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Men's fascination with pornography makes women unhappy
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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Young women whose partners use pornography are less happy in their relationships than those whose boyfriends are abstinent.
Destin Stewart, an intern at the University of Florida (USA), and psychologist Don Szymanski from the University of Tennessee (USA) note that not all couples fight over watching pornography, but in general it lowers the self-esteem of girlfriends and wives. According to them, women who find explicit material on their partner’s computer feel “not good enough, not able to measure up.”
The researchers also recall similar responses from participants in previous studies. Here's one remark recorded in 1999: "Men look at these pictures and then say to us, 'Look how beautiful she is. Why can't you be like that?'"
But few of these studies provided hard numbers, so Stewart and Szymanski set out to find out how common it was for women to feel this way. They asked 308 women aged 18 to 29 to fill out online questionnaires about the role of pornography in their partners’ lives, as well as relationship quality, sexual satisfaction, and self-esteem. All participants were heterosexual, and most were white.
It turned out that the more often young men and husbands watch pornography, the less happy their wives are in their relationships with them. If women are seriously concerned about their partner's passion (for example, they believe that it has become an unhealthy habit for him or that he pays an abnormally large amount of attention to it), they are more likely to have low self-esteem and be less satisfied with their relationship with their partner and sex life.
Of course, this doesn't prove that pornography is the cause of low self-esteem. As Ms. Stewart points out, women who feel insecure are more likely to forgive their partner's porn use and to stay with him rather than be left alone in that scary world.
The study is limited to young women, and most of the relationships were short-term. Also, since most couples did not live together, the women may not have known how much attention the men were actually paying to pornography. And of course, the frustration of a wife discovering her husband's "porn" after ten years of marriage is not comparable to that of a woman discovering what sites her 18-year-old boyfriend was visiting.
Either way, Ms. Stewart encourages women not to compare themselves to porn stars. Communicate and find a compromise between your desires.