Episode 111 - Porn

[transcript automatically generated - please help edit to make it better]

hey everybody welcome to the liturgist podcast my name is michael gunger and if you're new around these parts the liturgists are a global community working to end suffering by subverting the barriers our society builds around religion race gender ability and sexuality this podcast is part of how we do that work the liturgist podcast is a place where we have conversations about the most compelling things we can think of through lenses like science faith and art and today's episode is a bit of a doozy uh you know due to overwhelming popular demand we finally made an episode about porn and here's the deal with this particular episode the liturgist does not have a single perspective or opinion about porn and that's true about any topic because you know the liturgist isn't a person it's a bunch of us and it's a bunch of us who see the world in vastly different ways but let's be honest there's usually a pretty general consensus from most of us about most topics you know most of us around here are passionately lgbtqia affirming most of us around here are pro-science and enjoy deconstructing dualism and all sorts of other things that kind of make us alike but this particular episode really does offer quite a variety of perspectives about this topic in this podcast you'll hear from people who are quite pro-porn and some who are quite anti-porn and a bunch of people who feel like they have nuances somewhere in the middle of those things i just want to make it very clear right from the top that none of the opinions are the opinion of the liturgists but they all are opinions of people who are part of this thing in one way or another so i just wanted to warn you that on this one there's a good chance that you're going to run into a perspective that you don't share or like you know sexuality is such a powerful and taboo subject in our society and most of us probably have pretty strong feelings in relationship to it so i would love to encourage you to engage with the ideas presented in this episode more like you might engage with the assortment of items on display at the golden corral the buffet there's almost certainly some of the entrees they're going to look a little less than appetizing to you and that's okay i think we can still learn from each other's differences and perspectives even when we don't agree and that's what i'd love to encourage you to do with this one is to not just look for easy answers or find the person who you're like yeah that's what i think too but listen wrestle talk with each other examine what triggers you what makes you feel defensive what makes you feel embarrassed all of that stuff is gold if you pay attention to it and learn from it and then let's use what we learned to better love ourselves and each other this first conversation that we're going to jump into is with the four hosts science mike william matthews hilary mcbride and myself michael gunger and uh it gets pretty wild so here we go enjoy i think with everything in life things can get distorted it can be good and it can be bad there's two sides to every coin and that's the same thing with pornography let's talk about boobies touching these kids touching themselves their pornographies okay so i want to start us off with a question okay what is your position on pornography each of you i'd be interested to hear you don't want to start for us [Laughter] i just feel really awkward as a man that a woman would ask me this question what is awkward about that i don't know i was just trying to be woke sounded right is there any part of that that feels related to how you might think that i think about pornography um i think it's more about my sense of shame around pornography i think we all do i definitely have shame around it i grew up very christian obviously but i was always aware of sex scenes because my dad used to love to take me to the movie theaters but he wouldn't take me to see movies i wanted to see he only wanted to take me to see movies he wanted to see which i remember seeing uh terminator that's how he heard the crap out of me uh i mean this is before i was in school so this is you know anywhere from like three to five um different times different times it was the 80s y'all i remember seeing my first sex scenes in movie theaters and my dad would cover my eyes but you know i'd find a way to peek through so i think my first understanding of sex always carried shame attached to it because of those experiences of oh you're not supposed to watch this let me cover your eyes uh wait this is bad but i kind of knew what it was uh so i think i've always related to sex especially sexual images with a sense of so what about you what about me i'm not a big porn dude but you know growing up i remember my first exposure to sexual imagery i found some my cousin and i found some uh playboy or hustler or something they were like all wrinkled and old but up in a tree house and we're like what is this i mean it was like electricity shooting that was like what is that again i'm not supposed to look at that i don't think there's so much shame around all of it and would rarely look at anything and i wasn't looking at anything during the ages where you could like download videos most you could get was yeah take a day and get a get a photo of some a topless lady or something and then i remember what my big way of overcoming looking at things was i promised god that i would tell andrew my friend andrew if i ever looked at something and masturbated reason about it one of my favorite parts of your book wait what i said that in my book no but you just your your really intricate strategies to manage like masturbation behaviors and the concealing by like scribbling things out in your journal so that no one would see but still trying to like work through it's really fascinating am i uh diagnosable with anything you're definitely a case study for sure so i don't know i don't have a position on porn i assume like anything there are healthy and unhealthy uses of it i'm not an active user of it myself but i'm interested in this conversation that's for sure what about you hillary yeah you know i've been thinking a lot about it because of our conversation i think my my default position for a long time was pornography as an industry is predicated on the submission and humiliation and degradation of women's bodies if i was to make a large sweeping statement that the mainstream pornographic industry is capitalist in nature and white supremacist and exploitative so my position for any kind of media that falls into those categories is to be to not consume it to not support it to be critical of it and to understand the impact that consuming that media has on our lived experience and our brain and our understanding of sexuality and the way we view and treat other people particularly women if i was to say something for sure right now and i imagine this might be inflammatory as a statement but inflammatory be provocative be productive okay is that i fundamentally disagree with straight men watching porn wait a second whoa inflammatory is it are you inflamed please expound on that very provocative statement okay there's a few different views of pornography within the feminist movement [Music] they largely center around if pornography is about promoting sex positivity or if pornography is about the exploitation degradation humiliation and objectification of women so second wave or radical feminist versus third wave liberal feminist the interesting point that the liberal feminists have to make is that people don't get to choose what women do with their sexuality and people for a long time have oppressed women by promoting the idea that women don't desire that women aren't sexual and yet are simultaneously at the same time only good for their sexuality so i've thought about pornography primarily from a scientific and a political lens the scientific lens being what is the impact that pornography has on the brains of people who consume it and the evidence is overwhelming and compelling that basically anything other than the occasional use very occasional or interacting with pornographic content for media analysis or critique has really detrimental impacts on our physiology on our understanding of other people how we conceptualize women's bodies etc that's kind of the framework that i come to this conversation with so trying to balance the conversation about women's liberation and women's sexuality i would say people primarily in the pornography industry have used the trope of sex positivity to continue exploiting women's bodies and that women have at times participated in their own exploitation and oppression by doing the same thing that was always done to them but under the illusion of choice what i might say is that if women want to participate in and watch pornography that i think it's complicated and i want to be really clear that i don't think it's good for your brain but i fundamentally reject the idea that men would benefit from a privileged position from women's liberation and would use that like i said as a trope to maintain the oppression of women so if women want to participate in and view it i don't think it's great for you but i think at some point you're allowed to say the system as it's been up into this point no longer works for me and i get to make my own choices whether they're healthy for me or not that that's a right that you have but i don't think that it's appropriate for people in a position of privilege over women to have access to women's bodies as an object to consume just because women are saying that they want to do that in their own lives so do you think porn should be illegal then then cigarettes should be illegal and right anything that harms us if we use it too much should be illegal i think it's ineffective to expect the law to hold people accountable to behaviors that are not oppressive and just because we're asking the law to make a statement about what's okay or not doesn't mean that people on the inside are not going to continue to objectify and oppress women so i think that making it illegal doesn't change the problem and actually creates perhaps even more problems because there are probably some form that aren't problematic so to say an entire form of media is not okay the conversation needs to be more nuanced than that i'm curious at where you draw the line of what you think is oppressive and objectifying to women say a woman wants to make some cash buys herself a webcam makes some videos puts them up online sells them how is she being oppressed how is she being minimized yeah so we have to do a little bit of analysis about what choice is we have to have a conversation about what choice is because we can say that she's making a choice to do that but if she's choosing to benefit from an existing system of oppression it's probably because she doesn't have many other choices so it might require us to use a feminist marxist analysis of how capitalism facilitates the oppression of women there's a gentleman who writes about a second wave analysis of pornography he's a he's a scholar and i would say he's a feminist although he doesn't use that language because he thinks that only women can use that that term but robert jensen he often makes the point when he's talking about pornography that people who go to college and people who are in upper class middle class frameworks when they're given career inventories about what are suitable jobs for them it's often not presented to them to do webcaming or pornography or prostitution in as a viable option because they're already within an income class where there are other options for them can we zoom out even further to say what's the framework that she's living in how did the oppression of women keep her in a position where she doesn't have opportunities to other employment possibilities besides using her body so that somebody else can essentially use her her body to masturbate to but why is using her body to masturbate to worse than using her body to eat a hamburger from or a massage therapist or a doctor i reject the idea that we are as women in particular that we are restricted to our sexual object nature and that often part of the function of patriarchy in a culture is to say that women don't have value except for their capacity to either child bear or be an object of desire their body is an object of desire and nothing else in their sense of identity or their value matters so based on that premise anything that supports the minimization of a woman and reduces her to a sexual object i am going to resist and i would say that like that extends beyond pornography to the kinds of clothing that i buy based on what what companies use for advertising their products so if there's a company that uses the objectification of a woman's body or the sexualization of a woman's body to sell a product i won't shop there because i fundamentally reject i mean that's everywhere yeah for me choosing to support a whole person instead of supporting companies usually owned by men which support patriarchal messages about women in our communities that's something that i'm working really hard to stand against and pornography seems to be to part in the pun but like the money shot of that yeah it's in essence the marketing and the consumption of women's bodies as limited to their function to create a masturbatory tool for a man which is why i you know if if i'm gonna say if a woman wants to watch pornography i don't think it's great for your brain but i don't think you're participating necessarily in the same exploitation of women as if you were a man watching and consuming a woman's body now i can hear that what i'm saying is largely about mainstream heterosexual pornography we've got some pretty compelling evidence about the damage that gay pornography does to gay men's perception of their genitalia and their muscle size and their sense of self-worth the evidence is compelling