"He Chose Porn over Me": Women Harmed by Men Who Use Porn

By Independent Publishers Group

He chose porn over me. Porn killed my marriage. It killed my trust. It destroyed my sense of self and understanding of true intimacy-CourtneyShattering the popular myth that porn is harmless, the personal accounts of 25 brave women in He Chose Porn over Me reveal the real-life trauma experienced by women at the hands of their porn-consuming partners men who were supposed to care for them. This confronting but necessary book dares to tell the truth about pornography's destructive impact about the men who habitually use it and the women and children who are mistreated and discarded as a result.The women in this book were collateral damage in their partner's insatiable greed for porn. Their stories tell of the crushing of intimacy, respect, connection, love. Porn colonised their families, leaving women rejected and scarred. They were subjected to sexual terrorism in their own homes. The men, turbo-charged by pornography, were intoxicated by sexualised power. They didn't care if they lost everything including their partners. In this haunting exposé, pornography is rightfully situated as an insidious tool of violence against women.The contributors, now working to re-build their lives, found a confidante in Melinda Tankard Reist who supported them in the sharing of their experiences in these pages, and to warn other women don't date men who use porn...As long as pornography exists, we don't stand a chance of creating a fair and equal world. —Carla

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jul 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781925950595

Book preview

MELINDA TANKARD REIST

Introduction

We’re in love. He struggles with porn. Do you think it’s OK to stay with him? A young woman approached me in the ornate hallway of a private college as the crowd dispersed following my address to its graduating students about the devastating impacts of pornography on their generation. It was mid-2021, at an event that only just made it through as the latest COVID lockdown rolled out across New South Wales, Australia.

She hadn’t been in the audience because she’d had to work that evening. But, on her return, her friends had talked to her about what I had said. Bright-eyed and glowing in the thrall of first love, she told me about her new boyfriend. He was wonderful, they were so happy … but … he had confessed to using porn. She was concerned, naturally, but was it enough reason to cool things and take a step back? Should she stick with him and help him overcome his problem, or break it off until he’d proven he would choose her over porn?

I offer this book to that woman, and all young women, as a warning. The testimonies in this book show where you could end up — a shell of a woman, living a half-life, tied to a man who either treats you as a blow-up sex doll or has no interest in you at all. Continuing on this path — without radical action and demonstrable change by him — will not lead to your best life.

Shortly after meeting the young woman above, I came across heartfelt advice from US abuse and trauma recovery coach, Sarah McDugal, who asked other women like this, Why choose to walk into hell? (see pp. 80).

He Chose Porn Over Me is also for the women who are trying to make a life with porn-drunk men. The women who have tried everything, including submission to his porn-warped desires (What can I do to make it more like porn? asked one woman I know, who, newly-married, quickly realised her husband had no interest in her).

It’s for women drowning in self-blame; the women who think there is something wrong with them for feeling repulsed when men want to act out their violent fantasies on their bodies. And for the women who know, deep down, it’s not meant to be like this.

No, you don’t just need to try harder. It’s not you. It’s him. Porn is abuse. It’s not your job to fix him. He needs to do the work himself, and recognise he has become a patron of a global industry built on the bodies of women and girls. He needs to see the depth of suffering he caused his partner, acknowledge the erosion of his humanity and the atrophy of his empathy, and run for help.

You should not be expected to sacrifice the rest of your life to a porn-twisted man who loves his porn more than he loves you.

Some will inevitably ask — Don’t you think men can change? I do believe this is possible. I know men who have broken their habitual porn use. But it took drastic action — commitment, effort and time, leading to observable change. As the stories here show, some men do not make the necessary effort. Or they just pretend and lie. Some women believed them and held out hope for many years, but there was no change.

A man contacted me out of the blue. He said he had broken free from a history of porn use. He saw the damage it had caused: to himself, his wife, and his children. He wanted to help other men get free of porn’s grip, and so he offered to work with me in schools and elsewhere. I decided to speak with his wife to get her perspective. She became a contributor to this book. Turns out he hadn’t changed after all.

He Chose Porn Over Me is, first of all, for women — the ones who need to be warned, and those who need to get out. Perhaps a book of stories about men re-engaging with their humanity, valuing the humanity of women, and recognising that porn consumption is inconsistent with human progress, can be written one day.

It’s what he chose over me every day for 11 years.

Courtney CatEarth wrote this line in her searing lament over her husband’s preference for porn over her, every day for the 11 years of their marriage.

