Introduction

Despite the range of perspectives on whether, and to what extent, pornography is addictive, a subset of the population certainly seems to believe it is. Grubbs et al. (2019) found that 11% of men and 3% of women reported some agreement with the statement “I am addicted to porn," with 3% of men and 1% of women reporting strong agreement. If we take this as the starting point—not focusing on if or why different actors believe pornography is addictive—then we can ask questions about the broader, social impact of porn addiction (PA). This is not to minimize the scholarship demonstrating that PA is socially constructed; rather, this is to recognize that the work of claims-makers has been compelling enough that people now identify as addicts and seek treatment for PA, associating their mental health and intimate challenges with porn use (Ford et al., 2012; Pyle & Bridges, 2012; Skinner, 2005; Taylor, 2019; Voros, 2009). Importantly, this cultural work has also led to the creation of another group situated as impacted by the social problem of PA: the partners. Considering that the literature largely focuses on heterosexual men as self-identified addicts (Grubbs et al., 2019; Skinner, 2005), and that experts and public discourse frame porn addiction as a predominately heterosexual male problem (Burke & MillerMacPhee, 2020; Wilson, 2014), it is reasonable to infer that partners of porn addicts are largely women. How is the stress of being partnered to a porn addict gendered? How might this emotional stress be buffered or exacerbated by other social actors? What do those efforts reveal about broader ideologies around gender, pornography, and relationships within a patriarchal society?

Analyzing open-ended surveys and interviews with members of an online space for partners of porn addicts, I uncover how part of the gendered aspect of PA not explored in the literature is women partners’ perceived lack of social support from family, therapists, and male partners. Women’s experiences seeking social support in-person reveal an imposition of feeling rules which deter anger and sadness in response to their relationships, a reflection of inequitable design and enforcement of feeling rules. I then suggest that the online space provides a reprieve from feeling rules where grace and forgiveness are framed as the only appropriate reactions, feelings which inadvertently and preemptively block discussions of the social implications of PA on women. Instead, rage and sadness can be expressed and affirmed online, which in-turn facilitate discussions around the broader, collective impact of PA on women. This is by no accident, as the online space is moderated by partners who understand the toll of feeling rules that sanction anger and sadness, and explicitly forbid the minimization of partners’ emotions on the site.

This paper contributes to theories of gender by exposing how the broader framing of PA as a clinical disorder justifies imposing feeling rules on women. In this specific case, as men “addicts” are framed as people “healing” from a disease outside of their control, the feeling rules imposed on women in paid work (sanctioning anger and sadness), become imposed within their intimate relationships, as well as when they seek out support from therapists, friends and family. Rather than assessing the effectiveness of different modes of social support, this paper reveals (1) how this partnership is replete with emotional expectations that reflect and reproduce gender inequalities; (2) how the negative impacts on women partners is concealed by the medicalization of PA, which centers male addicts’ recovering and healing; and (3) that through accessing anonymous support with other women partners online, respondents can redefine how to navigate their situations.

Porn Addiction and the Partners of Addicts

Debates around PA engage scholars, clinicians, therapists, journalists, and religious and political leaders, each of whom put forth claims regarding the psychological, sexual, and moral consequences of problematic pornography use (Burke & MillerMacPhee, 2020). These debates are shaped by broader moral panics around queer sexuality, news media framing, Christian nationalism, and gender role scripts (Burke & Haltom, 2020; Burke & MillerMacPhee, 2020; Oeming, 2018; Perry & Whitehead, 2022; Taylor, 2019; Taylor & Jackson, 2018; Voros, 2009). The medicalization of PA provides a particularly popular framework through which porn use is understood. Although the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders does not recognize PA, and despite the major methodological and theoretical inconsistencies and issues in PA research (Ley, 2018), PA is nevertheless medicalized through the research and treatment recommendations of clinicians, who argue that the addiction framework is a valid way to understand and treat problematic porn use (Zitzman & Butler, 2009). However, as Oeming (2018) argues, the problem at hand with PA as a clinical disorder is that it exists as a compulsion, which carefully avoids alienating the consumer and avoids critically examining pornography itself. The clinical frame of porn addiction also centers the needs of the men addict, including women partners insofar as they shape the addict’s recovery through support or enabling (Hentsch-Cowles & Brock, 2013; Rotunda et al., 2004). This parallels some of the literature on gambling addiction and alcoholism which suggest that a partner’s behaviors and emotions can impact the addict’s behaviors, including increasing their addictive behaviors (Côté et al., 2020; Rotunda et al., 2004; Rychtarik & McGillicuddy, 2005).

