Your advice to NOPE implies that all or nearly all men use porn. That may be true, but not all porn is equal. Perhaps NOPE could find a form of porn she doesn't find threatening that might also turn on her man. If it's pictures or vids that freak her out... she might be okay if he limited himself to erotic stories. Or if it's the fact that porn features other women, maybe her guy might enjoy male-on-male porn. (I've encountered plenty of straight guys who are into watching gay porn.) If it's the super-sexy unrealistic comparisons to her humanly imperfect body, maybe she'd feel better about amateur porn featuring imperfectly human women. Maybe instead of deciding ALL porn is bad, she could figure out what specifically ABOUT the porn is triggering her feelings.

Wants Understandable Solutions

My response after the jump...

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Sorry, WUS, but I had to get that out of my system before I could even begin to respond to your letter. And with that out of my system...

HA HA HA!

Sorry. Here we go:

All men use porn—science says so—and your solution for couples who are in conflict about porn is laughable. People are turned on by what they're turned on by. A man can't just choose to be turned on by porn that has been vetted and approved for him by a censorious girlfriend/wife. A man can't order his dick to get hard looking at porn that features bodies he may not find attractive, or sex acts or combos or bodies he finds repulsive, to mollify an angry and controlling girlfriend/wife.

Dick don't work that way.

And while I know and have heard from lots of straight women and lesbians who love gay male porn, I've never heard from a straight guy who digs gay male porn. Ever. And erotic stories? Women like erotic stories: romance novels, slash fiction (much of it featuring gay sex)—all created by and for women. So your solution to the eternal conflict between men and women about porn seems to be this: men should be women. But men aren't women. A women who would rather be with a woman should go get a woman. (A woman with whom she can watch gay porn and read erotic stories.)

Once again here's the only solution to the tiresome porn controversy:

The porn de la concorde—the only porn compromise that works—goes like this: He pretends not to look at porn, out of consideration for your feelings, and you pretend to believe him, out of consideration for his.

You just can't order a guy to switch to erotica that appeals to women to keep the peace. Or you can, I suppose (and you just did), but it's not gonna work. The porn that makes his dick hard is the porn that makes his dick hard and that's the porn he's going to watch.

The End.