around that too but which is why i'm gonna say i don't agree with straight men watching pornography i'm not going to make a statement about what happens in the gay community as a straight person what about lesbians yeah you know i think lesbian pornography is a fascinating area of media and interestingly i think that there needs to be more support of the eroticism of women and women's experiences of eroticism that don't have anything to do with men so primarily a woman's sexuality is portrayed it's in relation to a man in fact so many women that i work with and treat don't know this is straight women and women who are exploring their sexuality don't know what their sexuality is like outside of vaginal penetration or even genitalia what is sexuality especially for those of us who grew up in the church if not something that is owned or possessed by a man who then also consequently possesses us so i think that no men being involved in you know an erotic form of media that's all about women's sexual pleasure for women by women i don't think that there's anything that i politically have a problem with that but again is the person using it to support a sexuality that feels healthy and sustainable for them and in their relationship or is it something that's unfortunately having negative impacts on their neurocognitive functioning that's a whole other question so it sounds like to me a lot of what you're framing everything through is the male normative gays i guess my question then is is there a way for heterosexual men to take pleasure in the body of a woman without engaging in objectification or being complicit in a patriarchal structure it makes me think of the sermon on the mount too like i don't know what's happening in a person's brain when they're looking at or thinking about another person what i do think is that for whatever reason when it comes to sexuality so many of us throughout our value system holding the other as precious we move into the consumption mentality and the taking and the possession and the individuality mentality that i think is destructive to the fabric of our social interaction i've talked about this before but i really i'm really moved and compelled by the work of martin buber and his premise around i thou and how when we see in the other person the holy and the sacred and we enter into a mutually kind of mysterious and honoring experience and encounter with the other that's where god is that's how god shows up and i don't think that we have to leave that at the door when it comes to her sexuality but for whatever reason and i i mean we could explain this neurologically as well and hormonally when it comes to our sexuality part because of how we're socialized and probably part because of the mechanics of what goes on in our brain body system when we're aroused it becomes really really hard to hold that framework and to not see the other person as a thing for us and you think that's what jesus meant when he said like if you look upon a woman you know and lust and you have committed sin not necessarily but maybe the what i mean by this sermon on the amount premise is it's about what's happening on the inside that nobody can police that except you nobody can know what's happening on the inside so again back to your question about government i don't think that having government impose rules is actually going to help us be healthier as a people i think at some level we have to say i don't want to treat you whoever you are as an object and i think it's really hard based on how pornography portrays women's bodies to not see the body as an object i think to think about a person a whole person not just parts of a body that we use to titillate our kind of sexual fantasies but i don't have all the answers to this but i want to find a way that we as the society can move away from the reduction of a human for our masturbatory game to creating experience as a mutual encounter hi there my name is trisha bapti i'm located in vancouver british columbia i was a sex worker for 15 years and i have to say pornography is a form of violence against women it is a direct deterrent to our equality it's the last place where violence racism capitalism everything collide and repress women's equality there's no reason men should be able to pay for sex that's an invisible right as long as women can be bought and sold like a pair of levi's we cannot be seen as full and equal human beings [Music] i think that pornography is a great tool to explore and understand your own sexuality i think a lot of the conflict though comes when we don't use pornography in an ethical way so when we go on pornhub or red tube and we don't ensure that the actors and everybody involved is being paid properly and it's not being sexually exploited there are a lot of problems that can come from that so i personally pay for my porn from sites that i know ensure the safety of the actors and everybody involved and have all of the legal restrictions and follow all the laws associated with the making of pornography the line between human sexuality and art is nearly indistinguishable human bodies are beautiful human sexuality is beautiful be a mindful consumer exploitation is never acceptable yeah so much of what hillary was saying especially the heart behind it for women i guess where where you lose me is i see how women have been reduced and are reduced to a sexual image but to me answering that problem by sort of taking the sexuality out of the equation so now women cannot use their sexuality in any way towards making money towards social status towards whatever it's part of it's part of the women while i see how industries and shopping malls and pornographic movie companies whatever certainly do a lot to reduce their actresses to a role i kind of see that in every industry that's kind of the nature of corporations the nature of industry is to reduce human beings to work units you're gonna you're gonna hear all our marxist listeners doing this right now so that that's how business that's the that is capitalism that's the problem with capitalism it is objectifying and putting a quantifiable value to a person's worth and so to say that a person's sexuality can't be part of that equation i just don't think it's realistic take away the entire entertainment industry take away the entire fashion industry take away most of the marketing industry like it you don't have much left in our society if you take that completely away and then especially to only say that that's off limits for a certain segment of the population straight men okay so when you make a really interesting point right when when a group of people has been pressed and a certain label or style of interaction has been put on that group of people by the oppressors by the people who are in positions of privilege that there are times when the people who are in the marginalized oppressed group reclaim that that function that identity that word that style of behavior and say no no no we're taking our power back but i don't think that it's ever been acceptable for people who are still in a position of privilege and power to then also keep doing that same thing and saying they're okay with it they use that word amongst themselves so it's okay for me to use that word like as a white person if i hear black people use the n-word that doesn't give me permission to do it to them because it's their right to reclaim how they want to use whatever language they want to use as a way of having some agency in a system that has been excessively oppressive hurtful derogatory racist etc etc etc so i think that it may be a better question to ask instead of how can i say that you know women should or shouldn't whatever and i'm actually not trying to make that point what i am trying to say is the whole system is messed up and we need to be better supporting women so that they can make other choices if they want to and don't feel like they have to participate in their own oppression to make money if they don't want to and don't have to i'm not actually trying to police what women do but rather saying that when men are benefiting from a system that has historically and continues to oppress women that they have to be really careful about what kind of scientific evidence and what kind of political arguments they write off just because they get their jollies i do keep hearing the equivalency in what you're saying of objectification oppression and sex as though they're all the same thing i mean and and maybe that's part of my journey since sexual repression was such a central wound in my spiritual journey learning to destigmatize d taboo sexuality has been a big part of my freedom and doesn't mean that i do whatever i want with that freedom you want to be mindful and wise and kind and compassionate but i do think that there is the response sometimes to the heart which is what i grew up in fundamentalism there are potential harmful consequences of seeing women as just sexual objects and the fundamentalist response to that is okay let's take that off the table do not thou shalt not anybody and what i'm kind of hearing from you is thou shalt not straight man which to me i would prefer an approach that is more of a yes and so there's like a a story that i heard of maharaji he walked in to one of his devotees bedroom and the devotee had a poster of some scantily clad woman on his wall and maharaji just came walking in the guru came walking in he was like oh no we was going to see so he like tore it down real quick as he was walking in maharaja is like what are you doing put that back up that's the goddess and i don't think being sexually aroused by even masturbating to a woman is the equivalent of objectifying them any more than i think i can order a hamburger from a woman like i said before and she's just the thing getting me the burger or i can see a thou and that's in me that's in my experience that's not and you can't judge whether the eye thou is happening based on if it's sexual or if it's a restaurant or if it's a retail interaction whatever kind of interaction it is i don't think the i thou whether i'm seeing that person as the image of god or just a thing for my own pleasure has anything to do with whether that's sexual or not yeah i actually really agree with you on that so what i want to say is that we all have to be the guardians we are all responsible for what we do with our thinking and how we view and treat another person we also have to see that within a social context which grooms us to not even notice some of the ways that we think about other people as being hurtful or diminishing of them so like i said at the beginning if i had to have a position if i was pressed i would say i feel like i oppose the idea that men continue to consume women's bodies for sexual pleasure where there is existing social structures in place that promote rape myths and patriarchal and reductive perspectives of the experience of women and whatnot and that that for me is uncomfortable but i am certainly not going to stop anyone from doing anything and i would much rather prefer that they did something because they felt like they could see the thou in another person than because i said to do or not do anything based on my political values the problem is that we confuse sometimes what we want with what we have been shaped by our culture to want and it's really hard to extract ourselves from the sociocultural values that are extremely patriarchal heterosexist heteronormative white supremacist and at times we don't even realize the things that we want are a result of how we are enacting these oppressive storylines so we have to be really careful about how our desires line up with oppressive power systems and think critically about them i was first exposed to the idea of pornography when i was very young at a church event i was less than 10 years old and being taught that pornography was something that felt good but never truly satisfied that it was sinful and against god's commands i barely even understood what it was at the time but i knew that if i did it that i would be impure as i've grown up i've wrestled with whether or not this is actually true whether or not it's a moral or simply a way to release those sexual urges that we all have when i first encountered it at 16 years old i noticed the way that it changed how i viewed the girls in my life began to see and notice their body and their shape and their size i began to imagine scenarios in my mind in which i did things and sexualized them and prefers ways things that i never would have imagined on my own but had seen in these videos and images began to hate the way that it left me feeling empty after i'd consumed it and i began to hate the way that i caused me to sexualize the women in my life i don't know whether or not this means it's immoral or wrong or whether or not it's simply unwise to fill your mind with things that disconnect you from the people in your life that don't bring intimacy or love i'm interested to hear your thoughts on this somehow it affects the brain and how it affects behavior and how it has impacted society and culture thanks for all that you do i think too often it creates a very dangerous assumption that sex is about you and for you and it's about reaching an end which is orgasm and doing it repeatedly watching porn repeatedly masturbating repeatedly especially when it's linked to wanting to handle depression or you know when you make these repeated connections these are connections that your brain makes neural pathways for so that this is your new normal and this is your new way of coping with things when thinking of pornography the word conflict comes to mind i have this primal self that wants to enjoy this beauty and involve myself with it but then i have my higher thinking self that has involved religion and of relationships and the conflict between the two personalities is what leaves me in the middle struggling through life with this situation [Music] it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourself