Make love, not porn.
There is a common conception amongst the more judgmental of us;
It is generally assumed that non-decent abusive humans, the love-rats, the
lust-rats, the emotionally unavailable life forms, the creeps you see in clubs
clutching at female genitalia, go after overtly vulnerable, provocatively
dressed and drama loving targets.
And while it may be true that this may be the stereotypical
victim, any of us can be targets, any of us can be groomed, any of us can fall
into an abusive relationship, no matter how intelligent we are or how much we
guard against it.
I recently had a conversation with a rather beautiful and
intelligent woman, assertive in her opinions and a casual confidence in her
convictions. And yet as she tells me her story, her confidence so clear at my
kitchen table, was undermined by her troubling tale.
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| Mad Men's Don Draper |
She met her creep in person at a ‘work do’ and kept up a long
distance friendship that slowly turned romantic. He seemed an ‘absolute
gentleman’, offering to pay for her plane ticket for her to visit him and
finally deciding to come to London to sweep her off her feet. Ten years older
with a face that reminds you of Mad Men’s Don Draper, it is hard not to see the
initial attraction. And yet once the physical distance was gone, a much more
sinister distance appeared between them.
Her face has still traces of the recent trauma of encounter, as
she sits with a cup of tea and some dried mango at my kitchen table, she
divulges exactly what happened. Yet it is hard for both of us to accept this
has actually happened to her, her tale feels unreal.
It started off with something so small, yet what would become a
significant trend. She met him as soon as he arrived, after months of intimate
cyber and skype contact; she was filled with excited anticipation. They were
finally both in London and promptly went for lunch. At this point, this rather
wealthy man very assertively told her he wasn't going to pay for anything.
Which is fine, in one feminist sense, but on this occasion was an early example
of his total lack of regard for any human other than himself. Unresponsive to
any attempts at conversation, there would be only one way he would communicate
with her throughout this ‘romantic’ trip.
Soon after their first ever lunch together, he compelled her into sexual acts, as if his urges were the most imperative thing in the
room. In fact, every sexual encounter seemed to be his disastrous attempt to
act out a scene from a hard-core porn film. While this is acceptable in a
consensual relationship, for a first time intimate encounter with a less than
happy partner – it feels like an affront. Perhaps he was attempting to
‘over-compensate’ to satisfy his ego. A suggestion of post-coital hug was
shuddered at and a touch of the shoulders was treated with disgust. Anything
that wasn’t interaction with another male or pornographic performance with her,
he met with a cold disdain. Indeed, what motivated him to treat her and all her
female friends in contemptuous silence; apart from when acting out his porn
star fantasy, while any male friend or passing dog was reverenced with respect
and love, we can only speculate.
Meanwhile the main question in our conversation – is why did
she, after this first awful encounter, see him again? When you’re immersed in a
relationship, it can be hard to see it objectively, because it has been so
built up – how can we easily let go and accept that we were abused by someone
we trusted? How can we accept that our knights in shining armor have deceived
us?
I’d like to point out the perils of cyber relationships built up
on MSN, email and Facebook. Certain people come across much more gregarious and
emotionally available when there is no face-to-face contact. We can end up
building an idea of someone in our head – which is rather hard to accept as
false.
Besides which the perils of men who base their sexual prowess on
porn is particularly worrying too. Check out ‘make love not porn’ for more
information.
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