Woman's Hour - Woman's Hour special: How is porn shaping our sex lives and relationships?

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

Over the past few weeks, Woman’s Hour has been having a frank conversation about pornography. Four women spoke about how porn has shaped their relationships, sex lives and self-image. Three men spoke openly together about their attitudes to and experience of porn. The film-maker Erika Lust explained why she wants to make ‘ethical’ porn and Dr Fiona Vera-Grey explains what she’s found out through the research and surveys she has done about pornography and by talking to 100 women for her book Women On Porn. In this special podcast episode, our reporter Ena Miller guides you through the stories and conversations you might have missed.Presenter/Reporter Ena Miller Live item Producer: Emma Pearce Series Producer: Erin Riley

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2. And of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. I'm Enna Miller. This is a Women's Hour podcast pulling together our recent series about pornography. We're looking at how porn shapes our sex lives, relationships and self-image. We talk to women, men, experts and a filmmaker. We also heard a lot from listeners and I'll feed some of your comments and experiences in as we go.

Back in February, Women's Hour spoke to Baroness Gabby Burton. She's leading the government's independent review into pornography. You can hear that conversation with Emma Barnett on BBC Sounds. The date was the 28th of February. That was the beginning of an honest and frank conversation about porn. First, Joanna, not her real name, is in her 30s and believes that her partner's porn use shaped their sex life and relationship in lots of ways. I asked her about the first time she encountered porn. I think I was 14. I was in high school. I'd walked home with a boy I really fancied.

I was in his bedroom and we were looking for a Michael Jackson cassette. And under the bed, I found this magazine and I opened it and there was like this full page spread of a woman with her legs spread apart. I guess it made me really uncomfortable. What was it about it that made you uncomfortable? Being 14, all you get is a bit of sex ed at school. There was this cartoon of a man and a woman having sex, presumably for reproduction. And they were literally line drawings of the man on top of the woman.

He was moving. She was still. And I remember so distinctly my teacher saying, if you like the person you're with it can be enjoyable and I was like no that that I've just seen could be pleasurable I don't get it and the constant descriptions of the vagina being like a passageway for babies to come out of and penises to go in I was just, that's not how I see my body. It's really daunting. And I remember I got bullied in school

and I remember a boy just kind of pointing at me saying, ha, I can't imagine you having sex. Ha ha. And I thought, neither can I, mate. So yeah, I think sex education could have been better. It could have been about mutual exploration. I guess when you got older, did you watch porn yourself? I had a sexual relationship when I was in college with a friend

and that was brilliant. And I wish everyone's first experience was as healthy and as equal and as fun. And that should be the norm. What made it equal and fun and healthy? The lack of porn made it more natural. We weren't doing penis in vagina sex so I guess we were just doing what felt good. We didn't have like an end goal like oh we've got to have fulfillment. It just happened for as long as we decided it happened for and there was no performance. I don't think we were preoccupied too much with what we looked like or all of that baggage that can come with sex.

And then you met a partner that that baggage came with sex. I met a man in a mutual sort of social circle and I just thought he was so confident and I remember the first time we had sex he kind of asked what isn't okay and I suppose that's his way of getting consent but the way it was worded made me feel a bit bewildered because what do you say to that now I'd have loads of answers strangling's not okay and physically hurting me is not okay yeah I was just out of my depth

I guess you did say to me that you did have a good sex life with him yeah I thought we had a great sex life fun and pleasurable and he had talked about porn and said oh let's watch some together and he got this dvd and I can't remember the storyline it was some like woman next door type storyline it was quite banal compared to the hardcore pornography that's out there now but yeah we watched it and it didn't really do anything for me I guess he really wanted me to like it he wanted to have that as part of his sex life with his partner to spice it up so then when did it change? Did he change or did you change? The first time I found out he was watching pornography I had to use his phone to reply to somebody and I put a kiss and the letter I put in just came up with this name of a porn site and then we had a conversation about

what are you watching, when are you watching, how much are you watching? And I guess he felt really ambushed and invaded and defensive and saying he didn't think it was a problem that everybody did it. Then I just got so paranoid and so suspicious and I wanted to know the truth. There was this whole thing going on that I'd been oblivious to that really worried me. And when I looked at his phone and I saw the extent of it, it was so often, it was like multiple times a week, even a day. It made me wonder whether he was looking at younger girls slash women because those women are fertile and there's something biological there, or if it's just those women are fertile and there's something biological there or if it's just those women are vulnerable. I'm wondering how him watching porn crossed over to your intimacy. I think the impact of porn is just you can't take it out of the sex life we had I think it's so

inextricably linked because porn had been part of all of his adult life longer than sex had more than sex had there's things that happen in porn that he'd seen and wanted to try with me I guess his positions he'd suggested and obviously they were probably coming from porn because they certainly don't teach him any positions in sex ed and I don't think you tend to have conversations with your parents about specifics I think I was so naive I just assumed that what we were trying was things he'd tried and would say oh other women like this that and the other. He was suggesting things I had nothing to suggest. Were there other moments that sprung to mind that made you just think whoa? He made a big thing of birthdays anyway. On his birthday, he'd be like, oh, can we try anal sex?

And I was like, okay. And it was just really, really painful. And I derived no pleasure from that. And he did. He would lose sense of what my experience was. And it became a very absorbed, selfish act. So I suppose you end up feeling used and it becomes a bit of a battleground of, oh, I want this. You won't do it. Why not? Maybe you feel like there's something wrong with you. I think as women, we are often socialized to

be really super considerate to the point where worrying about how our body looks, even when we're meant to be enjoying things, we're worried about how we smell, we're worried about how we taste. It's just a constant, all these adverts making us feel less than. Is him having all these desires and wants and what he wants to do would you class that as experience he seemed quite clear on what he wanted in many areas of life and i think that's quite sexy being so assured and maybe i was just going with the flow of it and what are the things that he was asking you to do that i guess were sort of okay and then you must have hit something that you were like nah I'm not really happy with this some of the types of BDSM and the dominance and submission and I suppose if I'd have been wanting to be dominant he'd have been open for that but I didn't feel like doing that I just

thought it was a bit embarrassing and a bit cringe to try and pretend to perform in a dominant role it just wasn't me and he was asking you to be something that you weren't I suppose he was putting options on the table and I wasn't really into it and we were just trying to make it work I'd really learned what was in porn I'd learned that there were categories based on race, based on age, based on all these criteria that is like you're ordering a pizza. And I suppose you think how much time has he spent watching this in the years that have gone by and how much has that got in his head and how desensitized to these really violent acts often these different far-fetched scenarios that men like to fantasize about that probably does make them view you differently makes them focus on your like orifices pressure to remove pubic hair I did go along with it I did do it and I didn't feel fully myself it didn't feel genuine I'd say to anyone oh I chose to do it nobody was holding a razor up to my body

I was deliberately removing it but it didn't feel good and he wasn't doing anything he didn't have to do any grooming for me to like him so So I think there's a big double standard. I was always concerned he was watching porn when I was out. I'd be going and doing feminist activism. I'd be trying to end the porn industry. Meanwhile, he's part of it. And he's saying, I'm not paying for it. So I'm not really creating the demand.

But he was the demand. I guess if you were criticizing something that he enjoyed doing, you were shaming him? Yeah, I guess he's saying, oh, it's fantasy. It's not real. And I was like, those women are real. He kept talking about individual choice. That was part of his philosophy. So I was like, okay, so could you make the choice to not watch it? And he felt controlled. So he was saying, oh, I don't want to be a sex pest nagging you for sex. I'd rather just meet my own needs and we can have sex together when we want to. But that wasn't a solution for me.

I wanted sex with him, but it tainted it for me. I had no problems with masturbation, but I think that takes more imagination. And the more you've been watching pornography, the more extreme things you need to make it work as quickly as possible. And I think he said, oh, if I'm stressed at work or whatever, it's like there's other coping mechanisms for stress. You can go to the gym, you can talk to somebody, you can go for a walk. When you go back to seeing the stuff that he was watching and knowing the person that

he was, could you reconcile the two of them? I think if you know your partner's watching people who are being traumatized and they're watching that and they're getting sexual pleasure from that, how does that stack up? Cognitive dissonance, just thinking, how can you be proud of your partner? How can you be proud of your relationship when there's this darkness to it that felt like I had to keep secrets for him? And it got to the point where I said, I can't go on like this. We've got to do something. We're going to have to go to some counseling. He suggested we could make some stuff that he could then watch. and then that might be better than watching unknown women. And I actually got to the point where I even said, I would rather

you have sex with an actual other woman in real life. Opening up the relationship would be preferable to living with porn, which to some people probably sounds quite incomprehensible, but I was just so adamant that I couldn't cope with this porn use. It was really eating away at me. When you suggested that you can basically go and sleep with another woman, what did he say to that? Maybe that surprised him. Did it surprise you, saying it?

