So much going on here

[conuly]

DEAR ABBY: My husband looks at pornography. I find it disgusting and it turns me off. I feel that if he has to look at it, it means I'm not good enough or sexy enough for him. I don't believe his excuse of "It has nothing to do with you." When I try to tell him how it makes me feel, he becomes indignant and turns the conversation around to something he doesn't like about me to take the focus off himself.

He doesn't watch porn around me, but he gets pop-up ads on his phone all the time, so I assume he looks at it frequently. I have even seen notifications suggesting he belongs to a website where he can chat with women, although he says he has no idea why he gets them. I'm not stupid. I don't know anyone else with this kind of issue. I haven't been able to have sex with him lately knowing this is going on. I don't have plans to leave him over this, but what can I do? -- TURNED OFF IN WASHINGTON

DEAR TURNED OFF: Realize that your husband's appetite for porn really has nothing to do with your level of attractiveness, and EVERYthing to do with his own appetites. Next, and this is equally important, please seek a referral to a licensed psychotherapist who can help you to rebuild your damaged self-esteem. Your husband is far from the only man who enjoys X-rated entertainment. (So do some women.) And many couples view it together as a form of erotica.

The chat rooms, however, are another matter. Perhaps your husband can explain that to you during some of the sessions with your therapist. It might be more effective than him becoming critical and accusatory when you attempt to try to explain how his behavior affects you. Of this I am sure: Denying sex to your husband not only won't improve your relationship, but it will erode it further, and I don't recommend it.

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Comments

[conuly]

So, first things first, I think everybody but LW understands that frequency of pop-up ads does not necessarily correlate with frequency of porn viewing. In this case, we know Husband is consuming porn, but that brings us to the second point which is that the frequency of pop-ups and alerts and texts about sexting services does not necessarily correlate with actually having an account. Maybe his phone is just infected with a virus or he's been getting a lot of spam texts and emails. It's not at all clear to me what's going on. (Edit: And I think sexting strangers is a heck of a lot more obviously problematic in a marriage than pornography. I don't know if that's what's happening here, but if it is then it's not at all in question whether or not that is wrong. We can debate about the porn consumption, but this, I feel, has no real debate.)

With that said, porn has nothing to do with whether or not you want your partner. Abby is right about that. However, if your partner has made it abundantly clear that this is a total dealbreaker for them then you need to either stop watching pornography or, at the very least, start being a heck of a lot more discreet about it. And the two of them should have discussed this before marriage.

LW's husband also needs to stop this childish form of argument. If your wife says "I don't like all the porn" the correct response is not "Well, I don't like the fact that you don't always fold the laundry".

And that brings us to the last point, which is the sex. LW has a right to not have sex if she doesn't want it, including with Husband, and in this case it makes sense that if LW thinks of this porn as disgusting turn-off, as well as being personally insulting of her self-worth, that she wouldn't have sex. However, let's be clear, most people would leave a marriage where one partner, having no illness or injury that makes sex difficult or painful, had decided to stop having sex with the other.

And maybe LW should leave this marriage. If couples counseling does not get results pretty fast, that might be the best option for both of them. They're not treating each other with respect.

[summerstorm]

It's entirely possible that what the LW thinks is her husband chatting with women is ALSO malware/spam.

[conuly]

Yes, I believe I said that.

[minoanmiss]

So much unnecessary pain. Augh.

[jadelennox]

there's a missing piece of actionable advice: nothing about that device behavior means the husband belongs to a chat room, that means he has malware, Abby. LW, stop wasting energy on things that are none of your business, and call a grandchild to come disinfect your devices -- and put on ublock or the basic filters so your husband can look at porn, and you can download recipes from sketchy websites, without getting infected devices.

tl;dr:

• your husband's private porn watching habits are none of your business unless he wants them to be
• they have nothing to do with you
• he shouldn't abuse you when you fight, and you both need to stop being cruel to each other
• you don't have to fuck him if you don't want to
• you don't know how computers work
• please befriend someone who knows how computers work and get them to pesticide your house

[dabbleswithpoisons]

Yeah, I was thinking, this is arguably a separate issue because we know dude does watch porn, but it feels worth mentioning that I occasionally get 'sexy ladies in £@%#& want to chat with you' 'hi I'm Nicola and I want to chat with you tonight!' pop-ups and I have literally never watched porn on the Internet.
Obviously the fact that she really minds him watching porn and he refuses to make any concessions to how she feels is a legitimate issue, but I also suspect she's so upset about it that she's seeing it where it isn't as well as where it is.

[mrissa]

I am now having flashbacks to New Year's Day with my elderly aunt shoving her phone at my husband wailing, "Make it stop showing me the ladies' naked butts! If you can't make it stop showing me the naked butts at least make them men's butts!" Which...is not a form of partial virus clearing he is capable of doing. (He got the virus fully off her phone. Until next time.)

