back.
Like I said, I am not a psychologist but I did attend a pornography addiction course by a psychologist who works with children addicted to porn. One last thing, if you are using sex toys you are also training yourself to be satisfied without bonding. Your body may eventually want sex without ever reaching emotional satisfaction. I hope it helps, and, wife to wife, I wish you the very best!
The truest part of this person’s comment is “I am not a psychologist of any sort.” Sex toys teach someone to be satisfied without bonding? What about masturbation? I’m guessing she’s not for that, either, as someone would run the risk of satisfaction without bonding there as well.
Mightn’t porn be a symptom, rather than the cause? Does she also think that watching violent movies makes people more violent? For someone with an unhealthy obsession with watching violent imagery, seeking out violent themes… we’d be more likely to think that person’s violent inclinations arose elsewhere, and that the obsessive viewing itself is merely an expression of those inclinations, not the cause. The same thing goes for porn, much as she (and Tipper Gore) would hope to convince everyone otherwise.
There is no such thing as porn addiction. Some people become better lovers because of porn; some become worse; nobody is addicted to it, any more than I am addicted to vanilla fudge ice cream. Whatever is wrong with this guy (and remember we have only one side of the issue) “porn addiction” isn’t it.
The jury’s still out on whether porn viewing that adversely affects the porn viewer is an addiction, a compulsion, or non-of-the-above. Check out this feature from the American Psychological Association:
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/04/pornography.aspx
There was one study which showed that brain activity of problematic porn viewers when showed pornographic images was NOT like the brain activity of alcoholics when showed images of booze — which caused a lot of publications to run stories with headlines like “Porn Addiction Isn’t a Real Thing.” But as this article shows, there are lot of studies that have conflicting results. Add that to the fact that studying porn in a scientifically rigorous way is still in its very early stages — no one wants to fund it. So no one really knows yet what to call it. But as this article states: “Whether or not pornography is a diagnosable addiction, it’s clear it hurts some people.”