Thoughts on “He Chose Porn Over Me”: Women Harmed by Men Who Use Porn, edited by Melinda Tankard Reist
This book, a series of first-person accounts by women of their male partners’ porn use and the train crash it causes in their family lives, is a painful but necessary read.
There were so many resonances with my own failed marriage. The women’s dismay at how that beautiful sensitive man they fell in love with had morphed into a selfish narcissist who neither noticed nor cared about the impact of his behaviour on his wife and children. All that mattered was that he got his own way – the once sublime sex now reduced to something more akin to masturbation with a blow-up doll.
For me, this all happened more than three decades ago, long before we had the internet with its wall-to-wall porn in our homes, let alone in our pockets.
Misogynistic patterns are baked deep into our culture. Late in our marriage, desperate at his endless put-downs and occasional violence, I’d say, ‘Don’t you see, you’re treating me exactly as you used to complain that your father treated your mother?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous’, he’d retort. ‘What do you know, you stupid, ignorant woman.’ And my head would echo with the same words my father would snap at my own mother. I was alone in a profoundly hostile world.
It was the feminist underground that saved me then; that made me understand that it wasn’t entirely my fault; that I wasn’t a failure; that these patterns were intrinsic to the patriarchal world we live in; that the capitalist system along with its military industrial complex relied on the nuclear heterosexual family to brutalise us into conformity, to make us accept abuse of power and the hierarchies that dominate all our institutions – from the schoolyard to corporations and governments.
And yes, my ex-husband had learned his lessons well. He’d internalised the rule that once a woman becomes your wife or permanent partner, she is your property and this is sealed when she gives birth to your child. She is not a full human being. She must serve you and not disturb your equilibrium by expressing her own needs and if she does, she deserves your full wrath and any damage or violence that follows is her fault. And while I didn’t believe this in the same way that he did, I was utterly unprepared for resistance or change. All I knew was to fawn, while being constitutionally unable to do this consistently enough to assuage his rage.
Thanks to the women’s liberation movement, I eventually found a way out and built a new life for myself and my child as a single mother, and slowly I learned new ways of being; how to stand up for myself and other women.
But as the widespread change that resulted from the women’s liberation movement and the other liberation movements that developed in the 1960s and 70s started to gain ground, and people were no longer so prepared to accept abuse of power and hierarchies, a brutal backlash took hold.
Pornography was fundamental to that backlash and drove the technological revolution – first VHS, then the Internet, broadband and the development of ever smaller and more powerful devices. Even though pornography became increasingly violent, governments practically everywhere turned a blind eye. This didn’t change significantly even when it became clear that children were being exposed to it from increasingly early ages and that all or most of the content is composed of “crime scene videos”, as Suzzan Blac so memorably put it, and not simply videos of sex.
Internet porn is not fantasy, it is real violence and it is incitement to violence and hatred against women. “He chose porn over me” is evidence of both the devastation that porn causes and how it inculcates men into misogynistic cruelty more effectively even than the old nuclear patriarchal families could. It confirms everything the radical feminists have been warning us about for decades, including that when people are exposed to porn in childhood, the consequences are even more catastrophic.
Gemma, one of the contributors, explains:
“When using his computer, Pornhub came up as the last visited site. I was horrified by the nature of what he’d been looking at, how malevolent it was towards women. […] It all seemed to be about injuring women intimately. […] I’d had absolutely no idea of the level of hate towards women in pornography, that it was rife with so much abuse, degradation and exploitation.” [Pages 123-4]
“I think that for young men now, whose formative sexual development has likely been largely influenced by pornography and living in such a hyper-sexualised age, they won’t be able to view the content critically. It is terrifying to think how this will play out in their attitudes towards women and children.” [page 125]
Catherine echoes this:
“My chronic porn-using husband said he could not see women as human beings. He ruined our family financially and destroyed our relationships within our community and extended family.” [Page 46]
On page 70, Sharni says:
“Part of what made things so difficult was that, because of many years of porn use instead of meaningful sex with real people, his body was conditioned to get off only in a certain way…”
Many of the women find that their partners were not only using porn but also paying ‘cam girls’ and prostituted women for sex – which is further evidence, not that it’s needed, that porn and prostitution are not separate phenomena.
Each woman’s piece ends with advice to other women and about what needs to change. Don’t go out with men who use porn is a key theme, as is listen to – and believe – your instincts. And churches, relationship counsellors, schools, universities, and all kinds of services and institutions are urged to get their act together and educate themselves on the reality of porn and the devastation it causes and to stop making excuses for men’s porn use and the barbaric behaviour that stems from it.
This book challenges anyone who still thinks that “sex work is real work” and porn is healthy sexual expression. Would governments and corporations more or less everywhere tolerate, ignore and condone such violence and incitement to violence against any identifiable social group other than women?
This tolerance alone is proof that the sex industry is neither radical nor subversive and can never be part of any real socialist revolution. Rather porn and prostitution are tools for the oppression of women and an assault on our collective humanity – for the benefit of predatory capitalism.
Porn and the sex industry help no one. As Melissa articulates so well:
“[compulsive porn use] turns [users] into someone who is selfish, narcissistic, entitled, and willing to lose everything for their porn.” [Page 170]
Sharni again:
“It’s interesting that even after having this rough experience, I am still quite sympathetic to my ex and others like him for being victims of the porn industry and its lies. It doesn’t excuse anything but sometimes I think men who got into porn as very young kids never stood a chance. I feel that my chance at happiness with him was stolen by the porn industry, the adults in his life not protecting him, and the culture of toxic masculinity he was raised in.” [Page 71]
This book is clear evidence of the devastating loss of status that porn is causing women and children. Let this book be a call to arms against the sex industry. At FiLiA 2022, French lawyer, Lorraine Questiaux, made it clear that all European countries already have sufficient legislation that could be used to take down the porn industry if we could only find the collective will to use it.
It is time. We cannot allow this vile assault on our individual and collective humanity to continue unchallenged.
‘He Chose Porn Over Me’: Women Harmed by Men Who Use Porn, edited by Melinda Tankard Reist.
Spinifex
Title: “As long as porn exists, we don’t stand a chance of creating a fair and equal world” is a quote from Carla on page 117.