Sex File: His porn use is so open - I find it insulting 

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I just discovered that my boyfriend, who is 47 (I'm 35), follows hundreds of random women on Facebook, a lot of whom appear to be in the porn industry. I am no prude, but this seems very strange to me as I've never experienced this with previous partners. He does it very openly, though, which makes me wonder whether I am the strange one?

It is difficult to understand why humans derive sexual pleasure from two-dimensional depictions of stuff that they could be doing with the three-dimensional human right in front of them, yet explicit imagery has existed for millennia.

Pornhub, the biggest player in the market, knows lots about the people who use it and releases its statistics every year. In 2019, for example, the website was visited 42 billion times by an audience that was 68% male and 32% female. We also know that traffic spiked at 4pm and again at 10pm and that the average visit lasted 10 minutes and 28 seconds. Most Pornhub viewers (61%) during this period were under the age of 34 and only 11% of visitors were aged between 45 and 54. That particular piece of data is of interest to you because it shows that, like sex hormones, sexual frequency and sexual desire, porn use declines with age.

Although Pornhub data can tell us who, how and when people use porn, it doesn't tell us why. That question is now being answered by academics such as Joshua Grubbs from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. In 2019 Grubbs conducted a review of 130 studies into the personalities, behaviours, attitudes and motivations that are associated with, or predicted by, porn use. 

What did he find? Nothing we didn't know already, to be honest. His team concluded that porn use is a hedonistic experience that is primarily motivated by the pursuit of impersonal, undemanding sexual pleasure. Some of the studies that they assessed found associations with boredom (obviously), narcissism, risk taking, relationship difficulties and depression, but if you studied the population of an average supermarket you would find all that and more.

Although it is probably not what you wanted to hear, or maybe it is, for most men porn is a meaningless sexual indulgence that is so completely separate from real-world human relationships they find the idea that their partners might perceive it to be a psychological threat difficult.

The problem with your boyfriend's approach is that Facebook activity is not private. Many men of your boyfriend's age are clueless about technology, so he may not even realise that if you can see what he is up to, so can everyone else, including his boss, and his client, and his mum. The other problem with Facebook is that it is much easier to make personal connections, whether through a screen, or in the flesh, and that ultimately increases the risk of real-world transgression.

There is, I'm afraid, no easy solution to your dilemma, but when an adult male really cares about his female partner, he doesn't ignore her feelings, or make her feel "strange" if she says that she is not comfortable with his porn use or finds it a blockage to their intimacy. Nor does he openly expose her to it, when he knows that it unsettles her.

It takes minimal effort to keep porn private and clear search histories, and not to do so when you know it bothers your partner is more than disrespectful. If you talk all of this through with your boyfriend and he tries to tell you that you are being irrational, remind him that diminishing, mocking, ignoring or rejecting feelings rarely makes them go away and ask him to propose a solution.

He will probably never change, so I would suggest that you question if you want to stay with someone who ignores your feelings. The minute it becomes clear that his interest in Facebook outweighs his interest in you, it is time to change your relationship status.

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