A friend of mine (who knows damn well how to wind me up) sent me a link to a forum on which they were discussing the question “Is watching porn cheating?” to which the answer any sane human being would give is very obviously ‘no.’ On the thread women (and some men who are recovering porn addicts) argue that perhaps it is, and that it certainly feels like it is when a lady accidentally stumbles across her boyfriend’s internet history.

After a brief Google around the subject I discovered that rather than being a mockable minority, the people who believe porn is cheating are not only serious, but worryingly numerous.

I’m presumably preaching to the choir here, but I’d like someone to disagree with me so I can form my argument more fully than I have in this post, which essentially consists of me going “What the ACTUAL MENTAL FUCK ARE YOU ON ABOUT” over and over again.

My boyfriend watches porn and it’s like he’s fucking someone else

No. It’s not at all like he’s fucking someone else because it’s just some pictures on a fucking screen. You’re no more cheating when you watch porn than you’re a vampire when you read Twilight, or a member of the Secret Seven when you crack out the childhood Enid Blyton books.

You sometimes put yourself in the place of people acting in scenes in order to enhance your enjoyment of the material, but that does not mean you are actually there. It doesn’t even mean that were these people performing a live show right in your living room and getting their awesome porny juices all over your sofa, you would join in.

But it’s cheating in the mind, right?

No. Because what you’re describing there is a thought crime. If watching porn is cheating then writing slashfic is a form of rape.

I think this comes from female (and it is usually female – I’d like to see how men react to the idea that their girl watching porn is ‘cheating’) worries about not being adequate, and their partner being sexually interested in other people and things. It’s ‘cheating’ because he’s getting off to something that isn’t you, and that taps into a fairly primitive female jealousy about boys leaving their girlfriends for younger/prettier/thinner/more-willing-to-do-anal models.

Well, it probably sucks for these girls to hear this but he is interested in other people. Sexually. No matter how stunning or sexually adventurous you are, you are not the only thing that makes your man’s dick hard. Nice though you might think that would be, it’s not practical, nor even desirable. Many of his best moves have probably come from things he’s seen while doing some one-handed browsing during an idle moment.

But what he watches is so disgusting and degrading

Hahahaha.

Haha.

No, seriously, stop it – you’re killing me.

It’s so much easier to demonise men for the porn they watch because men tend to require more visual stimulation than women do to get off. In short – you can watch theirs too whereas yours is probably locked away inside your head. Saying that their fantasies are ‘degrading’ and ‘disgusting’ is really easy to do when your own fantasies aren’t exposed for all to see, at the click of a mouse on the 3 a.m. section of your Chrome history.

SECRET ALERT: Women’s fantasies can be disgusting and degrading too.

While John’s beating one out to a video of someone getting beaten on YouPorn, Jane might be having just as much fun imagining biting into her partner’s abdomen until she draws blood and he whimpers and comes into her red and ready lips. Or thinking about her old Geordie history teacher reaching into her open shirt while she finishes off her homework, squeezing her nipples and calling her a ‘good girl’ then dragging her to the front of class to finish the rest while sitting on his lap. Ahem.

I’ve never been as degraded, humiliated, used and spat upon as I am in my own fantasies. It’s extremely lucky for me that most exist only in my head and not on an easily accessible hard drive.

Porn and sexual fantasy is by its nature degrading because the people in it are there for one purpose – to get you off. Even if you’re rubbing one out to the thought of your ex (who you’re still hopelessly in love with, and have a deep and abiding respect for) touching you up until his cock throbs, at the moment you’re fantasising you don’t give a fuck if he’s real or unreal, alive or dead – all you care is that his fictional dick is hard and his fictional fingers are fumbling at your fictional crotch through your pretty, fictional, soaking wet knickers.

But it’s a violation – it just feels disgusting

Porn is disgusting. Your fantasies are disgusting. But that’s OK. We can wallow in gallons of misery and shame during frantic solo sessions and no one gets hurt – our relationships don’t get a fucking look in. You imagine some things in private that you wouldn’t dream of in real life, because it’s unreal – and the unreality of it is what allows you to abandon yourself.

