I obviously can’t speak for all women here – I’m sure there are some out there who, if they discover you watching porn, will consider it cheating and write to Cosmo about it before angry-baking all night to deal. But most of us realize that most of you – men – watch it, download it … maybe even look at it in print. Here is our general consensus about porn:

1. We’re ok with you watching it
We know that men have insane sex drives and want to get their peens touched all the time. If this means touching it yourself along with some visual stimulus, we prefer that to you getting someone else to do it.

2. Except if …
My friend pointed one time when a porn habit does get annoying – if you and your lady are not having sex because you are generally gross/disappointing and she doesn’t want to sleep with you, seeing you watching porn just reminds her of all the things you could do to suck less instead of literally jerking off all the time. Or to put it another way – Freud disapproved of masturbation because it was passive. Just make sure your sock is not a substitute for actually being a bangable person out in the real world.

3. We understand that you might watch “weird” porn
Only the most naive among us assume that your porn somehow involves an attractive man and woman having a totally romantic “roll in the hay.” Sexuality is strange – especially when it comes to the realm of imagination and not reality. We understand that you may stray into some really weird territory in those nights alone in your room with a stack of empty beers by your side. But if your favorite porn involves strangling girls or animal fucking, your girlfriend will be deeply disturbed.

4. We look at it too but get caught up in the details
Some of my lady friends (who are straight) told me they can only watch lesbian porn. This makes some sense because the guys in porn are generally disgusting, and the fact that a man is in a porn makes him already skeezy. At least the girls are pretty. Watching porn kind of turns us on, but we get really caught up in things like, “Why is she wearing such skanky fake nails? She’d be so pretty without them,” “Why is her vagina lip purple? Is mine purple?” and “Does that really feel good to her? I feel bad for her …” until we’re totally turned off. Clearly porn is not designed for women, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the more innocuous ones.

Bottom line: Your girlfriend probably knows you watch porn and is ok with it. If she ever asks to see your porn, show her a sexy lesbian porn with zero violence and you should be good to go.

-Rachel Green