I guess we had an agreement in theory that I could have sex with another woman, but that wasn't something I ever did. I wonder whether that came from porn, this idea that relationships between women are quite sexy and not very serious and not that disruptive. And this one dick policy, as it's called called that again didn't feel me you eventually thought why should you keep it a secret and you spoke to his mum I guess I was never officially keeping it a secret but um because it just felt like something so massive but something so unseen

it felt a bit weird that the people closest to him wouldn't realise this was going on. And his family was really hoping that we might get married and start a family. And I got so sick of the expectations that relationships naturally progress in this way that I just said, I don't like his porn use. Porn's pretense. And I wasn't going to pretend.

What did his mum say? I guess I was hoping I'd get some backup. I think mums tend to support their sons and I think conversations tend to be quite superficial around that topic. You told your dad? Yeah, I told my family that there were relationship problems and obviously they ask what they are. So I was just honest. I thought, why should I make up some excuse when the real issue seemed to me was that he was watching porn? Was he frustrated by you? What was his viewpoint on you?

Really frustrated and angry that I was interfering in his private life and telling him what to do and suggesting he was a bad person for doing it. I think he felt, oh, other people have girlfriends that aren't bothered and here I am, I've got a difficult relationship and why can't she just be more easygoing about this? Now you've moved on to your new relationship. Have you discussed porn? How is that? When do you discuss porn actually? Have you learned when you discussed porn? How is that? When do you discuss porn actually? Have you learned when you discuss porn? In the new relationship I think I discussed it on the first date. How would you know who's going to be watching what and that's why you actually just have to ask them and I think you've got to be prepared for the answer if you're asking somebody

you've got to be able to accept the response sometimes people see porn as fun it spices up our love life it brings us together i think a lot of the things that are meant to bring you together they would be things that are personal and buying red lacy knickers or buying a black lacy bra or buying some handcuffs it's just somebody that some manufacturer has manufactured in a mass market it's like anything that's off the shelf off the peg it's not gonna do anything for your relationship it's just gonna set this blueprint and put you in this box that you're always gonna feel a bit like is this me is this us are we replicating something here or are we forging our own path and I think porn

prevents you from pursuing the potential that's there well we wanted to start a conversation and that interview certainly did one listener wrote in and said last year I discovered my 40 year old partner husband of 11 years has a porn and sex addiction. Since then we've been in therapy and had a lot of frank conversations and it seems he's had this problem from his earliest sexual experiences. Since being a teenager he's used porn obsessively to deal with the depression as a hit of dopamine. That habit stuck and it's become his way of dealing with and managing difficult times in his life. It's hugely impacted our own sex life as the joy of sex means something entirely different to him. And someone else wrote in and said,

I think that porn is useful not to prescribe what we enjoy but to inform us of what we might enjoy. Of course there are hugely problematic areas and as an intersectional feminist I cannot watch a lot of it but I think that to just suggest that porn equals damaging to women is to underestimate women's sexual palate and our ability to experience pleasure in a variety of ways. Which brings me neatly to Erica Lust. Anita Rani spoke to Erica, a filmmaker who makes porn, what some call feminist porn. She creates adult films that focus on female pleasure, diversity and ethical production. Anita asked why Erica and her team started making what is sometimes called ethical porn. I felt that when I was watching porn, my body did get excited. It reacted to the images I did see, But I didn't like them. And most of my female

friends, they felt the same way as I did, that something wasn't really working out for them. So I kind of took the matter into my own hands. And I felt, let's see if I can make a porn film, but with my values, from my point of view, where I put the women in the centre of the story, we see them develop their desire, their fantasies, and we see them having sex in a way where they are not just tools to male sexuality, but they are actually pleasing themselves in an authentic way. So the porn that you're creating, how does it differ? Everything is really different. It's about the process, how you take care of the worker standards of everybody working to make this film happens from crew members. We have a bill of right

where we explain to our performers the process and it's about conversations with them beforehand. So they are aware about anything that they are going to do. I want to create an environment that is as safe as possible. So people feel that they can speak up if something is going wrong for them. And then I check in with them after a shooting. But it's not only about... And that doesn't happen elsewhere. I mean, it's becoming better in the industry, I think.

I think that independent porn producers have had an impact on the kind of mainstream industry and how people are shooting films today. But what I see in the industry is still that even if production is made in a proper way, many times, you know, when we get into marketing and distribution, then it becomes unethical in the way that they market the films, in the way that they classify people, they fetishize people, they tokenize people, you know, people feel that they stop having agency

over their image and their representation. And I think... And we're specifically talking about the representation of women in the porn industry. Is it because the majority of... Is it because it's made by men for men? I mean, it's definitely still, you know, it's a male industry still today, even if more women are in it. But it's not only that it's done by men, but it's really what kind of men if you start looking at it, because it's a group of men that most of them are cis, white, hetero, middleaged, and they have a particular vision of sexuality.

And that vision is, you know, boobs and ass and cars and cigars. And it's kind of the sexuality that's in there, you know. But this is not very different from our society in general. You know, the way I see it, porn is really a mirror of the values we have in our society. So I think that what we need as women is getting into this industry, is starting to tell our stories from our point of view. We need to start telling the world what we find sexy, what we want to see, what turns us on. You have customers that have to come to you and pay for it.

It's behind a paid wall. That's also a big part of what I call ethical porn. I think that we not only have to protect the children, but we also have to protect the workers in this industry. There are people here who need to be paid correctly. And you do that by paying for your porn. You do that by investigating the sites. When you go porn surfing online, you need to see if there's an about page.

Can you see if you align with the values of these companies? Because most companies in the porn world, they are not transparent. They are just, you know, a post box somewhere in the world, but without real people, without real names. I want to feel proud of the work we are doing. I want to be able to show people how we do our films. Erica Luss speaking to Anita Irani. We had this from an anonymous listener. I'm 63 and married 30 years and still feel embarrassed and uncomfortable about taking pleasure in sex that isn't sleeping with my husband. So celebrating women's right to self-pleasure and talking about

how it's normal is empowering and such a help. Thanks so much. Sam, not her real name, is in her late 40s. Her awareness of porn goes back a long way and has a profound impact on her self-image and sex life. Sam is a recovering sex and love addict herself. The relationship counselling service Relate defines this as any sexual activity that feels out of control. One of her relationships was with a man she thinks was addicted to pornography. In what you're about to hear she uses explicit terms from porn to tell her story. I asked Sam when she first encountered pornography. I would have been four years old. We lived in tenement flats and I remember going out into the back garden

and there was an empty field and I remember finding pornography. I didn't know it was pornography and I can still see the woman's kind of like 1970s hair, splayed legs and just being really confused by it. Four is very young so then when did you experience it again? Probably teenage years, aware that male friends had pornography magazines. Maybe always a little bit fascinated in shops and things, and like page three, you know, those kind of Sam Fox, beautiful, pale, blonde women.

And also, I don't know if you remember, those tenants' lager cans with the women, blonde, beautiful, and kind of like knowing that I was like a brunette, you know. Like I didn't quite fit with who I was as a young teenage woman. So I think for me there was always this maybe not being enough, and pornography was like, oh, this is what I should be and this is what men like. I looked much younger than I was so I would have been what 25 but I want to look at pictures now there was something that was quite childlike about me so I definitely had a couple

of partners that were very into the brand of porn that would be like sweet 16 and I would have fitted like you know quite small chest like I didn't have boobs really until I had babies and I think I knew that was my category definitely school girl kind of like fantasies or younger type of porn inspired role play. You seemed very comfortable with that. Yeah I kind of accepted that I would never be enough so I was always happy to kind of use porn as a reference of like this is the benchmark of what you have to be to be like a sweet 16. When the relationship actually ended it ended because I borrowed a laptop from him and on the laptop he had what would be described now as like MILF porn so it was an older

it was a woman being ejaculated on I remember she was very fat and I just remember like being really confused because I was like that's what he likes looking at is it not okay to like two different things? I was confused and I think you do have quite linear thinking at that age whereas now as you get older you can fully see the plethora of like ooh I love all different colours of skin, I love all body shapes. Do you know what I mean? I see Eros in everything. I feel you're a bit of a rebel. And I've only known you 10 minutes.

I'm no longer schoolgirl now. I'm in the MILF category. And again, that's like so boring. When you were the people pleaser, was there times you were enjoying yourself? There's definitely been times in my life where I've allowed pornography to be in the bedroom. VHS tapes of, you know,

lesbian porn or whatever it was. I think there was one bondage one that's coming into my head. Women being hung up and kind of whipped and my partners watching the VHS and using me as a body. So not engaging with me at all. So when you were in that moment, you're telling me that he's watching a VHS and then you are there. What are you doing? I mean, there's a lot of times when you're self-pleasuring or you're doing stuff for yourself because there's this disconnect. It's like a virtual menage a trois when you've got pornography in the room.