Her pain — and anger — at a rapacious, predatory, multi-billion dollar industry, which warped and stunted him and made her feel inadequate and unable to compete, is visceral, red-hot with rage and grief. Porn Is Killing Us, she says of the collective agony of a increasing number of women.

Courtney’s evocative prose echoes the brokenness, humiliation and abandonment felt by the 25 women who generously — and vulnerably — share their stories in this book. Her words also reflect the emotional turmoil of the many other women who contacted me and whose correspondence I draw from this Introduction.

The collection came together very quickly. At the end of another COVID-19-ravaged year, I posted on social media about a 21-year-old woman who had called off her wedding the same week she learned her fiancé was addicted to watching porn¹ (Cliff, 2018). My social media in-boxes filled with stories of women who wished they’d done the same. I followed up with a few more posts quoting some of these women, which led to a cascade of even more traumatised women coming forward to say: This is me, this is my story too … (Most names and some identifying details have been changed at the contributors’ requests.)

One young woman shared her experiences at the hands of a series of chronic porn users from the age of 16. A number of women writing to me were in their 20s, others in their 60s. More than one had gone into marriage not knowing their husband-to-be was a compulsive consumer of pornography. From young women in their first relationship, to women leaving first husbands due to unrelenting porn use only to discover their second husband was no different, to women hanging on for years — at the total costs of themselves — thinking tomorrow he might change …

The men who caused this misery were teachers, academics, doctors, lawyers, pastors, military officers, blue-collar workers, artists, IT workers, landscape gardeners, and fathers and grandfathers.

Pornography colonised their lives

The men consumed porn everywhere. At home, in the garage, the shed, at work, in the car, in the work truck, on the plane, in the toilets at bus tour rest stops. Multiple times a day, even when they were supposed to be looking after the baby.

The women — and, for those who were mothers, their children — were collateral damage in their partner’s insatiable greed for porn. Their stories tell of the crushing of intimacy, of sex that was deadening. Sex became mechanical. We only ever had porn style sex, we never made love, writes Maggie in this book. Respect, connection, and love — the bindings that keep a relationship intact — unravelled.

Porn colonised their union, their families and homes, and seeped into every aspect of their lives, leaving women rejected and scarred and knowing they were being compared to other women and would never match up. They tried and tried, thinking it was their failure — if only I could be a better wife, not provoke him, try harder, lose weight. As feminist therapist, Dr Betty McLellan, put it (2011, p. 254):

For as long as pornography exists, the harms to all women will continue: a lowered self-esteem; confused and embarrassed self-image; a struggle to rise above the image of women perpetuated in pornography; a losing battle to reach and maintain equality with men; the desire to be treated with respect and dignity by one’s male colleagues in the workplace only to be disappointed again and again by those whose image of women is affected by their reliance on pornography.

Jacqui, commenting on my Facebook post about a man admitting he’d lied to his partner and of course watched porn, wrote:

I know that every time it came to light that my husband was ‘getting off’ on the images of other women/people in sexual acts made me feel incredibly devalued as a wife and sexual being within my marriage. I felt inadequate and that awful feeling that I simply cannot compete with the images he was filling his mind with (Facebook comment, 28 June 2019).

The men had nothing to give; they grew harsh, distracted, were self-serving and uncaring. They had no time for the ebbs and flows of home-life; were unmoored from partners and children who got in the way of the satisfying of their appetites through porn fodder delivered at the touch of a key.

In ‘An Open Letter to Porn’ (April 2016), well-known researchers and clinical psychologists Dr John and Dr Julie Gottman describe its destructive impacts on relationships. We are led to unconditionally conclude that for many reasons, porn poses a serious threat to couple intimacy and relationship harmony, they wrote.

The destruction of trust and ‘attachment security’ that pornography brings to relationships is also explored in an article by Spencer Zitzman and Mark Butler in the Journal of Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity (2009, p. 216). They are equally sure of pornography’s harmful effects on bonds between couples:

Pornography in no way supports or fosters intimate, attachment-linked and attachment-sustaining sexual gratification, anchored in emotional connection, intimate responsiveness, and relationship/attachment fidelity.

Dr Caroline Norma, who co-edited Prostitution Narratives: Stories of survival in the sex trade with me (Norma and Tankard Reist, 2016), emailed this observation after reading an early draft of this book:

It’s actually quite an extraordinary contemporary phenomenon that men are so loyal to porn that they’re prepared to have women leave them — that real women and children, households, future plans etc. are nothing in the face of men’s porn usage. They just end up meaning nothing, because men actively and willingly choose porn regardless.

As Paula told me: He chose porn over me and over us, again and again (pers.com., 28 November 2021).

