A Radio 4 Woman’s Hour series examines the impact that porn has on relationships, with one woman saying her husband encouraged her to shave off her pubic hair and try anal sex – because he’d watched it in an X-rated film.
The new series, billed as ‘an honest and frank conversation about porn and how it affects people’, sees reporter Ena Miller speaking to people about how their lives have been impacted by explicit sexual content.
This week, an anonymous woman in her thirties, known as ‘Joanna’, revealed that she’d been so upset by her husband’s addiction that she said she even suggested he sleep with a real woman to help him combat it.
BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour this week launched a new series on porn, looking first at one woman’s experience of the impact it had on her relationship (File photo)
She told the programme how their ‘fun and pleasurable’ sex life had become dominated by his porn habit.
Joanna said she first became aware that he was watching porn alone after typing a kiss into his phone while replying to a message.
The ‘X’ automatically brought up a porn site, and a search revealed that he’d been watching explicit content multiple times a week, and sometimes multiple times a day.
He told her that ‘everybody does it’, and justified his addiction by saying ‘it was just fantasy and those women aren’t real’ – and that if he was watching it, at least he wasn’t nagging her for sex.
![Breaking point: Joanna said his habit tainted her sex life with her ex partner, saying 'How can you be proud of your relationship when there's this darkness to it?](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/03/01/17/81926775-13146237-Breaking_point_Joanna_said_his_habit_tainted_her_sex_life_with_h-m-46_1709313264638.jpg)
Breaking point: Joanna said his habit tainted her sex life with her ex partner, saying ‘How can you be proud of your relationship when there’s this darkness to it?
Joanna said that his habit became so big that ‘you couldn’t take the porn out of the sex life we had’, saying it was ‘so inextricably linked because porn had been part of all of his adult life – longer and more than sex had.’
She grew so exasperated that she suggested they have an open relationship, she told the Radio 4 show: ‘I said I would rather you have sex with an actual other woman in real life, opening up the relationship would be preferable to living with porn, which might sound incomprehensible but I was just so adamant that I couldn’t cope with this porn use’.
The positions he would ask her to try were, she thinks, what he’d seen in pornographic films.
She said she found his request for anal sex ‘really, really painful’ and he would ‘lose sense of what my experience was’ and became desensitised to ‘really violent acts’.
After he asked her to shave her pubic hair, she says she did it but that ‘it didn’t feel good and he didn’t have to do any grooming for me to like him. There’s a big double standard.
She added: ‘How can you be proud of your relationship when there’s this darkness to it?’
Woman’s Hour airs weekdays at 10am on BBC Radio 4