So I think there's a difference from the porn that I experienced in my 20s, which was probably just kind of quite pretty, quite glamorous. You know, it was much more about, like, lipstick and high heels. And pornography in my 20s was very different to the pornographies that was introduced to me in my 40s, which was definitely much more hardcore. What people do that, that's weird. Oh my God, like it's not even enough to be penetrated by one penis,

it has to be two. Did pornography ever enter your life without having somebody there, as in just for your own pleasure? Where I would enjoy pornography is, you you know because I like looking at beautiful women like as a young woman there was a fascination with those magazines and what was in them and that was maybe a little bit tantalizing but I certainly never bought a porn magazine do you know I mean that would have been bizarre 30s maybe occasionally but not so much because I was like in the world of motherhood and like having babies so no in my 40s reintroduced to pornography

through another person although I have watched content that was sent to me over the past couple of years I have explored like online dating apps but there is one particular app and I didn't realize it's got this function that opens up into video mode you open them up and it's just somebody masturbating I have had one moment of self-pleasuring where this really cute guy in America who was in an office must have been what I don't know if it was the beginning of his shift or the well like do you know I mean it's 10 o'clock half 10 my time he was really cute and he asked really nicely he was like oh yeah do you do you want to have some fun and that's what we did he asked permission before he showed his penis and things and you know he asked me what I was into and what I wanted to be called or what the kind

of narrative was so actually setting the scene up in that space where it's real time and I'm consenting as an adult and so is he I'm down with that you know I mean that for me is more fair trade ethical we both gave each other a virtual helping hand in a sense I want to dance I want to shag I've been quite interested in younger men, I've refused to get into sexting or texting, like that's something that I don't do anymore. Like I have to be careful because as a love and sex addict for me like actually what I should be striving for is actually true connection and deep connection. But you enjoyed yourself. Pornography is a, it's a beast isn't it it it just needs a constant stream of new things

weird things nothing sacred everything can be fetishized and wanked on we can mix a bit of this with that even with my own experience of like dating a porn addict it starts off quite quite vanilla and then by the end of it it's just so extreme so you dated one how did it start so he would have been my teenage love from when I was 13 he would have been 19 yeah when I was 16 I actually lost my virginity with him he got got in touch. My dad had passed and I remember at the time just being like, really like, my head was really messed up. So he phoned up just to, you know, say sorry. He knew how I felt, to connect. And then it really quickly turned into this strange conversation

of like, he asked me, was I having sex? Was that in the first conversation? Yeah. He over over shared with me about his wife intimately they weren't having sex and then he kind of playfully was like oh everybody needs to have sex everybody needs to have sex and I kind of just laughed and then for all of the stuff that was happening I definitely there's something for me now that I know when grief happens to me I can sexualize it in weird ways as a coping mechanism because I am like you know I'm a bit of an addict so even like when my granddad died

I found myself in a strip club after the funeral with five blokes I didn't know the first time I put whatsapp on my phone was at his suggestion then it was like a barrage of messages and things like what like love bombing of like oh you're beautiful you're wonderful you're this you know and then yeah he just he just wanted pictures at some point did it become exciting it was intense and even when I was looking through some of the messages that I've I've kept was just aware of, like, oh, God, we were both in, like, fantasy role play. Can we have a look? Streams and streams. I'm reading this over your shoulder. Is this OK?

That's OK. This one you're about to read me, this is at 19 minutes past three at night, and then it goes back and forth, back and back and forth back and forth it's like every second you're texting through the night 1am 2am 3am 4am at 5am you tell him horny and he goes yummy oh you send an attachment at 7am, do you want to say what you said? I'm a fan of boosh and then yummy, he says that

and I say no, too hairy I know but I'm just trying to see when you stop talking, it was continual he was into the idea of watching me have sex with other people. Will you come too? What will you wear? He was always really into like, I'm your slup, what do you want me to wear? Please can I come? I've been edging for longer than normal. What's edging? Edging is like you're waiting to get permission from your partner to come. A lot of porn addicts

maybe do it because it's just about taking longer and then it feels better. So sometimes with this person, he could be edging for days. And it would be a constant flow of pictures, images. These are pictures that we started using to send to various apps and online profiles to start doing things together as a couple. It was very much like on his terms and I knew my place. I was just there for his occasional fun and it was going to involve other people. And part of you was up for it? Oh yeah but I always knew it was going to be enticing. As a coependent woman with a man who's a porn addict, I certainly knew how to manipulate and titillate,

but all of it was quite sad. Like, he decided that he would take over, like I was saying, almost like my PA, he would do all of that side of it, which actually I enjoyed because, you know, I wasn't particularly fussed about meeting people, but for him it was like there was definite fantasies that he wanted me and him to to play around with and and try things out but I had real feelings for him you know I remember like meeting him in this hotel

and I remember feeling really beautiful and sexy. He basically just wanted to come in my face. He wanted to have sex with me and then he was like working and I remember having this real disconnect from like the fantasy of what I thought it would be and the reality was like really quite uncomfortable. Like it was just a crazy relationship, like crazy in terms of what I would do, the lengths of what you would do and then when you get your forties, like if it hasn't been successful you kind of do this thing where you go through all your past relationships and you're like oh god maybe that one would have worked maybe that one would have worked and where I think I was really accepting with this relationship and this person was like you know I see porn addiction just in the way as I see alcoholism you know as a good codependent woman there I was supporting all of the needs of this porn addicted man I was was willing to go above and beyond and be like,

oh, I'm fabulous. I'm this, I'm that. Maybe as I get older, I'm much more comfortable with my sexuality and how flamboyant that can be or how I like to express it. I need to look after myself and my own needs. When we get told as women, we're meant to stop feeling things once we get to a certain age. I think like I'm still going

to be 90 and I'll still feel juicy and I'll still want to be like doing whatever I'm doing because I think that's part of who I am as a creative woman you know it's not going away even through all this perimenopausal stuff when I speak to older women they kind of laugh and they're like no it's you know I think you're taught this idea that it's meant to end or it is going to end but actually I think I'm only just beginning. I love talking to Sam. Later in this podcast you'll hear from the writer and academic Dr Fiona Vera Gray who'll pull together some of the issues raised by the stories and experiences we've heard so far based on our own academic research. Now, a woman we are calling Sophie who believes pornography has had a detrimental impact on her

sex life and the desires and expectations of her sexual partners. She's very clear about her attitude to porn and as you'll hear it's been shaped by her own experiences. I hate porn and I think it's okay for women to hate porn and I want other women to know that it's okay not to be okay with porn just because it's an everyday part of people's lives. I think it's impacted me in my personal life and I think we need to talk about it more. When you say you hate porn did you hate it because of how it impacted you or has there ever been a time that you thought it was okay? I've never thought porn was okay. It's difficult for women to say, I'm not okay with porn. People assume that I'm somehow frigid or prudish or anti-sex. People disagree with me. They disagree with me quite

vocally. When it comes to intimacy, what is it that you expect? What do you imagine? Healthy sexual intimacy looks like two reciprocal mutual consenting adults having an experience that's based on empathy and connection. There shouldn't be a power imbalance or a kind of using of the other person's body. There has to be a genuine interest in what the other person is feeling and experiencing. And I think that's something that is lacking in a lot of sexual interactions as a result of porn. What was your reality? Yeah, my reality has often not involved respect for boundaries and interest in what those boundaries are, let alone an interest in sexual desires or wants or needs. Sadly, in my experience, all too common for men to disregard even a very, very clear no.

And this is also nice guys, normal normal guys guys you might think of even as feminist what were those things that were happening to you sexy violence like wanting to strangle me or wanting to do anal sex or wanting to kind of pin me down. And that is from porn. That's not something that is inherently physically pleasurable. That doesn't increase my sexual pleasure. It doesn't increase his sexual pleasure. But it may. That is a sexualisation of violence. That's making violence against me sexy.

There have been occasions where men have specifically asked me to not make eye contact with them during sex or where they've requested that I make pornified sex noises. It was about me replicating a kind of porn experience where I was basically just delivering a service for them. But then there are people who enjoy porn. They enjoy watching it. They enjoy it being part of their relationships. Could you see how it could actually benefit a couple? No. And how does anybody who's using porn know

whether the women in it are even adults, whether they've been under pressure of some kind, whether maybe they've just changed their minds? And their orgasm is somehow my responsibility and I have to provide that. And if that's not provided, then I've done something wrong and terrible. One guy actually got his erection and kind of shoved it towards me and was like, what am I going to do about this? As if it was my job to deal with it, which felt very threatening. So in that moment, what are you thinking? In that moment, I felt completely unsafe. I felt I was at his mercy.

