“So I’m just not good enough, huh?”

Two-and-a-half years of dating and it had just come out that he watched porn fairly regularly. In the 20 minutes after he admitted it, I cycled through a drastic series of emotions: Surprised, then quickly confused, then hurt and finally I just settled on being angry.

“Answer me,” I demanded. “Is what we do really just not good enough for you?”

I felt awkward. How could he ever want to have sex with me after watching provocative women with boobs bigger than mine scream racy phrases I could never bring myself to say?

He apologized. He said he would stop.

I knew it was bullsh*t, but I pretended I was happy with that. I pretended everything was just fine.

And it was fine, sort of. I loved him and I wanted to be with him, but it was still slightly perturbing. Did all boys regularly watch porn? Did girls? Was I missing out on something? Wasn’t pornography degrading? How could he do this?

And as it turns out, it’s not just my ex-boyfriend who is enamored with jacking off to a clip of two or three or perhaps even four people having sex on his computer screen. A recent study by Case Western Reserve University, found that upwards of 87 percent of men watch some sort of porn fairly regularly. Add that to 34 percent of adult women who watch as well, and it becomes plausible, that as the study suggests, 13 percent of all Internet traffic is directed toward porn.

Curious, my 18-year-old self made the decision to see what all the fuss was about. I sat in front of my computer for a while before actually typing anything into the browser. Finally, I just did it: “P-O-R-N,” and clicked enter.

“XXX”
“Live cams here!”
“Single women want to talk to you!”

When I opened the first video, I was immediately greeted with a string of cooing and dirty talk that made me laugh.

As I continued to watch, I became more comfortable with the situation, but it honestly did nothing for me. Not once during the course of the video was I able to relax enough to feel aroused. It was a messy scene of breasts, c*m and screaming, and it was nothing like any intimate situation I had ever experienced.

The whole thing felt so forced and scripted to me. I needed to be touched and feel intimate with someone, not be alone in my room with fake moans and faker boobs.

Despite the bizarreness of situation, my experiment with watching porn made me realize that my boyfriend’s decision to watch probably had little to do with me not being good enough for him, and much more to do with his desire to masturbate.

Boys are much more visually stimulated by sexual images and videos than girls as proven in a study by Emory University’s Woodruff Health Sciences Center, which looked at brain activity of both genders when they were shown sexual stimuli.

While I wouldn’t go as far to say that I agree with what happens in the industry and declare myself a pornography devotee, I think there are many worse things that could be going on in a relationship. Your boyfriend probably isn’t comparing you or the sex you have with him to what he sees in the video, and he most likely knows that you are real and whatever is going on in the pornography is not. Perhaps — in the best-case scenario — he is even a little better in bed because of something he learned from watching.

As someone who has been cheated on, I now believe that getting upset over the porn your significant other beats off too should be the least of your relationship concerns. If you’re getting along, still having entertaining, healthy hookups and being open and honest with one another, then it might be a little absurd to let his porn-watching habits ruin that.

Alex Archambault is a sophomore newspaper and online journalism major. You can email her at ararcham@syr.edu or follow her @Alex_And_Raa on Twitter.

Published on October 12, 2015 at 8:57 pm