I know you see me as your mom, but I am also a woman. I want to speak to you on behalf of the woman who will someday be your wife, the little girls who will be your daughters, the sisters of yours who are growing into women before our eyes.
Why Porn Is Bad
For all the hype around porn, it really isn’t that complicated. Porn is marketing. Porn is trying to sell you something. It’s trying to sell you an idea of who women are. Porn is lying. The more you believe the lie it sells to you, the less you will be able to enjoy the truth. (And there’s so much more I want to tell you about the lies porn is telling you about YOU and your worth and your value as a man. A conversation for another time. Along with the conversation I need to have with your sisters about what porn will mean to them.)
Porn wants you to believe that:
- Women don’t age
- Women don’t have cellulite
- Women have the bodies of little girls with the sexual appetites of grown women
- Women want all manner of degrading and scary things done to them even if they say they don’t. Please don’t believe those things. They will set you up for a lifetime of unrealistic expectations and unhealthy attitudes towards women. You are feeding into a society that tells your sisters they need eating disorders and boob jobs to be acceptable. You are paying money to an industry that will encourage your daughters to prove their worth by sending naked pictures to their boyfriends to be passed around at school. YOU are doing this when you give porn your money, your time, your heart, and mind.
You may think you need porn to understand how women work. You may hear this is educational and normal and healthy. How else will you understand how to please a woman if you don’t figure out how all this stuff works?
Learn From Your Wife, Not Porn
My sweet boys, sex is not that complicated. If you get married you will find you have the best and only teacher you’ll ever need. Your wife. She will tell you what she wants and she is a unique individual creature to be valued and heard. She knows what makes her feel safe and loved. And it works both ways. Before I married your dad, my mom said to me, “There’s nothing in Cosmopolitan Magazine that your husband can’t teach you. Don’t let them tell you what he wants, let him tell you.” I know— gross, Grandma. But she was right.
Your wife doesn’t need you to be more “experienced” or knowledgeable about these issues. When you invest your energy in studying the curves of women who have bodies created by science and photoshop, you are robbing from your own ability to enjoy your wife. That is no gift to her. When you spend hours viewing men who have made their careers selling themselves as sexual masters, you are going to feel inadequate. You have to remember– porn will only continue to make money as long as it continues to make you believe you need it. You don’t need it. And it’s hurting you.
If you want to create a beautiful sexual expression of love with your wife, there are things she needs from you.
Your wife will need:
- To feel confident in her body.
- To feel safe with you.
- To feel free to express her desires.
- To feel respected if she says “no” to something. Porn undermines all of those things. Every. single. one.
Read the rest of this amazing letter about why porn is bad here at A Musing Maralee