Compared to the body of work on heterosexual male porn addicts themselves, we know relatively little about woman partners. From the clinical standpoint of the literature on PA, women partners are important to consider because they are “coaddicts,” often framed as being an important aspect of the addict's recovery (Hentsch-Cowles & Brock, 2013; Maltz & Maltz, 2009). Therapists also note a rise in women partners seeking therapy to cope with the stressors of PA within their relationship, including intense emotional distress of betrayal, sexual dissatisfaction, and negative self-image (Futrell, 2020). To be sure, even women who are not partnered to porn addicts report similar negative implications of porn use among their male partners, including feelings of needing to objectify themselves to compete with porn, finding that their male partner's sexual needs are prioritized, and feeling betrayed and emotionally traumatized (Ashton et al., 2020; Futrell, 2020; Stewart & Szymanski, 2012). Similar negative emotional and social implications, such as isolation, a sense of betrayal, hypervigilance of their partner, and parental role strain are also reported among women partners of male gambling and alcohol addicts (Holdsworth et al., 2013; Riley et al., 2020; Rychtarik & McGillicuddy, 2005). Within the context of marriage and family therapy for porn addiction, there seems to be a consensus that women partners will undertake additional responsibilities in the relationship to support their partner, though there is disagreement on the extent to which these tasks should be prioritized over their own treatment or practiced at all. These emotional expectations—otherwise known as feeling rules—are part of how gender inequality persists (Hochschild, 2012; Wingfield, 2015).

Emotion Work

Emotion work is the maintenance, production and suppression of emotions in others and self in interpersonal interactions, including intimate relationships (Frith & Kitzinger, 1998; Hochschild, 2012). From a sociological standpoint, that emotion work is more often expected of women (Hochschild, 2012) and is perceived as being impactful for relationship satisfaction (Horne & Johnson, 2019; Minnotte, 2017) reveals a different way to understand the social significance of emotion work. Indeed, family interactions are typically organized to reproduce gender inequalities (Erickson, 2005; Ferree, 2010), which may not be measurable using questionnaires to assess stress, wellbeing, and general relationship satisfaction. Further, women’s self-reports of emotion work not only speak to their perceptions of their actual emotion management, but they also tell us about the broader expectations of women’s emotionality in relationships (Frith & Kitzinger, 1998).

These expectations around emotions—which emotions must be felt, suppressed, and produced, and when—are called feeling rules (Hochschild, 2012). In the context of paid work, feeling rules for women across service and professional roles include the suppression of anger, which functions to repress structural critiques of the conditions which give rise to that anger, though white women have more leeway in the expression of anger than women and men of color (Bellas, 1999; Billingsley, 2016; Hochschild, 2012; Kang, 2003; Pierce, 1999; Wingfield, 2015). In intimate relationships, feeling rules also involve masking emotions which are deemed negative, especially anger (Minnotte, 2017). Duncombe and Marsden (1995) refer to emotion work in intimate relationships as one of the last frontiers of gender inequality. Even as norms around what makes a “good (heterosexual) relationship” have changed, such that men are now expected to offer emotional support and disclose their own emotions, the practice of women doing the bulk of that work has not changed (McQueen, 2023). Further, since women’s emotion work is culturally framed as reflecting their innate abilities and desires to manage the household’s emotions, this work subsequently produces a more positive relationship climate and higher relationship satisfaction in both partners (Horne & Johnson, 2019). Thus, there is much at stake in understanding how and why women suppress negative emotions, as this unequal distribution of emotion work not only reproduces inequality in the home (Erickson, 2005), but also reflects broader patterns of women’s subjugation in which women are not compensated equitably with material resources, status, or prestige in exchange for their labor (Bellas, 1999; Berheide et al., 2022; Durr & Wingfield, 2011; Hochschild, 2012; Wingfield, 2015).

