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The purpose of writing this post is to explore the very grim reality that the man sitting next to you at work who you chat with every day, the man who makes your coffee in the morning and smiles at you as he hands it to you, and the friendly men in your sporting circles probably all masturbate to porn. In our every day life, these men are not monsters - they're possibly very charming and lovely to talk to and spend time with. And yet when alone, they jerk off to videos of women in their teens and early 20s being brutalised. They might realise that what they're doing is disgusting and they might feel guilty and somewhat icky afterwards. But they keep going back for it. I'm not talking about 15 year olds who don't have fully developed brains yet; I'm talking about fully grown men all the way up to middle age and beyond.
I hate that women have to navigate this dissonance. That a perfectly lovely man who is intelligent, kind and interesting can also be a consumer of porn. I just dumped a man. There were several reasons why I dumped him, but a big one was that he told me that 'before he had met me' he masturbated a lot because he had a 'high sex drive' and this of course involved watching pornography. This man was in his late 40s. He was ashamed of his porn habit and initially I felt happy about this. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that if he was so ashamed, he should have just stopped. If a grown adult wants to stop watching porn, he can stop.
Of course I knew the first time we had sex that he was a porn consumer. First of all, he had problems with his dick. Secondly, gone was the kind man who I had been growing to love and in his place was an animal. He knew what he was doing and apologised immediately, but the sex didn't get much better as our relationship progressed. One the one hand, he was very considerate and generous when it came to going to down on me and never demanded I go down on him, but on the other, he needed to be very rough in order to climax, and only from behind. I eventually told him this was dehumanising and I didn't like it at all, and that was pretty much the end of the relationship (among other reasons, including our increasingly clashing temperaments).
It's not fair that women have to manage and navigate this, and it makes me despair. You will understand by now that the title of my post is not meant to defend men; on the contrary, it means that the kindest men around us are probably, and inexplicably, masturbating to degrading images of women. This, no matter how lovely they are as companions, ruins them as potential partners. Some like to say that 'porn has ruined men', but men have done this to themselves. The porn industry exists because men, exercising their free will, choose to consume it.
This is unfortunate and so true. I may be inundated with hate now, but most people have this kind of cognitive dissonance with animals as well. They will say they love animals (that is, pets) and have no problem with billions of animals living lives of pain and fear and getting brutally slaughtered. If you consume meat, then you can take a moment to put yourself in these men's shoes. They have every reason to rationalize their porn consumption: the women love it, they are getting paid, it's just "fantasy", it's "normal", "men are visual". They would never date a porn star and most would be mortified if their search history were made public, but they will come up with every excuse to justify their consumption to keep the dopamine flowing. If you are puzzled by how that is possible, then you can take a moment to contemplate your own consumption of animal products. I find the same thought patterns show up there quite often.