His Porn, Her Pain, Confronting America's PornPanic with Honest Talk about Sex

by Marty Klein

  “OK, I’ll tell you how I feel,” Rachel eventually said to Jackson. “I’m afraid you don’t want to have sex with me because I don’t look like a porn actress, and that when we do finally have sex you’re thinking of them instead of me.”

  Brava—perfectly said. Sad, but perfectly said.

  And Jackson was able to get it: “Doc, I guess this is where I sympathize instead of telling her she’s wrong, right?” Bravo—perfectly done. “Rachel, that sounds lousy. I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said.

  They both looked at me—now what?

  “Jackson, if you don’t want Rachel to feel that way, how would you like her to feel?” “Um, I think she’s pretty attractive, so I’d like her to feel that way. And I know we don’t have sex very much, but when we do, I’d like her to know I’m focused on her.”

  “Thanks, but I don’t get that,” Rachel said testily. “If you’re used to gorgeous bodies and deep-throating, why come to me? And when you do, why focus on me instead of fantasizing about some fabulous babe?”

  This is where things get interesting—when people finally start talking honestly. Sometimes I think patients need me to speak for them, and I do. Other times I feel I can trust a patient to speak the truth gracefully and without rancor. So I turned to Jackson, took a quiet breath, and motioned for him to answer her.

  “Honey, it’s not real,” he said. “True, I get excited and have nice big orgasms when I jack off to porn. But they’re videos, not people. They don’t kiss me, don’t hug me, don’t know my name. It’s true that your body isn’t like an actress’s body, but you’re real. I can think about them when I’m alone. When I’m with you—especially if we’re getting along—I want to focus on you. On us.”

  “But look at this body,” she said tearily. “My hair’s turning gray, my butt’s getting bigger, and my boobs sag. I know you love nice boobs. I just don’t have them anymore. So with unlimited porn babes to look at and think about, how can you get excited with me? Why would you want to?”

  “Wait a minute,” I jumped in. “First of all,” I said, looking at her warmly, “at your age breasts don’t sag, they relax.” They laughed, and the mood lightened a bit. “Second, that’s your work right now, Rachel—to imagine your body as an attractive sexual object to Jackson, to imagine that you bring something to him that he can process into erotic feelings. Every adult has to start doing that work sooner or later. And don’t tell me it’s easier with men. As they get older, men have to envision themselves as being sexually attractive and competent, too—and it’s not always easy.”

  “I don’t know,” said Rachel quietly. “Well,” I said, “as long as you can’t imagine yourself as attractive in Jackson’s eyes, you’ll always be suspicious about his experience with you, and you’ll never be able to enjoy it yourself. This isn’t a porn problem,” I said. “And getting him to stop watching porn won’t fix this problem.”

  “Maybe this is related,” she said thoughtfully. “I think I’m nervous about how successful he’s getting. It’s not like I think he’ll leave me,” she said, “but that he’s going off on new adventures without me, and that I’ll be boring compared to all the exciting new people he’s meeting.” “That sounds scary,” said Jackson right on cue. We both looked at him and chuckled.

  I leaned in her direction. “So your kids are growing up, your husband is growing up, and you’re imagining feeling left behind by everyone?” At that she burst into tears. And that issue—supporting our loved ones’ autonomy even while we fear abandonment—was a key to the entire case.

  When Rachel saw that his porn-watching wasn’t the problem, she told him he could go ahead and watch—“as long as you connect with me on a regular basis.” Pleased to have part of his adulthood back, Jackson agreed—“as long as you’re usually nice to me.” I clarified this—“usually nice, not always nice—right?” He smiled and agreed that that’s what he meant.

  Jackson had to change his thinking a bit, and point himself more in her direction when thoughts of sex crossed his mind. This didn’t mean he’d abandon masturbating to porn altogether, just that he’d remind himself of options with her—and, presumably, choose sex with her more frequently.

