“Sex Doesn’t Feel the Way Porn Looks” An Interview with Marty Klein on Porn’s Role in Modern America
The United States is undergoing a so-called “porn panic,” says psychotherapist and author Marty Klein, a humanist who has spoken at many secular events. He defines it as a moral panic stemming from the way many Americans see sexuality that has evolved its language to one of public health, with claims that porn is related to a series of negative social effects like divorce, violence against women, child sexual exploitation, and more. In his latest book, His Porn, Her Pain: Confronting America’s PornPanic with Honest Talk About Sex (out September 30), Klein attempts to address these fears and provide a rational way to talk about sex and pornography based on research and his decades of experience as a sex and marriage and family therapist.
Q: Why did you decide to write about how porn affects heterosexual relationships in particular?
Marty Klein: Male couples rarely bicker about porn. Female couples rarely bicker about porn. Conflict about porn happens almost exclusively in heterosexual relationships. And I almost never hear men complain that their wife or girlfriend is involved with porn (or romance novels). There’s an enormous, recurring quarrel in American relationships, and it’s women complaining about men watching porn. Hence the title, His Porn, Her Pain.
Q: Why do some people see watching porn as infidelity?
Klein: Infidelity is a contract violation: you promised this, you did that, you broke your promise, that’s infidelity.
When people couple up, they generally assume they’ll both be monogamous, but they rarely discuss what that means and what that excludes. Slow dancing with someone else? Facebooking your ex-boyfriend? Flirting with strangers on airplanes? A massage with a “happy ending?” Having a profile on Match.com?
For some people, masturbation falls outside the bounds of monogamy. The logic is approximately: “you shouldn’t need any sexual gratification outside of our sex together.” Or: “if you want a sexual experience, you should come to me, and I’ll always oblige.” This creates severe sexual dependence (or interdependence, depending on your viewpoint) within a couple that may challenge the autonomy that a person may desire or assume they have.
Generally, when someone says, “I don’t want you looking at porn,” they mean, “I don’t want you masturbating and looking at porn.” That should be approached as a masturbation issue, not a porn issue.
But if just imagining others is a form of infidelity, every human alive is unfaithful. If someone has a more substantial complaint (i.e., you treat others better than you treat me), let’s talk about that rather than porn.
Q: What does the Bible say on this?
Klein: The Old Testament says nothing about masturbation, and it generally doesn’t problematize lust. That story about Onan being punished for “spilling his seed” is about him refusing to impregnate his dead brother’s widow—coitus interruptus. The New Testament doesn’t say anything about masturbation, but it condemns lust in many places. Several Christian thinkers during the early Church years even condemned lust within marriage for one’s own wife.
Q: You characterize viewing porn, accompanied by masturbation, as a singular activity. But don’t couples also enjoy porn together and incorporate it into sex?
Klein: Yes, of course. That’s just not something I’m talking a lot about right now. We can’t talk about everything all at the same time!
Q: Recently, the media has been infatuated with covering stories about how millennials have less sex than previous generations or lose their virginities later in life. One common refrain is that millennials feel they’re too busy working and pursuing their hobbies to pursue sex. Some fill that gap with masturbation and porn instead. How often does porn become a complete substitute for sex and is that a problem?
Klein: It’s true that millennials and people younger than millennials have different courtship patterns and sexual lives than those of generations before them. I think there are three primary reasons.
One, millennials and young adults in general don’t live on their own as early as previous cohorts, and so they have less privacy and fewer opportunities. Secondly, they don’t establish their households as early in their lives, so they’re not driven to couple up the way previous cohorts were. They’re also not after the same emotional gratifications regarding coupling that previous generations were.
Lastly, the process of courtship is slightly different because of the Internet. People are learning to substitute digital experiences and digital relationships for face-to-face experiences and face-to-face relationships. Without asking, “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” it does mean that younger people have a different attitude about sexuality.
Getting sexual pleasure from watching Internet porn, to me, is just another example—side by side with Google, Wikipedia, GPS, and Yelp—of all the many ways people are substituting digital experiences, digital communication, and digital interaction for face-to-face, person-to-person interaction. In this particular case, I’m not interested in critiquing if it’s good or bad. It just is. In America, because sex is this exceptional thing and porn is treated as an exceptional thing, people point to that and ask, what if it becomes a substitute for sex? What if Wikipedia becomes a substitute for conversation? What if GPS becomes a substitute for looking at street signs?
It’s part of the way we live today. That’s not to say it doesn’t have any impact, but when we talk about this impact separate from all the impacts of digital life, it’s more about our attitudes towards sex than anything inherent in porn.
Q: Additionally, new technologies attempt to make sex with each other for pleasure obsolete—for example, with cyborgs that can be programmed to fulfill specific fantasies. Advances in stem cell and genetics research may even render sex for reproductive purposes obsolete at some point. What do you think are the implications of no longer needing each other for sex? Is it dangerous to be able to fulfill ones’ fantasies?
Klein: In order to feel fulfilled as a human being, some people need a live person—whether for sex, intimacy, touching, or companionship. Other people can enjoy (or tolerate) living more isolated lives. This is nothing new.
Technology increasingly makes other people optional in our lives. Depending on your philosophy, you either call that “progress” or decry it as “dehumanized dystopia.”
In this context, technology simply demands we be more intentional. For some people, masturbating to porn is all they need; for others, it’s a supplement to partner sex; and for still others, the idea is just silly. I’m fine with people having choices—as long as they really experience their choices, and aren’t seduced by the commercial marketplace or their own sense of inadequacy, frustration, or past disappointment with people.
