SOLITARY VICE
Raehael Jones discovers that her husband
surfs the Net for porn, and concludes that we live in a sick society
I HAVE been with my husband for almost 30 years. He's 64 and I'm 53. We have four children in their twenties, and our sex life has been steady, perhaps even active, comparatively speaking. The handful of my friends who have been married for a similar length of time appear, for the most part, to have abandoned sex.
The other morning, after an avalanche of obvious signals, I discovered on his computer a large collection of downloaded pictures of young girls designed unequivocally to arouse sexual excitement. They dated back over the past five or six weeks, and coincided very much with a falling-off in his interest and performance when having sex with me. It also coincided with Toby Young's piece in The Spectator on 10 November. All my old Seventies' feminism was revived in an instant. These girls were younger than his daughters. I had a disagreeable vision of him sitting there at his desk masturbating over young females who were simply two-dimensional images on a screen. Suddenly Andrea Dworkin became my heroine, my role-model. I saw with instant clarity how right she is. This perniciously widespread activity is simply not right. We are deeply wrong to accept pornography; to dismiss it with one of those British shrugs, part embarrassment, part apathy.
One of pornography's claims is that it enhances a person's sex life. This is not true, believe me. Pornography is harmful to everybody. What does it say about a society that can be so comprehensively obsessed by and addicted to the kind of sexual stimulation which offers nothing you can touch, apart from yourself? No kissing or cuddling, no mutual delight in each other's pleasure, no letting go of inhibitions and deepening of affection.
My disgust spirals, alighting first on the fact that this man has two daughters. Have I been right to trust him near them all these years? And that makes me disgusted with myself: this is akin to the mindless hysteria that sends people out on to the streets to mistakenly attack paediatricians. I'm not like that. I've worked as a couple counsellor. I'm supposed to look for the underlying needs, the messages, treat it all calmly and rationally. I know that he would never touch them 'inappropriately' — would he? Is he now irredeemably a dirty old man? Or is it simply a question of solitary masturbation, and real flesh is either boring or actually repugnant to him?
I know that I ought to feel sorry for him. He made some gloomy remark about losing his sexual confidence. 'So what?' I flashed back. 'What do you expect at your age? Why the hell does it matter? Why does it all have to be such a performance? I can now see how utterly 'goal-orientated' our sex has always been, thanks to his being in control of almost everything that went on between us in bed. The orgasm has been the Thing, every time. And I never seriously tried to explain that this is really not how I wanted it to be. It isn't such a massive deal. Now he is saying that I'm puritanical because I've reacted so powerfully to what he insists is almost nothing.
I'm prepared to admit that 1 haven't been even close to the perfect wife. I'm a selfish slob around the house, leaving him to do much of the cooking and washing. I don't take his minor ailments seriously. If he went off with another woman, I like to think that I'd see his point. But he hasn't; he's done something infinitely worse, more disgusting and more tainting, because he's allowed himself to become part of a network which validates practices that can surely have no validation.
He says that he's found parts of himself he never knew were there. This, I gather, has emerged from the sexually focused chat rooms, This is one of the most insidiously sinister aspects of the whole thing. The rationalisation, the solemnly exchanged justification. He says that he's 'chatted' to women, sharing sexual fantasies with them — virtual adultery. This, he insists, is where his interest lies, not in the unsolicited pictures of young girls. But he saved them on to his disk, and they appear in the frequently accessed files list.
Why should I find it so abhorrent that he admits to finding all this exciting? Why am I so certain that there is a subtext that I haven't yet fully grasped? Maybe it's simple jealousy. Maybe I'm scared of what comes next. But no; it isn't unreasonable. This stuff comes into our house and keeps him up half the night. It's threatening, intrusive and profoundly corrupt. Are men now so sidelined and irrelevant that this is the ghetto they've created for themselves? Should we leave them to it if it makes them feel better? In these times of state-approved feminism I have argued in defence of men, and now I feel a fool for so doing. There isn't anything too bad you can say about them. They have willingly consigned themselves to the outer darkness, and I don't feel remotely sympathetic.
The girls on the computer presumably get paid, and this might explain the satisfaction on some of their faces. But this is just another alarming aspect of the whole dirty business. In the Western world, where money is the benchmark, where money equals virtue and value, they can ignore the other considerations. Try defending it in terms that might come under the heading of 'spiritual'. Try constructing an argument that rejects the label of 'decadent'.
It even makes me wonder whether alQa'eda might have been right all along. We are sick, and we are contaminating the whole world. We're not even happy about it. My husband told lies, hid himself away in a darkened room, missed some outdoor activities that would probably have done far more for the state of his gonads than smacking them in solitude appears to have done. He might well have wrecked a marriage at a point in his life where he could probably use someone around the house. I can't for a moment believe that it was worth it.
Rachael Jones is a pseudonym.
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