or feeling connected to the people that we love better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house and you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through betterhelp you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions betterhelp has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com liturgists so this episode of the liturgist podcast is sponsored by betterhelp and i feel really weird reading an ad for betterhelp because like i'm being paid to talk about betterhelp and so it makes you like question everything i'm saying um but like the true thing in my life right now is better help is is changing my life i have so much issues with stress and anxiety and heart health that even getting to the therapist's office is something that ends up activating me and causing me a lot of problems and better help lets me engage with a licensed therapist from the comfort of my own home in a way that feels safe to me and that's that's what they do they offer online counseling with licensed therapists that can help you deal with whatever you're coping with in your life i think we all need therapy and i think finding a therapist can be really hard i think it'd be really hard to find the the money to afford therapeutic resources but betterhelp offers their services on a sliding scale you can talk to your therapist on the phone you can video chat you can text and chat if that's your thing that's certainly not mine you can do that on ios apps android apps on the web however is convenient for you it's a life-changing service i mean it has made such a difference in my mental health and my physical health and because it's a licensed therapist anything and everything you share with your better health counselor is confidential and if for some reason it's not working you can let betterhelp know when they'll find you a new therapist at any time no questions asked so anyone who listens to the liturgist podcast can get 10 percent off their first month of mental health support with the discount code liturgist so why not go ahead and and try it out just go to betterhelp.com liturgists and you'll fill out a questionnaire that helps them assess your needs and get you matched with a counselor you will love again just go to betterhelp.com slash liturgists okay so when you talk about the the objectification of women or something that happens when we engage in in sex that seems to reduce people how much of that as well is just us being primates right like there's something feels very like used to talk about hormonal like or biological that sort of kicks in and i'm not talking about predatory behavior as much as you know like when you're when you got the urges you like kind of like sometimes end up doing things that you wouldn't normally like in your conscious rational mind like you're like why do i like doing that with this other person right like how much of of what you're saying is also to part of our hormonal biological makeup again not rape or predatory behavior as much as seeing the other and and wanting to pleasure them or receive pleasure from them i think that's the question i'm asking so if starting where you were william of course sexual media is compelling to us as primates who don't have a mating season like we're a strange animal it's pretty common among mammals for males to be frequently sexually ready but the fact that human women they have a monthly menstruation like we are abnormally able to have not only frequent sexual contact but frequent procreation opportunities even when compared to other mammals even when compared to other primates so like there's no question to me that sexual media is going to be really alluring and really attractive and really evoke something in us when i was younger i loved porn i i was like you know a baptist who had occasionally full of guilt and shame go to a store and buy a playboy magazine because in those days internet it was just it took forever to see anything and my cycle was like go and buy the porn look at it be overcome with guilt after masturbating once destroy the magazine and then engage in like this really penitent posture self-hatred just god i'm so sorry and that's really unhealthy like for me pornography was almost uniquely evocative of my evangelical shame about sexuality in general especially my sexuality as a man i've actually always been more uncomfortable with male sexuality than female sexuality because of the evangelical narrative that means sex drives are wildly out of control and sinful i think i'm sympathetic to everything hillary said i don't even think i could be cleanly put into an agree disagree because there's so much ambiguity for me here but i think the things that i really like hell yes we have a problem not just with pornographic media but with media today the internet has exacerbated it but it's not unique to it so much of the media we consume would be something scientists would call super normal stimulation the idea here is we have drives that are innate to us physically that are then developed through our environmental interactions and those those drives produce behavior so if i'm hungry then i want to eat something but if something smells really good like warm bread even if i'm not that hungry i might want to go ahead and eat some bread right and if you can imagine something like a pizza a pizza is an unimaginable nutritional bounty to a pre-agrarian hominid like it's unimaginably good so of course even if i'm not hungry at all when i smell this like salty fatty acidic like everything my brain is developed to believe is hard to find in the environment it doesn't matter if i'm hungry i'm gonna eat some pizza and that's what our media does but it does it with human bodies so my concern with porn especially internet porn is the access to two things one is a completely unrealistic and overblown portrayal of human bodies the people who are in most porn are either starving themselves or working out an unrealistic amount or both they are often surgically enhanced they are often extreme examples of genetic giftedness especially regarding things like genital size among men i don't even like my terminology there of giftedness genetically they just have large penises which is funny by the way that of all groups straight and gay men are the ones the most obsessed with large penises women aren't no not by the data that is i don't know dude thing and the other thing that internet porn offers that i find concerning is the novelty so we understand there is a novelty effect with arousal in the human animal both men and women and that the more different sexual partners we're exposed to the more frequently we can become aroused and so that means pornography is a uniquely potent form of supernormal stimulus that goes even beyond the normal things we see on television and on magazines and in films because you don't watch 25 netflix shows in 20 minutes right like but if people as they're trying to find their what we understand the data find their chosen video for the moment they rapidly cycle through images people engaged in sexual activity who are nude and parts of their brain have real difficulty differentiating between the images on the screen and real partners which is why for example we're starting to see pretty strong linkages between heavy porn consumption among young men and erectile dysfunction their brains become so primed for this incredible amount of stimulation that when they have an actual sexual partner there's not enough stimulation to get the body brain system to do what it normally would do in regards to situation those people typically report feeling trapped so that means when i get worried about porn when i have trouble with porn it's for three reasons either it creates a behavioral compulsion where the person watching the porn no longer has like a lot of control or willpower influence over the behavior and that's a really easy thing to form because porn and sexual stimulation are very powerful tools to combat both boredom and anxiety anything you do that lets you combat anxiety your brain is going to be attracted to it so if you're if you're nervous if you're anxious if someone didn't text you back and you watch some porn and masturbate that just created really powerful networks in the brain the first time you do it and those compulsive behaviors can actually over time grow into actual addictive behaviors where you have people who can exhibit withdrawal symptoms physical and psychological withdrawal symptoms when they reduce their porn consumption rates so those things are what i find like personally concerning about pornography but there's this other lens that i think hillary spoke to really well there is a tendency in most pornographic media that's created today to objectify people and the way the porn industry has responded because it is hyper capitalist in nature as much as facebook or twitter or more it's algorithms trying to get the most engagement to sell the most advertising that's how porn is monetized today so what we see is instead of men especially straight men being called to more healthy sexuality through porn straight women and lgbtq people are being called towards increasingly straight male-like understandings of themselves and understanding others so of course porn rates are skyrocketing consumption rates are skyrocketing among straight women but that doesn't mean the media they're viewing is offering them a de-objectified view of self or a holistic view of self and so that is a really really pressing problem that is a a massive systemic life destroying rape creating problem but i can't like write off porn completely i still actually see great promise in pornography there's several things that has i've kind of looked at some big data analyses of the porn industry that i find not just interesting but compelling number one one of the fastest growing and most popular forms of pornography is amateur pornography that's where a man or a woman or a couple bring a camera into their own bedroom and start creating pornography in a way that is not monetized and when i look at the popularity of that including among straight men what we see that's often different in amateur porn is greater depictions of intimacy of mutual caring of mutual concern we certainly see more realistic depictions of human bodies these are people who have what i would call an everyday body a body that you would see on the street yes everyday body and so what i've started to wonder is perhaps are people getting an addictive and compulsive relationship with pornography and going to some pretty unhealthy places and almost bottoming out and does something like amateur porn allow people to start to acknowledge within themselves that there's a desire in sex for more than sexual pleasure and gratification for more than orgasm that maybe this emerging and more popular form of pornography is a sign that people long for connection and knowing and caring for the other i'm also fascinated that among straight men one of the most popular types of pornography is of highly feminized trans women so these are men who completely identify straight we understand that that porn involving trans women is not popular with gay men for example it is not popular with straight women but it's very popular straight men and i think two things are happening one there's this hyper objectification of trans women because they have a penis and i think many men are confused and daunted by female genitals there's no obvious sign of orgasm like there is with a penis and so there's almost like a familiarity with a woman with a penis and they can kind of explore an even more objectified and even less healthy version of sexuality with this woman as they view as exclusively sexual they would never imagine dating or marrying a trans woman at the same time that that kind of imagery often acts as a gateway to exploring pornography that involves more diverse gender identities and and this is really the thing that i struggle with with porn uh dismissing it is the way in which pornography so often allows people to explore what their sexual preferences are and even what their sexual orientation is by consuming media instead of participating in a sex act with another person who maybe even they have a really supportive relationship with yet but don't yet feel comfortable talking about because they don't even know what they like i've experienced not only a lot of friends not only thousands of podcast listeners telling me these stories but people who started off with a straight identification through the act of mainly destigmatizing pornography and watching porn learned who they really were sexually and were no longer straight in a very strange way i wonder is the mass media and increasing acceptance of pornography in our culture becoming a tool that is deconstructing straightness itself something which frankly i'm not entirely sure actually exists what straightness straightness i think it's just so freaking complicated because yes on one level there is the biological and primatological but there's also the sociological the way this impacts the way we form culture i definitely don't think there's any way to put the genie back in the bottle i definitely don't think legislation is going to do a damn thing whenever we try to use prohibition to regulate human behavior we only create incarceration and dysfunction in black markets but i do think there needs to be some kind of ongoing public conversation in education about the potential and the pitfalls of porn when i started ask science mike really early in that podcast i started talking about porn because my whole vision for that podcast was to have stigma free conversations where people could ask literally any question and not be judged for it whether that question is like social justice clueless or social justice informed it was a space where people could ask their questions and not be judged and someone asked me about porn and i talked about what happens in people's brains in