  That is, in fact, the way it worked out. They still had to navigate their family situation, in which he worked too hard, spent less time with his kids than he (or she, or they) wished, and she struggled to create a satisfying life outside her role as homemaker. But they did it with more affection and trust than they had in years. They even had a little more sex, which led to more smiles. Which sometimes led to a little more sex.

  Case B

  JOHN & BORA: THE MAN WHO TRIED TO COMMUNICATE THROUGH PORN

  Although John worked for a well-known high-tech company, he was not an engineer—he was a designer. Unlike many of my more science-oriented patients, he has friends outside work, listens to music, can talk about the news, and cares if his clothes match. Our session was often a change of pace for me in the day’s routine of computer geniuses.

  Ironically, it was John’s non-tech wife Bora who was inhibited and non-social. Bora felt especially self-conscious about sex. The daughter of small-town Korean immigrants, she always felt inferior to American women. They all seemed so self-confident and energetic to her. Sex had never been mentioned during her childhood, and like many Korean women she was completely unprepared for a sexually dynamic marriage—which is what her artistic American husband had envisioned for them.

  John and Bora came to therapy because he wanted her to watch porn with him as a preliminary to sex, and she was extremely uncomfortable doing so. Meanwhile, their sex life was languishing. He was upset. So was she—mostly because he was upset, which meant she was failing as a wife. His response was to urge her to watch a variety of porn with him, and he was confused by her lack of interest, no matter what kind he suggested.

  “Bora, why does John want you to watch porn together?” I asked. He started to answer, but I interrupted. In a respectful tone, she replied, “Perhaps you could ask him.” “No, I’d like you to answer,” I responded gently. This is a common approach I use to find out what people know (or imagine) about their mate’s thinking and expectations. “I don’t know,” she said quietly, an answer that would be common from her in the weeks to come. “I think he wants me to imitate the girls in the videos?”

  John almost jumped out of his chair like an impatient third-grader dying to give the right answer. But I stopped him, saying, “Let’s let her continue.” “Bora,” I asked, “I don’t know if John wants you to imitate the girls in the videos, but if he does—if he does—why would he want that?” John wanted to answer again, but again I gently refused to let him.

  “To get me to be good in sex,” said Bora quietly. “So far I know I’m not, and he’s disappointed.” Ah, now we were getting somewhere.

  John, of course, was bursting to speak. “No, no, no,” he said emotionally. “That’s not it. I want to help you get really excited so you can desire and enjoy our lovemaking. I’m looking for the right porn to get you aroused with me.” Turning to me, he said, “Doc, tell her there are many kinds of porn, and that she should give me a chance to find the right one.”

  For her part, Bora wanted to satisfy her husband. But the more exotic the videos he shared, the more confused and pessimistic she became. If those videos are his idea of a good sexual experience, she reasoned, “I’m never going to please him,” she said sadly. “I’m not like those girls,” she told him, “and it seems you want sex things that … that … well, I don’t know how you find a girl like that, but I’m not one of them.”

  Given the videos John tried to share with her, Bora had gradually become convinced that his taste in sex ran extreme—threesomes, climaxing on a woman’s face, rough fellatio, sex in public. To avoid feeling pressured to do stuff she didn’t want to do, or to continually turn him down (and to maintain her dignity), Bora’s response over time was to quietly withdraw from sex.

  I didn’t want them
damaging their relationship any further. “I suggest four weeks off from genital sex,” I said to their surprise at the end of our session. “Is that OK? If you want to kiss or hug or cuddle, go right ahead,” I said, “but do it knowing that it won’t lead to sex, OK? You can each masturbate privately if you like, but no sex with each other. Agreed?” They agreed—she with relief, he with curiosity.

  When they returned two weeks later, they had indeed refrained from sex. And they were more physically affectionate. I asked them why, and Bora reported feeling freer, less self-critical, closer to him, and less anxious. I smiled. “Interesting, don’t you think?” We talked about other aspects of our previous session. They agreed it had been valuable, encouraging them to talk about “intimacy.” “You mean sex?” I asked gently. Yes, of course.