I'm assuming you're getting on before. These moments happen. And then what? It changed the scenario from a nice relaxed state where you've made out that you've entered a state of undress you're getting a bit vulnerable with each other and then suddenly there's this huge power imbalance where he said to me this is is what I want, what you want doesn't matter, and maybe I'm going to take what I want. And that was, I mean, he didn't, I asked him to leave, and he did respect that, and he did leave. But there's a moment where suddenly everything shifts. I think porn

definitely has something to do with it. And how could it it not it's something that they've all been consuming since their you know even pre-puberty days and one of my previous sexual partners talked about the effect that porn had had on him and he said that when he encountered women out and about like cashiers at his work friends he couldn't stop imagining them in sexual scenarios. He said that he couldn't stop that video playing. How did this discussion come about? He came clean to me that he had a porn addiction. We were talking about that and the effect that it had on him. The way it made me feel was, you know,

first I appreciated his honesty, but I also felt deeply uncomfortable because if that's how he sees all women that's how he sees me I'd lost some of my humanity in his eyes and I think he agreed with that and he wanted to move on from that and find a way to relate healthily to women but he couldn't porn had done damage on his brain somehow so I just found this it's just on my phone right and it was just a website that's there to educate parents on the terms that people are using and one of them I read was the death grip. Have you heard of that? No. The death grip is where the man will hold his penis so tightly

while he's masturbating, so he gets so used to the sensation of his own grip that then, basically, if he's having sex with a woman, that's never tight enough. I've definitely seen that happen with some of my former sexual partners. They've had real problems with basically enjoying normal sex. The only way that they could orgasm was through masturbating and sometimes that's what they would just have to do.

How do we learn how to have sex? Well, I think the boys were definitely learning how to have sex directly from porn. And I think the girls were learning it indirectly from, at least for me, I was learning it indirectly from the way that porn had seeped into the rest of culture in media in adverts in even jokes that were made about things like doggy style and you know how does a 14 year old girl know what doggy style is like why is that part of popular culture why were 13 year old-old and 14-year-old girls that I knew having anal sex? Where had we learned that from? That's because of porn influencing culture more widely. Like these things had become normalised to me.

I think when I first started having relationships with men, I was trying to be the cool girl who was doing all the things that the girls were doing and was being adventurous and could please her man just like we'd read about in Cosmopolitan or other magazines that had these ridiculous lists of ways to drive your man wild as if that was our purpose in life and as if that made us like a better performing woman and I remember there was also competition between girls of who'd given head first who'd done anal and you know who was having sex how much sex was everybody having but it was still all centered on on the men somehow what's the impact on you Sophie even

on lead up to this interview you know you have been quite emotional about this whole process which is absolutely fine so to me it's obvious there has been an impact on you. I think porn has made me feel fundamentally unsafe in sexual interactions. A lot of my previous partners have ignored my no, have violated my boundaries as a result of their porn consumption. That's made me feel like every time I enter a new relationship, we've got to have a conversation about porn. Yeah, instead of having fun getting to know someone, I have to have all these heavy conversations. When you meet someone and they behave one way, then you get intimate and they behave in a way that you're not happy with, how do you reconcile that they're one and the same person I was seeing a friend of a friend he was a nice guy

and at his house we were making out and he would kind of pinned the back of my neck and I said what are you doing that hurts you should have asked me and he said oh I didn't want to ruin the mood I thought hang on what why so you'd rather risk making me feel unsafe and uncomfortable than ruining the mood he said oh but women women like that he'd obviously learned somewhere from porn that that's what I wanted or from other women doing what he wanted. Well yeah or maybe maybe these other women hadn't hadn't felt safe enough to articulate that boundary in the way that I was confident to. You talk about boundaries a lot. What are those boundaries? The line beyond which you don't want something to happen. I've told you what I wanted,

which was for you not to put my hand on your dick, and you've just done what you wanted because what you want is all that matters. It's emotional to think about because my current partner also has to deal with the trauma that I've experienced that's something that has stayed with me and if I'm in a situation which reminds me of any of those previous situations it's very very difficult I have to give myself time to learn how to feel safe again this listener like Sophie feels that pornography has harmed her sex life

she says my husband's porn addiction has destroyed our sex life he became desensitized to normal intercourse and can no longer have sex that way. His expectations of me to perform, e.g. wearing stockings, turned me off sex. Whatever I was willing to do, he wanted to push it further. He promised to give it up and didn't and destroyed my trust. We are still together but haven't had sex for over 18 months. I'm shaking writing this. Just the thought of porn triggers anxiety. I'm Anna Miller, and you're listening to a Women's Hour special podcast on pornography

and its impact on our lives. Dr Fiona Vera Gray's book, Women on Porn, drew together conversations with 100 women aged between 18 and 70. It grew out of her research on pornography. She was Emma Barnett's guest. We are continuing in our porn series now with someone who has studied specifically how women feel about pornography. My next guest, Dr Fiona Vera Gray, says that when we think about porn, we still mostly think of men, men as producers, consumers and women as the product. In her new book, Women on Porn, Fiona details the experiences of 100 women and their views on it, what they

like, what they don't, how they consume it, how it affects their sex lives. It's been said that porn sites account for more than 20% of what we search for on our phones. So how is it shaping your lives and shaping the lives of women? We have lots of male listeners, I should say as well. But you've been getting in touch about your experiences. I'll come to some of those in just a moment. But Dr. Fiona Vera Gray joins me now in the studio. Good morning. Morning, Emma. Thanks for being with us. You wanted to look at women. I did. Why? I think that women have been excluded from the conversation about pornography in a really particular way. So there's two dominant positions, dominant narratives that are associated with women's views on pornography. You've got on one side, sex positive, feminist, cool girl, loves pornography, uses it, thinks it's great, doesn't have a problem with it.

And then on the other side, you've got, in quotes, frigid, sex negative, women who do not like pornography, don't think it's useful at all, and have never used it. And actually, what I found and what I thought going into it, because it's my position, was somewhere in between the two is where probably a lot of women's experiences and maybe some men's experiences lie, that there's women out there who are using pornography more so now than ever before because of how easy it is to access and might not be entirely happy with everything that they're coming across, but are still using it. So don't reject it so much because of the content. And what I wanted to do was see if we could introduce some nuance, some complexity, and actually hear the range of women's voices on this issue.

I think women, a lot of the time, we're reduced to stereotypes. And I wanted to actually really capture what do women think about pornography, how has it affected their life, and what does it mean to them? Let's get to some specifics of what you found then, because, you know, the idea of putting women at the heart of it is, of course, what we try to do all day, every day here. Well, for the hour live, but in the prep for it, for this programme.

But you, for instance, found that women, a lot of women who are heterosexual like watching lesbian porn. Yeah, exactly. So this again speaks to the content. So what I found that was is that I think there's a lot of conversation about women watching ethical pornography or feminist pornography. But what I found for the women that I spoke to is the vast majority are watching mainstream pornography on the mainstream platforms. It makes sense because it's free. It's easy to get. And a lot of women were talking about they don't have a massive commitment to pornography that means they're going to pay for it. And what we know about the content on these mainstream sites is that it's fairly misogynistic.

It's fairly racist. It doesn't necessarily represent sex as something that's always women for women. It's more that women are there for men. So women would talk about having to navigate around that content to find something that centered women's pleasure. And the way that they did that a lot of the time was heterosexual women would look for lesbian pornography or also pornography of women alone masturbating so in some way I mean it's a sad indictment of pornography that in order to find material that wasn't misogynistic women talked about having to remove the men from what they were watching but also lesbian women that I spoke to and some straight women as well watched gay

male pornography so pornography with no women in it at all and they would talk about this also being a way to remove the misogyny from pornography that sometimes when there was just two men there was no way that they could see misogynistic content and that in itself even though it didn't represent their sexual lives enabled them to uh feel aroused without the sense of conflict about what they were watching well also perhaps because it doesn't represent their sexual lives it's more arousing as well yeah because it's different exactly can you imagine just as a side point the uh the energy that would be back in uh women's systems if they didn't have to navigate around and find work rounds yeah just generally i was thinking even within pleasure uh there's a there's

a there's a bit of extra work perhaps that goes on to try and find your place yeah another form of invisible labor that women are kind of habitually having to do. You said it far better than me. That's why you're a writer. I mean, I do write occasionally, but not all the time. And I think it's another example. Are there other examples from what you found specifically that you want to bring to people's attention, to women's attention? Yeah, I think one of the things that's important is that all women have a relationship to pornography today, because of how prevalent it is in society. So that means even women that aren't using it, that have never used it,

we are surrounded by colleagues, by teachers, by everybody in our society. And because of the access to pornography, that means we have a relationship to it. So women, I spoke to women who used it, that's a very clear relationship, but also women who didn't use it, who found that it was being brought into their sexual lives by male partners predominantly. So women in their 20s talking about it taking quite a while for them to feel able to say what they did and didn't like in sex because of how much pornography had

infiltrated their understanding of what sex was, but also the understanding of what sex was of the young men that they were having sex with. But then also speaking to slightly older women who had a relationship to pornography through their male partner's use, sometimes, and I know that you've had women talk about this on the show as well, discovering that a male partner had a pornography habit that they weren't aware of, discovering that they were watching kinds of pornography that the women felt particularly confused by. So women talking about suddenly feeling like, who is this person that I've been married to for 10 years, 20 years, I didn't know this about him, and feeling torn again, you know, another sense of of conflict feeling like I should feel okay with this I want my partner to have a private sexual life but there's something in the

