Torn by porn

A divorce, as well as the stress that comes with it, can be protracted for various reasons. In the case of a Chinese couple, the husband took his ex-wife to court after their divorce in 2023 in a bid to get custody of their daughter.

Pre-divorce, the couple surnamed Shao and Ji had two children, one taking the father’s surname and the other the mother’s, an arrangement that contradicted tradition but is now the norm for marrying couples in modern China, South China Morning Post reports.

The husband divorced his wife for refusing to change their son’s surname to Shao and she took custody of the children then. When Shao sought the court’s intervention to get custody of his daughter, the court ruled in favor of the ex-wife.

Meanwhile, an Indian husband asked a high court to grant his petition to divorce his wife after his request was rejected by a family court. The couple were married in 2018 but began living apart in 2020.

The petitioner from Karur district in Tamil Nadu complained that the family court had erred in dismissing his allegations of cruelty by his estranged wife, a valid ground for divorce under the Hindu Marriage Act, Hindustan Times (HT) reports.

The man alleged that his wife was a spendthrift, was addicted to porn, refused to do household chores, often indulged in masturbation, and suffered from a venereal disease, according to HT.

The Madras High Court ruled that there was no proof that she had VD, and watching porn and masturbation did not constitute cruelty in marriage.

In their ruling, Justices GR Swaminathan and R Poornima cited a 2024 jurisprudence that says one’s right to privacy included spousal privacy which encompasses various aspects of a woman’s sexual autonomy.

“So long as something does not fall afoul of the law, the right to express oneself cannot be denied. Self-pleasure is not a forbidden fruit; its indulgence shall not lead to a precipitous fall from the Eden Garden of marriage,” the court ruled, HT reports.

“When masturbation among men is acknowledged to be universal, masturbation by women cannot be stigmatized,” the court added, according to HT.