  “Maybe you two don’t have a porn problem,” I soon continued. “Porn is sort of the way you communicate about sex,” I said, “and it’s not very efficient. It’s confusing things rather than clarifying them.” OK, I had their attention. So what did I think was their problem?

  Although they loved each other, John and Bora hadn’t expressed their sexual interests to each other clearly enough, and so each had incomplete information about the other. Each had to fill in the missing pieces by imagining stories about each other—stories that made things more complicated, not less. And this had been going on for several years.

  Bora thought John wanted to know exactly what sexual activities she wanted, but her vocabulary (and comfort) for that conversation was quite limited. She knew how she wanted to feel, but he didn’t seem to be asking about that—and she didn’t want to make things worse by talking about vague things like her feelings.

  John wanted hot sex, but Bora seemed uninterested. And he couldn’t get her to talk about her interests in a way he found helpful. He believed he simply needed to figure out what intense things she would like, and then they’d do them, and live happily (and hotly) ever after. So he thought they just needed to go through the catalog of stereotyped human eroticism contained in porn, hoping she’d eventually see things she wanted. Too much the eager administrator, he made only limited attempts to get her input, which wasn’t nearly enough for her.

  It was both charming and heartbreaking to see these two people who, most of all, wanted the other to be sexually satisfied—but somehow couldn’t make it happen.

  “John,” I asked, “what message do you think Bora’s getting from your porn-of-the-week approach?” He hadn’t really thought about it. “Do you think she’s feeling more relaxed, more self-accepting, more curious about her body? Do you think she’s feeling more loved?”

  He realized that she probably didn’t. “The porn’s not helping, is it?” he said slowly. “And Bora,” I asked, “can you imagine that John might be using porn as a way of trying to understand your sexuality better? You might think that’s an odd way to do it, but can you imagine that might be what he’s doing?”

  Bora turned to him with a simple and direct question: “Is it?” When he nodded and said it was, the room was quiet for a long time. There was no reason for me to insert myself into their delicate dance of discovery at this point. Finally, Bora spoke.

  “My husband,” she said with a warm smile, “we don’t need those ladies to help us understand each other. Come home and talk to me.”

  He did.

  They only needed a few more sessions after that, which were entirely different. I helped them talk; brokered a few agreements; challenged a couple of myths they both believed (like a real man could make a woman climax from intercourse, if she were a real woman); laid out some facts about contraception, lubricants, and sex toys; and rather than teach them sexual anatomy, encouraged them to teach each other about their bodies.

  Later, at our final session, I asked about porn. “Still not for me,” Bora said simply. “It’s for John. But privately. And not when we both want sex!” Which, apparently, they were starting to enjoy regularly.

  Case C

  JEVON: THE MAN WHO TRIED TO ORGANIZE THE INTERNET

  “He’s a nice guy with a massive porn problem,” said the voicemail. “Maybe the biggest one that even you’ve ever seen.” It was a message from a local therapist who had just referred me a case.

  And so Jevon called me that evening. He said that he had been seeing this therapist about two months, and that when he told her about his porn stash, she replied, “Well, that’s beyond what I know about. You should see Dr. Marty Klein.” We made an appointment for later that month.

  Jevon seemed like a nice guy, a supervisor in a local post office branch. When I met him he was still wearing the blue-gray tie he wore all day at work—unusual in sartorially informal Silicon Valley. In a friendly but straightforward way, he sat down and got right to the point.

  “My therapist said I should see you. I think she’s a little freaked out by my porn collection. We’ve been getting along fine—she’s very good—but two weeks ago I mentioned relaxing with my collection, and she asked a few questions, and when I told her what I had, she looked nervous and said, ‘Um, this is a bit beyond my training. You better see a sex therapist,’ and you were one of two people she recommended. You were the first one who returned my call, so here we are.”

  “Two- or three-minute snippets of adult films,” he said. “Extracts from longer movies.”