in the content that they're consuming that's making me feel very uncomfortable. Did women feel that they need porn to to masturbate to have pleasure alone? So for the women that were using pornography it's a really interesting question actually actually. They did talk about, in the research, we talk a lot about escalation and the impact of pornography on our sexual imagination. But no one has ever looked at that from the perspective of women. And I did have women say to me that after using pornography habitually for a while, it became more difficult to imagine, fantasize themselves freely. What they found that they were doing was when they went to fantasize by themselves without pornography, they were imagining scenes from pornography. So that in

some ways it kind of seized their sexual life. I had a couple of women who talked about the fact that they started to feel they didn't like, no one really spoke about addiction, but there are a couple of women that said they didn't like how much they were using pornography and how much it was affecting their sexual imagination. And so they tried to kind of wean themselves off it. And they definitely said that eventually, within three to four to six months, that sexual imagination, that ability to freely fantasize came back to them, but that it was a struggle. And again, when you think about women's lives, we're so busy. And sometimes all we want to do is just get off quickly. And the fact that pornography, this mainstream stuff is there, it's so easy to access. I think women are going to it to get that easy

kind of pleasure to get it out. But it's also introducing a lot of conflict and a lot of shame because of the content. I mean could you could you put an analogy a bit like junk food you know in in how easy it is and I mean it's free yeah in quotation marks yes there's adverts there so it's slightly different in that respect but but that busyness and that hijacking and that need to numb and get something and feel nice for a few minutes feel good and then the fact that that could then be waylaid with a load of other feelings it's difficult isn't it you know you go towards a fast food or whatever because you haven't got the time you're hungry you're craving it and then

afterwards you can also feel pretty rough yeah yeah it's not always but sometimes you feel great afterwards but it's exactly that so women would talk about things like being very aroused by what they were watching even if it wasn't what they necessarily went to search for. So on these mainstream sites, for anyone that hasn't seen it, the platform themselves is projecting a lot of stuff to you. So they would be aroused by the different material that they were seeing. They would then masturbate to it, come, and after orgasming, feeling a rejection. So women would talk about doing things like deleting all their history, closing their laptop, throwing, one woman talked about throwing her phone over the other side of the room, being a bit aghast at what they were

watching on the screen when they were no longer aroused. And so I think there is definitely something there about the way the sites are set up to encourage this kind of overwhelming sense of arousal. There's so much sexual information coming into your mind that it's overwhelming maybe your internal sense of what kind of representations of sex you want to see or what kind of representations of women you want to see. I had one woman, you know, in this way that when you interview women, as you do, sometimes they just say things that are perfect. And she said, it's a conflict between my pleasure and my principles. And so, and I think that that articulates something that I haven't previously heard articulated

in terms of women's experiences of pornography. And I wonder if it resonates for men as well. Can I read you a few of these messages? Let me share them with everyone. And I'm a heterosexual female who enjoys watching female porn. We had our internet provider changed and now the channel I watched it on is blocked but I daren't ask my partner to unblock it in case he's offended you're smiling yeah I definitely had women talking about not so I think again the conversation about partners hiding their pornography used from another partner we always think about that in terms of women sorry men hiding from women but I had a number of women saying that their partner had no idea what kind of pornography that they watched or even that they watched pornography at all it was a very private practice um and I know

we talked about uh the the choice to watch lesbian porn for some women but there are other categories aren't they when you talk about this overwhelming uh experience on the websites um and they they can also make women feel differently. And specifically, I know you've spoken to black women as well. Yeah, so what was really interesting in terms of what came out was talking to black women about representations of blackness, both black women and black men on pornography sites, because what definitely came up in talking to them

was the representation of black men they found incredibly racist. And the representations of black women, for some black women, they were talking about, it's a bit, again, this conflicting feeling, because in one way, it's actually nice to see a black woman's body being eroticised in that way, in the way that we don't see in a lot of the mainstream media. So they would talk about a conflict, particularly if they were watching black women with a white man, where they actually liked seeing a white man kind of fawning all over himself over a black woman's body. But the vast majority said they stayed away from representations that were two black people together. And they really stayed away from representations of black men because

of how racist they were. And so for a lot of the black women that I spoke to, they would watch white women in pornography, because again, it was a way to consume content where you didn't have to necessarily also consume at the same time, the levels of oppression and discrimination that you face in your day to day life. Another one here, which says, I've come to watching porn after two babies via c-section returning to penetrative sex with my husband has been difficult for us I'm now one year postnatal and it's all a bit much still watching female-based porn has brought my sexuality back but I'm still private about it even with my husband. Yeah yeah and it is and I think that this is why women are very good at talking to other women and I think that this is one thing pornography

is one thing that we haven't spoken, speaking generally, the vast majority of us haven't spoken to our girlfriends about it in the way that we talk about literally everything. You know, we talk about the sex that we have and everything, but we haven't really spoken about that. I think that part of it is because of this dominant narrative where we either are watching it and loving it or not watching it and hating it. And I think we need to open up the space so that we can talk to female friends, maybe before or maybe instead of talking to our partners, to be able to just make sense ourselves of what we've seen, how we feel about it and what it means for us both personally in our sexual lives, but also on a societal level.

Did you also hear, just because it relates to one of those messages, that people are scared to go on it because of their internet history, then being phished and scammed and all of that? Partly, but not so much. I think that there's a couple of the big porn platforms that have done quite well in terms of people not being so scared of that anymore. Definitely when it was about downloading material or going on kind of these slightly dodgier sites women would talk about that but when they were using the

mainstream big porn platforms that most of us know it wasn't a message from jane he says since the menopause i find my libido has reduced porn helps me to become aroused i tend to view it in anticipation of sleeping with my husband we never view view it together. My husband's unaware that I view it. So many people saying partners are aware. I use porn infrequently. I usually look at the lesbian encounters. I'm heterosexual, but I prefer female encounters as they're more focused on female pleasure and not as misogynistic as male on female porn. So it's synonymous with your research there and conversations.

But another one here saying, I felt moved to message on how porn has impacted me. My partner was addicted to porn when we started our relationship. I didn't know this, of course. I'm thinking this is a male partner from the way this is written. I didn't know this. It was the hardest time of my life. Now I view porn as hugely damaging all around for the viewer, their family, to the people featuring.

I see it as abuse. It wasn't something that I'd really thought about before this time. I find heterosexual porn particularly awful in terms of the role of the women. This cannot be good for our intimate relationships. In very rare circumstances, if I do want to see something visual, I prefer to see men pleasuring each other. But this isn't without some of the issues

that the heterosexual porn industry also has. Yeah, it's really interesting just listening to those two. I think both of them are more nuanced than that conversation that's been had so far. And what it really shows is that we do need to open up the space for women to talk without feeling judged. Because I think there are a significant number of women out there who exactly feel like that caller, who feel like pornography is a form of abuse, who don't think it has much of a place in society, but find it difficult to articulate that without being seen as being frigid, sex negative, you know, particularly younger women, and particularly with the push amongst younger women to be sex positive, that it means that for

some of the younger women I spoke to, they felt like they couldn't say anything critical about pornography, or they couldn't say that maybe they were a bit confused by some of what they'd seen. And so I think what we need is to open up that space. So there's no judgment for both of these women with different kind of stories, just to be able to talk about the whole range. And that's really what I was trying to do in the book. And it's what you've been trying to do in the series as well. Well, it's called Women on Porn, the book. It is what it says on the tin. Dr. Vera Gray, thank you for coming to talk. There's a message here which says,

I've never used visual porn, but keeping with books, I've found erotic passages in novels to be more arousing. Mental stimulation, I think, is the route to arousal. The mind is more powerful than the eyes. So different tastes and different practices, as you have found. I should say, if anything in that conversation has affected you, there are links and support links on our website.

And join my colleague Claire Macdonald on Friday's edition of Women's Out, where we're going to hear from some of our male listeners on this topic in the ongoing part of our series. That conversation amongst three men was absolutely fascinating. I'll let Claire Macdonald introduce them. Now, as part of our ongoing series on pornography and how it's shaping our relationships, we've heard from many of our female listeners whose attitudes and feelings towards porn range greatly. It's been a very frank and honest set of conversations. Men, of course, are still the major consumers

and producers of porn. And as a result, we also wanted to hear their voice. Now, no one group of men, of course, or women can claim to be representative of an entire gender. But three men did agree to speak to me as part of this series, and we can hear them now. Sean Russell is The Times journalist who has written for the paper about his porn use. Sean is in his 30s. We're also joined by two listeners who didn't want to share their real names. One we're calling Jake, who's in his 40s, and also Gabriel, who's in his 60s.

