Is this adultery...

[Viv]

Following from the adultery thread, do posters think using porn is committing adultery?

Here is a recent item for background:

... the new figures show that one in four men aged 25 to 49 have visited an adult website in the past month - a total of 2.5 million...

Relationship agencies have reported that as many as 40 per cent of couples with problems believe pornography has contributed to their difficulties...Christine Lacey, a senior counsellor for Relate, said: "For many women, the reaction is exactly the same as if they discovered their partner is having an affair. They may not be having sex with someone else but the effect is the same if it is detrimental to their marriage."
While some specialists welcomed the figures, saying they show Britons have a more liberated attitude towards sex, others warned the search for graphic images of sex acts is contributing to relationship break-ups.

Phillip Hodson of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy warned that this new generation of "voyeurs" risk problems in their love lives. "The internet has made sex-lazy men even sex-lazier where they get lost in their own world," he added. "It used to be said that men neglected foreplay, but now they are neglecting sex.

The UK porn industry is estimated to be now worth about £1bn, compared with £20bn worldwide. British internet surfers look up the word "porn" more than anyone in the English-speaking world.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/porn-uk-480084.html

[Gareth]

Huge cause of marital breakup so arguably yes. Porn causes more problems than it solves lets just say, even not in marriage.

Also statistics say that 1/3rd of porn users are women. It's not just a guy thing.

[Viv]

Huge cause of marital breakup so arguably yes. Porn causes more problems than it solves lets just say, even not in marriage.

Also statistics say that 1/3rd of porn users are women. It's not just a guy thing.

I left the statistics on women out of the thread because it is not the issue I wish to discuss, i.e. is use of porn being unfaithful?

In the adultery threads, men sometimes take the view that adultery is wrong and dishonest, but the same men will use porn and feel nothing wrong in that.

This could be viewed as double-standards. And the stats show a huge number of men participate in this...1 in 4 men have done so within the past month? It is a major issue.

[Gareth]

Yes, but why do you refer to how many men, and not how many females? It's not exactly objective.

[Viv]

Yes, but why do you refer to how many men, and not how many females? It's not exactly objective.

More men are involved.

[Enver]

I see nothing wrong with looking at porn (full stop :D) while in a relationship, unless it really bothers the other person.

[Gareth]

That still doesn't erase the fact that 1/3rd do.

Surely, it's just being biased towards the male species by trying to excuse it away. Both men and women use porn.

I still find it wrong, but we need to establish the facts.

[An Céachta Dearg]

I see nothing wrong with looking at porn (full stop :D) while in a relationship, unless it really bothers the other person.

I agree

[donquixote99]

do posters think using porn is committing adultery?

Nothing like it. Adultery requires at least two people at the same place at the same time, one making a protein donation to the other.

[Enver]

Nothing like it. Adultery requires at least two people at the same place at the same time, one making a protein donation to the other.

:D:D:D:D

[Viv]

Nothing like it. Adultery requires at least two people at the same place at the same time, one making a protein donation to the other.

Amusing as that comment is, I must dispute it. :p

Could be the OP is flawed in so much as I really intended to ask if this is regarded as being unfaithful.

I kind of agree that unless the dirty deed is actually done, it is not really adultery, but IMO there is a strong case for porn to be regarded as breaking faith in a relationship.

Gareth: OK, I just want to man-bash, I admit it. It annoys me that men use porn as porn promotes abuse of women. Also, it denigrates women and whatever the figures say I suspect only gullible women (who are probably lead into it by men anyhow) ever access porn.;)

[Gareth]

apologies, a lot of feminism (or feminazism as the case may be) get's under my skin that is if it isn't a fair criticism.

[Viv]

OK, here we go...;)

The porn issue is wider than just how it affects marriage. It leads to much greater abuse of women and by using porn, that abuse is supported. It is an issue which I feel people just do not give any thought to:

What do you think is more demeaning to women, being forced to go about their business covered from head to foot and treated as a possession for a man's ego, or being encouraged to go about like a prostitute for everyman's enjoyment?

There are threads here in which people express outrage at the lack of civil liberties for women in Muslim countries. These Muslim women are only being abused by one man.

In western culture it could be said that women are abused by large numbers of men who couldn't care less about their civil rights so long as they can have a leer at a naked woman.

You may say these women have the right to choose whether to be photographed naked or not and that they're making a living. Do you seriously think any woman who is right in the head would choose that life?

