Can anyone tell me if I'm being insane or if I'm right in what I'm thinking?

Sorry tapped “you’re right” by accident!

I imagine you would both feel a little nervous if it has been so long, Honestly I think you are prob reading into it to much just feeling a little insecure, you have had his baby and if he truly loves you a little extra weight is not going to make a difference .. also I dont think it matters to a guy if you attractive or not if he wants to get his end away then I think he would do if he fancied you or not. X

Nah…. I don’t want to lie to you. And this isn’t a you thing. It would be a him thing if anything. I’ve gained 40lbs and my husband still looks at me and doesn’t have trouble. I’m post 3 kids and pregnant with my 4th. But that sort of change in behavior definitely indicates he’s struggling with something. I don’t think it means he’s being unfaithful or doesn’t love you, or any of that. But you guys may need to talk about it in a way that doesn’t put either one of you in the hot chair. At the end of the day; sex is supposed to bring you together but your marriage is more than that. Each should be caring for the other in a way that is concerned about the mental and emotional aspects of it too. And if he’s struggling with something, he won’t be able to talk through it if he’s afraid of making you angry. It may seem immature or shallow if this is bothering him and maybe he even recognizes that and is ashamed of it. You won’t know until you talk

Thank you, I'm due on too so I'm really hormonal as well as really self conscious so not sure if I'm just being insane lol

Talk to him. He was probably as nervous as you were, and he probably feels really embarrassed about it. Did he say anything about not being able to carry on? X

@Amy yeah im going to were on holiday at the minute so I don't want to make it awkward. No just that he was nervous and went to sleep d

Most likely he's afraid of causing you discomfort or pain due to episiotomy as well as you both are intimately out of touch. It can be weird for both people. You need to start small and build back up to sex. Start with talking, hand holding, cuddling, foreplay etc. You two are probably just emotionally disconnected and need to be intentional with your time. It happens to a lot of couples. Don't think theres something wrong with you.

Don’t go jumping to conclusions

Maybe try a more basic position where you’re close together and can mostly just see each others faces to start with. If you’re both feeling a bit nervous

The first time back again can be awkward for both sides. You will both have to talk about what you like at your “new normal.” It doesn’t mean your relationship isn’t working if you go for a said period time without intercourse sex. Especially during pregnancy and postpartum.. these are times when your body is going through so many changes and healing. And girls on tv are fantasy’s where you are the real thing. ;) It sounds like he wants you and respects you just doesn’t want to hurt you physically and maybe notice you bowed out emotionally too. You’ll just have to talk about new positions or things that make you feel sexy and turned on maybe one of them is turning off the tv once started.

He's probably been using porn and porn use will tank actual sex.

@Tiffany this is an assumption and not generalisable either. A lot of people consume porn and most of them prefer the real thing if given the choice. The idea that porn use is inherently damaging to relationships is a subset of radfem rhetoric, be wary of it.

Idk I remember when we first had sex after giving birth it was painful and uncomfortable and it didn't feel the same to him either so it was a bit awkward the first several times. I remember being so scared it would never be good again...but flash forward now and we have amazing sex...so it takes time. Don't rush to conclusions just yet. Be patient and open with eachother without judgment. And if the weight is something that's bothering you then you can take steps to lose it but do it for you not for anyone else. I'm sure he still loves you and finds you attractive, it's just different and an adjustment. Consider also how he makes you feel outside of the bedroom too.

Could be worried about hurting you physically too

@Carolyn I've just had countless experiences where a man was using porn a lot, had death grip, and couldn't maintain an erection with an average woman until they stopped jerking it 🤷 not all men but enough of them.

@Tiffany I'm sorry you had those experiences but they're not the norm. Most people do not consume porn to the detriment of their sex lives.

@Carolyn I would disagree and I agree with Tiffany. Porn is a detriment to people’s lives. Psychology reports have found definitively more harm than any possible good. And it’s 100% a predatory industry. It’s done more harm to relationships than helped and arguably I don’t think it’s actually helped anyone but be a bandaide or a distraction to an actual solution.

@Janis yeah this is just purity culture/radfem rhetoric. Most of the "research" on it is cherry picked and funded by Christian fundies.

@Carolyn Nah. Hate to break it to you. It’s really not. That might be your opinion, but it’s actually pretty wide spread detailed in multiple studies and journal articles throughout reputable and unbiased health websites You can’t just claim it’s trad/fem rhetoric or Christianity bias because you don’t like them.

@Janis yeah nope. It's radfem rhetoric. Hate to break it to ya too, but purity culture do be like that.

@Carolyn 🤷‍♀️ I suppose ignorance is bliss for you.