  He had about 50,000 of them—yes, about 50,000. That’s a lot of anything. I said, “I’m mandated to report anyone owning images of adult-child sexuality.” “Oh, there’s no child porn in it,” he said. “I don’t go for that stuff. I know some guys do, but not me. I like good old-fashioned naked ladies and regular sex, that’s all I have.” He seemed pretty definite about it. So with that issue out of the way, we could proceed.

  As matter-of-factly as I could, I asked lots of questions, and Jevon answered them all. Yes, the videos showed a pretty wide range of activities. No, most didn’t involve a lot of kissing scenes. Yes, he was still acquiring new ones. No, he never looked at the whole collection all at once—at most, just a section of the collection once in a while. No, he rarely masturbated to the videos already in his collection—it was always to new videos.

  So what was his vision in assembling and expanding this collection? Not surprisingly, his answer was quite mundane: “Nothing, really. It just seemed like a good idea. Fun. Relaxing. I never imagined it would get so big, but it did.”

  It started about six years ago when his wife went to Phoenix to care for her ailing mother for about a month. He’d go to the Internet to find porn with which to masturbate. He used a common free site that had thumbnails (little freeze-frame pictures) of videos; click on the thumbnail and up pops your video. They were organized by category—romantic, threesome, gay, older women, etc. Very convenient, perfect for the modern consumer.

  He’d pick a category (“I like woman–woman or woman–woman–man,” he said), click on a thumbnail, watch, and begin masturbating. “But then I’d start thinking, ‘Well, what about all the other videos?’ So I’d switch to another, and the same thing would happen, so I’d switch from one to the next to the next about 30, 40 times in a single session of masturbation,” he said.

  “Sounds a little hectic,” I said sympathetically.

  “Yes, and it meant one hand was always on the mouse,” he said. “Sometimes it was hard to maintain the continuous arousal that a person wants during masturbation. The different videos didn’t always match up in intensity—one might be from a foreplay scene, another showing people really going at it, etc., so sometimes it was a little weird.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “I started feeling that I was missing more videos than I was watching—which of course I am, when you think about it. So I just got into finding videos I thought I might like to watch in the future, and saving them in files inside my computer. And I categorized them just like on the porn website—pregnant women, or Russian models, or drunk women getting gang-banged, or whatever.”

  So did he find the activity of lo
cating and storing images sexually arousing? “Hmm, interesting question,” he said. “Well, in the first few months, I’d be erect most of the time that I was doing it,” he said. “In fact, sometimes I’d stop and jack off, and after I climaxed, that would be the end of finding and sorting for the night,” he recalled ruefully. “But now I don’t get quite so excited, so it’s easier to keep building the collection, I don’t get so distracted, and I can focus.”

  So he was quite surprised when his wife accused him of being a porn addict. “She knew I used porn for years, and never said a word,” he said. “We had friends, we had family, we had church, there was nothing wrong.” Then she got laid off from her job, and their financial situation became precarious. “And ever since,” he says now, “she gives me a bad time about it. I don’t know why. I just know that I have this harmless hobby, my wife says I’m a porn addict, and I say she should leave me alone to do my thing. She’s mad, I’m mad, and I think somehow the church, or recovery group, or whomever, is giving her bad advice.”

  And indeed, she had been told that he was “addicted,” “disrespectful to her and all women,” and “borderline unfaithful,” and that he should just give up porn and accept her as his only mate. Jevon was confused: “All that stuff isn’t true, is it? I thought what I was doing was harmless. Now it turns out it isn’t? Is there something wrong with me?”

  “Jevon,” I said, “you’ve accumulated 50,000 of something. Forget what the something is for a second. Fifty thousand of anything is a lot, isn’t it?” “I guess so,” he nodded. “You guess so? Listen, don’t just agree with me to be polite. If you don’t realize that 50,000 toy cars or 50,000 bars of hotel soap or 50,000 books about knitting or 50,000 baseball cards is a lot of those things, just say so.”