I started by asking Sean to tell me how his porn use shaped his real-life relationships when he was young. I had an idea of what sex was, and it was based on porn. I'd been watching porn from the age of, say, 13 through to my first experiences, which had been in my late teens, sort of 16 through 18 through 21. And it was an immense amount young. But I think when you're exposed to literally thousands of hours of online video porn, you start to think, oh, I have to last this long, I have to do this amount of positions, I have to be this size, I have to do this, I have to do that. And then suddenly, when you're presented, and then you have a girlfriend over or you're in a

situation where you're about to have sex, that suddenly becomes incredibly daunting. So my first relationships were actually built around a sort of feeling of fear and anxiety. And I tell stories of situations where I was probably about to have sex and then chicken out and sort of shut it down quickly. And that came from fear. And then equally at university, I had situations where I would be in my bedroom with a woman and then for whatever, what I believe is performance anxiety, you just couldn't perform. It just couldn't happen. And I think porn has always played a part in that. Jake, same question to you then. Do you think your early relationship with porn changed how you had sexual relationships as an older person i think much later on i think with watching porn rather than magazines as a as a kid or even like james bond movies always had sex scenes in them and for me that seemed like quite naughty and and grown up

but i think later on definitely i relate relate to the last speaker's point, if there becomes a narrative in porn, which I'm really interested in, which is it's really problematic, is this way that it has to perform and how it works in a sort of narrative way, as in the acts that you do and how it has to end, et cetera, et cetera.

And when I first started having sex as a 14, 15-year-old, there wasn't that narrative spelled out because the only way one would have seen porn is static in a magazine, whereas obviously there's a narrative in video porn or online porn. You were much more instinctive when you were younger. Yeah, totally. And that changed, did it, as your access to porn grew?

Yeah, completely changed. It was much more instinctive it was much more messy i don't mean physically messy but you know we were making it up together and you know it was really awkward as a 14 year old 15 year old but myself and and the woman would be would be making up as we go along. And I think then since porn being so readily available, I think my sexual experiences are much more, there's much more of a narrative about how sex should work. And it's almost less awkward, but more performative, perhaps. I know you're a heterosexual man. So how would you say, so that's your experience, but how has that changed for the women that you've been with as well is that the same thing that applies to them

that they feel like they're performing as well a hundred percent i really i really i notice it even more so like in the last few years even is that that idea of a narrative and also even how sex acts work um is quite different and i'm i'm really convinced that that's a lot down to the narratives of pornography you can spell it out because we're we're going there on this series when you say how sex acts work what do you mean specifically i would say that for example with oral sex eye contact has become a thing so and i think that's a trope in porn probably perhaps when a man's been given oral sex um the eye contact from the woman has become a thing i've noticed that it's really like strangely obvious in a way. I'd also say that, I mean, anal sex is a thing that seems to be more

prevalently, like, assumed, perhaps. Assumed by who? By both parties? I think so, yeah. Sexual experiences have become different in terms of it very much feels like there's a third person in the room in terms of what i mean by that is um it's more visual for both people so i think i think about what i look like more or what how sorry not what i look like how the sex looks like more than i did previously and be more in the moment and i definitely think for women and talking to female friends that they they would agree with that and would you say that's a negative thing because you're disconnecting from the person you're with yeah and and maybe thinks about good set like supposedly good sex

and inverted commas needs to look really good probably more so for women because in most porn, women are more objectified perhaps than men. Gabriel, the same question to you then. Do you think that's necessarily a bad thing, the way that easier access to porn has changed how people relate to one another in the bedroom? Is that your experience? Well, no, not for me because I suppose i formed my ideas of how things are going to go long before all this so i think actually no i had i had a bit of a revelation

when internet form came along because i just learned a lot to be honest with you before that i it was always pretty repetitive and kind of boring. Not boring. No, boring is the wrong word, but I don't know, formulaic or something. And then I came across internet porn, I guess, in the 90s. And I thought, oh, wow, you can do all this other stuff. So it was actually sort of a bit liberating. I mean, when I started reading about sex in the 70s and oral sex was a big deal

and the man had to give the woman an orgasm, that was a really, you had to do that. But beyond that, it was, I don't know, maybe I just haven't got very much imagination, but when porn came along, before that I'd only seen pictures. So you're only looking at still images. And then in the 90s, you're looking at moving images.

And you get a lot of, I mean, obviously, you know a lot of it's unrealistic. It's just, you know, because it's a film. But I just realised, actually from lesbian porn more than anything, just thinking, oh, you can do that. You know, that's interesting. I didn't know you could do that. I suppose for me, being of an older generation, it was, yeah, it was actually quite liberating.

So educational as much as anything else. Yeah, but, yeah, I must admit, I don't look at a lot of porn with men in. So maybe I'm missing a lot of brutality or whatever. I feel like I've learned a lot. And it's, you know, it's not just in my fantasies. It works. I wanted to pick that up with you, actually, Sean and Jake, about, you know, the way Gabriel took that into the brutality.

Because a lot of the women we've spoken to in this series say porn has had a negative effect inside the bedroom for them in their relationships. We heard from Sophie who told us, porn has left me feeling fundamentally unsafe in sexual interactions. Previous partners have violated my boundaries due to porn consumption. So on one side, it kind of opens up your experience and your mind and your imagination to a world of possibilities, but's not all positive is it Sean do you understand why Sophie feels that way

yeah 100% I think the difference between sort of say my experience and the previous speakers is that it's almost like inverted whereas learning about sex through doing and learning and with another person it's going for the opposite it's like you have everything there this is you go on a website and there's just literally millions of videos and then you find out that sex is for the most part different to that and so i i mentioned a um a study in my, I think it was a 2021 study, which said one in eight videos suggested to first-time users was violent now. My personal experience is it's never been something that I particularly enjoy, but those videos are always there. You go on to look at one type of video,

and then eventually you just keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, and you find so many other videos that you would never think to watch but then when they're there people are going to click on them and that's the point there's an algorithm at work that's kind of bringing people into these situations so whereas when i was watching videos and growing up they tended to be pretty much lesbians and it was always a little bit more um well it certainly wasn't violent and but i built my ideas of how sex was through these videos but if i was starting with violent videos then i'd begin to think that was normal if i think that um a woman wants to be

choked and that's a normal part of sex because i've learned about it from porn then i'm more likely to implement it without thinking. I guess because that's what you think sex is. And that will go the same with all sorts like slapping and gagging and all of these things that are quite violent. And some people will want that and some people won't. But if you think that that's what sex is, then you're not going to think to ask i think in

many cases and and that's why i feel that even when i was young it was still more difficult we still had a family pc and it wasn't until i was probably 16 17 that smartphones came along if you increased the amount that you're able to watch and made it even easier you're seeing more videos you're getting through more of the the suggested videos you're going to see these things and you're going to try them out and I think that's where this disconnect comes from and it doesn't surprise me at all that women in particular are feeling less safe when having sex. Jake you mentioned the fact that you have young children. And another point Sophie made was the way that porn has sort of indirectly seeped into the rest of culture,

you know, with the media, with adverts, with jokes like doggy style. And she knows 13 and 14 year old girls who are having anal sex. And she said, you know, how else does that come into our culture other than via porn i just pick up on what sean was saying that you know these days you can access the dark stuff pretty easily the algorithm will take you right there um that's quite dangerous territory to be and isn't it for young minds yeah i would agree completely um the other thing that Sean was saying, I think is really interesting is these tropes like choking has become numerous, like female friends that are single and,

you know, have relationships with guys. And so often they've mentioned like that. The guy seemed to think if it was, you know, it was just a casual thing, but that the guy thinks it's totally acceptable and wanted to be they would choke the person during sex which is the the woman rather during sex which i just find like for me anyway that seems like such a new thing but apparently talking to female friends like really common and unwanted on like 90% of the time. Gabriel, what would you say to that?

Do you think it should be that easy to access? I think you're underestimating how much imagination we have, to be honest. I think of some of the kids at school, you know, they were talking about all sorts of stuff. In the absence of pornography, people don't just do nothing. They still try stuff out. I don't think anal sex is a new thing. just do nothing they still try stuff out i don't think anal sex is a new thing people are together they try stuff i mean one of the things like i got the

joy of sex the book quite early on actually in the early 80s and it's in there you know it's not rare it's not weird i think i mean erotic asphyxiation isn't new either is it i mean people choking themselves to have an orgasm is not unusual. It is unusual, but it's not new. So I don't know how much, you know, if you take away porn, would everybody just go back to doing the missionary position? I don't think so. You know, people have been trying out weird stuff since forever.

I think we're having a bit of a moral panic here, maybe, because we're, you know, we're thinking all this is really new. And it isn't. You know, people back in the 60s, you know, the swinging 60s, people were doing all sorts of stuff. I think we really are. So we've got to sort of, it's like a history free zone. This is like, we don't seem to know what the past was like. It's not a foreign country. It's like a history-free zone, this. It's like we don't seem to know what the past was like. It's not a foreign country. It's actually remarkably familiar. It's just there's no videos.

