Testimony in Minneapolis: Porn and the Death Spiral of a Marriage

Citizens gave testimony about their encounters with porn and those
who consume porn to the Minneapolis Government Operations Committee on
December 12, 1983. This account appears in In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (p.110-114). Portions of it have appeared in earlier posts.

Testimony of R. M. M.

At that time [age 21], I married this man, and for the next two years we mainly pursued our careers. During the second year of our marriage, he started reading more and more pornography. He started out reading Playboy and started picking up magazines like Penthouse and Forum, and as I would come home [for] dinner–come home from work and fix dinner–he would read excerpts from the magazines. Some of them were articles and some of them were letters to the editor ranging from group sex, wife swapping, anal intercourse, and bondage, to mention a few. I was really repulsed at the things he was reading me and I was really in disbelief. I kept saying, people are just making these things up for this magazine, I don’t believe it. He bought more and more magazines to prove to me that people weren’t making this up, that all of these people were saying how wonderful these things are.

About this time, when we went out we started meeting his friends at wet T-shirt contests, amateur strip nights or elsewhere–we would meet together as a group–or pornographic adult theaters or live sex shows. Initially I started arguing that the women on stage looked very devastated, like they were disgusted and hated it. I felt devastated and disgusted watching it. I was told by those men, if I wasn’t as smart as I was, and if I would be more sexually liberated and more sexy, that I would get along a lot better in the world, and that they and a lot of other men would like me more.

About this time, I started feeling very terrified. I realized that this wasn’t a joke any more: that this was something that he was really serious about. I called my mother and I told her that there were things happening in my marriage around sex that I really didn’t like, and she told me that divorce was something that she didn’t want in our family, and it was very disgraceful, and she knew how competent I was and she said, I know you can hang in there and give it your best.

About this time, to kind of numb myself, I remember that there was a lot more drinking with my husband and I and with our friends. When people would come over to diner, there was a lot of alcohol consumed, he would bring out a drinking and stripping game. After the game began, he started to ask the people to live out the various different scenarios that he had been reading to me in the magazines. A few times, the people participated in this. A couple times I stayed. Once I left.

Following this, we would have incredible arguments with each other. I would tell him I loved him, I only wanted to love him, I wanted to be a good wife, I wanted our marriage to work, but I didn’t want to be with these other people. It was he I wanted to be with, and no one else. He told me if I loved him I would do this. And that, as I could see from the things that he read me in the magazines initially, a lot of times women didn’t like it, but if I tried it enough I would probably like it, and I would learn to like it. And he would read me stories where women learned to like it.

During this time once when I was asleep at night and a friend of his was over, he asked the friend–he set up with a friend to come into our room and sleep with us. I woke up finding this friend in bed with us. Once he realized that I was not a willing participant in this experience, he apologized to me and said he was sorry and he left.

To prevent more of these group situations, which I found very humiliating and very destructive to my self-esteem and my feeling of self-worth as a person, to prevent these I agreed with him to act out in privacy a lot of those scenarios that he read to me, a lot of them depicting bondage and different sexual acts that I found very humiliating.

About this time when things were getting really terrible and I was feeling very suicidal and very worthless as a person, at that time any dreams that I had of a career in medicine were just totally washed away. I could not think of myself any more as a human being.

Because of his job, we were transferred overseas. When we got to overseas, the pornography that he was reading and that his friends were reading was much more violent than the pornography that he had been reading to me at home. He started taking me to sex shows where there were women and animals, especially snakes. He started taking me to sex shows where the women were called “banana lady shows”. We went to sex shows where men were participating in the sex acts with women on the stage.

About this time, he started having to go away a lot and I was left alone. I started studying karate over there, and I also started feeling again like I had some kind of control over my body. And I started really feeling in touch with the fact that I was a person. I started traveling. I did a lot of traveling by myself and I started feeling more and more courageous. I went to the Philippines on one of my last visits overseas and I was there for three weeks. During the time that I was there I was staying mainly at a Navy base. Outside of that Navy base the prostitution was very visible and very explicit. Everywhere you went there were men hiring prostitutes. Those where the only women that I saw there. I was one of the few American women.

One night when I was in one of the pornographic institutions, I was sitting with a couple of people that I had known, watching the women on stage and watching the different transactions and the sales of the women and the different acts go on, and I realized that my life wasn’t any different than these women except that it was done in the name of marriage. I could see how I was being seasoned to the use of pornography and I could see what was coming next. I could see more violence, and I could see more humiliation, and I knew at that point I was either going to die from it, I was going to kill myself, or I was going to leave. And I was feeling strong enough that I left.

I spent the next few years of my life, though the help of therapy, education and friends, healing myself. I would like to forget that the woman’s story is me, but I know those memories and those scars will remain…

If what I said today can help prevent one woman from experiencing what I experienced, the pain that I was involved in, it is worth it…

I actually refer to my whole marriage as marital rape. But specifically at the time, what I was considering rape was several times, especially following the incidents where he asked our friends to come to bed with us after I was already asleep, following that time he felt that it was his privilege to, when I was sleeping, if he felt at all sexually turned on or in the need to be gratified, to rape me in my sleep. Most of the times I would wake up. Sometimes I would just keep my eyes closed and try to tolerate it…

[Andrea Dworkin:] When you were actually living in the Orient, you said that the porn[ography] was very much more violent. Could you describe to us what was actually in it [that was different from] what you had seen before?

Okay. The pornography had mostly Oriental women in it and black women in it and it depicted women as animals and had women having sex with animals in it. It was women in cages. There were a lot of whips. I guess some of them is what they call S and M pornography. Women were led around with collars. They showed women being penetrated anally. They showed more gang rapes. It was more abusive in that the women were not portrayed as these glamorous perfect women, what I had seen before. They were portrayed more as slaves…

[Catharine MacKinnon:] Could you describe in a couple of words what you see to be the relationship between the pornography and the things that your husband asked you to do?

He would read from the pornography like a textbook, like a journal. In fact, when he asked me to be bound, when he finally convinced me to do it, he read in the magazine how to tie the knots, and how to bind me in a way that I couldn’t get out. And most of the scenes that we–most of the scenes where I had to dress up or go through different
fantasies–were the exact scenes that he had read in the magazines.

[Catharine MacKinnon:] Did your husband remarry?

He remarried within the year that we got divorced to a woman that was almost ten years younger than he was. And at the time I had seen him to finalize things on our divorce and get some of my last possessions, he showed me pictures of her and said, “Do you want to see what she looks like?” They were pictures of her naked and in pornographic poses.