Methods

This study analyzes online surveys and interviews with women recruited from a subreddit called r/supportforpartners (a pseudonym, hereafter referred to as SFP). Reddit is a popular site dedicated to commentary and community around any topic a user might think of, ranging from baseball, stay-at-home parenting, brunch enthusiasts, to international relations. A subreddit is a forum dedicated to a specific topic. The subreddit SFP was created in September 2018 for the purpose of providing a space for partners of porn addicts to share and access resources and support, with a membership of 18,800 when IRB approved of this study in October 2021 (the membership at the time of submission of this paper is 40,700). With the moniker “we are going to love you until you love yourself,” SFP explicitly centers support among members. The subreddit saw an explosion of engagement in the Spring and Summer of 2020 when many couples were quarantined together. This led to many women discovering the extent of their partner’s “problematic” porn use, which partners refer to as “D-day.” “D-day” is also used to denote any subsequent and repeated discoveries of continued problematic porn use after their partner has stated they are abstaining, which subjects in other studies have reported as a traumatic event (Bergner & Bridges, 2002).

Though I may have been able to access women partners by placing ads on social media sites more broadly or searching for face-to-face support groups for women in treatment, recruiting from SFP helps us understand how women make meaning of social support found on an online space designed for that purpose, which can help expand theories of emotion work. Further, considering that almost all the literature on women partners draws on samples of women who predominately access formal therapy in-person, we know little about women who heavily rely on online resources and what might have led them online. While there may be heterosexual men who are partnered to women porn addicts, their inclusion into this study is beyond the scope of the project, particularly because emotion work in those relationships is not necessarily organized around alienating male partners.

After obtaining IRB approval for the study, I gained approval from the moderators to post a recruitment flyer on the subreddit page in October 2021. The moderators tagged my flyer “MOD approved” to signal to users that the recruitment flyer was seen as legitimate. The flyer stated that I was seeking to understand how women partners of porn addicts receive and offer social support and specified that women could fill out an open-ended survey or choose to be interviewed over Zoom. As the present study is concerned with meaning-making, open-ended surveys and interviews were used to learn how women seek out and make meaning of social support in relation to their role as a partner of a porn addict. The surveys provided accounts, which paired with findings possible through probing achievable in interviews, offered in-depth insights into the experiences, meaning-making, and beliefs of this group (Braun et al., 2021).

None of the questions provided a pre-determined definition of pornography or addiction; rather, the study begins with the assumption that these women navigate their relationships and the online space with an understanding of their situations as fitting with “pornography addiction,” and that the range of behaviors around the variety of content their partners consume all fall under this category. According to respondent self-reports, some are dating men who masturbate to pornography and will not stop even though women have expressed discomfort; other women are partnered to men who spend hundreds of dollars each month on personalized pornographic videos and text messages, despite goals of saving money. Some women have not had sex with their partner in months because he cannot maintain an erection unless pornography is involved; other women have not had sex with their partner in months because the men do not initiate sex or emotional intimacy. Some women are dating men who have disclosed they enjoy watching women drown, choke to death, or otherwise be harmed, whereas others are dating men who shared they are simply content masturbating to topless pictures. Thus, despite the range in behaviors and content respondents believe their partners enjoy (either due to unconfirmed suspicions, hacking into their account to see the content themselves, catching partners in the act, and/or being told by their partner outright), all respondents consider their partner’s pornography use addictive.

Open-ended anonymous surveys composed of 20 substantive questions provided the opportunity for women to explain, in their own words, what it is like to be a partner of a porn addict, including the perceived consequences of porn addiction on their relationships, sense of self, and social life. The survey also prompted discussion of the forms of social support they have sought out, to what extent they found that support effective, and how SFP specifically provided them support. Women were also asked how, if at all, they think their engagement with SFP has shaped how they view PA, pornography, their relationships, and themselves. Another reason for using open-ended online anonymous surveys is that this sample was recruited from an online anonymous space, where they are proficient in communicating complex and intimate details of themselves to others in that modality. As Barak and Gluck-Ofri (2007) found, self-disclosure is higher in online forums designated as supportive spaces, posts tend to be longer than in normal discussion forums, and reciprocity in self-disclosure, especially among women, is a common practice. Thirty-three women completed the survey, with answers to each question ranging two sentences to four paragraphs. I also offered Zoom interviews, which used the survey questions as a guide, probing for follow-ups and in-turn leading to new inquiries. Nine additional women contacted me for this option in 2021, and twenty-six additional women partners in 2022. The Zoom interviews lasted around one hour each. I transcribed interviews and assigned pseudonyms to specific places of work or programs women were involved with. My analysis focused on process codes to highlight observable action in the data, and value codes, which reflected respondents’ values, beliefs, and attitudes, as well as their perceptions of others’ values.