response to viewing porn imagery especially frequently and there is marked differences by the way between regular consumption of pornography's impact on the brain and occasional consumption and when i did that i got the first torches and pitchforks mob brigade i'd ever seen as a public figure it was almost exclusively women who told me i was being anti-sex positive and problematic and that pornography was instrumental in women's sexual empowerment that surprised me i expected to get a bunch of you know evangelicals mad that i talked about porn at all and that i wasn't immediately morally dismissive of it but there was none of that it was very much hundreds of women sending me emails taking me to task for not being sex positive and so i wanted to really like reflect on what they were saying it was hard for me to reconcile what i saw as systemic problems with pornography and toxic masculinity and the impacts on the brain with what they were reflecting and so i looked in some resources they recommended and i also reached out through a couple of these people that emailed me to actual porn performers women who perform in the porn industry for a living to have conversations and interviews only one would go on the record the other thought that science mike sounded too religious to be publicly affiliated with but they were happy to talk to me anonymously and i remember one thing that was striking rena skye who is a porn actress said that no one starts working in porn on the best day of their lives so she talked about the issues she faced with substance abuse and substance addiction and how by entering the porn industry not only did she get an income she got a steady supply of the substances that were ruining her life and that took her into a really dark period and she saw some of the the worst aspects of performing in the porn industry which is male controlled male dominated she was compensated very little and exploited and then she made a shift to working independently not having a representation only doing the shoot she wanted to do starting her own website doing a lot of cam shows and says that she is extremely happy in her work that she likes what she does that her favorite part of her job is having webcam sessions with some of her clients who have severe mental or physical disabilities and in her estimation otherwise don't have access to intimacy and that was a story i heard from many performers and when i asked them i said i described to them my confusion and i said since they were so often the topic of conversation it wasn't fair for us to talk about them and not talk with them and to them and i asked them like if one wanted to make sure if you're going to watch porn you're going to do it in a way that doesn't cause harm to other people is there an organic version of porn something that's ethically sourced and produced and they said to stay away from pornhub and all the ad driven sites and most of the subscription sites that are owned by men they talked about a handful of paid porn sites that are owned by women and in fact by feminists who don't make porn centered on the male gaze although they do make porn involving men and women in addition to a truly wonderful and staggering array of sexual orientations and gender identities and they said you can also make sure when you watch or buy porn you buy it directly from a performer on their website where you're not empowering people who exploit them lord over them exploit substance addictions and i'm not really a porn consumer if i was i would be very unashamed to say that i was my relationship with sexuality these days is pretty complicated but if i were to watch porn i wouldn't watch the big sites any more than i'll get my news from facebook these days because i don't want to participate in a predatory system i don't want to help capitalize systems that exploit people and tear lives apart and if i were going to watch porn i would find and procure porn directly from performers primarily or exclusively from women because i would want to make sure i was doing the least harm and the most good with every every action we make every item of clothing we buy every service we subscribe to it has incredible global impacts and porn is is no different other than compared to most media it has uniquely deep hooks into your brain can we have another word instead of porn i feel like that word is just so tainted that anytime i hear it it feels dirty one of the feminist words that's used from time to time is erotica so erotica when it's defined by the kind of a particular branch of the feminist movement would say that erotica is about sexual imagery that promotes mutuality so i don't have any problem with heroic right the problem is that we have conflated pornography with sex and i don't think that that's necessarily an accurate assumption that pornography doesn't always tell the truth about the full range of human experience it doesn't necessarily even promote sexual satisfaction or creativity in relationships with people in fact it can impair sexual activity and sexual pleasure over time i really want to get away from this binary that we are either anti-porn or sex positive because it minimizes the discourse that we can have when we look at the complexity of a form of media both how it's produced what it actually says about sexuality and what is happening in our culture around sexual desire and also consumption so to say that we are anti-pornography or pro-sex limits our ability to look at the interaction of all of these different factors i think mike's argument is interesting about pornography or we could say erotica being helpful in people understanding their sexual arousal and desire and their even their sexual identity i guess it's possible that a person could see some sort of sexual imagery of another person and it could be really empowering the problem is that the way that pornography is created and consumed in america is that for the large part that's not true but it's not yeah i agree in large part because i came from such a black and white world with this i would just be so slow to make any black and white judgments about any of this especially with sexual i mean i agree with you hillary that sex is not the same as looking at pornography but the sex drive that pornography at least kind of scratches the itch for people is a primary human drive it's a big drive it's just and we live in this society that is so weird about sex in my perspective it's like we are sexual creatures we're all sexual creatures but we have this society where we go around and we cover up our sex organs we're the only animals that do this we cover them up and we say here's where you're supposed to have sex here's what the gods say about it in the scriptures if you're a boy and a boy you can't do this make sure you cover this you gotta go with it it's so weird and constrictive and full of shame full of taboo like sex with humanity because of how society has evolved with patriarchy and capitalism and religion sex how we interact with it is fucked up mm-hmm having this like weird technology where somebody can get their jollies on some level if there wasn't that release valve for our society what would that be like to me the answer is not like okay shut off the underbelly now what it has to be more nuanced more holistic rather than don't look at porn straight guy i would be more apt to tell a straight guy like when you're looking at porn if you're looking at porn are you paying attention to your heart are you paying attention to how you're viewing those people are you getting off on someone else's pain are you getting off on somebody else's oppression like what's going on in you that that's happening to me that's the kind of conversation that'd be far more interesting but how many men do you think are actually watching porn that's mass produced and accessible to them in that way where they're like jacking off and also thinking wow i really love i really love the spirit of this person as the guy in the film is coming on her face well and we've seen really troubling data really troubling insights among post-millennials who have been kind of the first generation to have easy access to like 4k streaming porn in their sexually formative gears and what we have found is not an elevation of mutualism and their sexuality but a simply a much greater willingness that if they are sexually active and they are less likely to be sexually active than previous generations at the same age but if they are sexually active they are much more likely to try more extreme sex acts and you see both boys and girls engaging in a sexuality that emulates what they've seen portrayed in pornographic media and that is something that is very very much in the room i think that the problem that i have is like there's multiple angles as i was saying with pornography there's the consumption and then there is the production and there is what the text is saying and there is what text being like a way of thinking about media and doing media analysis like what is actually being said about people about what's the message here and i think that you're right vishnu about sexuality being an inherent part of our being the problem is i don't think that we get access to use another person's body just kind of carte blanche because we have a right to our own sexuality i don't necessarily even think that sexuality is defined by orgasm i don't think sexuality is defined by genitals so when we say yes everybody has access to or everybody deserves to have sexual experiences i don't necessarily think that that means automatically that you can do whatever you want including use the body of another person i struggle with a narrow version of sexuality that's all about orgasm i would actually say that as part of my sex positivity i look at sexualities being more inherent that it has some expression in what we do with our genitalia but that we have to be also really careful about what we assume is our sexuality and how we use our genitalia and if that has a long-term impact on ourselves or somebody else that's negative so just because we're sexual doesn't mean we get licensed to use the body of another person totally agree and i think that's a more healthy evolved sexuality is one that becomes more holistic one that's more embodied one that's more about connection and spirit and all of it but i can also tell you i remember being 19 years old sitting in my college class having tried to not masturbate for two weeks and just like i can't even pay attention but i'm not saying don't masturbate but what are people supposed to think about when they mess up but a very different conversation but even if you think about it you think about it what if yeah the person that masturbates thinks about a person they saw on the street that's still using that person's body in their mind for sexual pleasure i won't speak to the objectification part but from what i've seen in the data it is far better for your mind and body to masturbate without the aid of pornographic media than with it is wonderful it is one of the best easiest things you can do for yourself is masturbating i can't it's wonderful no no but that is not what jesus said jesus said if thou looks at a woman and then thou hath committed a sin okay but actually and to pluck your eye out but you're joking no i'm telling you what my lord and savior what i'm telling you is that's actually a pretty feminist notion like the idea there the looking on a woman lustfully it can be interpreted in the fundamentalists like shameful sense or it can be like don't reduce another person to an object of gratification even in your mind okay that's very liberating that is not what jesus said i get it i'm saying i can actually get behind the notion of if there are guidelines in the bible it's not best to reduce other people to objects now i understand we have body systems that yes want to have sex with other people yes we have fantasy yes we have arousal associated with fantasy i think the point here we have to understand that our internal fantasy landscape is shaped by and informed by the media we consume and that today most pornographic media is radically derogatory degrading and objectifying towards women radically and increasingly so towards trans people towards men who are gay and straight and towards lesbians what pornographic media is not moving toward is an increasingly holistic portrayal of a person it increasingly turns everyone involved into an object including men in porn today men are portrayed as jackhammering objects that move towards a single inevitable conclusion their own gratification towards orgasm that involves the humiliation of their partner that is not a holistic view of sexuality it's so such a shallow depiction of the larger and more beautiful expression of sexuality that's possible when i do look at sexual media it has to be in that framework that hillary described at erotica the only thing i find appealing is if i see something and it could be a picture it could be a video it could be text where people are loving supporting and affirm each other in a way that includes sexual activity i find that quite beautiful i want to make the distinction too because pornography is often used as a tool for masturbation right people aren't just watching it and then analyzing ideas and getting you know house decorating tips and stuff like that i think that we need to separate porn and masturbation as two separate things porn is often used to support masturbation but i think that masturbation can be a beautiful embodied meditative spiritual practice and i think that masturbation particularly for women to engage in sexual pleasure that isn't connected to men at all is a really liberating thing politically and spiritually what about though you talk a lot about women on women what about men on men is it sexually liberating for men to watch male and male sex we do have the data that says gay porn as popularly depicted can create pretty severe body image issues for gay men who