@Janis No, I've just researched the radfem roots of anti-porn and swerf rhetoric. It goes back decades. The idea that porn is inherently exploitative, "heteronormative", the erasure of porn that isn't cishet, the demonisation of kink, the idea that any woman in sex work must be either exploited or coerced, that porn is primarily violent and encourages violence, on and on and on. If you dig just a little deeper, you can see the undercurrent of shame tied to it - and the msg that there are "proper" and demure roles and behaviors that "deviant" "porn addicts" and sex workers violate. And that is threatening to Christian fundies and other authoritarians, so they push their dogma and pump out "research" to scare everyone else. The irony is that sex-negative ideology and purity culture causes so much shame over normal sexual desires and behaviors that a lot of the "damage" porn users deal with that these articles report can't be separated from that.

I don't care if you disagree, but the rhetoric you and Tiffany have been sharing is 100% swerf talking points. 10 seconds on Google will show you that. You can talk like a swerf all you want, but if you do, you can't deny it when people call you a swerf.

@Carolyn It’s interesting how much of your argument heavily depends upon extreme bias and “circumstantial” evidence in order to try and make it plausible. Or that you have to come up with terms to try and isolate very specific groups of people from outside the rest of the general population without any scientific evidence or reasoning for that separation or how it’s done. It’s all political on your end. It’s literally just buzz words.

@Janis it's hardly my argument. The debate for and against radfem bullshit, like I said, goes back to Andrea Dworkin in the 70s. Feminists have been battling it out with the same points and counterpoints ever since. I don't really have the energy to fight back against Brandolini's law myself, but anyone who genuinely wants to educate themselves can just look up SWERF ideology, its origins, and the dishonest ways they both conduct and present research findings. 🤷‍♀️

@Carolyn I’ll give you credit on the brandolinis law at least being entertaining to all of this discussion. I don’t need you to provide me research. I’ve done plenty myself already But the rest. Nah. I can admit every side has a particular bias or a lens in which they interpret information and the world…and that’s one step further than I bet you are willing to do yourself. If it’s “radical” for me to believe what I believe, fine. Doesn’t hurt my feelings and you can call me whatever acronym you want. Seems like the popular thing to do now a days.

@Janis lol, what constitutes swerf rhetoric isn't up for debate. The "radical" in radical feminism doesn't even mean what you think it means anyway - it's a reference to the ideology they have regarding how to fight the patriarchy, rather than to describe the "extremeness" of their beliefs. You don't even know the roots of the stuff you're spreading and you apparently have done "plenty" of research already, lord help us 🤦‍♀️

@Carolyn sorry I'd have to disagree with you on this too, porn can be very damaging to relationships and this is just through my experience/ observations not just cherry picked literature.

@Holly anecdotal experiences are even less generalisable than cherry picked literature, and still doesn't make swerf rhetoric okay.

@Carolyn It’s absolutely okay. Yours is an opinion based off of someone else’s experience and their opinions and philosophy on why things should be okay, And we have ours.

@Carolyn i also dont agree with it just being radfem rethoric. I was in a relationship for 4 years where my boyfriend was addicted to porn and he would defenetly prefer to masturbate to porn instead of having sex. Not only that his group of friends most of them would defend that than watching porn is easier and more confortable than having sex, and the girlfriends had similar issues as me. I left him because i had very high libido and the situation was really making me unhappy when we would have sex once per month but he would masturbate every single day

@Janis no. Radfem/purity culture rhetoric is inherently authoritarian and harmful. There is no version of it that is "okay", even if you take out the stuff that isn't queerphobic/transphobic. But it doesn't surprise me one bit that a platform that has a poll every other day about whether trans women count as women has radfems coming out left and right spreading swerf rhetoric and insisting that it's "just an opinion" and is "okay", and thinking anecdotes count as evidence.

@Carolyn Men are not women. 🤷‍♀️ You can have your own opinions, but you don’t get your own facts. You are wasting your time trying to convince anyone here of anything because you keep saying the same circular thing without actually bringing any evidenced backed claims. And by evidence I mean actual science, not gender philosophy by people who have an extremely political agenda and skew their research results. Ive read all versions of the WPATH and have deeply researched its president, chair members etc…. And independently fact checked their sources and studies which still use sources such as John Money who is a known fraud and sourced his information and study materials from sexual deviants in prison. So you really don’t want to start with me there. Don’t even get me started on Marci Bowers the past president who has an extreme conflict of interest. I actually have interest in protecting people and it’s not affirming mutilation of the mind (pornography) or body (surgery)

And feel free to call me a “rad fem” or terf or swerf or whatever I’ll wear it as a badge of honor. It doesn’t hurt my feelings

@Janis I know you wear the terf badge with pride. That's why it's not worth arguing with you. And you can call my claims circular or lacking evidence all you like. As if radfem "evidence" is anything *but* circular 🤣