The sample was predominately white (n = 49), heterosexual (n = 55; bisexual n = 13), and ranged from 18–56-years-old, with an average age of 38. There are no user demographics for SFP, so it is difficult to know how representative the predominately white American heterosexual sample of women is of the entire userbase or partners in general. Still, social media sites provide spaces to transcend and enact normative gender performances, which are important to study beyond their generalizability (Schoppe-Sullivan et al., 2017). Further, how the features of online spaces shape social interactions has predominantly been applied to toxic, antisocial cases, such as identity-based harassment (Gray, 2012; Massanari, 2017). Yet, there is also evidence of benign prosocial disinhibition (Suler, 2004), wherein people practice self-disclosure and offer social support to others online (Magsamen-Conrad et al., 2014). So, while we might expect social actors to provide social support in an online anonymous space, we also need to explore the meanings women attach to this social support, the factors which led to their engagement in such a space, and the implications of this online emotion work.

As this study is on the subjective perceptions of partners, rather than an ethnography of what men who are (in)formally diagnosed as addicts actually do, it is important to note that when “porn addict” is used below, it is in the essence of saving space in prefacing each instance with a full explanation of how the PA diagnosis is poorly understood in a clinical sense, associated with its own limitations and issues, but still socially understood as a real condition that partners believe impact their well-being. I thus use “porn addict” to denote the self-reports of respondents, narratives which are critical for understanding the experiences of this population, but which are not without the potential for reifying the PA framework.

Findings

These findings reveal that for respondents, an intimate relationships with a porn addict has social and gendered consequences, with the enforcement of feeling rules playing a key role. I begin with a brief overview of the emotional distress women report, drawing attention to the perceived lack of formal support mechanisms available to respondents, as well as their experiences of stigmatization when they disclose their partner’s addiction to close friends and family. Respondents report that this lack of support leads them to seek out informal and anonymous resources. In the SFP space, respondents find the social support they perceive as effective, being heard without judgement, and learning strategies for managing their self-image and relationship. This work is highly valued among respondents and creates opportunities to talk about the conditions which create their anger and sadness.

“So, to Hell with My Anger?” How Women Partners Perceive a Lack of Social Support Offline

Surveys and interviews are saturated with stories that highlight the multiple forms of distress being partnered to a porn addict creates. My findings mirror the themes of deterioration of women’s sexual satisfaction and self-esteem noted in the literature (Bergner & Bridges, 2002; Ford et al., 2012). However, I also find that women report distress due to increased care responsibilities in the home. These stories include men masturbating to porn while the woman rushed to feed a crying infant in the other room; men spending hundreds of dollars on personalized porn content after the couple agreed to save money for purchasing a home or helping a sick parent; and men watching porn and masturbating at work, which raised additional emotional and financial concerns for partners who worry about the loss of income. As respondents noted the transformation of an initially low-conflict relationship into “miserable conditions” with D-Day, and their own decline in mental health, these social consequences prompt women to seek out social support from partners, family members, friends, and therapists, though they noted being routinely disappointment.

Importantly, respondents report a failure to find social support where expected, which is tangled in two issues highlighting the gendered consequences of PA: (1) the centering of men’s needs and desires, reinforced by the clinical frame of addiction; and (2) feeling rules which deter rage and deep sadness. To start, partners themselves provide little support for respondents. In fact, most women talk about the multiple, consistent ways that addicts center their own desires and emotions at the expense of their partners. For participants whose partners are currently being treated for PA in therapy, the language of healing and co-addiction, reflective of the medicalization of PA, becomes—as perceived by the respondents—leveraged against them. As Florence reported in her survey:

There are all of these expectations for how I should change my feelings and reactions to him that he’s learning in therapy. If I voice concern or anger, or want to talk about my hurt, I’m “getting in the way of his healing.”

Likewise, Nora shared this experience during our interview,

His therapist decided it would be useful to bring me in as a coaddict, since I apparently contribute to him wanting to watch porn for hours on end.

Interviewer: How so?

If I cry out of anger or sadness, because nothing is getting better with his addiction, that makes him feel terrible, which makes him feel like he needs to watch more porn to feel better.

Interviewer: And what do you make of that?

It’s not right. It's like telling me not to have a real human reaction because it will only lead to more hurt.

Nora notes that her anger and sadness are tempered, sometimes preemptively, with the possibility of exacerbating her husband’s addiction. Indeed, as she continued,

If I let my emotions out, I have to deal with him not giving a shit, and then having him use that as a reason to really go off the deep end. Or I keep it all to myself and he still watches porn.

Interviewer: have you brought this up in session? Did either the therapist or your husband ask how you feel about this coaddiction label?

