Women Partners, Feeling Rules, and the Gendered Consequences of Porn Addiction

Abstract

A significant portion of the research on porn addiction has focused on the construction of this social problem and the heterosexual male addicts, yet relatively little is known about women partners. Analyzing open-ended online surveys and interviews with women partners of male porn addicts, this article demonstrates how the medicalization of porn addiction has social consequences which are profoundly gendered and tangled in emotion work. Respondents’ narratives reveal how family, friends, therapists, and partners center the addict’s “recovery” and “healing” by imposing feeling rules that suppress women’s anger and sadness. These feeling rules repress partners’ discussions of the social challenges of porn addiction and lead women to seek out anonymous support online on a site explicitly designed to affirm partners. The site provides opportunities for respondents to discuss the implications of their relationships in ways not fully possible offline. This article thus expands sociological understandings of porn addiction, gender, and emotion work by (1) highlighting the social implications for women who in these partnerships, especially those which reflect and reproduce gender inequalities, and by (2) documenting how women make meaning of social support which affirms, rather than minimizes, those gendered experiences. By doing so, this article raises questions about how the medicalization of other issues related to sexuality, paired with clinical authority of therapists, results in the constraining of women’s intimate lives under the guise of treatment.