[watersword]

I'm sorry, but that's hilarious. Thank you, I needed that laugh.

[lilysea]

I have never understood the "watching porn is cheating" idea

It's fine to say "I don't want to watch porn with you"

It's fine to say "I would rather you watch porn when I'm not home, or watch porn in another room with headphones on"

It's fine to say "It worries me that the particular TYPE of porn you watch seems really violent/really misogynistic/really degrading to women/seems racist, when there's much more respectful porn available to buy, can we talk about that?"

but the idea that porn = cheating feels really alien to me

If porn = cheating,

does reading fanfic = cheating?

what about reading a romance novel?

what about watching a TV show or a film with a sex scene, or with an attractive actor being naked?

It all feels very Christian right wing to me

[minoanmiss]

Word..

[conuly]

I don't disagree, but I also feel that if your partner really hates something you do then you need to engage with that in some way rather than go "but no you" all day long.

[minoanmiss]

you need to engage with that in some way rather than go "but no you" all day long.

The "but no you" is absolutely unacceptable, and something I see in many of these letters: LW reporting that when they[often she] try to discuss X thing that Partner [often he] does that bothers them, Partner responds with "well this is what YOU do wrong so THERE". Unhelpful and unkind.

That said...

It may be because I don't find porn inherently disgusting, nor do I think " if he has to look at it, it means I'm not good enough or sexy enough for him." so I am bothered by demands from one partner for another one to give up a pleasant hobby. I had a friend (she died-- I do miss her) who asked me to move in with her, and my real reasons for not doing so were 1) she and I were both financially unstable 2) she deeply disapproved of two of my major hobbies (fanfic and fan music aka filk) and I didn't feel comfortable living with someone who disapproved of things I did for fun and considered relatively harmless.

Now a marriage is not (just) housemates, and so on, but still. I have had SOs who had hobbies that buggged me and in most cases on looking at the hobbies through their eyes I made peace with those hobbies.

[conuly]

I do think that LW would be well-served by just getting the heck over it, but I also think that porn is a slightly different beast than filk. If she really doesn't want to get over it then I absolutely support the alternative of "get a divorce". (I guess I'd support that alternative if it was his fanfic hobby that was her dealbreaker, but I'd absolutely think that was more strange than this one!)

[minoanmiss]

Hahah yeah, "and so on" was meant to encopmass "porn is not filking," although when it comes to fanworks...

... which reminds me of a Thing that Happened in Supernatural fandom when a woman's husband found out about her SPN fanwork hobby and made her quit.

[ashbet]

Agreed -- watching porn (or masturbating) is not the same as "cheating."

There are situations in which this becomes a marital problem (too much money spent on porn, getting into direct/sexual chats or videos with others [if that's not something they've discussed with their partner], exclusively watching porn and neglecting your partner sexually, etc.), but a lot of that has to do with INCONSIDERATION and not communicating well. That doesn't turn it into infidelity, but it brings up issues that should be addressed directly.

I don't believe in statements like "All men watch porn," but many people do, and masturbation is a part of many people's sex lives (including when partnered.)

Focusing on "cheating" or "porn is evil" really fails to address the usual problem, which is that the spouse is not behaving considerately toward their partner.

(I do absolutely think it's controlling and unacceptable for anyone to insist that their partner never engage with titillating media or never masturbate -- they are entitled to a solo sex life as well as a shared one with their partner.)

[katiedid717]

Yeah, the only time I ever had a problem with a partner watching porn was when I made advances, he turned them down because he was tired, and then 5 minutes later I walked into our home office to see him jerking off to porn. And in that case it wasn't even really about the porn, it was "I literally just asked if I could do this with you and you said you were tired, wtf"

[castiron]

Yep. It didn't bother me that Ex liked reading erotica and masturbating; it bothered me that Ex was far more interested in that than in sex with me. (Not the only or even the primary reason Ex is an ex, but it was up there.)

[katiedid717]

I don't understand why people use the regular browser to view porn - you do it in incognito mode so that your device doesn't save the cookies, and then you don't get the porn ads during your normal browsing. As someone who looks at porn regularly, there are a LOT of ads for "Chat with local women!" or "Hot singles in your area!" etc that include the ability to live chat - the ads appearing does not mean LW's husband is actually using the chat services. Those ads are just the standard on porn sites.

It seems like the base issue here is a sexual mismatch between LW and husband, and this is just turning into a self-perpetuating problem: LW is turned off by the porn viewing, so LW won't have sex with husband, so husband is relying more on the porn, and then LW is even more disgusted, etc.