His therapist mentioned that it’s important for me to not “add additional stress or invalidate his pain and shame.” And I looked her straight in the face and asked, “so to hell with my anger?” and she just looked over at my husband with such sympathy! He has this therapist on his side worried about his feelings and I have no one else but the women online.

According to respondents, male partners can seemingly blame respondents for their behavior to avoid accountability for emotional and financial harms. The clinical frame of addiction deployed in the manner respondents describe, coupled with therapists’ authority, disempower respondents who are told that their reactions are harmful, and their own needs must be secondary to their partners’ needs. The clinical frame of addiction in the context of pornography is also deeply tangled in gendered behavioral and emotional expectations, which therapists seemingly did not problematize. Respondents’ narratives corroborate findings from gambling studies, where men can perceive their partners as “controlling” and “infantilizing,” which was associated with increased gambling to regain control (Côté et al., 2020). No one in respondents' lives questioned the gendered dynamics behind why men’s problematic behavior would exacerbate if women set boundaries; this was simply accepted as a truth respondents were responsible for accepting.

Women whose partners were not formally being treated for PA, but who were accessing informal resources online, also used the language of healing. Jilly shared the following in her interview:

He talks a lot about his healing, never mine.

Interviewer: What does he mention specifically about healing? Like, what does healing entail?

How he has to face his demons and overcome his fixation with porn, and that if I’m not understanding or caring about that process, I just hurt him and us in the end.

Interviewer: I’m curious, did you tell your own therapist about this?

I did and she agreed with the advice. I was furious at her thinking it was reasonable for me to try to modify my responses to him even more than I already do!... I’m exhausted worrying about his feelings and bottling mine up.

The message respondents report is that their partner’s healing from PA requires grace, understanding, patience, love, and care, and not demands for accountability or reminders of continued harm. Among partners and therapists, the clinical addiction framing of porn works to position the problem as outside of the addict’s immediate control on the one hand, but as somehow in the woman partner’s control on the other. From a marriage and family therapy perspective, control-based coping such as expressing emotions and setting clear rules, can be expected to increase strain for women partners of alcoholics, gambling addicts, and even domestic abusers (Petra, 2020). Indeed, even treatment programs can incorporate lessons on how a (woman) partner’s behaviors and feelings impact (male) partner’s behaviors (Rychtarik & McGillicuddy, 2005). This framing, in turn, requires women’s compliance with masking anger and sadness, which are viewed as counterproductive to the addict’s needs. For these respondents, seemingly no one outside of other women partners finds this line of treatment or advice problematic, which is not surprising given the institutionalization of feeling rules which sanction women’s anger.

This focus on tempering women’s emotions and perceptions undergirds the bulk of support they receive offline. Such minimization of women’s emotional reactions to PA is mirrored among women friends and women family members. When respondents disclosed that their partners have a PA to friends, 54 of the 68 women reported that were met with judgement, with the remaining 14 women reporting a mix of judgement, shaming, and disbelief. Respondents reported an obvious stigmatization around remaining in a partnership with a porn addict, which they interpreted as a critique of themselves as women.

As Katya shared,

It’s humiliating to share that pain with someone and they give you that look, like you’re crazy and stupid... my sister was appalled that I was considering staying with my husband. She told me she could never be with someone like that.

Interviewer: And what did that mean for you to hear her say that?

I felt even more alone. I know it’s not an ideal relationship, but there’s this high-and-mighty attitude people have when you tell them you’re with a porn addict, as if women are the problem.

Katya said that “people” have a “high-and-mighty attitude,” but it is worth nothing that none of the respondents shared disclosing their partners’ addiction to men. Respondents only mention seeking out support from other women, likely a function of the expectation of social support and emotion work women perform for each other. Yet, respondents still experience minimization and even encouragement of masking their negative emotions.

As Jules wrote in her survey,

I initially told my mom and two very close girlfriends. My mom told me she was disappointed I didn’t have more respect for myself. My girlfriends laughed and said they could never be with a man who put more focus on porn than sex with them.

Follow-up survey question: what were your reactions to those responses? Did you feel supported?

Absolutely not, I felt worse than before. I told them because I needed support but got more emotional distance.

In her survey, Meehan shared an important insight into the distinction between how her experiences and emotions are perceived, and draws attention to her identity as a woman in the process:

My boyfriend doesn’t think I have the right to be so angry. My sister thinks I have the right to be angry, but at the same time I know she thinks that nothing after the initial shock of D-day isn’t something I should be expressing. She said I should be embarrassed and that she could never be with a man who would choose porn over real sex. I hear that a lot, “I could never.” I get it, I’m a shitty woman.