consume gay porn and that's not yes related to whether they find it liberating or not when we've looked at the data is the way gay men who look at porn frequently view their own bodies their own penis size their own sexual performance it correlates with decreased senses of self-worth and less confidence related to their bodies and their sexual performance we could say that a group of people believes that using a certain type of media feels empowering for them and we can also say at the same time that we know that the evidence empirically says that it also impairs body image and increases thoughts about anabolic steroid use i'm actually i've got the results of a study by griffis in 2018 that said a bunch of multivariate analyses revealed that increased pornography in men and in the gay and bisexual community in particular was associated with vastly increased dissatisfaction with body including a sense of shame about body fat and height and muscularity a significant increase in eating disorder symptomatology like i mentioned more frequent thoughts about anabolic steroid use and a lower quality of life and the results of these uh analyses were statistically significant sounds like every gay man in hollywood right so like it's a complex thing to say i i'm not a member of the lgbtqia community so i'm not going to speak for them about what's empowering but we know based on the human brain that viewing images in conjunction with sexual arousal and orgasm over time changes our brain and shapes how we feel about our bodies what we desire what feels good if we can get an erection or not the kinds of interactions that we have with non-media people when we're having actual physical sexual encounters with someone else that the evidence is really overwhelming and compelling that it's generally not super great for our brains but it's also important to acknowledge the identity component of this or the agency and the politics component of pornography in terms of who gets to say what about who has access to certain kinds of media [Music] i just wanted to read some some really interesting results that that research from 2011 showed that people who consume mainstream pornography actually expressed greater intent to commit rape if they knew they wouldn't be caught than those who did not consume pornography at all and that those who consumed sauda masochistic pornography expressed significantly less willingness to intervene in situations of sexual violence compared to those who did not watch pornography or watched more mainstream pornography and so we know that there's a link between viewing pornography regardless of what you're doing on the inside viewing images which portray violence rape degradation and humiliation of anybody at all actually change our conception of what consent is and change our willingness to intervene and oppose certain kinds of behavior there's research about soft corn pornography and the use of soft core pornography in couples so we can say well you know we're not watching or consuming really degrading pornography but we are using soft core pornography as a way of you know air quote spicing up our marriage and there can't be anything wrong with that because we're not endorsing rape myths you know we're really supporting the industry of erotica but fascinating research 2016 el raman sanad just for anyone who wants to look up the reference showed that in a cross-section of 200 sexually active married women that the women did not watch soft core pornography were more satisfied with their sexual life than compared to the women who actually use soft chord pornography in their marriages these researchers found that the softcore pornography affected the sexual lives of women by actually increasing sexual boredom in both the women and the men and resulted in relational difficulties so what we don't know from the study is if relational difficulties were existing beforehand and if boredom was existing beforehand but what we know from the results is that it tends to not overall increase satisfaction and that the existing relationship problems and difficulty experiencing each other and having a mutually satisfying sexual encounter aren't solved by watching softcore pornography together well i would not be watching softcore porn then [Laughter] so when we engage with media that creates these reductive portrayals of sexuality it actually negatively impacts our sexual experience the data shows that trying to use pornography to facilitate sexual expression can actually backfire down the line i just want to make sure i get this right or wrong you were saying it is not sexually beneficial for you to learn like sexual tips from watching pornography no what i'm saying is that when you view a kind of performance of sexuality that it actually takes you out of your own lived experience and takes you into the expression of sexuality as defined and constructed by somebody else so habitually or consistently watching somebody else portray sexuality is a really easy fall back then for us if we don't know how to interact with somebody if we don't know how to be in our own body and in our experience and that at times we become a performance of what we think sexuality is supposed to be like instead of embodying what actually feels good for us to me it's it's pretty obvious porn as a whole is not healthy for a society no numbers would be surprising to me of like yeah neither is fast food the numbers are pretty bad but then the question is what do you do with that saying don't eat fast food okay that's that's nice and privileged to say what about the single mom who has seven dollars for food today saying straight men don't watch pornography that just feels to me like fundamentalism i feel like there's got to be a better way of equipping people to handle the complexities of something like this i'm going to speak to my interpretation of understanding of what i see when hillary gives this perspective on the implications of straight men consuming porn and she specifically said i don't think there should be a legal prohibition i don't think you see what i mean that was set aside i don't think there's some scriptural basis for saying you're sinning if you do this whatever but because there's um the phrase straight men shouldn't watch porn or some proxy if it comes out sounds so similar to a pastor i wonder if there's something happening well i think what michael's talking about and michael let me be your defender here for a moment because i asked the question about whether it should be illegal or not but i think what michael's talking about is a sense of social restriction which feels like a type of fundamentalism of like hey this language feels like a type of social shaming language so it feels like i'm being shamed as a straight white man socially maybe not legally or yeah which is the same as fundamentalism religiously it's really social always at the bottom of it can we then extend the conversation though to say at what point do people who have been harmed by a certain product form of media behavior at what point do those people get to say hey can you stop doing that thing yeah they get to say whenever they want to say it that's kind of what i'm trying to say is that if you're going to do it you're going to do it but i think we should look at the impact that it has on the performance of patriarchal gender scripts and portrayals of sexuality and i don't want to take anyone's sexuality away from them i just don't think you have to have a sexuality that's also oppressive of other people and it's my personal view that mainstream male gaze driven corporatized pornography is oppressive i would agree with that yeah i would too guys i just want to say i was riveting i really liked it i was feeling a little bit excited before a conversation just knowing that this would happen because i do have kind of inflammatory or strong views on this stuff but i just wanted to say i liked it and i'm glad we did it i'd like to thank you for sending me a trauma therapy so i can have this conversation without running out of the room because i've had to use all my strategies for de-escalation yeah i'm impressed mike i want to say thank you to hillary too for having this conversation with three dudes yeah seriously like yeah i mean you're the soul girl here and you know we could be 13 year old kids here victory's over in the corner yes victory's here victory our producer is listening but like yeah she couldn't speak into it either if she was here that might be great yeah thank you hillary i was uh i was happy that you disagreed with yeah that was sincere i i think it's good for us too absolutely good for me yeah and you i agree i'm just gonna say it's so easy for me just personally to just say the thing that will keep everybody feeling safe all the time and as part of my growth it feels important to to practice disagreement like i don't want to do it for the sake of doing it but when it feels like it matters to me i want to do it and so i like that i feel safe enough to do that with you guys to disagree um if i feel like i want to or need to flamesies beautiful y'all i'm severely nauseous but it's okay [Music] severely i told you it's gonna be a doozy all right so next up on the docket we've got science mike talking to his wife jenny mccarg and our friend caroline lee thank y'all for being here by the way thank you we're talking with like my wife jenny mcard the honey badger we've we've primed for our time together with a glass of bailey's on the rocks caroline thanks for being here caroline do you watch porn i don't really use porn in my practice of sexuality jaden and i have a friend who's a porn star and sometimes i send i just will randomly text him screenshots of her in very in very specific situations because i really enjoy shock value and it's really fun to just do that but i don't i don't really i don't watch it now when you have seen it how do you feel is it other than the shock value it probably won't surprise you to hear that i have a lot of opinions about porn that's why you're here and it's basically why i'm here but i kind of think that there's a much bigger kind of conversation that comes up for me when we're talking about porn and i think that the biggest thing that i care about is communication and just permission like feeling free to express myself and the people that i love feeling that they can express themselves when i watch it it can feel very acted and very like over the top and so that to me makes me crack up more than it does get into it but i think that we as humans are very visual beings and so the side of it of like oh that's an idea or like oh i'll take that or i'll try that or i think that's what i love about it is that there's conversation to be had and i think it's a touchy subject for a lot of people and that's where i think it's just important to talk about it and to have conversations about it to feel safe to speak about what i like what i don't like if i want to watch it if i don't want to watch it if my partner wants to watch it or not that there's that trust and that it's not an automatic oh my goodness someone that i care about likes porn therefore that means they're good or bad it isn't about morality it isn't about right wrong good or bad it's about is this effective or ineffective in what you're trying to create in your life or in this moment and physicality even just like body image and expectations when it comes to sex when if i'm watching something and i'm watching it over and over again and then i go to do that thing and it's very different than how i saw it it can totally mess with my view of myself or my expectations on how something should be and then all of a sudden i'm i might be in self beat up or judgment of my partner or there might be so many different layers to it so i just think the question do i watch porn it's like man how long do you have but um in the very very very very direct answer is no okay jimmy what about you do you watch porn yes you do yes have you always watched porn no although when i was younger when i was little i was a curious child and would plunder and i remember being elementary school age and stumbling across a whole stack of playboy i always was like curious and when left to my own devices without people there i would go snooping so i've come across stacks of porn magazines before and been very curious like the old joy of sex book where it was black and white and like those 70s 1970s bodies so much hair so much so much hair yes so yeah i remember at an early age discovering that and being fascinated you could look at it a number of ways i'm sure as far as growing up with a religious background evangelical fundamentalism and bodies being shameful not having an open view of sex and our bodies and nakedness and all of that so maybe as a kid there was a fascination there of what am i looking at ooh this is interesting let me keep looking and i noticed even as a kid whenever someone wasn't home or i was in that position to be able to continue to look at the stack of magazines and pick up where i left off i would do that and at that time i think it was really more out of curiosity as a kid i don't remember any kind of pleasuring of oneself in looking at the porn and then as i got older and especially when i became even more rooted in my evangelicalism and as a teen and then a young college student then the porn was a no-no and never looked at porn during that time and then in our married life having a discovery of myself of my body and as i've mentioned before in previous podcasts a discovery of like romance and in books novels whatever um then there was a resurgence of porn and especially like when you get uh toys sometimes a video or dvd will come with those toys and in order to know how to use those toys or to how to pleasure yourself or whatever you might pop the dvd in to see so the first time that you looked at it as an adult how did you feel i felt very self-conscious when i was looking at it and i'm pretty sure i was looking at it by