We understand the thinking atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol,
an idea. The population of atheists this country is going through the rule,
rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If I tell the truth,
it's because I tell the truth, not because I put my hand on
a book and made a wish and working together for a more rational world.
Take the risk of thinking. Feel so much more happiness. Truth Usian wisdom
will come to you that way. Assume nothing, question everything, and start
thinking. This is the Thinking Atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews. If you
are anywhere near Springfield, Missouri, on the fifteenth of November, I Am
going to be hosted by Springfield Freethinkers to come out and give a presentation.
This is brand new, by the way. It's called Seth Andrews versus God?
Who is the better intelligent Designer? And I've got some ideas I'm just
saying. So if you want to come out, it's going to be a
great night's all are welcome. For tickets and information, you can just define
the link on my website Seth Andrews dot com slash events. Here is just
a tiny window into what my life was like in a Puritan family. It
was nineteen eighty six, nineteen eighty seven, the film Children of a Lesser
God had just released. This is a wonderful movie starring William Hurt and Marley
Mattlin. And her character is deaf. She works like a janitorial job at
a school. She is a broken person. She has been tremendously traumatized in
her life, partially because of her disability and how she was treated. And
there's a scene in the film where after hours, she goes into where the
pool is. There's a swimming pool, and she strips off her clothes and
she submerges herself in the water. And this is symbolism, right. She
is a person who is raw, she is exposed, and she is essentially
to a degree, living in a world without sound. So the scene has
real power in so many ways. And I'm home, I am watching this.
Mom and dadd are in the room, and that scene happens on the
television. There is Marlee Matlin's bare ass underwater in the pool, and my
father was beside himself the TV. He was immediately shut off. And I
get the sermon, you get this is new to you can't show that.
My father used to say it like this. He'd say she was in the
buff, which I guess in the buff means you're nude or naked. But
this was like sinful material. There was no beauty in it. There was
no deeper meaning to be learned about, sort of the raw nature of the
exposed human self. None of that. No, no, no, he
just saw skin. He flipped out, and he didn't want that video in
his house. Oh, I'm sure he had wished for a filter. We're
going to talk about a bunch of that kind of thing today. We're going
to talk a lot about sex. That's how my mother used to say the
word fox. Her face would just sort of contort like it was painful.
And Natalie's always ribbing me because I'm one of five kids, and so Natalie's
like, well, you're one of five, so your parents were getting it
on somewhere. I'm like, nah, no, nan la la la la
la. Don't talk about that. But I mean, I guess it happened
unless I was born in a tube or a lab or whatever. But my
parents were not affectionate. They didn't express any physical affection. They were intellectual
partners. And this sort of fed into a sense of shame about physicality,
about sensuality, about sexuality. That was part of the temperature of my home,
and it's also part of the temperature of many Puritan cultures, high control
religions, especially. So we're going to talk about what my friend, doctor
Darryl Ray calls nanny software. We're going to talk about pornography, sex addiction.
I'm going to bring in a clinical psychologist and sex expert to get into
that. We're just gonna we're going to do some stuff that would have definitely
had my father reaching for the off button on the television. I had some
experience with this kind of nanny software back in the early days. This was
back in the nineteen nineties. I was a Christian radio host and I was
asked to endorse a client. This client was pitching a service, a filter,
a morality filter, designed to help you navigate the wild west of this
new thing called the World Wide Web. The service I was endorsing was called
Integrity Online, and the commercials I did for the service were what you might
expect, this wonderful software or I don't know if it was a browser filter.
It's been so long, but this will block out violent material, filthy
language, and certainly the most important thing, it will lock out porn.
Now did this service work? And the real question I know you want to
ask me is did you ever test it to make sure it worked? Hell?
No, I didn't test it, not because I was mister clean,
but because I was terrified that if I tested it by typing something naughty into
a search engine, it would set off an alarm at the client. They
would notify my employer, who would in turn thank me for my years of
service and escort me out of my career. We had just had a guy
who worked at one of our sisters stations in a different state and they found
porn that was downloaded to his office computer and they fired him on the spot.