Women friends and family offer some emotional leeway with anger and sadness, but not in the long-term sense respondents describe needing. That is, other women expect partners of addicts to leave; remaining in a relationship after discovery of PA shifts the context in an important way, and anger and sadness are no longer appropriate. This aspect of being a “shitty woman” is linked to the respondent’s stories of how other women responded to their disclosure. For women friends and family, the scandal of dating a porn addict is seemingly not in the emotional pain or sense of betrayal the partners are expressing. Rather, the scandal is not being the object of desire from men, a seeming failure of femininity other women would not sign up for, evidenced by the statement “I could never.” Indeed, as Carlie told me in her interview,

I think what hurts the most is the judgement from other women. Since my husband would rather jerk off then sleep with me, my friends are always like “Oh, I could never deal with that! How do you even stand it? Doesn’t that kill you inside that you’re not on his mind?” And it’s like yea, it kills me. But that he doesn’t want to have sex is the least of my worries… He’s spending a ton of money and he’s a zombie with the kids, but that’s not the worst to my friends. It’s that he doesn’t want me.

The work of maintaining heterosexual desirability is intimately linked to emotion work and gender (Ward, 2010, 2022) such that being a “good woman” becomes attached to, and inseparable from, being the object of sexual desire from male partners. PA can invalidate what makes a woman valuable within a heterosexual relationship, a process women family members and friends inadvertently contribute. Emotion work is shaped by contexts inseparable from misogyny and heterosexuality, which create values around women’s broader worth as sexual partners and norms about staying in relationships. These tensions become evident in how women partners see the failures of social support from women they expect to provide a reprieve. Thus, respondents found little to no social support in the form of validation, strategies for managing relationship strain, or offers to seek out other resources from their women friends and family. Indeed, the perceived stigma of dating a porn addict, wherein other women’s responses were centered on their own inability to envision themselves ever being in that situation, led to them seeking out anonymous resources.

“They Helped Me Harness That Rage into Hope for Myself:” Affirming Anger and Sharing Strategies

According to respondents, therapists, partners, and women friends and family minimized their anger and sadness. The SFP space, however, provided a steady and reliable source of social support for women partners through affirmation. That affirmation was largely centered around validating anger, sadness, and anxiety, and sharing strategies to navigate their partner’s addiction, including how to prepare to leave the relationship. It is the explicit rules of SFP, enforced through close moderation, which provide the contexts for women to experience the extent of support they report. There is positive affirmation of general anxiety and preoccupation with the effects of their partner’s actions, for example, as Zulema shared in her survey:

We can’t watch TV together. If there’s a beautiful woman on the screen, I’m obsessing on the fact that he’s probably imagining sex with her, or that he’ll look up porn with women who look like her later on. I can’t even enjoy a lot of shows or movies when I’m alone. I get jealous of these fictional women who get to have men with passion and relationships with connection... I’ve shared this on SFP and was flooded with support, lots of women telling me they feel the same way when they watch TV and that there’s nothing wrong with me for feeling this way.

This is even the case for women who never posted on the site, but who visited the site routinely to read posts and comments, such as Tia:

I don’t post because I’m terrified someone at work will find it… honestly, I don’t even need to post. It’s like everything I’m going through is already being discussed. Reading the love and support means a lot… I don’t get this positivity anywhere else. It’s a sense of sisterhood to have thousands of other women say “I’m hurting too and that’s real, but we’re still worthy of love and romance, we’re still sexy, we’re still amazing and this isn’t our fault.”

Whereas the aspect of a “shared experience” is part of the perceived social support, that is not the most meaningful aspect respondents described as positive; it is the absence of feeling rules which suppress anger and sadness which act as the key support mechanism. This is by design. Indeed, as one moderator shared in their survey,

I think that this [subreddit] is an excellent emotional support for partners of porn addiction because there is a lot out there for the addicts, but the partners are often times mislabeled as controlling, low self-esteem, etc. Because porn addiction is not commonly known or accepted, it is very misunderstood. So much of society has normalized porn use, that when people talk out against it, there are so many stereotypes surrounding it. And again, that doesn’t even cover the partners of it. Heck, we have seen time and again where even therapists (not CSAT- Sex Addiction therapists) have made situations worse with partners and PA's and not better. The partners are finally being heard and not being told they are crazy! … It's only now just becoming a thing that people realize the true damage porn addiction does to the partner too.