Q: In your book, you frame objectification of women in porn as a problem of capitalism intrinsic to most industries, not singularly affecting women. You suggest that if “our objectification of athletes and other performers takes place within a specific space, the same is true for pornography.” This seems like a false equivalence. The objectification of women’s bodies by cis-heterosexual men, for whom the majority of porn is produced, cannot be constrained just to the act of consuming porn. Won’t the audience come to view women as potential sexual conquests? We don’t view performers or athletes in the same dehumanizing way.
Klein: Personally, I believe that there is way more similarity between men and women than differences—I am unusual in my profession with that idea. Be that as it may, how the genders relate to each other and fundamentally how the genders conceptualize each other is a question as old as the human race. I think the fundamental question is not, “Do men see women as potential sexual objects?” or if men objectify women. I think a more fundamental question is about the concept of “otherness.” Do men see women as other and do women see men as other? Where that’s coded into our consciousness begins with the idea that we are “opposite” sexes. It’s the otherness that’s really the issue.
And different cultures sustain that sense of otherness to different degrees. Saudi Arabia is a good example. Women are so other, they don’t let them drive or go out in public alone. They really believe men and women are so different they mustn’t be exposed to each other. That’s one extreme of otherness.
Western culture has somewhat less of that going on, but we still have a debate in the United States about whether sex education in schools should separate girls and boys or teach them together. I can’t think of one thing that should be taught in sex-ed that girls need and boys don’t, and vice versa.
And if we talk about sexual violence, one way to reduce sexual violence is for men to think of women as people like themselves rather than as beings so significantly different from them.
In terms of otherness, porn is not 100 percent bad. There are certain tropes in porn that reinforce that otherness but others that undermine that deadly and toxic otherness. A lot of women in porn enjoy orgasm. They enjoy being admired or desired. They enjoy pursuing a sexual partner. They enjoy being erotically touched. Porn is, in a subversive way, undermining the idea that female sexuality is so much paler than male sexuality, that female sexuality is less robust or only linked to romantic love, unlike male sexuality.
Q: “Sex doesn’t feel the way porn looks,” you often iterate in your book. What does this mean?
Klein: To viewers who enjoy it, the sex in porn looks very, well, sexy. It’s filled with unusual bodies in unusual situations doing unusual things. The sex is intense, is consistently exciting from start to finish, take no communication or preparation, and is completely unbothered by logistics—there’s sufficient time, room, health, and privacy (if the characters want it).
In contrast, sex in real life is rarely intense, never consistently anything from start to finish, requires communication and preparation to be enjoyable, and must negotiate a range of real-life logistics. These can include sleeping children, sore backs, insufficient lubrication, an inconvenient cramp, a room that’s too hot or cold, and, “No, I thought you were going to buy condoms this week.”
The sex in porn is portrayed by actors. Unlike real people, actors aren’t affected by how they feel (crabby, achy, or distracted), uncertainty about what will happen (porn is scripted), lack of communication (actors are required to do so ahead of time), or self-consciousness about their bodies. Therefore, the sex they portray can be perfect. Real people are affected by a wide range of feelings, so their sex generally isn’t nearly as seamless.
Q: You argue convincingly that porn addiction and sex addiction don’t exist. Rather, you believe that some people make decisions about porn (and sex) that they regret. What are some of the underlying issues in such cases?
Klein: For a moment, let’s substitute golf for porn in hypothetical situations of alleged “porn addiction.” Say a guy is late for his daughter’s birthday party because he plays golf longer than he should. Say a guy carelessly leaves golf videos around the house where the kids can find them after he promised his wife he wouldn’t do that anymore. Say a guy’s girlfriend wants to talk about their relationship or their sex life, and he says he’d rather watch golf videos because they make him feel good and never complain.
I think we’d all agree that this guy doesn’t have a golf problem and that taking golf away from the guy probably won’t make him a better dad, husband, or partner. When people use porn in problematic ways, too many people—their partners, clinicians, policymakers—get distracted by the porn. Instead, we all should be focusing on the underlying dynamics. These may variously involve power, hostility, shame, or a refusal to talk about reality.
Some people look at porn and masturbate every night as a way of staying in a sexually frustrating marriage that they know (or believe) will never change. Some people are emotionally distant and express their loneliness or hostility in a wide range of ways, but viewing porn is what their mate (or culture) picks on. Some people desperately need to unwind at the end of a long, disempowering day at work, and they live in a relationship of chronic bickering, so they retreat to pretend “relationships” in which they can feel competent or content.
Q: How can we, as a society, lead healthier emotional and sexual lives?
Klein: Our society deals with sexuality differently than it deals with everything else; Americans tend to let other people do what they want—unless the behavior involves sex. It would be helpful if we didn’t do that—if instead we used the same communication, same ethical standards, same childrearing approach with sex that we do with everything else.
People who are uncomfortable about sex like to patrol others’ sexuality, and many feel that others’ private sexual choices aren’t really private—they’re public, and therefore the whole community gets to be stakeholders in their private sexual decisions. That’s bad public policy, and contrary to our conventional ideas about democracy, freedom, and personal responsibility. People against various forms of sexual expression like to say it’s about health (gay bath houses), potential violence (porn), protecting children (strip clubs), etc., but it’s about the long-term attempt to control others’ sexual expression. Women and sexual minorities should be against this tendency the most—since their sexuality is always the first to be judged and controlled (e.g. reproductive rights, “sodomy”). It’s unfortunate that progressive people have been pulled into this sex-negative coalition that fears porn, fears female sexuality, and promotes myths and misinformation about both. Challenging this is an important task for people who appreciate sexual expression and healthy sexual relationships.