Regarding porn...I'm going to say this...it's based on the person not the act of watching porn. Someone can not watch porn and still be a terrible partner...cheat, lie, be abusive, etc. And be generally disconnected sexually. Someone can watch porn and be addicted. I.e, use it like a drug and let it warp their perception of true intimacy. And Someone can watch porn and have a healthy sexual appetite and strong desire for their partner while fully satisfying their needs and being loyal. Porn is not always a problem, the people consuming it and their addictive tendencies or mispercetions on sex and intimacy are. I am speaking from experience here from every angle. Sorry to all the women who were mistreated by someone with porn addictions, but not everyone who watches porn is this way. That's like saying everyone who consumes any bit of alcohol is an alcoholic.

@Jen the *vast* majority of users who watch porn do not have any issue from it. The ones who do are nearly always struggling with religious-based shame about their sexuality, and not with porn itself. Radfem rhetoric that enables this authoritarian shaming culture is inherently damaging and no, science does not back it up. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/women-who-stray/201808/science-stopped-believing-in-porn-addiction-you-should-too https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4424581-is-pornography-really-warping-our-brains-or-is-it-a-moral-panic/ I could post all the studies referenced in those articles and more but radfems are like flat-earthers - the more you post stuff that debunks their shit the harder they cling to it. Last time I got into it on here I was literally having to point out the Mormon leadership behind the site someone tried to use as a source. It's exhausting. At least the one loudest SWERF here did everyone a favour and outed herself as a TERF. Can't say I didn't see that coming 💀

lol here is an actual informative source and not some opinion piece from psychology today. And again your “rhetoric” that people wouldn’t have all the psychological issues if it wasn’t for purity culture, religion, etc… is an OPINION. Not a fact. And your source and the people writing it and their studies linked behind it are heavily socially biased and influenced with a clear agenda which obviously influences their results to skew it in their “favor” and their narrative. It’s not hard to torture the data into your favor. Pharmaceuticals companies literally do it all the time in order to make money. It’s a massive industry. The porn industry is no different and so there will always be people to justify and try and “prove” its benefit because of the billions upon billions of dollars in it and because typically people who have the most sexual problems and mental health issues use it tojustify the use of other people as sexual objects https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9922938/

@Carolyn I agree with you on the porn Carolyn. If my man and I get in to watching porn or sexy tv shows alot he becomes hyper sexual with me. Porn makes him pursue sex with me more. I think the reason men watch porn is more what dictates the response they have to watching porn. Like if he watches a lot of porn because initiating sx has become a task or a bother, or they are over being rejected, then they are going to use porn to satisfy thier needs. The studies are probably biased in the way that they arent accounting for the individual factors that affect men who watch more porn like the reasons they turned to it instead.of women in the first place.

@Janis aaaaand here we go, the terrible sources come out. So again, the out and proud terf doesn't give a shit, but for anyone else wondering: A) psychology today and the hill wasn't supposed to be the endpoint for gaining info - the *studies* cited in both of those articles were B) cureus journal (cited by the TERF) is not a reliable medical journal. Their "peer review" process takes a whopping 48 hours. 48 hours is NOT enough time to look at an entire article, cross reference all the cited sources, check for methodological errors, etc. Most research papers require far more time to pore over which is why most reputable researchers don't publish their findings at article mills like cureus journal. There's a reason why a study looking at poor quality data identified cureus journal as one of the leading publishers of misleading and "predatory" information https://web.archive.org/web/20230328140348/https://www.sla.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Predatory-Journal-Publishing.pdf

(Also? Familiarize yourself with the way researchers in journals like JAMA, the Lancet, actually write. Right off the bat the fact that the abstract looked like a high-schooler wrote it for a science report was immediately suspect. Compare the abstract of the first article linked in Psychology Today to that abstract - the difference in terminology and writing quality is night and day.) Finally, fundamentalist religious organizations are out there to make money as well, not just the porn industry, and the amount of wealth and power churches can have eclipse the porn industry by a mile. The Catholic church in Australia alone is worth about 30 billion dollars. And churches *gain* when they can convince people that normal sexual desires and behaviors are sinful, bad, and broken. They gain when they can make you feel shame about normal expressions of your sexuality, *so that they can then offer you a cure.*

They have a vested interest in making an activity that nearly all men engage in (and quite a significant portion of women too, let alone queer/enby folk) seem horribly dangerous and destructive and *needing intervention* and strangely enough, only faith-based interventions are available because actual psychiatrists and psychologists rarely identify "porn addiction" as an actual addiction! What a coincidence! Istg it's equivalent to an MLM, they're just selling salvation instead of skincare. You wanna protect yourself from harm? Stop spreading radfem rhetoric, stop feeding into the shame culture, and stop sharing slop that's had less than 48 hours to be properly reviewed and published. Thanks.