These women therefore, are likely to be low intellect, from underprivileged backgrounds, have fallen on hard times, have no prospect of making a decent living, have no idea how to protect themselves and are abused and you should reconsider how you view them.

In a civilised society the strong protect the weak and these women are unprotected. By leering over their pictures, you are encouraging their abuse. This is pretty grim reading, but informs IMO..:

The sexual exploitation of women and children by local and global sex industries violates the human rights of all women and children whose bodies are reduced to sexual commodities in this brutal and dehumanizing marketplace. While experienced as pleasure by the prostitution consumers and as lucrative sources of income by sex industry entrepreneurs, prostitution, sex trafficking, and related practices are, in fact, forms of sexual violence that leave women and children physically and psychologically devastated.


Sexually exploited women and children are the sex industry's primary casualties but not its only victims. Commercial sexual exploitation diminishes the lives of all women and girls by inculcating in men and boys profoundly misogynistic beliefs and attitudes. By teaching males that female bodies are sexual merchandise to be traded, used, and discarded, prostitution bolsters gender inequality in all areas of society. Its effects are most readily apparent, however, in acts of sexual violence against women, in the sexual harassment of women in the workplace, and in violence against women by their intimate partners.


The global sex industry merchandises women and children in a variety of ways--through prostitution, sex trafficking, sex tourism, the mail-order bride trade, and pornography. These practices of sexual exploitation are interconnected and inextricable from each other, and most sexually exploited women and children are subjected to multiple forms of sexual exploitation. For example, women and children are often recruited or sold into domestic prostitution and then trafficked into brothels overseas. While being prostituted, women and children are often pressured or coerced into posing for pornography, which increasingly is trafficked internationally. Exploitation in "sexual entertainment" (strip clubs, topless bars, etc.) often precedes or accompanies exploitation in sex trafficking or prostitution. Customers of sexually exploited women and children often buy access to them in a variety of sexually exploitative contexts, while pimps, procurers, and traffickers profit from the different practices of sexual exploitation interchangeably. Indeed, one of the motivating forces for trafficking is the demand of prostitution customers for more "exotic" and compliant sexual playthings. It is impossible, as the drafters of the 1949 Convention understood, to separate sex trafficking from the exploitation of the prostitution of others.


Just as women and children in situations of sexual exploitation are exploited in many different ways, they are systematically subjected to a wide range of abusive and violent practices. Women in prostitution describe the sex they must endure from customers as unwanted bodily invasions--painful, disgusting, humiliating, dangerous, and rape-like. They also report that male customers often subject them to abusive and dehumanizing sexual practices that non-prostituted women refuse to engage in. Research demonstrates that many sexually exploited women and girls anesthetize themselves with alcohol and drugs or enter dissociated mental states in order to endure the sex of prostitution. The consequences of both sexual exploitation and the "survival techniques" that prostituted women and children adopt to inure themselves to it are injurious to their physical and mental health.


Sexual exploitation severely compromises the physical well being of prostituted women and children. A 1994 study of prostituted women in the United States found that only 15 percent had never contracted a sexually transmitted disease. The gynecological problems that prostituted women and girls suffer include chronic pelvic pain, pelvic inflammatory disease, unwanted pregnancy, miscarriages, high infertility rates, and increased risk of reproductive system cancers. The solution of "safe-sex" (condom usage) for prostituted women belies the inherent power dynamics of sexual exploitation. As the commodity in a transaction between buyer and seller, the sexually exploited woman or child usually must acquiesce to the customer's demands. The price of resistance is often violence. Because of the inherent power imbalance of commercial sexual exploitation--the gulf that exists between the buyer and the bought-- the prostituted woman or child is simply not in a position to demand "safe sex" practices.


As a result, exploitation in the commercial sex industry is increasingly a death sentence. A 1998 study published in the International Journal of STDs and AIDS revealed that prostituted women and girls in many parts of the world are more likely than not to contract HIV: 58 percent of the prostituted women in Burkina Faso; 52 percent of the prostituted women in Kenya; nearly half the prostituted women in Cambodia; 34 percent of the prostituted women in Northern Thailand; and 50 percent of the prostituted women in Bombay. Fifty to 70 percent of trafficked Burmese women were infected with HIV/AIDS and of 218 girls rescued from a Bombay brothel, 65 percent were HIV positive. Prostituted women in the global West and North, where AIDS education is widespread, also show a far higher incidence of AIDS than women who have not been subjected to commercial sexual exploitation. In Italy, for example, the incidence of HIV/AIDS among prostituted women grew from 2 percent to 16 percent from 1988 to 1998.