This moderator acknowledges the complex web of issues at play which shape partners’ access to social support, including therapists not trained to deal with sex addiction and the perception of women as merely being controlling. On SFP, the damage of PA on partners can be exposed and women partners have spaces to share their experiences free from stereotypes of women as irrationally jealous and controlling. Further, women mentioned affirming other users’ anger and sadness as ways they felt useful and part of a community of support, as Loise wrote in her survey:

I comment on posts weekly, just to let these women know they aren’t alone, and that the pain and anger they feel are real. I like to reassure them that no one has the right to tell them to change how they feel to make their boyfriend comfortable… being able to share that is what makes it such a special community.

Women also shared that learning strategies for navigating their partner’s addiction helped them regain a sense of control, a critical form of support. As Patty shared in their survey,

The most supportive aspect has been learning about the apps and sites that he can use for porn, how to check his history, and how to learn if he is lying about recovery. This all helps me focus my anxiety and take control of the situation.

As discussed earlier, advice and support from others offline frame modifying one’s anger and sadness as helping women navigate the stressor of PA. On SFP however, partners can provide and find strategies that do not involve becoming accepting of pornography or minimizing anger. Instead, their anger and views toward pornography are validated as rational and even useful. As Jilly told me,

So many of our partners lie or misconstrue what they watch and how much, and even where they’re getting their hands on porn. Having other women tell me to check for this app or be mindful of that shifty behavior is huge for me.

Interviewer: Do you follow that advice? Like, have you put into practice those types of strategies? Have you noticed any changes?

For sure, and it’s been really positive. My boyfriend knows I’m holding him accountable now and can tell when he’s bullshitting me. He knows I’m not just going to sit back and let him do this to me.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to assess the actual effectiveness of these strategies in buffering any negative consequences of PA. What is important here is that women partners perceive a difference in their experiences based on merely accessing this advice within a space where anger and sadness can be expressed freely.

Part of the perceived social support is also reading and posting about leaving addicts, though this can be problematic. On the one hand, posting about leaving a partner can be interpreted as criticizing women partners for remaining in relationships, which is not tolerated on the site. Further, women partners know firsthand that simply being told to leave is not useful. On the other hand, some respondents shared that reading about women who “made it out” provided hope as much as stories of boyfriends and husbands who were “taking recovery seriously.” Some respondents still valued accessing and sharing stories of newfound harmony and comfort, and strategies for creating a plan to leave. For instance, Lydia shared the following in her survey:

I’ve slowly been preparing to leave my boyfriend following the advice from a few other women. I’ve emotionally checked out, which helps me hurt less. I’m also saving money and I’m touring apartments soon… they helped me harness that rage into hope for myself.

For women who decided to post about their own experiences leaving porn addicts, they recognized that not all women were ready to hear and accept this advice. As Annika shared in her survey:

I left my husband of four years because he was out of control. When I see women with similar experiences talking about the financial stress and childcare stress, my heart goes out to them… I’ll refer them to my previous posts so they can see the way I suffered and how other women pulled me out.... Some women don’t understand the scope of the problem or they won’t be fully ready to leave at the moment, but it’s important for them to know it’s an option.

Annika shared earlier in her survey that it was difficult to imagine leaving her husband before joining SFP, not because she was opposed to the idea, but because she could not “process” her “feelings in peace” and come to the decision in spaces where others were simply telling her not to be so angry or so sad. On the subreddit, women validated her anger and her experiences rather than suggesting she simply “stop complaining and do something about it.”

Some respondents also shared perceptions of the problem of PA being so broad in scope, that they could expect any man they dated to have problematic porn use. Thus, advice targeted at leaving was “moot,” since their next partner would presumably have the same issues. As one respondent shared,

I appreciate when women talk about leaving. I feel jealous because they seem to have found one of the handful of men who isn’t addicted to porn. I’d rather stay and work it out with a man whose addiction I understand than start a new relationship with someone who’s into violent stuff or someone who wastes money on it. It’s moot to plan on leaving this for worse.