myself please note that this is not something that mike and i do as a couple there's only been a couple of times where we have done that and it's been he's done it more so because i've said hey let's look at this um so this is not so drop your gender expectations about porn consumption here we go this is not something that mike has said hey let's watch this together you know it's been me really being curious being curious about my body being curious how to obtain an orgasm and what all that entail you know how to how to get there so i want to actually want to dig into that more if we could so what's interesting to me about your relationship with not just pornography like you talked about magazines and traditional porn media but internet porn specifically both like as text erotica and as like streaming video what role did that media play in your sexual self-discovery and you being a woman who for many years was unable to have an orgasm to being one who does it played a very key role i think in achieving that i never owned a toy until we were married i remember when we went to condemology to go shopping yes right now i'm feeling like such a third wheel i'm like oh we're going down memory lane of the sex lives of mike and jenny i remember hiding the car in another parking lot adjacent to it because you didn't want people driving down the main street to see your car there because we were good baptist kids um anyway even with that toy purchase i don't remember ever having an orgasm with that one and i don't know it's because my body didn't know how to achieve that or was afraid i remember feeling like i would get like on the precipice of it i think and be so scared about it like what is this happening to my body because never having been taught or told you know like this is what how your body is or what it how it responds and i remember like being so like self-conscious because it was a lot of times it was just me by myself because that was where i felt so self-conscious that i was like this is what i will do on my own pretty sure it wasn't until after our first child and then um i got a new toy and the new toy came with like three dvds i forgot about that and i was that the sparkly one yes and i remember those dvds in our bedroom because we had a dvd player they kind of stayed in a rotation but there was always this shame with it because it was always what i did on my own during the day when the kids were at school or it was just me time and i feel like it either had to be like reading something that was like erotica reading it or seeing the visual in order to be able to help myself get to that zone of achieving an orgasm with a toy otherwise i think i was feel self-conscious and i couldn't create that picture in my mind without having that stimulation that's kind of what it became for me so porn like majorly changed your life in in terms of right and again and i can you know i can certainly recognize all the negative effects all right all right all right that's for later in the comments i do actually want to like kind of wade into that and start for third wheeling there for a second caroline i'm fascinated one of the things i most want to explore in this episode is how porn is a media like simultaneously objectifies women and perpetuates the male gaze and by doing so patriarchy and leads some men and well mostly men but not just men into compulsive relationships with pornography where it actually has detrimental effects on their sexual health and their ability right to partners and yet also helps some people overpower through fear and shame just by the raw strength of the stimulus into sexual discovery that's really fascinating to me that one media has such an intense variety of effects and then there's people like i'm really open to porn and especially if it can be made in a way that doesn't exploit people but i'm not terribly personally interested in it these days although there was certainly time in my past where i was much more interested as we explore the good and the bad of pornography how both of you understand the relationship between like internet porn specifically and sex positivity the notion that sex is good and not bad and that therefore we should be open to not only our own but other people's sexual experiences well i'm gonna go back to something that you said with good and bad and i'm gonna say ineffective or effective great i love that and i also think that i kind of see porn like so many things where it's really about how it's used and when it's used it's like anything like alcohol it's like sex i mean there's there's like 12 steps for sex and love addiction there's so many ways to overdo something or to use it as a drug in the sense that you know i have had friends who've had porn addictions and it has really impacted their relationships their lives i just read a really long study that was published in the atlantic a couple months ago and i was talking about how the younger generation is basically just like not having sex because actual sex with another human being requires vulnerability it requires communication it requires trust all of these things that it's so much easier to just turn to oh well i'll just watch porn or i'll just look something up on the internet i think it's really really important to look at the how and the when and the why for some people it's like one of my friends it was like a compulsion that was like an attachment replacement like when he was feeling a certain level of anxiety or a certain level of fear rather than dealing with that emotion it was like well if i just go in this room and watch important it'll go away and so i think it's it's very much an important conversation of when is it being used and how is it being used and how much in relationship to everything else that we've already said about communicating with your partner or being in awareness in my own self like am i accomplishing something by doing this or am i avoiding something and what i'm hearing in your experience jenny is that you're very much have been accomplishing something and that you know you got to know your body in a whole new way because you felt brave enough to and safe enough and trusted enough you know in your relationship and marriage to go down that road but there was also still i mean until recently and obviously now that i'm on a podcast telling however many people about it there's always been in the back of my mind this shame still connected with it and it wasn't the shame that i felt that i got from my partner no it was my own shame that was affiliated with it because of everything that we're taught especially in our upbringing about porn and the negative aspects of it and everything and so me as a curious person and as a person who once i did have orgasms and they're like oh this feels really good how can i have more of them and what are some other things that are possible in the bedroom to achieve that you know because stick figures in a magazine or in a book that doesn't show you a lot but when you're actually watching people doing it now granted they are not the average people though that's the other thing there is that what we've hinted on and touched on which for me i don't know that it has been anything that's added to any negative self-esteem or view of myself that i have because i don't have a body like those bodies that are portrayed in porn i still have that but it's i don't think it's coming from porn i think it's just from society in general and tending to be a heavier girl in society and all that comes with that but the porn itself when i watch that i'm not thinking about oh i don't look like that i could never do that i'm watching it and i'm thinking oh that looks interesting i didn't know that was possible hmm should we try that you know like should i should i tag that in my brain for something to you know bring up later in a conversation with my spouse but mike is also a partner that's okay with that too so mike did anything come up for you when jenny started using porn in her life what was your process like i was very excited because you know i know jenny and i knew that she had difficulty achieving orgasm and that my theory was that like we see in research so often that was enculturated shame from our faith tradition i've seen studies that especially with women show like women who masturbate more especially in their development years achieve heart and orgasm at a dramatically higher rate and jenny because of our i don't want to speak for you but my understanding was based on our upbringing you didn't masturbate and so i was like anything that gets her into a frame of self-discovery is going to establish the neurological relationship necessary for her to experience orgasm in a partnered state so i didn't have any like moral or ethical reservations at all so it's just anything i could do to support her you know like very typical like man in early 20s and early 30s like my climax was pretty much guaranteed i thought i had a little bit better research aptitude maybe than jenny so when i would be open and then she would illustrate frustration or have questions that i might suggest different things that could help it was really the like the erotica thing that she kind of found on her own that edward edward cullen my dear friend edward [Laughter] but i think that's really beautiful just to come from a space of like i want my partner to find what works for them and when there is communication and when there is trust and when there is consensual exploration then what more could you want but i think what comes up for so many people is not enough what's wrong with me and they make it about themselves of oh my goodness like what's wrong with me that she needs porn or he needs porn or whatever and so the fact that you were able to just be like this is awesome go you that's beautiful right like mike never took it as a personal affront that he wasn't performing well or wasn't doing something well and i never felt like i had to fake anything with him i was always completely honest you know honesty um because ultimately i didn't know how to fake anything because never having had one but he never took it as it's a problem right yeah and like what can i do to help you what can i do to make this better for you and and you achieving what i know will be great if you can't you know or whatever yeah i love that so i'm hearing what communication is important uh that's what i'm doing in a partner relationship yes yeah i think just being in a space of safe communicative exploration in a consensual way is the ultimate going back to what you're saying about you know being a kid and you're your first sort of discovery my my first encounter with porn as a practice was actually my grandparents and they've been together for in may they hit 75 years they're 96 now and i remember growing up and my grandma would talk about like we love porn and i was always like that's weird but i thought it was cool and she would always like make jokes about it and she would say some porn just can't follow the stories it's not that good but then she'd say like some of it's really well done and i was always like okay whatever that means and so that was my first introduction to it was actually a really powerful female character in my life who talked about it in a way that was playful and very consensual and so i think that that's a really important thing do you jenny talk to your girls about it at all do you talk to your kids do you talk to your friends now they know because they're listening to this but how do you talk about it to anyone else i talk about it with our close friends some more than others depending on their comfortability with it um the kids know i don't talk about it but i just don't think it's lent itself to be talked about right now with them our children are both in an age of we don't really want to hear about sex from mom and dad and what they're doing behind closed doors because they're teenage you know pre-teens and teens it is something i don't think i would have a problem with talking about with my kids as they get older and they're ready to talk about it we've always been very open as far as listen this is your body and there are things that feel good when you do this to your body and you have the freedom to do that you know we want you to do that if you're wanting to do that um because there are certain signs as kids are young when you see them you know discovering themselves and everything and and we've encouraged that for them instead of saying no we don't touch ourselves you know but yeah otherwise right now it's more of i talk about it a lot of times it's kind of mentioned on the side when with friends discussions depending on where the discussion leads it's kind of hinted at and joked about okay i do feel like i still have a long way to go i think when it comes to body shame personal body shame i have no problem with like possible experimenting in positions and things like that and doing like videoing it's the watching it afterwards i feel like i would be so self-critical but that's where i feel like that's a part of me that i'm trying to work on when i was growing up in the 80s we didn't discuss anal sex and yet now when i present in high schools about the dangers of the sex industry i have 14 15 year old little girls crying to me because they don't want to do anal sex but their boyfriend really wants them to and how much it hurts them and they believe they need to do that because they're fed a steady diet of pornography as well [Music] i was addicted to pornography for three years in my early teens and discovered it because i was too afraid to ask about sex i felt alone i felt disgusting and i felt like if i ever told anyone my life would be over in my 15 years of prostitution of whatever pornography was what men showed me they wanted me to do [Music] kiera williams also known as key is an arkansas native a writer a director and a black culture connoisseur she's a producer at buzzfeed and hosts her own podcast show you me and