Young women
who report that their romantic partners look at porn frequently are
less happy in their relationships than women partnered with guys who
more often abstain, new research finds.
The study bolsters some anecdotal evidence that men's porn use can shake the self-esteem of their girlfriends or wives, though certainly not all couples have conflicts over pornography, said study researcher Destin Stewart, a clinical psychology intern at the University of Florida. Stewart
decided to investigate the effect of porn on relationships after some
of her clients revealed that they were struggling with the issue.
Discovering explicit material on a partner's computer "made them feel
like they were not good enough, like they could not measure up," Stewart
told LiveScience.
What women think of porn
A number of studies that have interviewed women about pornography find a
range of feelings on the topic, from "scathing to mildly positive,"
Stewart and University of Tennessee psychologist Dawn Szymanski wrote
online May 6 in the journal Sex Roles. Nevertheless, concerns about
measuring up to the images found in pornography were a common theme. In
one 1999 study, for example, a participant told researchers, "These men
look at these pictures and say, 'Look at her. She's just beautiful. Why
can't you be like that?'" [Is Porn Bad For You?]
Few of these studies had hard numbers to back up the interviews,
however. Stewart wanted to understand how widespread these feelings
might be. She recruited 308 college women, ages 18 to 29 years old, to fill out online questionnaires about their current partner's porn use as well as their relationship quality, sexual satisfaction and self-esteem. All of the women were heterosexual and most were white.
The results showed that women who reported that their boyfriends or
husbands looked at more pornography were less likely to be happy in
their relationships than women who said their partners didn't look at
pornography very often. When women were bothered by their partner's porn use,
saying, for example, that they believed he was a porn addict or that he
used porn more than a "normal" amount, they were also more likely to
have low self-esteem and to be less satisfied with both their
relationship and their sex life.
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