Chennai: In a significant ruling, the Madras High Court refused to grant divorce to a man on the ground that his wife was watching porn and indulging in self-pleasure. A Bench of Justices G R Swaminathan and R Poornima, while upholding the trial court’s verdict denying divorce, said a woman indulging in masturbation cannot be a cause for dissolution of marriage. “By no stretch of imagination, can it be said to inflict cruelty on the husband,” the judges said delivering verdict on the man’s civil miscellaneous appeal petition.
For the couple in the instant case, it was their second marriage after their previous marriages had ended in divorce. The man from Karur, a western district, sought dissolution of his second marriage too on the grounds that his wife suffered from communicable venereal disease and would indulge in self-pleasure watching porn.
However, he had failed to establish that she suffered from venereal disease. At the same time, he argued that by being addicted to porn and often indulging in masturbation she had been cruel to him.
The judge said, watching porn (other than the statutorily prohibited type) in a private setting would not constitute an offence. “Having said so, we have to clarify that any addiction was bad and porn addiction was definitely so. It would affect the viewer in the long run. Since it objectifies women and portrays them in a degrading manner, it cannot be morally justified. But personal and community standards of morality are one thing and breach of law is another,” they said.
The wife’s act of merely watching porn privately by itself may not constitute cruelty to the husband. It may affect the psychological health of the viewing spouse. “That by itself will not amount to treating the other spouse cruelly. The other allegation was that the wife would indulge in masturbation. Calling upon a woman to respond to this averment itself was a gross infringement of her sexual autonomy. Indulging in self pleasure cannot be a cause for dissolution of marriage. By no stretch of imagination, can it be said to inflict cruelty on the husband,” the court said. “When masturbation among men was acknowledged to be universal, masturbation by women cannot be stigmatised,” it added.