keith growing up in like a predominantly black neighborhood around black people i got the sex talk like my sex talk from my mom was don't believe a man when you say he's gonna pull out that's how your siblings got here and i was like cool and then so i got to talk about abortion and the plan b pill and my family was like look you have too much to do like don't you go out there and get you no baby if something happens and you slip up you call us we will fedex you a plan be healed oh wow like they were serious about it like let me know if you need anything you need to go to the clinic i would give you 400 so they were like really open about that but we never discussed pornography ever like it was never a conversation that we had which is really weird my introduction to porn was in seventh grade i was on a bus on the way to a basketball trip and some of the ninth graders were watching little people porn on a portable dvd player whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa little little people point yeah that was the first time i'd ever seen anything like that before and i was freaked out and so i was like 13 at the time so you were 13 years old on a school field trips watching little people porn yep yeah i would say for myself i think a big part of it is because i grew up in such a christian purity culture that was like porn watch what you see watch what you you know i kissed a goodbye yeah all that stuff like we did all of that growing up so it was kind of something that i was like i'm not going to engage in when i was younger and like growing up in that space but i have friends who have always been like oh that's my thing me and my boyfriend we have sex to porn like i still have people in my life who are like heavily engaged in pornography and still for me although i've like gone through like my deconstruction all these things porn for me is something that i don't engage with because i know a lot of women who are in the industry today and like some of the stories that they have told me and like a lot of i would say like a few of them are there by choice and i'm like that's your choice yeah this is sex work you're getting paid for this like do your job like if you want to be there be there but i know a lot of women who are not there by choice and also know women who are there by choice but they talk about like the racism that they experience in those spaces i feel like with porn a lot of people give it a pass because it is porn whether we want to admit it or not there's a sense of dehumanization that comes there like we dehumanize to people so like for a lot of people it's just a fetish you know like it's just fetish porn and i'm just here to like get off and like move on or whatever but like if this fetish was like being portrayed in like black hollywood movie we wouldn't support that you know also another thing they all talk about is like some of them have like literally walked out off of settings because they've asked them to like we want you to play like really ghetto and like like tie cast people into things like that i know with like black men that they've talked about they want them to play the thug caricature yeah um and myth of criminality black criminality yeah and i'm like that's just like a weird thing that like a lot of people don't want to be involved into and also i don't think a lot of people know this i won't say for everybody but for a lot of the porn industry if you're a white porn actor and you film with a black person you get paid more to film with a black woman because black sex is undesirable i feel like the hard part about it is that you don't know like one thing that has always been like just like my personal conviction is like when i'm watching porn i don't know who's there by choice and who's there by force you know what i'm saying i don't know who wants to be there who doesn't want to be there i don't know who's there has been treated right and who's there has been treated wrong and because those actors and like people in that spaces don't have the voice or like their voices aren't amplified or they aren't cared enough uh cared for enough just because they do sex work that we don't hear their stories in the way that we should that i can never tell the difference like i don't know that so i just personally choose not to um engage with it yeah also i just feel like a lot of it is weird um like it like promotes like a lot of weird shit like fetishes like especially like incest like you're right that is like yeah a lot a lot of incest a lot of like especially like when it comes to fetishizing like black men especially and i feel like a lot of that rolls over into real life into how white women specifically treat black men and like literally just use them for their penis like that's lydia all that and i feel like a lot of that is like it derives from pornography and like this depiction i mean also back from slavery how uh people have like depicted black men to be but i feel like that only like amplifies that you know what i'm saying it's just like a lot of weird shit that i just don't fuck with and i was like i'm good i would just rather have sex okay okay i could get with that have you ever been propositioned by a dude to film like even just amateur you're in the moment or maybe you're with your boyfriend and they're like hey can we film something yeah yeah absolutely um how common is this all the time guys are like man we should record this shit and i'm like no you won't play me you won't play me but i feel like it's a really common thing during relationships like i have had guys just being honest send me sex tapes of them with other people are you serious yeah like and they just recorded on the iphone and like look at this like i will say that with probably 90 of the men i've dated at some point or another they've been like can i record this and i've had to be like no wow yeah i have been recorded without my permission too at one point and that was like a big blow up thing that turned into something else but yeah that's also okay you can't just drop that like no so there was a guy who i was dating he had recorded all these videos of us that i had no idea about that i did not consent to and then when we broke up he tried to use it as blackmail against me saying that like oh i have all these videos and stuff i felt like something shifted in our culture in music and entertainment with the infamous infamous kim kardashian ray j sex tape so their family was kind of well known and whatever so when that sex tape i don't know how it i mean the internet was around so that was that went that was one of the first viral things i think on the internet for culture was was that sex tape it's funny because it it literally made kim kardashian and ray j's it built the entire kardashian empire like kylie jenner is like the youngest billionaire now and it literally came from the empire of kim kardashian in that sex state shout out to ray j he's created a bunch of millionaires yes one thing that that just reminded me of is tumblr you know how tumblr just banned porn from being on there that's where you used to find porn was like a whole section of tumblr that was just like all like amateur porn and stuff like that like allah kim kardashian and ray j but now all that stuff is shifted to twitter and there's a whole section of twitter that's like never seen porn on twitter it crosses my timeline all the time i have to mute people and follow people all the time because i'll literally be at work and just see ass cheeks i'm like guys okay i've seen that but i didn't know if that was considered porn i thought it had to be like genitals no no i'm saying ass and like the whole thing like as i'm just scrolling it like dude oh my gosh i'm having lunch like do we have to do this it's too early to be doing all of this what do you think this does for children what do you think this does for your nieces and nephews you know and you're like what do you think that does for them i have a relative who was like in seventh grade like a few years ago she logged in on my computer um and was on facebook leaves her dms open i go through her dms and like they're good at wood yeah and they're like literally talking about sex exchanging videos like pornography like with each other at like seventh grade and i was like man i was and i was talking to my friend who's a teacher and she was talking about how like fourth graders were like literally getting caught like having sex with one another like in the back and i'm like man i can't imagine like having that much access first of all it's everywhere now like you don't have to like wait for aol to dial up to get to porn i don't know listen maybe maybe i'm just see we're we're really i'm old you have an old soul you're not as old as me but uh and we're also deeply churched so i'd be like we just need to pray and fast this is the only time i get real like where i just want to i just want to pray and like let's bring the babies before they alter and just anoint them with all and and pray father son and then they're going to leave and go masturbate and i'm just like this is just no we have to tarry in the holy ghost until they speak in tongues with with evidence listen let me tell you i was in youth group and we were all speaking in tongues at the assemblies of god church and watching masturbating oh my gosh all the time i can't with you in this it was bad like i mean and we were the churchiest kids that we knew like everybody was praying for the gifts and passing out and all those things and still touching each other yep [Music] talking with michael gunger is kevin garcia kevin is a digital pastor content creator writer and podcaster as well as lgbtq advocate i'm just so happy to be here thanks for having me i'm so happy to have you it's the honor it's the moment it's a dream you're a dream oh my listen don't butter me up i'm vegan i'm not vegan just sorry to all my vegan friends who lied to you all right so we're talking about porn listen when i got that email i was like okay let's jump into this because i gotta talk about it sometime right is that something that you haven't talked about very much not as much because it's still such a you know to use a stereotypical word nuanced conversation being staunchly sex positive and being somebody who really you know wants to be sex positive you know i believe in sex workers rights i believe that it's valid work i believe in what's the phrase i used one time theoretically non-monogamous because i just haven't had anyone to practice with yeah is that i mean that's that's i mean i'm not in practice because yeah yeah like psychologically open porn tell me how you feel about porn kevin how do i feel about porn short version is great i think it's it is complicated for me though because i i'm constantly wondering about whether like some of my ethical framework is still me holding on to all the bullshit that i picked up from evangelicalism and just like the poor messages i got about my body and about you know what sex was to be used for what it couldn't be used for things like that so on the one hand it's this thing of just like this is a tool in some ways it's also art for other people it's also work for other people the short version is if your porn is ethically sourced because there's a huge problem in the industry with the exploitation of women and children obviously so if you can know where your porn is coming from if you know that the actors are getting compensated fairly that the women are treated well i think it's okay i also think that like any tool it can become an addiction and i can't think that it can become a replacement for actual intimacy it doesn't cause you to actually confront you the fear you might have around your body or your own desire or your own sexuality or your gender for that matter um at least that's what what it did for me like anything too much i mean too much pleasure in general causes you to become a hedonist right like anything it's like the top of that mythical food pyramid that isn't exactly accurate at all where the sugar is just you sparingly i hope that makes sense is that all how you've always felt about it was it a shameful thing for you growing up oh yeah so how has it changed why did it change um so i was going through life my teen years was all um x-gay therapy so like add a like layer of weird body shame sexuality shame gender shame like all you know as much as you could tack on to like the shittiest cupcake and like you know give that to me that's what i was eating you know i learned growing up that um pornography was bad and people who watch pornography are bad people and that masturbation they wouldn't call it a non-pre cro-creative orgasm they would just say that's sex outside of marriage and marriage can only between one man and one woman and so you know when all of your you know teenage fantasies are about robbie the really really cute guy from art class it's terrible so like i didn't actually like look at porn until maybe i was 17 and it was always uh like middle of the night no one's up i'm gonna go downstairs and like look at a certain tumblr page um on my parents computer i wanted to see something that you know like we we're so desperate to connect with our own sexualities right we're so desperate to like feel our feel ourselves within our bodies and when those types of desires you know those sections the sexual desires that allosexual people experience when those things are pushed down in any ways there's a metaphor that was given to me one time you push a like a blow up beach ball under the pool and then it just lose like you know you can't control that for forever it's gonna pop up and hit somebody in the face and so it's like all the things that you're surprised are gonna pop up in other areas of your life so that desire to connect with that part of your sexuality whether you are gay straight or otherwise um when you press it down it like becomes it turns into something that's not good it's like this shame spiral so the shame spiral