And there's less quantity. But the information was there. Sean, pick up on that point. This is all a bit of a moral panic. It's nothing new. What do you think to what Gabriel's just said? I agree that it's nothing new um what do you think to what Gabriel's just said I agree that it's nothing new um I don't and I don't sort of cast some moral thing on any of the acts in and of themselves or even porn I'm not anti-porn particularly either um I just think that the difference is that maybe

you learn this stuff in a loving relationship. Maybe if a couple wants to try something, fine, go for it. But I think the difference is when a 13, 14 year old believes it to be normal. Does a young woman have enough sort of information to make that judgment herself? Or does she feel an expectation to do the thing that the boy has seen on online porn? So I don't think it's the acts themselves that are wrong. And no, there is nothing new. I just think that it's so much easier to access now. And I think that it is changing the way

that young people are approaching their first relationships. And I wonder what damage that could do. This is not trying some sort of sexual position in a loving relationship or or even just you know having a bond with someone and trying something it is possibly even someone losing their virginity in this way and I think it's one thing if it's done in a safe environment um but if that is what is expected and people are not wanting these acts and as you said I think you mentioned Sophie it clearly is happening in a way to a lot of people where they don't where they're

having sex that they don't necessarily want or they're trying things that they don't necessarily want and they're feeling a pressure because that's how a lot of people feel sex should be from the moment they get going they haven't started at missionary and moved in. They've gone straight in for choking and more extreme forms of sex, and they haven't grown into them. I think that's probably what my point would be on that. Yeah, I mean, people of my generation and before did not necessarily learn what they were doing in a loving relationship. I mean, there's kids playing sex games in the garden.

I don't know what they got up to. But, no, I think you've got a bit of a golden age idea here. It wasn't like that, honestly. There was one girl in our class who was clearly very, I suppose these days you'd say she was sexualised. But she was clearly, you know, she had very, we were, again, junior school. And she was talking about stuff that had happened. And, you know, she had very, we were, again, junior school. And she was talking about stuff that had happened.

And, you know, she's completely, whether she's damaged or not, I don't know. But it was there. All I'm saying is that, and people did do stuff that they didn't want, I'm sure. You know, people had bad experiences that were, you know, were not what they wanted. They were not consenting. I mean, consent's the point, isn't it, to me, in this whole conversation? It's about consent.

You know, it's not about what people do. It's about whether they're allowed to say no and be listened to. I've got a final question to all three of you. So you've all had various different relationships because of the different ages you are with porn down the years. But in 2024, is it possible to have a healthy relationship with porn given its proliferation

and accessibility jake let's start with you i think probably there is my worry is that the ethics of it is like the performers in pornography is their safety and rights or what have you there's obviously ethical supposedly ethical porn um which i'm quite interested in as a concept also watching that perhaps it is healthy but just it seems that most porn that's available is like the lowest common denominator if you you see what I mean. And I don't know whether like if ethical porn, if there is such thing, could be more prevalent, that would be interesting. Gabriel? I'd like kids to know the difference between porn and real life better. I think they're more able to distinguish fantasy films from real life.

You know, they don't go out and shoot people normally, even though they watch action movies. Maybe kids aren't taught enough, so they go to porn, or young boys especially, go to porn for information. And maybe it isn't so clear that this is entertainment, fantasy, and this is real life, and they're two. They are. I mean, now I still use porn, not as much,

and I have a good sexual relationship as well. And the two are quite separate. You know, they really don't have much to do with each other. Sean, let's end with you. What do you think? Yeah, I agree 100 percent with what has just been said. I think it took me probably until my early 20s when I realised that these two things were separate entities. And again, I haven't got a problem with porn. I think there are a lot of problems surrounding porn. I think it could be ethically better. It could be better for the sex workers. It could be better for the viewers. It could be better for people involved with it. But the main thing, and I agree with

Gabriel, is that there needs to be more education for kids. Kids need to have another way of learning about sex that is not just porn. And they need to have these conversations with their fathers, their mothers, their teachers about the difference between porn and real sex. And I believe, I do believe it will come at some point. But yeah, you can't be throwing kids into these situations where that's what they think sex is. And I think that that is where the issues come from, not just violence, but also the things I've talked about in terms of like fear and anxiety of even going into these relationships. And so I wonder if there is a way of making it harder for children to access porn before the age of 18.

But I do on the whole, I believe it is possible to have a healthy relationship with porn and I don't think porn's going anywhere anytime soon. In response to that conversation, one listener wrote, I have two prepubescent daughters and I'm terrified that my girls will meet teenage boys who might have been overexposed to pornography and may view my girls through that lens. A listener we're calling Elaine emailed to ask for information and support. Her husband, like her, is in his late 60s. Elaine's words are read by an actor. I've discovered that my husband seems to look at an awful lot of porn.

How did you discover it? I was wondering what he was doing on his computer, hour after hour after hour until the early hours, all the time, not going out, not doing anything. Occasionally stopping for a cigarette break and then back again. And, well, I felt, obviously, he was depressed. So I broke into his laptop. What did you discover? Some very unpleasant porn.

I discovered what was out there. When you use the word unpleasant, what do you deem unpleasant? Naked people who are sometimes performing quite unpleasant sexual acts. I think looking at pages of female bodies' genitalia performing quite unpleasant sexual acts. I think looking at pages of female bodies' genitalia, to me, is rather unsettling. And why would a married man of my age, because we are the same age, be looking at this stuff?

And what pleasure is there in looking at such things? I don't understand it. Do you not understand it because it's your husband or do you not understand it in general? I know people look at it, but why would somebody want to look at it for hour after hour when they're in a relationship? I think it's been going on a lot when he's stressed. That was when I used to discover porn in his bags or in his suitcase or hidden in a drawer. I know the trigger points. Stress at work sometimes used to be that. He's retired now, but I still look on the laptop fairly regularly and actually search out what he's been looking at and look at what he's been looking at.

And I'm sure it's had a major impact on our marriage. I'm quite sure of that. And that's what I find very unsettling. And particularly as I feel I'm not getting now any affection at all. And then as a wife who discovers all of this, who do you go and speak to? Because on the odd occasion I've mentioned it to other women, they laugh about it. Oh, that's what men do, and I'm thinking, really? Because I have a brother and he doesn't.

Have you asked him? Yes, yes. Do you think he'd be honest with you? Yeah, I think so, yeah. Yes, yes, certainly. Because we say it's something, or you say it's something, people don't talk about. So if confronted, would people be honest?

Probably not. My brother was the one who showed me how to block a lot of the stuff on the computer, but there are still ways round it which I've also learned which I also find very very upsetting. So I want to take you back you and your husband how would you describe your husband how would you describe your relationship before all this happened? Well this is difficult because I think there's been porn around in the marriage over many years I mean the language that's used to me when he's cross, when he's frustrated by things I've said or done or not done, then this language comes out, bitch. And frankly, other words I really don't want to repeat. And it's not language I would normally associate with being a professional.

Where does that link happen between the porn and, you say, the language? Could that just be him over a lifetime of marriage, and he's just, oh, doesn't want to do pleasantries anymore? Well, it's one thing being cross with you, but being abusive about your physical attributes, your whole physical nature, the fact that you're overweight and never feeling that your body, your clothes, your whole appearance get any praise at all. It's just a very negative attitude to it all.

Do you compare yourself to what he's looking at? Oh, no, because I'm fat and tubby and that's it. You've tried to talk to him and what's his response? Well, his response is not to talk about it. I mean, literally, smile and walk away. Walk out the house, walk out the front door, just will not talk about it. When you try and talk to him, is it a case of,

are you enraged? Are you upset? Are you like, look what I've just found again? Are you calm? Well, I've tried a number of approaches, deliberately calm, deliberately quiet about it all. And the reaction I tell you every time he's not discussing or talking about any of it. Yet when we're driving along and he might see some woman at the side of the road, which then triggers lewd comments, which I find thoroughly unnecessary and unpleasant. Like? Making comments about these young girls, usually.

Their breasts, short skirts and looking at them, even though you're driving. So you're looking to the side, not concentrating on the road, and that will happen. What's your biggest fear with regards to your husband watching porn? My biggest fear is that I'm seeing my grandchildren growing up and I have got a granddaughter. I'm scared that there might be some sort of physical attraction when she's growing up. You know, tight t-shirts going through all the fashion things that teenage girls do and the lewd comments that'll be made behind the scenes when she's gone. I mean, not necessarily in front of her. Yeah, I'm scared by that.

And particularly when I see some of the stuff online where I'm not sure how old they are. I mean, are they under 16, over 16, over 18? I have my doubts. Well, what do you do? You know that child porn is illegal. It's wrong. This is not child porn, I don't think, but it scares me. Where do you get helper advice? I don't know there is anywhere. Where have you tried? OK, yeah, I went home, tore up the magazines, left them all over the mattress so he couldn't get into bed until he cleared it and a message saying, I find this unacceptable, don't do it again. But now it's all online.

It's not so much the magazines anymore. And when you told them not to do it again? Completely blank, which I would have expected. And that that was it helplines and support groups those are all aimed at the person who's looking at the porn they're not aimed at the partner of somebody people talk about marriage guidance i don't think that's an answer either well i thought i'd try that, but my relationship is now so bad. It's very much feeling his pleasure is somewhere else, not with me. In partnerships, there's always things that we don't like that our partner does.

And we tolerate it. Is this something you feel that you will just tolerate? I've tolerated because I'm worried that I don't think he's well but I can't do anything about it or I'm scared, financially I think I've tolerated so much over the years to have a comfortable life there's nothing anymore to keep me. Why don't you just leave?