Research also shows that women and girls in situations of sexual exploitation are subjected to shockingly high levels of violence--beatings, rapes, torture, and homicides. "Prostitution in Five Countries," a 1998 study of 475 prostitutes in South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, the United States, and Zambia, revealed that, across countries, 73% of the subjects reported physical assault in prostitution and 62% reported having been raped in prostitution, 46% at least five times. A 1985 Canadian report on the sex industry in that country reported that women in prostitution suffer a mortality rate forty times the national average. The violence directed against sexually exploited women and children is neither accidental nor incidental: it is endemic to the sex industry, systematic, and fueled by the dehumanization and devaluation of women it normalizes.


The physical harm of sexual exploitation is at least equaled by the psychological harm it wreaks--suicidal feelings, clinical depression, dissociative disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorder. In "Prostitution in Five Countries," 67 percent of the 475 prostitutes studied met criteria for a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder; 58 percent reported sexual abuse as children, with an average of four perpetrators; and 72 percent reported past or current homelessness. When asked what they needed, 92 percent wanted to leave prostitution; 72 percent wanted refuge; and 70 percent wanted job training.


Some have argued that prostitution, sex trafficking, and other forms of commercial sexual exploitation are not human rights concerns when adults enter these situations consensually and voluntarily. The reality is that many women and girls do enter prostitution voluntarily but whether that voluntariness is meaningful or of any significance is questionable when one examines the powerful social conditions that mediate this process. Vast numbers of women and girls enter prostitution to feed their children, to support their impoverished families, and to survive economically after escaping domestic violence. Others continue in prostitution in adulthood because they were sexually abused or exploited as children--indeed most adults in prostitution entered these conditions as children, and studies show that approximately two-thirds have histories of sexual abuse in childhood. For whatever reason women and children enter conditions of sexual exploitation, getting out is often impossible until they are too diseased, traumatized, and broken to continue to attract customers. The only options for most women who have managed to survive prostitution are destitution or work as madams or mamasans, controlling and exploiting the younger women who are still marketable commodities.


It is not a coincidence that the people who are sexually exploited in local and global sex industries are overwhelmingly female, young, and poor. In the global North and the West, the victims of the commercial sex trade are, with few exceptions, members of groups with histories of slavery and discrimination, women and children traumatized by sexual abuse, women who have immigrated from poor countries or have been sexually trafficked, women who are addicted to drugs, and/or women who are mentally ill. In the global South and East, victims of the sex trade are often young women and girls who are desperately poor in cultures where females are expected to sacrifice themselves for the well being of their families and communities. The global sex industry preys on this sexual, racial, and socioeconomic inequality, profits from it, and reinforces and exacerbates it. It turns the exploitation of members of groups at the bottom of gender-, race-, and socioeconomic-based hierarchies into the sexual entertainment of members of powerful groups. In short, it eroticizes inequality as it makes inequality immensely profitable... http://action.web.ca/home/catw/readingroom.shtml?x=16756&AA_EX_Session=26cd56b6bd05096ae264d04492a94254

[Gareth]

I'm still not convinced that the blame should be on men. It's a passion of the flesh for people to lust, it can be controlled yes, but both men and women have this capability.

[Mono Tejano]

the issue of whether or not looking at porn is adultery really comes down to matters of communication within the relationship.

If I like to look at porn but my significant other finds it objectionable, for whatever reason, and we begin the discussion there, early on, then we have the opportunity to have an open, honest discussion about our likes and dislikes vis a vis sex.

Many people, at least in my experience, never have discussions like this and that leads to one partner (usually the man) 'getting it where he can' so to speak while the other partner is marginalized. And when that partner (usually the woman) finds out, she (rightly, in many cases) feels betrayed. Not so much, in my view, because of the porn, but because 'her man went behind her back' to satisfy some sexual desire.

If they have an honest conversation and arrive at some mutually agreed upon compomise then this whole issue can be avoided. But then, that's the case with most problems in relationships, people just avoid the issue and never talk about it until it's too late.

For the record, I've been in relationships with equal numbers of ladies who enjoyed watching porn with me and those who didn't. It's a matter of personal preference. Nothing more. But it is something that needs to be talked about.