like this was for me it went like this have the desire to connect with myself you know just like wanting to be loved wanting to like be sexual wanting to you know experience orgasm because that's a pretty dope feeling but i think it was deeper than that it was just the desire that i needed to be in my body and i didn't know any other way to do it that became i watched porn and then i would feel bad about it and i couldn't tell anybody about it because if i did that the shame it's like you know they're going to tell me that you're a bad bad person i don't want to be told that i'm bad and so i'm going to feel bad about this and keep it quiet and try to be strong and the more i try to be strong the more i have a desire to connect with my body that i'm like deeply trying to avoid and so it's this vicious cycle of learning to like especially for me like we learned to hate our bodies because it was the flesh that was causing us to sin which i think is the reason why so many queer folks like you know have suicidal ideation because like if the body's the problem just end it porn used to be something that i was super ashamed of and i was disgusted with myself not just because i was watching porn but it was also gay porn yeah and so out on top of that that whole shame of around like your desire is literally disgusting to god it was hard the i think what kind of shifted my mindset around it was my coming out process and being exposed to obviously very different ways of thinking and not just going i think there's this hang-up that maybe folks who when people are deconstructing things like they'll start they'll do like okay women are equal um yes racial justice um yes to my gay friends sweet you know they're doing all the right things and then it kind of stops right short of like conversations around sex and body and desire and especially around around porn usage i'm just like you know why aren't we taking that same hermeneutic of blowing it all up and understanding why we believe what we do and apply it to sex and porn and relationships and so that's kind of what did it for me it was meeting non-monogamous friends of mine and like really i wanting to understand why why and how they functioned in that space and then recognizing that owned desire within myself for that same sort of intimacy and then taking that deconstruction of relationship and applying it to work and sex work and the autonomy of the body what i've learned so much from non-monogamy and polyamory and that kind of discourse is the autonomy of the body and so if i'm to believe that every single person if empowered properly can have autonomy over their own uh what they do with their body or what they don't do with their body then who am i to tell a sex worker or someone who is a porn star or an adult film entertainer you're not doing what god created do with your body and like who am i to tell that person what god is doing or not doing in their body as someone who has the potential to connect with like multiple people romantically i think about like oh maybe that's just like their expression like that's how they express that connection it's one of those things where i want to trust that everybody knows what's best for them and then hopefully if we're if i am also still a christian which most days i am i think about just like if i'm providing community for people like that's my job as you know a future pastor is like i'm here to help people live their best life and i can't tell them what that is i can only tell them what i've experienced what i know what i don't know and help them lead to better questions to figure it out for themselves that's true freedom is being able not wanting to control other people you know letting people learn that they don't have to be controlled by other people either i'm curious about what you're you explain some of it already but when i think of like my temptations as a child and i had a lot of sex shame myself but i was straight so there wasn't that extra layer of like not only am i a pervert for wanting to see naked women but like my fundamental desire at least i had the sense that my fundamental desire was good but it was misplaced that's what it but to feel that your fundamental desire to connect to love to be sexual was inherently yeah and evil yeah that's hard for me to imagine and i'm curious about like how porn plays into that especially for the lgbtq community because for most of us porn or some degree you know masturbation fantasy whatever on some level is how we first experience the sexuality of our bodies and it's where you kind of first let the rubber hit the road if you will yeah about this is actually what i'm into and you're kind of it's not just like being attracted to somebody casually and dismissing the thought it's actually like no this is what i'm into discovering what turns you on sexually discovering so i wonder how the lgbtq community at large like how does porn play a part of people's formative sexuality and discovering who they are and what what they're into and what yeah all of that is and how do you think that's different i don't know i i see it through this straight lens right and i'm trying i would love to hear from another lens of out of the homos how the homosexuals use the porn tell you what son [Laughter] i'm glad y'all think oh yeah listen y'all forget y'all don't remember i'm from the south now when i get really excited about stuff my voice just drops right back in um it's i think i i resonate a lot with what you said about porn being a vehicle for understanding our own desire and what we're actually into i think i think the answer is different depending on the you know the sub community within the lgbtq community you're talking about because you know the way my lesbian friends use porn is way different from what i experienced among you know cis gay males um it's honestly i will say by and large like even within the queer community talking about sex talking about masturbation talking about things that you're into like when you talk about things that you're into talking about who you've slept with and whatnot but the actual like conversation around desire for at least in the south i'd say is still pretty stigmatized around sex in general and trying to get people talking about what you're into or what you're not into or like how you experience your body which is what i which is like why i like to do the work that i do because i want to de-stigmatize your desire and i want to uncheck vulnerable yeah it is so vulnerable and i think that word right there kind of hits the nail on the head is that so many queer folks are wounded from either their family of origin or um just from their religious community or just from being a queer person living in a world that's not built for them so like to talk about what you like or don't like in bed you know is not really something that goes on you know other like queer people talking about their experience with sexual assault is not something that happens all the time and it requires that vulnerability and that healing i think porn like how at least in my communities how people experience porn is very similar to how straight people and cis people probably use it just like it just kind of just depends on the person because there are straight folks that are part of like king communities right like monogamy [Laughter] i'm done i'm gonna go now but yeah i think i think for some people like it's it's used as a release like i am stressed out and i just really need to jack it real quick and then move on with my life or for some people it is stress relief for some people it is um i know people who watch porn with their lovers and their partners and it's part of their sexual expression for each other to be turned on by erotic images together i don't know if it's like very particular i will say like the kinds of porn that queer folks are into i think typically is i don't want to say weirder but i'm just saying like we have really good imaginations so it's like it's um it's interesting but there's also this flip side to it that i wonder about and this is where like i get hung up on the ethics of porn and like what we're doing with it so this is like i wouldn't say this is a community-wide thing this is a question i have is like everything else the porn industry is controlled by the you know the white the white system of patriarchy and like um i think about you know the kinds of bodies that are typically used in popular porn are white muscly dudes with like no hair anywhere on their bodies and like these huge dicks and it's like wow i should be aspiring to be you know the colby kellers of the world you can google that later if you want if you lied and then is that a porn star yeah also be problematic fave because apparently he voted for trump and so like we have to this is me confessing to the people and saying that i'm canceling him in my life thank you but you you like him though otherwise oh i mean like oh wow yeah look at that guy lots of muscles and also just like he's going through like all these different phases with his hair and so like you know like different versions i'm just like oh my gosh you're like uh throw me up against the wall hulk version you know what i'm saying too much too much no but that's the thing it's just like even though it's like i have to confront a my own bias here like those like that the the white male gaze is like i was like oh like that's what i should be aspiring to a a white body a cis body a very like particularly in shape quote unquote in shape body you're like european standard of beauty and so on the one hand i am acknowledging this like yeah the thirst is real and at the same time just like i know that i've been conditioned so like how can i you know decolonize my desire how can i intentionally start working away from bodies that look it's only a particular way and you know kinds of things that like the kinds of practices that like people think is like oh i should be able to do all these different sort of like sexual positions you know how like there's like three solid ones that i think everyone can go to and it's just fine like you like people get fucking performance anxiety out of this stuff i get performance anxiety when i'm having sex because of shit that i see in porn because i'm thinking that i should be able to do x y and z i should be making the noises a certain way and like it it puts all these like very weird expectations around what sex should be for ourselves and i wonder in my own person is like what's the fruit right and i and i i think it's sometimes it's a mixed bag and i'm like i was so i wonder if rather than looking like the at the collective fruit of everything because of such a mixed bag like individuals in their own life have to look and say what fruit is this bearing in my head am i foregoing relationships am i watching in you know in public places where it's not appropriate to do that is this impacting my relationship with my family my friends my lovers and if that is the case do i need to take a step back something my friends from the 12-step program so i always say is like if you can take it or leave it take it but if you can't take it or leave it like you have to take it then you need to leave it so i think that there is a lot to be said again for the individual autonomy of the body and the person come on kevin come on somebody that's some clear-headed shit yes i'll tell you well i'm telling you i was a i was talking about porn at the christian fellowship conference they let me do a whole talk on sex positivity it was so fun but apparently some people had some trouble with like the things that i said and i went back through and i watched the whole thing i'm just like i can't imagine i know but it was one of those things where just like i talked about porn i'm just listening can we all just talk about the fact that we're all watching porn and that's the other thing about desire too is like it's like some it's that statistic of like the places where like people are most conservative they have like the most interesting porn uh search terms and then usually the more like what people might consider depraved or like what looks like exploitative sex okay so it's uh it's just very curious to me that like let's just talk about it yeah the more it's in the shadows the weirder it gets the weirder it gets and like you know maybe maybe there's a future for me in the porn industry if we can like really change it around you know what i'm saying that's why you're here really right absolutely hi everyone my fans only account is i don't have one yet well i was i was telling somebody else i'm like i think that i could open up a fan's only account but it'd be like the discount version because like you know just like i don't have the muscley body yet which is like you get in that introductory price as they begin to get muscularly later on just like opt-in now because it's only gonna get better honey that's how i paid off my student debts i'm just kidding hope you enjoyed and or were challenged by this episode on pornography and we'd love to hear your thoughts and how it challenged you and what you learned so you can do that by leaving a comment on our discussion thread on our patreon page which is just for the liturgist podcast patrons or you can reach out to us on our official social media platform social.theliturgist.com of course we're also on facebook at facebook.com solidus and on twitter and instagram at the liturgists your hosts this week have been michael gunger hillary mcbride william matthews and me science mike we want to thank our special guests jenny mccarg caroline lee kee williams and kevin garcia editing and sound design was provided by pat kicklighter at resident recordings music has been created by vishnu das and tyler chester uh talent management by brick cradle production manager corey pig and producer victory palmisano thank you for listening to the liturgist podcast and we can't wait to talk with you again soon thanks for listening everybody [Music]