process and the isness of porn

January, 2007
I still carry some fear, some pain. I don't want it. It gets in the way. It keeps me from feeling what I want to feel. It keeps me from melting completely into myself, into you, into us. I want to let it all go, the porn issue too, that wound that seems to still open easily. I'm doing better with it, but it still comes up.

I want to feel I can tell you anything. Do you want me to come to you when this comes up, when anything comes up? Or do you want me to keep it to myself, work it through myself as best as I can?

I need to embrace everything I feel, including the awful images. I need to sink down into them and everything else too. I need to toss out the thoughts that lead to icky feelings. I cannot let them come back once I've embraced them and sunk in. I need to replace them with better thoughts and the feelings will then transform. Maybe I don't want what I think I want. Maybe I want what I actually have, which is wonderful.

D,
Interesting - in the last weeks I've gotten a bunch of e-mails from women about porn. It must be epidemic. I started thinking - this has been with us forever, porn, girlie pictures, and prostitution. Playboy and Penthouse have been acceptable magazines for men forever. So now we have the internet, and its pretty much no different from Penthouse.

So it seems to me, the only thing we girls can do about it is say - don't bring it in the house! And yet, as soon as we say that, we push away a bit of openness in the relationship, and we are, just by saying it, accepting it outside the home.

I think women are just different than men, and looking at girlie pictures is just not that big a deal. It's a different kind of worldview than we have. Addiction to anything is always an avoidance of something, fear based.
But a man who looks at a Penthouse when it shows up or porn on the internet when he has a free moment and sees a picture of a pretty woman on ANY site ANYWHERE, as long as he can stop after 5 minutes and get back to his work or what he was doing - I don't see a problem with that. I see it as an acceptance of a man for not only who he is with all his bugaboos and weirdnesses (just like he accepts us for what must be incomprehensible perspectives and emotions) but his plain old MALENESS.

And I almost see it as giving us license to feel, be, and express more of our FEMALENESS. Whether or not you want to "keep it out of the house" is a pretty darn acceptable house rule too and should be a problem for him to deal with. "Keep it out of your life" seems way too much for any relationship to bear, and I wold like to encourage you to keep going with your own work to where you can negotiate, share, talk with him, and come to a mid-point agreement that you both can live with.

Making this about your insecurities just talks yourself into it. Talking about what you "can't handle" is perhaps way too negative. Let's talk instead about what you "don't want around you, in your environment" and see if you can go from there.
Love, R