Leaving relationships where respondents feel enraged, ignored, undesirable, and in a constant state of anxiety and hypervigilance was not the primary aim of social support; validating the tumultuous emotions and helping other women feel a sense of control, as opposed to passive victimhood, became the tool of choice. Finally, some respondents suggested that in addition to their emotions being affirmed, their sense of “womanhood” was also restored through participation in the group. Juliet shared in her survey:

Porn addiction makes being a "good" woman even more impossible. I feel ugly and undesirable, even though I know deep down I'm not… I rarely post, but reading through comments helps me realize we're still strong and beautiful women, even if we're with people who don't appreciate that about us.

Likewise, as Bella wrote in her survey:

Feeling passionate and affectionate is something I love about being a woman, that side of me isn't possible anymore in my relationship…. showing women love and care is such a meaningful part of SFP, it’s like, finally someone cares about me and appreciates me.

Social support accessed in this online space can provide a means to restore some of those perceived injuries of PA on a relationship, in part due to feeling rules. This online space affirms and supports respondents in profound ways. Indeed, as Patty shared, “When I am down, they uplift me. When I hate myself, they remind me why I shouldn’t. When I wanted to die, they gave me reasons to live.” The sentiment of this quote may seem extreme, but it is representative of the deeply meaningful role of SFP in providing a reprieve for respondents and highlights the extent of suffering respondents experience in partnerships with porn addicts. This suffering creates the conditions under which women seek out support and, importantly, the contexts through which feeling rules are reconstructed.

Discussion and Conclusion

Previous studies of PA have correctly pointed to the social construction of this perceived social problem. However, studies of PA have not considered the social implications for women who are partnered to addicts, including those which reflect and reproduce gender inequalities. Using the framework of emotion work, this paper explored how women partners perceive feeling rule enforcement by therapists, friends, family, and partners, which suppress anger and sadness. For trained therapists, minimizing women’s anger and sadness was bolstered by clinical research and expert opinions that men’s recovery was predicated on women controlling their emotions. For women friends and family, minimizing anger and sadness was linked to the absurdity of the idea of remaining in a relationship with a man who prioritized porn over actual sex, an action which was perceived as symbolizing a lack of self-respect as a woman. In that suppression of emotions deemed counterproductive to addicts’ “healing,” respondents were not able to access social support for the several negative implications they associated with their partnership. Women partners thus searched for anonymous support, which lead them to a subreddit. There they find validation of anger and sadness, which creates space for women to share stories of the social, gendered consequences of PA. This study thus expands on our understanding of porn addiction, intimate relationships, gender, and emotion work by showing how (1) the medicalization of porn addiction has serious implications for how women partners are expected to manage their emotions and (2) the online space of SFP provides tools to explicitly manage feeling rules in ways that push back against constraining emotional expectations, which provides opportunities to talk about the gendered consequences of PA.

The SFP feeling rules are part of what make the online space so important to understanding social support for partners of porn addicts and emotion work more broadly. In face-to-face contexts, explicit and implicit feeling rules around women’s emotionality govern interactions. Online, the moderators do not allow such constraining feeling rules to ever emerge. This is not possible elsewhere. In no face-to-face scenario can all women partners enter with the reality that they will not be held to emotional expectations of grace and forgiveness. However, such feeling rules can be explicitly managed online, which opens new opportunities to understand emotion work, especially how moderators and users resist larger cultural forces which design and enforce feeling rules. What kind of cultural change is possible when such explicit management of emotion work becomes feasible for women? Lopez (2014) suggests that in the context of social movement organizing, the ability to express anger online in ways deemed unacceptable in face-to-face interactions can be transformational for feminist and anti-racist collective efforts. That these women can also explore the depths and roots of their anger might lend itself to consciousness-raising and identification of the structural inequalities they experience more broadly. To be sure, that the sample is predominately white and was focused on remaining in heterosexual partnerships with the addict certainly requires more attention beyond the space in this article. The racialized and sexual-orientation aspect of these experiences may not have been obvious to white respondents (McDermott & Ferguson, 2022). Future studies should focus on the role of whiteness, and more purposively recruit women of color to understand how racial oppression contributes to the processes laid out in this paper.

Some may read respondents’ narratives as evidence that the moral panic around pornography has reached a fever pitch and that women’s acceptance of a more porn-inclusive range of sexual desires and behaviors can help ease their anxieties. Such a reading must grapple with the broader issues this paper draws attention to: there are gendered consequences to the medicalization of PA, such that it is predominantly women being tasked with and expected to minimize their anger and shift their frameworks, their attitudes, and their behaviors around porn use. But as this paper demonstrated, respondents find community among other women, where gendered expectations around emotionality are still present in the space, but instead function to affirm women’s experiences and provide space to strategize.