Finally, the idea that people wouldn't have the psychological issues if it weren't for purity culture and religion is not just an "opinion", it is also the findings that resulted from the studies that my articles cited. They looked at users who consumed porn and found that frequency of porn use had no predictive effect on the user experiencing distress or categorizing their consumption as an undesirable or uncontrollable "compulsion". But *religiosity* and internal shame DID have an effect, and it had an effect that was totally independent of porn use frequency. Soooooooo.... gee idk, what could possibly be the cause here? *must* be the porn itself, no question! Lmaooo (See what I mean about Brandolini's law though? A terf can write one paragraph of dishonest information and cite one terrible source and debunking all the bullshit took up 4 comments in reply. This is how bigoted authoritarianism prospers - it takes disproportionately more energy to fight lies than it does to spread lies. 💀)

Well of course, if people are told and taught to not have a conscience they are going to feel pretty good doing whatever they want. That’s how you get sexual deviants and people who harm others. People have a moral conscience for a reason… and when groups with your ideology tell people “oh no don’t feel bad about it…” and you encourage poor behavior and approve of it, sure they are gonna feel pretty good about themselves. This is true of anything. The issue isn’t with murder, it’s with peoples moral feelings about it and their religion. Personally, I think the moral safe guard that are there, alarm in people for a reason and usually when we follow them… people do less harm to themselves and others… but when you dismantle those things which is your agenda… that’s when people start to give themselves license and entitlement to all sorts of behaviors. So I actually think those in psychology who are manipulating peoples beliefs and brains to justify their own sexual habits… is abuse

Your argument is porn isn’t harmful because if people didn’t have a moral conscience about it then they would feel good about it and it would only help things. Where you and I strongly disagree is on the foundation of that morality and what constitutes benefit to the human body and what is or isn’t considered abuse or destructive to the body or others. Psychology is a highly speculative and easily manipulated field. It can only observe, record, and report data but it cannot provide truth, only theory and evidence. And how you extrapolate that evidence and use it will be entirely dependent upon your world view. Now I know where my world view comes from.. and I can guess yours. The difference is I was not personally going out of my way to try and incite or insult you with silly jargon and perjoratives to distract from the argument.That’s childish. And it shows evidence of a lack of depth and maturity on your part and insecurity. If you have to try and mock your opponent, you’ve lost

@Janis again, no. The religiosity predicted distress *independent* of porn use frequency. Also religiosity and shame is not morality, and exploring your own sexuality is not a "moral conscience" violating thing unless you're violating someone's consent or have been brought up to be ashamed of normal sexual desires. You can see the purity culture in full force behind those comments. Finally, TERF is not an insult, it's a descriptor. Someone who believes in TERF ideology is a TERF, and by definition it makes that person authoritarian and bigoted. You can't be transphobic and not bigoted, for the same reason you can't believe in white supremacy and call yourself a non-racist. Reality don't work like that, woops.

Literally this is a circular argument. So do you have anything new?

@Janis you tried to insist that religiosity equated to "having a conscience", and that these things would merely allow recognition of a problem. Neither of these claims are true, and the latter was something the article and studies within it that I cited explicitly examined and debunked. Religiosity was not a moderating factor, as you would expect if it truly just "shone a light" on harmful behaviour - it was an *independent* factor. None of this is circular at all but if you keep posting the same uninformed comments you're gonna keep getting the same rebuttals. That's repetitive but it isn't a circular argument. A circular argument would be smth like "porn use disgusts me because it's morally wrong, and it's morally wrong because it triggers that feeling of disgust", which beneath all your attempts to couch your comments with pseudoscience, is really the core of your position if we're both gonna be honest with each other.

If we are both being honest with each other as I have with you , you would have admitted a long time ago that you have a world view bias by which you also focus all your information on and how you feel about it. You just haven’t admitted it yet. See, I have no problem with that. I know where my world view comes from and have stated it multiple times I know it and that everyone has a lens with which they extrapolate information. But you are just as skewed to your own religious ideology. And it IS religiosity in its own form. You don’t have to serve a God or believe in one even, but you still “serve” an ideology with the same religious intent and tenacity you accuse me of and it will cause you to no matter what, disparage and dismiss any other argument that doesn’t support your belief system To be honest the data is irrelevant when it comes down to what YOU want to believe I’m just more self aware of it and can reason through it. Something I have not seen you do once

Sure, I am "biased" in favour of fighting bigotry, prejudice, and authoritarian belief systems, and I have dedicated a lot of time to identifying authoritarian dogwhistles so I can call them out when I see them. That's my "religion", I "serve" in the fight against the oppression of minorities and non-conformers. 😊