Your wanking is your wanking – it has little to do with your partner or your ex-partners or the guy who delivers you pizza – it has everything to do with the things you think inside your head, or the things that happen inside your head when you’re watching the teeny screen people frig each other off for your delectation.

Wanking (whether to porn or to your own imagined depravity) is usually a solo sport – it wouldn’t work if we allowed others to scrutinise it properly.

If we start giving that the ‘cheating’ label to our personal fantasy life then monogamy is not just dead but hung, drawn, quartered, burned, then fired out into space to make sure it’s gone forever.

If wanking is cheating then no one is faithful.

For Valentine’s Day I want a blow job.

Yep, today I would like a nice, hard, deep-throating blow job. The sloppy kind – dribble and spit and choking – that ends with you coming violently all over my face until your spunk dribbles down my chin and I can use the excess to draw a heart shape on the bedsheets.

And I want to give you flowers. A beautiful, big, hay-fever-inducing bouquet of them. Roses, tulips, lilies, anything frothy and soft and romantic. All tied up with a big fat pink ribbon that you can put in your hair afterwards or keep in a special memories box to remind you of the day when girlonthenet displayed some vague semblance of emotion. An expensive bouquet, too, so your Mum knows I’m a good financial bet for your future.

OMFG SEXISM

I don’t usually give much of a shit about casual sexism in couples – if two people, within a loving committed relationship, choose to conform to old-fashioned gender roles then I’m not one to stop them.

My problem comes when every single goddamn article or advert decides that we should all be doing the same thing. Usually we question this sexist dickery – we raise a wry smile at the dude in the cleaning products advert who’s crap at wiping the kitchen surfaces, or the woman who uses the expensive beauty product because it’s imperative that women defy the laws of physics by refusing to visibly age. We question it. We laugh at them.

And yet on Valentine’s Day for some reason our questioning attitude is hurled out of the window. Sexist? Aw, it’s just romantic. It’s just how couples are.

He should be panicking the day before.

She should be getting excited.

He should be saving his pennies.

She should be dropping hints about roses, chocolates, her favourite restaurant.

The racier, cheekier brands will lace their adverts with hints of euphemism. Maybe, just maybe, if you buy your girlfriend something grotesquely pink and painfully expensive she might just suck your cock. You lucky bastard.

A quick note about gays

It’s worth noting that I am not immune from presumptive twattery myself – I frequently write as if I’m talking about boy/girl couplings. This is deliberate – it’s because apart from the odd squirm with a ladyfriend or two, that’s mostly what I know.

But that’s not to say that we should automatically exclude what happens to be a fairly sizeable portion of the population from enjoying these couple-centred celebrations. Whether you love it or loathe it, Valentine’s Day is for everyone. And insisting on prescribing Valentine’s Day behaviour like only heterosexual couples exist gives a skewed and laughably ancient view of the world.

Gender roles and Valentine’s Day

Where was I? Ah yes – we’re not all 1950s chocolate-box dream couples.

It shouldn’t need to be said, to be honest, but I’m going to say it anyway, because some narrow-minded cardboard-cut-out cunts still think I should be crossing my fingers in the hope that someone gives me chocolates. I like chocolates, I do. I have also gone a bit melty inside on the very few occasions when boys have bought me flowers. Likewise I enjoy champagne, Lego and being wanked off by a boy while I watch porn I’ve nicked from the internet.

But some people still think that the sign of a successful relationship is one where the guy does all the work. Where he feels compelled to spend money making his woman feel special, and that if he jumps through these specially-defined hoops then maybe she’ll repay him by giving him sexual favours that she wouldn’t have given otherwise because she’s that fucking feminine that she must keep her sexuality under wraps so as to avoid breaking a fingernail or displaying some semblance of human frailty or something.

