It’s January. You’re beginning to hear about a virus sprouting up in Asia. You’ve just begun a relationship with your crush.
It’s now March and Canada is seeing rising case numbers of that virus. You and your boyfriend buy a few bags of beans off on an otherwise empty store shelf. Toilet paper has become more valuable than oil. Mad Max-style coalitions plunge the world into chaos and BDSM attire. Trees and the sky become distant memories as we devolve into a burrowing species. You’re leaving Ottawa to wait out the first wave of the pandemic in your hometown.
Give or take some dramatic details, this was my experience in the early days of COVID-19. Like many others, the pandemic had me physically apart from my partner, leaving me, to put it eloquently, horny as all fuck.
If the boom in porn consumption during quarantine is any indicator, I was far from alone. Without a body to hold, grab, bite, tie up, piss on or [insert your favourite kink here], the urge to masturbate is perfectly logical. Wanting some sort of material to ‘crank it’ to often goes along with that.
However, pornography is a divisive topic for many people both in and out of intimate relationships. Outside of a relationship, a person’s feelings towards porn should really only affect themselves. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to watch it. Since a relationship is made of individuals, the simplicity should transfer, right?
Wrong, you absolute clown.
Intimate relationships can complicate the discussion around pornography, and rightfully so. What are each person’s feelings towards porn? If everyone in a relationship is either for or against porn, then the relationship’s ‘rules’ toward porn are pretty clear-cut.
Of course, humans aren’t bastions of pure logic and reason. A person’s attitude towards their partner’s porn consumption can be influenced by factors ranging from jealousy to ethics to their own experiences with porn. There may be a myriad of reasons that a person doesn’t want their partner watching porn, but I feel that when there is a conflict between people on their porn allowance the question becomes, “Do those reasons matter?”
Porn is an artistic genre. I feel that restricting your partner’s porn consumption (if it’s a healthy consumption, i.e. isn’t interfering with your day-to-day functionality) can be an overly-controlling behaviour based in stigmatization around sex, sexual experiences outside monogamy, and sex workers.
I am not advocating for anyone to disrespect or betray their relationships over porn. Every relationship is unique in its boundaries, and restricting porn can be fine, so long as all parties in the relationship are unambiguously okay with that agreement.
Negative attitudes surrounding porn that is safely and consensually made are heavily influenced by the societal taboos surrounding sex. From my perspective, restricting your partner’s porn consumption on the basis of a tired understanding that it is ‘exploitive’ is akin to restricting their access to other explicit content, like horror films or violent video games.
Some porn certainly is exploitive, but exploitation is present in some form in any industry, as capitalism is inherently exploitative and anything that is produced within it will be part of that exploitation.
Pornographic content refers to a massive quantity of work across countless mediums, and varies wildly from piece to piece. Therefore, saying all porn is exploitive is simply not true.
Let’s say a dispute begins between a couple over Partner A buying an erotic novel, or an independent sex worker’s masturbation video. Partner A wants to consume these works and Partner B tells them they can’t. Partner B claims porn is exploitative and immoral, and it feels disrespectful that Partner A would want to experience it, and this makes Partner B uncomfortable.
Some might see this as reasonable—yet I would take the same stance I took above. Would this request (‘do not consume what you’ve paid for’) feel reasonable if it were applied to a horror film or a video game? Certainly both the horror film and video games industries are rife with exploitation. Both mediums could be argued to push immoral messages on the consumer. A person could claim that their partner watching them would go against their values, and make them uncomfortable as well.
What distinguishes porn from these other types of content is its focus on providing the consumer with sexual gratification. If a partner bans porn on any of the grounds listed above, but doesn’t apply them to other genres of content that also violate those grounds, the only factor that is influencing their decision must come from that sexual aspect—something they are clearly approaching from a stigmatized lens.
What remains is the debate between the individual’s liberties in a relationship versus the respect they owe their partner. While everyone’s interpretation of what is acceptable in a relationship will vary, I feel restricting what content your partner can and can’t watch borders on a controlling form of behaviour—something that is unacceptable for a healthy relationship.
Featured graphic by Etta Gerrits.