I don't know. The truth is I should go, but where do I go? I know that I get quite scared when I'm in the house on my own. And I'd always hoped that maybe there'd be a change. I thought with him stopping work, it would be much more doing things together, going off, but I must admit I find I just pack my bags and go off on my own. I've travelled the world on my own.

It's quite nice sometimes, though, to come home and know that there's somebody there on the other side of the door, but at the same time I know I'm tolerating behavior that I shouldn't tolerate I find it very lonely so I found my own hobbies to do I'm really involved in music and take myself off to our local community cafe and meet up with other friends I've made a real effort not to be at home because in some ways I'm quite scared of the silence and the loneliness. You'd said something to me which I found really poignant. You said the time that he was spending watching porn, sometimes you'd have liked to have had that time just for him to give you a hug.

Yes. Oh, yes, when my mother died, I would have loved a big hug. Just a cuddle. Or sometimes just going out once a week to a pub or a cafe, making our special treat. No, he's spending all his time on his laptop, looking at porn. Everything you've told me, if a really good friend of yours was to come

and say the same things to you what would you say to them get out elaine there talking to enna miller uh and elaine is clear that her husband is not viewing images of child sexual abuse i should also say there are links on our website of organizations that can give information and support if you fear someone is breaking the law in that way but joining me are two people I hope might be able to address some of Elaine's concerns and also some of your questions that have come in over the last few weeks. Dr Paula Hall, a sexual and relationship psychotherapist, author of Sex Addiction, The Partner's Perspective and also the Clinical director of pivotal recovery and professor valerie voon neuropsychiatrist and neuroscientist at the university of cambridge good morning to you

both paula if i come to you um how difficult is this sort of behavior on partners oh gosh it is hugely hugely painful i mean just hearing elaine's story there is is quite heartbreaking isn't it um it's of course impossible to know just from her story whether this is addiction or not or whether this is just a a man who's deciding to put his desires and needs ahead of hers but I mean it's got all the hallmarks of addiction it's taking more and more time it's used as a stress relief and the impact it's having on their relationship is huge, which is not uncommon with this problem. And yeah, I really feel for her. It's very difficult for her to be able to address this if he won't accept that he's got a problem.

Valerie, you've researched porn watching. What happens in our brains when we watch it? We ran a study back several years ago. and if you show people with compulsive sexual behaviour disorder these pornographic images, it activates the same brain regions as what you'd expect to see with drug use and those with drug addictions. And when we, I mean, as we just heard from Pauli, it's impossible to know here if there is an addiction. But the point is, there is a medical condition. Yeah, so this is now accepted as a disorder in the ICD-11, the International Classification of Disorders for Mental Health. And it's called compulsive sexual behaviour disorder. It's under the impulse control disorders okay and so when you see what happens with the brain what's the treatment or how if you're listening to this and you're thinking perhaps my partner has this or i know someone who does what can be done i think that two things basically um putting it very simply stop find out what the triggers are

and interestingly elaine was talking about triggers find out what the triggers are. And interestingly, Elaine was talking about triggers, find out what the triggers are, learn to avoid those triggers if possible, and if not, develop relapse prevention strategies. But the other critical bit is actually looking at what's driving this. There are, of course, many millions of people out there who use porn recreationally, and it doesn't become a problem for them. It doesn't affect their relationships in this way. So really looking at what's going on underneath, what the deepest psychological issues might be that are driving the behaviour. I wanted to read you some messages we've had in, anonymous messages. Let me start with this one. I enabled my husband's use of pornography, not knowing he already had an

addiction. He was using sex workers, some of them younger than our daughter. I understand why. I am a pleaser. He didn't think this was an issue because he hadn't done anything illegal. I thought watching pornography was what young men did. I thought sex with me wasn't good enough. I tried to fill the perceived gap and engaged in damaging sexual activity. It ruined our marriage and we are divorced after 30 years together. I tried to support him. He's been diagnosed with OCD with sex. Paula, what would you say to that?

Again, unfortunately, it's not uncommon. We did some research with pivotal recovery users recently and 47% said that it caused sexual problems within their relationship. 60% said it caused conflict. I think it is difficult for partners to really recognise ultimately, it might be a case of leaving the relationship. But I think drugs your partner may be drinking too much but they're probably not forcing you to drink along with them but for some people certainly not for all but some people with compulsive sexual behaviours that does actually transpose into the couple relationship as well. There's another email here and I'll bring you in in a moment, Valerie. It says, my elderly dad and many of my friend's elderly dads get addicted to porn and start contacting women for chats. My 80-year-old mother is totally crippled emotionally since she discovered my dad was doing this.

She takes it personally. I tell her that old men seem for some reason to get addicted to sex as their virility fades. I think it's part of dementia, but she can't accept this. She wants him to stop or she leaves. addicted to sex as their virility fades. I think it's part of dementia, but she can't accept this. She wants him to stop or she leaves. He's over 80. And a sort of plea at the end of that message,

please discuss this on your programme, as many older women feel desperate about husbands of 50 years doing this. Paula, again, your take on that? I've been really curious about Valerie's input on this one as well. I think really cases like that do demonstrate that this is actually not really about sex this is not about libido this is not about testosterone which we know will be significantly declining at that age it's about a dopamine arousal in the brain and the older we get the harder it is to get those dopamine hits those dopamine highs but porn is is a very, very effective way of getting it. So potentially, as you get older, it actually becomes even more, not more rewarding,

but more enticing. Valerie, what do we know about the brain on this and ageing? Yeah, so I think most of the initial studies, people were concerned about more youths and adolescents, just because there was some concern that it might be affecting the kind of growing and developing brain. What we do know is, it seems to affect actually, the studies that we were running, you know, people were between the ages of 18 to about into their mid 50s. And I suspect that it's related to more the anticipation and the expectation of these videos. So this is what other studies have also shown, sort of replicating what we've seen. And it's people working and putting an effort into doing this, but they're not necessarily actually liking it, right? So when you think about an addiction process, we actually start out with liking and enjoying and obtaining pleasure initially. But in fact, with this disorder, we've shown amongst others that you actually then move away

from just liking it, you're actually just working for it. So this is kind of an underlying theory of addictions that might apply to this. And is there any link between dementia and what's been raised by our listener here? So there are specific forms of dementia that might be more likely to be associated with compulsive sexual behaviours. So especially things like frontotemporal dementia, and it has to do with disinhibition, right? So part of how you think about this is there's an accelerator, you're putting on the accelerator, so the urge and the drive, but it's also what you're able to kind of control your kind of top-down ability to put on the brakes. If you take off the brakes, then actually the accelerator ends up being, you have this mismatch, right? So in the context of think, Paula, someone would very much appreciate a response to or some thoughts on.

Again, anonymous. I found out four years ago my husband had a porn addiction. We've been married seven years at this point. I'd been aware of something was odd. I came back from work early on a hunch, searched the house. I found a laptop hidden in the garage and confronted him that night. Endless denials, endless lies. Eventually, he said he'd been watching porn and had been his whole life and wouldn't do it again. We both had counselling. Two years later, my son found him with another laptop he'd secretly bought. He then went to addiction counselling. Two months ago, I came home from work early and found him upstairs behaving bizarrely

and another laptop which he'd hidden in my son's room. My problem is, yes, I hate the porn. It makes me feel physically sick. But the worst part is the lies. I don't trust him. I can never trust him again. It's affected my children who know about it. He's a good man otherwise and a good husband, but a liar and a porn addict.

I have no idea what to do. Paula? Absolutely. We run a lot of support groups for partners at the Laurel Centre, which is another organisation I work for. And at the Laurel Centre, we see people, partners of all sorts of different kinds of behaviour. So, yeah, pornography, sex workers, massage parlours, a whole range of different things. And the common denominator for all of them is the deceit that really, really hurts. They may be disgusted, they may be,

you know, really dislike the sexual behaviours, but it's the deceit. And so many of us, you know, believe we're a good judge of character, we believe what's going on in our own home, we think we understand our environment. And actually, to find out that somebody you are perhaps closer to than anybody else in your in your life is actually leading double life yes is is hugely hugely damaging and i think just hearing from other partners and support groups is so important just to break through that sense of isolation that so many partners we will have to leave it there dr paula hall professor valerie voon thank you to you as emma said el Elaine's story really resonated. A last message from one of our listeners.

I'm 67 and I've had a near fatal breakdown in my 44 year marriage due to porn. My husband's 69 and started watching porn 10 years ago when our children gave him an iPad for Christmas. I think there must be many women of my age who've had a similar experience. I hope younger women will think about what it will be like when they're past 60 and post-menopause and their men are still watching 20-year-olds who are paid to put on an act

for the camera. Thank you, Women's Hour. I feel less alone now. And thanks to everyone who's contributed to this series and to all of the listeners who trusted us with their stories. I'm Sarah Treleaven and for over a year I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies.

I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I covered. There was somebody out there who's faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby.

It's a long story. Settle in. Available now.