Moral erosion

Some women described how porn use amplified pre-existing abusive and narcissistic tendencies; that relationship traumas were compounded. Others observed the moral eroding of their partners and the shattering of the image they’d had of them. Many reflect on their partner consistently and wilfully engaging in behaviour antithetical to who they thought him to be. And if he wasn’t who she thought he was, what did that mean for their relationship and future? Caroline relayed the grinding down of her husband’s empathy in Big Porn Inc. which I co-edited with Abigail Bray in 2011 (p. xxx):

Any suggestion … of the reality that women were coerced or treated badly was dismissed. They were fine, they were well paid. Self-delusional and ambiguous arguments ran amok. He seemed to have gone to a different place; to comment about the women in porn and me in a cold and detached way, to say things about women’s bodies, about sexual acts which came out of his mouth with swinging bluntness. A layer of empathy had been ground away. My man. The one I had promised to love and cherish.

In this shattering of reality many women experienced the metaphorical stealing of the man they had known. Kim (Facebook comment, 29 January 2022) saw herself in one of my posts quoting another woman tossed aside for ‘pornsex’ (Klein, 2011, p. 86):

I think I held my breath reading this, it’s word for word my seven year marriage to a sweet, funny, sensitive, handsome soulmate … I lost the man I married about a year in, pregnant with our daughter. A stranger took him over and never left. Self-involved, neglectful, secretive, erratic, irritable, lazy, turning compulsively to his old habit of porn. He wasn’t ‘with’ me in bed, he was inside his mind with these fantasies and it made me feel worthless and used; like a prostitute.

I couldn’t reach him, I couldn’t bring him back.

I’d never felt more lonely.

Feeling worthless and used by men they no longer recognised is a common theme in the women’s stories in this collection.

The porn star experience

Women told of a total lack of respect for their boundaries, an overblown sense of entitlement, expectations that they would provide sex-on-demand, and participate in sex acts they found degrading and demeaning. Their men knew only a power-over version of sex and their gratification triumphed over empathy every time.

The women could tell when their partners were using porn or having a ‘relapse’, because the nature of the sex changed. He wielded phallic power over her. It was amazing how his behaviour changed when he was watching porn compared to when he was not watching it, writes Maggie. I knew when he had had a lapse before he even told me.

Women describe having to replicate the performance of women in the porn industry, with their partners expecting a ‘porn star experience’. Gemma writes:

He wanted me to scream and ‘perform’ in a way that felt unnatural but would make him feel gratified even if it would just be an act as he wasn’t actually reciprocating or focused on learning about my body or my pleasure at all. Sometimes he would want me to dress differently and ask why I didn’t wear what other girls wore like shorter skirts.

Natural affection was crushed. The women’s feelings and grievances were minimised, belittled and trivialised; their need to be understood, heard and valued outside of sexually servicing men they tried so hard to care for, ignored. He only knew a pornographic style of relating.²

Brandi says she no longer asks for hugs.

When I want a hug or comfort he turns it into wanting sex and then gets so angry when I decline. I no longer ask for hugs. I feel devoid of emotion. The only time he would touch me is when he wanted sex. He couldn’t even give me a hug without it turning into him thrusting into me (pers.com., 20 December 2021).

Porn sex. Rough sex. Criminal sex.

It is difficult to refuse sex when in a relationship with a man saturated in porn experiences. In porn, women are up for it 24/7. And refusal is just another porn genre called ‘forced’ or ‘violated’ (Tankard Reist, 2021). Forcing compliance is a standard component of their sexual repertoire. Madeleine told me: He would emotionally abuse me for saying no (pers.com., 16 January 2022). And Kate wrote in this book: After being forced to perform sexual tasks for his own pleasure, I would lie in bed and cry silently.

Most men asserted their sexual ownership over their partners. Women were subjected to what was essentially sexual terrorism in their own homes. The men, turbo-charged by porn, were intoxicated by sexualised power. One contributor observed her partner would go into a trance-like state as he enacted his pornfuelled fantasies on her body.

Two women were pressured into sex shortly after the birth of a child, with one suffering the agony of torn stitches as a result.

Some women discovered their partner’s history of porn use and of buying women for sex after they were charged with sexually assaulting their partner at home. Other women made the stomach-churning discovery of child sexual exploitation material on their partner’s computer.

Porn and domestic violence

He Chose Porn Over Me situates porn as a significant element in the perpetration of domestic abuse. The men in this book inflicted physical, mental, financial, verbal, emotional and spiritual violence. As Dr Caroline Taylor wrote