A young Ugandan couple divorced after the wife caught her husband masturbating in the middle of the night.
Never mind that they had by that point gone without sexual intimacy for weeks, because he kept coming up with excuse after excuse, until she caught him and he confessed that masturbation was his preferred avenue to sexual satisfaction.
What had started out as a heavy reliance on pornography – to the point that it was always part of their foreplay as a couple – eventually ended their marriage when he gradually locked her out of his fetish and it all became about him and the fictional characters he watched off his phone.
“I could sleep right through a bomb raid – I’m a sound sleeper – but this time round I was about two months pregnant and my body was going through uncomfortable changes that shifted my sleep patterns. I woke up one night and my husband was on the floor, lost in his own world masturbating to porn!” the now ex-wife shared.
They tried to work things out, but he admitted he was “too far gone”; he expected his wife to perform with the unrealistic, acted-out scenes from porn movies as her gold standard, or not at all.
As their marriage continued losing intimacy, his addiction to porn and masturbation were not letting up; so, she walked away. Now sex therapists and counsellors even report a correlation between pornography use and impotence and other sexual dysfunctions among young men.
You just have to search different health journals and research findings online to see what you are possibly setting yourself up for. Naomi Wolf, who in 2003 also researched and reported on the same in the New York magazine, was met with similar issues of delayed ejaculation, impotence and other sexual difficulties for young, previously virile men.
“The hypothesis among [the experts I talked to] was that heavy porn use was progressively desensitizing these men sexually. The science behind this anecdotal evidence was not yet fully established,” Wolf writes in her book. Vagina: A New Biography.
Imagine what the scope of the problem must be now, if this was already a crisis in 2003, long before the era of smartphones, cheaper internet and information overload!
If you are binge-watching pornography, be careful; in real life you may be as useless to your spouse as a white crayon. Even women get addicted to porn, by the way, and set unrealistic size, frequency and longevity standards for their husbands, and soon husband-dearest is replaced by exotic sex toys in bed.
But pornography addiction is mostly a men-thing. “The more vaginas a man masturbates to in an unmediated, online, click-through format, the more habituated to this stimulus he will become, and the less able he is to engage in the sustained, patient, slowly arousing attention to ‘the goddess array’ that ‘deep orgasm’ for women requires,” Wolf writes.
It is either that, or he starts finding his wife absolutely boring in her natural responses to him, because she cannot measure up to the fake acrobatics and fake everything that have made the porn industry thrive, especially with technological advancements.
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