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Dr. Klein,

I respectfully disagree with your opinions about porn. Please allow me to balance your perspective as one man with my perspective as one woman and that of the women who I know well. I find it offensive for a man to say that Empower's audience of women shouldn't feel threatened by porn. I think you've used your title as medical or PhD doctor to justify the money that is made by porn, the women who are ill-used in the making of porn, and the over-valuing of male fantasies that under-values female fantasies. Masturbation is one thing. Watching porn to masturbate is a different thing entirely.

It seems unprofessional that you haven’t cited references to back up your statements. One-third of rapists and one-half of child sexual abusers report using porn as prep before the committing the abuse. 38% of prostitutes reported having had sexually explicit photographs taken of them as children for commercial purposes and/or the personal gratification of the photographer, leading to a normalization in their attitudes of the sex trade as a legitimate business. There is a significant link between organized child sexual abuse and subsequent participation in porn and prostitution whether as the pimps or as the prostitutes. (Itzin, C. (1997). Pornography and the organization of intrafamilial and extrafamilial child sexual abuse: developing a conceptual model. Child Abuse Review, 6, 94-106.) I wouldn’t want to be in a relationship, sexual or otherwise, with someone who normalizes the kind of attitudes and business practices that lead to pornography, sexual abuse, or prostitution. Itzin (1997) describes the women participants as victims of a history of male-female power abuses who need rescuing and help to make a fresh start. I wonder how many porn actors are human trafficked.

In contrast, a healthy sexual relationship is reciprocal and balanced, valuing the contributions of both male and female hormonal/brain structure tendencies, leading to a beautiful, evolving, surprising, exciting sexual relationship. The woman's needs, preferences, and fantasies are just as relevant to both people as the man's. Men who don’t yet understand their women’s preferences in speed, aesthetics, and conversation will NOT understand their women better by watching porn. Anything (i.e., sex as business venture) that values one person's experience and needs over the other is unhealthy.

A person who watches porn chooses to spend that time being influenced by the porn producers’ values and world view instead of by the person’s partner. Watching porn validates men’s fantasies of what women should try to be like. Porn over-values male needs and power and devalues female needs and power in the general relationship (including the sexual part of the relationship) of the man who watches porn. Porn is on the same power continuum that includes abuse. Porn validates the man's wishes at the expense of open communication from the woman about what she wants.

Having a significant other who watches porn would be a libido-killer for the women I know, so porn is counter-productive for a healthy sexual relationship. Porn is not going to be sexually exciting for anyone who acknowledges the abuses toward women that must have taken place for a woman to want to cheapen sex by participating in the making of porn. The emphasis on the male-domination and on male fantasies alone is enough to make a man less open to a woman's fantasies and sexual needs, and so to make a woman less willing or able to share her needs and fantasies.

A good sexual relationship is relational and emotionally intimate. The women who I know well fantasize about their men cherishing them relationally, emotionally intimately, and affectionately physically over time in ways that naturally flow to physical intimacy. The depth of relational intimacy that leads to female-fantasy-sexual intimacy has nothing to do with videos of strangers being physically intimate. Porn feels like the opposite of a non-abused woman's fantasy imho.

Porn, not porn myths, keeps couples from talking about sex. Porn sets the bar too high, higher than is normal for women, increasing a man's expectations, and decreasing a woman's ability to meet his expectations. The smiles and experiences of porn actors are not any more real than of tv actors; they get paid. (Or maybe not in the case of trafficked porn actors.)

Women need to sort out together how to respond to porn in a way that women don't continue get hurt. It is offensive that you have watched enough porn to know the content, and that you are using your status as "Dr." to influence women into settling for porn. I respectfully submit that a man who watches porn does not have authority to talk to women about how they should feel about porn. Your article feels inappropriate to me; I'm surprised it was allowed to post. I will be unsubscribing.

September 30, 2016 - 6:35am

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