Reply to Giving in to DH's porn "needs" = Good Wife or Bad Wife?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]"Porn is one of those misuses that is so wrong, you don't even need to be aware of the full meaning of sex to see its harmful effects."

Out of curiosity, say DH and I make home videos of ourselves having sex, which we watch later to get ourselves in the mood to have sex again.  Is that wrong?  Also, what if DH takes it with him on business trips to masturbate?  Are those forms of porn ok?[/quote]

These are very thoughtful questions.  The answer is simple, but the explanation is long, because it involves trying to understand some of the greatest mysteries of our existence.  Can you bear with my morning-sickness-addled brain?  This will probably take more than one post.

To begin, you have removed some of the most offensive aspects of pornography--the unfaithfulness and the exploitation and degradation of strangers.  You've enclosed it within a marriage, inside the private love of a committed couple.  The presumption is that anything within a marriage is automatically fine, even good.

But no matter how secular you are, I'm sure you could come up with some examples of sex within marriage that are still wrong.  Marital rape is the most extreme example, but thinking back to some other topics on this board, what about when sex is just tolerated?  Used to get something?  Withheld as punishment?  Painful for one spouse, but demanded by the other?  There are countless scenarios that we could all agree are not good.  But do we know WHY they are not good?  Is there a rulebook somewhere out there that explains WHY sex NEEDS to meet certain standards to be good?

What also becomes obvious is that there is a range of good and bad sex.  Not in terms of pleasure, but in terms of rightness and wrongness.  This is another topic that comes up on this forum all the time.  Which is worse, adultery as a one night stand or as a year long relationship?  Cheating with someone who has kids versus someone who is childless?  An emotional affair or a physical affair?  Vanilla porn or child porn?  Etc.  Some things strike us as really really bad, while others are more understandable, more forgivable.

And how do we make those value judgments?  If you're coming from a background of 20 years of total promiscuity, as is your spouse, along with an extensive porn habit and an open marriage, your perspective will be very different from someone who married young, a virgin like her spouse, who believes sex is sacred.

Perhaps this is where PPs would say, exactly, Church Lady.  Go have your prudish life, and let us have ours.  Especially within our own marriages.  It's our private business.  There is no rulebook.  We write our own rules.

Let me put that perspective aside for a little longer.  Because I want to answer PP's specific question.  What could possibly be wrong with homemade porn?  Isn't it just a celebration of the joys of awesome married sex?  Isn't it great that my husband wants to masturbate to my image, instead of some porn star?

I'll need to continue later.  But hold onto these premises for now:

#1. There are actual rules for sex, whether we acknowledge them or not.  We bump into them all the time, but usually can't quite articulate a coherent whole.  The coherent rule book does exist, though.

#2. There are degrees of offense, and culpability.  An analogy could be our federal and state laws on rape and murder; but those human laws are just a reflection of an absolute standard that we can fail in varying degrees.

#3.  Our ability to grasp the whole meaning of sex AND ACTUALLY LIVE ACCORDING TO IT will be influenced by where we are starting from.  If we are already comfortable with porn and objectifying people for personal gratification, the full meaning of sex will seem impossibly idealistic at best, repulsive and undesirable at worst.

Out of time...will try to answer in full later...[/quote]

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