Women don’t just want chocolate, and men don’t just want sex.

Perhaps she wants a fucking Scalectrix. Perhaps he wants a nice long bubble bath and a box of chocolates. Perhaps both of them just want to fuck in an alleyway then head to a late-night bondage bar.

Perhaps – just perhaps – all your roses and cards and adverts and irritating 1950’s Goodwife bullshit can fuck off back to the ad agency that spawned them, because neither of the members of our fictitious happy couple give a flying tossfuck about romance at all.

Love is like being tied to a rock that you also sort of want to have sex with.

It’s like being repeatedly punched in the face, but by something quite nice, like a pillow or a bowl of trifle.

Despite all of my best efforts not to fall into this pitiful trap, I am in love with a boy.

Being in love changes people

Love seems to make my friends do odd things, like deliberately go on tedious, all-inclusive holidays. Like buying joint-owned kitchen equipment and cooking things with butternut squash in.

Likewise love makes me do weird things, like spout inexplicable platitudes about his possessions. Like cancel an evening’s drinking so I can stay in on a Saturday night with his big arms wrapped around me. Like writing a blog which – let’s be honest – you couldn’t crack one off to if you tried.

Love makes me think more about a boy than about things that matter – like my career.  

It makes me lazy. All I ever want to do is sit with him, on him, by him, until my bills go unpaid and my washing up starts to evolve new breeds of bacteria. Until the sun goes down and the world is destroyed and everything I’ve worked for crumbles to dust.

I love love

Don’t get me wrong – there are up sides. He is, as you’d expect, especially spectacular. Of all the boys who have stamped their footprints into my ice-cold heart, his are some of the very few that I want to put my own feet in and go “Ooh, look, big. GIGGLE.”

He’s beautiful when he lights cigarettes, when he’s biting my nipples or bringing me coffee. He’s funny and fun and good and gentle and filthy and kind and calm. He makes me relax and he makes me laugh and he fucks me like it’s the end of the world.

He’s the one whose friends I’ll meet. Whose house I’ll stay at. All the other boys get fucked and moved on, but he’s the only one who gets to spend the night. He’s the one who can stroke my face without making me hiss, and he gets to call me pretty without me vomiting copiously all over his living-room floor.

I hate love

But ultimately the great stuff is desperately overshadowed by the bad. Love is a fucking bastard. It makes me irrational and needy. It tempts me into shit decisions. Problems I’d previously have stamped on become reasons to run to him for a hug. Challenges stay unchallenged, because he makes them easy to forget.

I don’t want to love him – I love me – normal me. I love the me who can tell boys to fuck off when I’m busy, who has enough motivation to pull myself together when I’m miserable and do good things when I’m not. Love can make me blind to a lot of things, but I’m not yet blind to what I could achieve if I weren’t sitting so comfortably in his arms.

How do you solve a problem like a hormonal imbalance?

For a long time my solution was to break up with guys if I thought things were getting emotional. But things have gone too far this time. I cannot decide to not be in love because I am in love, and so I am irrational.

How can I not see him when I need to see him? How can I not love him when, at just the moment I think I’ve steeled myself to tell him I’m off, he says something that makes me laugh like I’ve had a lobotomy? When just the idea of his shoes lying jumbled by the kitchen door makes me grin with possessive, deranged pride?

I love his shoes.

His shoes.

I am ridiculous and I love his shoes.

If you’re expecting some sort of conclusion or words of wisdom after the above torrent of out-of-character arational loved-up bullshit then you’re probably a fucking idiot. But I’ll forgive you. If you’re powerfully idiotic then you may well be in love yourself. Unfortunately for all of us there’s no known cure, but to relieve the symptoms I can thoroughly recommend wanking and gin.

 

When I was 14 I tried to go on the pill. I wanted it not because I was having sex, but because I was going on an activity holiday and had heard it could stop your periods. The doctor man didn’t cough up: fair enough. That beautiful green prescription slip failed to materialise.

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