Increasing numbers of women seem determined to forbid their partners from watching porn or even liking influencers’ photos
Is it OK to like a girl’s bikini picture on Instagram? Well, what about replying with a fire emoji? What about liking lots of her pictures? What if she’s a stranger? Or an ex? The debate is as old as the internet itself, and yet it never stops being a hot-button issue: which sexualised activities online count as disrespecting or cheating on your partner, and which don’t?
There is, of course, no firm answer; everyone sets their own boundaries for what they’re comfortable with. However, straight women’s discomfort about their partners’ online activities – whether it be watching porn or interacting with other women’s flirtatious content – is both understandable and often accompanied by some strange assumptions. A recent Tiktok by @giaaldisert on ‘why you shouldn’t settle for a man that likes other girls’ pictures on Instagram’ – which has already racked up a million likes – argues that liking pictures of other women and ‘following random women’ on Instagram is a sign of disrespect to a relationship: “I’m not dating someone who’s a fan of another girl.” Comments on this and similar TikToks talk in a startlingly blasé fashion about surveilling their boyfriends’ internet activity, to see if they’re scrolling other women’s feeds: “he looks them up and deletes them from his search history cause he knows it bothers me […] sometimes he forgets to delete it”; “most men hide things. gotta catch em in the act”; references to checking through his follow list, likes list, even private DMs.
Alongside normalising cyberstalking your boyfriend, another common theme in these conversations is effusive praise of men who delete their social media, block or unfollow women on Instagram when they enter a relationship (sometimes blocking every woman on their socials), or perform dislike of content with attractive women. Such pronouncements are often met with “marry him” or “you’re so lucky!”. You’ll also find a wide array of incredulous, upset TikToks about how a boyfriend unfollowed all women on his socials, gave his girlfriend carte blanche to go through his social media, and yet he ‘still found a way to cheat’ – as if men refusing to interact with women online is always a green flag, rather than an indication that he only sees women as potential sexual partners.
There is a lot going on here. Monitoring every aspect of a partner’s internet activity is unhealthy, and can indicate a pattern of abuse and coercion. It can also be a tactic of desperation, practised by people – of all genders – whose partners continually lie to them and refuse to communicate. Two similar-looking patterns of internet use can reflect very different behaviours in real life.
What bothers me, though, is seeing the women who talk about this settling into certain questionable beliefs: that straight women should constantly monitor their partners, and that existing in a state of paranoia is to be expected; that you shouldn’t desire anyone else when you’re in a relationship, and it’s only men who do so; that if your partner finds another woman attractive, it’s natural to compare yourself to that woman and to feel inadequate; that women who post pictures of themselves looking pretty online are threats to your relationship security. Under the seemingly feminist banner of ‘you deserve better’, women are tacitly designated the work of policing their male partners, told to define themselves as in competition with other women, and made to believe that the gold standard of love is a man who will make them feel secure by minimising his interactions with other women. But do men with no women friends really make the best partners?
A lot of these same points recur in discussions about pornography, specifically women being uncomfortable with their boyfriends watching pornography. As Polly Barton’s recent book Porn: An Oral History discusses, the descriptor ‘porn’ covers a vast array of material and prompts a vast array of responses; it is a near-unfathomably complex topic, involving the navigation of various landmines around desirability politics, violence, and the disempowerment of women. Demanding control of a person’s entire erotic imagination is absurd, but the prospect of your partner watching, say, highly violent porn – or even deepfake porn of people they know – can understandably inspire a lot of fear.
@giaaldisert don’t settle ladies #relationshipadvice ♬ original sound - gia
However, one kind of response to porn crystallises in the subreddit r/loveafterporn, aimed at the partners of ‘porn and sex addicts’, whose almost-entirely-women denizens paint a bleak picture of their lives as filled with insecurity, paranoia, obsessive surveillance justified as self-protection, and essentialist views of men’s and women’s desire. “Nothing about my body is special. He’s seen so many naked bodies. Nothing I show him will be exciting,” reads the current top post, clothing a seething resentment for other women under criticism of her partner’s use of pornography, while the second post describes round-the-clock monitoring of her partner: “I obsessively look at his Google activity […] When he is home I refuse to leave or if I do I leave early in the morning. Even if I’m visiting my parents I tell them I have to leave by 1:30pm so I can hurry home before he gets home.”
What these women’s lives and relationships are like, aside from ‘bad’, is murky and difficult to discern, but one thing is obvious: they have subsumed their criticisms of straight life, their husbands’ anger and lying and refusal to communicate, their sexual dissatisfaction, their high burdens of housework and childcare, and the exhausting work of trying to feel adequate as a woman, into a full-scale war of trying to block images of naked women from their husbands, lest those women “steal him away” – in the words of the subreddit’s top all-time post. There’s a worrying reactionary strain here, which sees our current culture as ‘pornified’ and debased, compared to the ideal of loving, intimate monogamy unthreatened by the spectre of pretty naked women – an ideal which has never really existed, but which is very useful for snaring new tradwives. There also seems to be an element of self-harm; how else to explain the consistent assumption that if a man watches porn of another woman, that woman must be his ‘real’ type, and he must prefer that woman to his girlfriend?
Watching these women navigate endless cycles of sexual anxiety and misery is grim, as is watching them try to justify their surveillance activities as safeguarding, detective work, or half-ironic ‘psycho girlfriend’ behaviour. Fixing patterns of disrespect and miscommunication in relationships is very difficult, but much of this behaviour seems aimed at letting men off the hook: men are simply children or animals, in thrall to their impulses, and women must compete to regulate those impulses and keep them out of other women’s DMs. Surely we can imagine a world less depressing than this, less infantilising of men and imprisoning of women? At the very least, we can refuse to accept some of this work as women’s work: not surveillance, not paranoia, not self-doubt, and not self-harm.
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