I mean they found out and they said sorry, you are terminated.
And he cried and he apologized and prayed and he begged, please don't fire
me, but boom, he was gone, just like that. So the
whole point of filtering and monitoring and screening and even reporting was to keep this
kind of thing from happening. The problem was Integrity Online was horrible at knowing
the difference between what would have been considered an evil site and a legitimate site.
We got complaints across the board, and Integrity Online blocked me at almost
every turn I would try to go to a mainstream news page, access denied,
lifestyle and entertainment online access denied, trivia and game sites access denied.
I'm sure even decades later, this kind of thing is a problem now,
and I think it's because these developers simply can't keep up with the massively complicated
nuances of the web. Software code has no idea about context. It didn't
understand intent. That couldn't know the difference between a kink in somebody's armor or
a kink in somebody's bedroom. But the whole concept just roots in moral panic
about the temptations of the outside world. James One talks about tempted people.
They're dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed Luke twenty two forty.
Pray that you will not fall into temptation, Matthew chapter six, verse thirteen,
and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.
I find it interesting a lot of religious people think that temptation or being
tempted is a sin, like the temptation. I am tempted then I've sinned.
And here's what I mean. Let's say that I am not married,
I am outside of wedlock, as they like to say. But I've got
a girlfriend, and my girlfriend and I are alone in the house. We're
both tempted to have sex. We don't have sex, but we are tempted,
and then we resist the temptation. However, before we both separate in
our holiness and then go home for a cold shower in some prayer time,
we had just for a second really been considering it. We'd thought about it.
Wouldn't that be something if we could have sex? Had we still not
sinned? Hadn't I sinned? Matthew five? Anyone who looks at a woman
with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. I had looked
at her with lust. But wait a minute, I resisted the temptation.
I got out of there, didn't have sex, but I was still a
sinner. I didn't commit adultery, but I was still an adulterer. Does
that mean temptation? Being tempted considering the temptation is itself a sin? The
Book of Hebrews says that Christ himself was tempted in all things did he just
express no desire to give in? Or did he take a moment and say,
hmm, what if? Right? I mean, he was one hundred
percent God, but he was also somehow one hundred percent man. Christ tempted
in all things. The Bible says, flee temptation, but Christ stayed there.
So was he a sinner? Jesus seemed awfully prone to surrounding himself with
forbidden fruit. Did his eyes ever wander? Did he ever fantasize? Was
he sitting at his ancient web browser wondering what might happen to him if he
typed the words hot harlot. All he had to do would be to pull
up his ancient search engine Jerusaleugal and then click download photo. Download speeds for
naked pictures would have been really slow back then, but he's Jesus, so
he could have sped that up. So tempting. Jesus was tempted in all
things, just as we are tempted with all that carnality today, and lo
and behold, accountability software is here to save the day. The website for
Accountable to you, it is a marital aid, if you'll pardon the expression,
It is a preventative dongle for your fondle. Okay, let me play
you just a little bit of the website video about how accountable to You works.
So what can you do to help encourage your family's purity in this digital
aid? Introducing accountable to You software for all of the major operating systems that
facilitates openness, transparency, and integrity between individuals and families through comprehensive, easy
to read reporting. How does it work? Simply install accountable to You on
your laptops, desktops, and mobile devices, then set an accountability partner for
each device. For example, you might want to be the accountability partner for
your kids while setting your devices to report to your spouse or someone in your
church. Accountability partners will then receive daily or weekly reports on device activity.
Our sophisticated system can also send instant text alerts if something objectionable is detected,
so partners can check in immediately. Okay, beyond the fact that these people
need a sound engineer, somebody who knows how to properly mix sound so that
the music doesn't drown out the narrator, what do we take away from the
c But I'm not going to focus on children. I think that's a different
conversation right now. I'm talking about the age of consent. Crowd. We
choose an accountability partner. Accountable to you says it will link your spouse to
everything you do online, because nothing says relational trust like being monitored twenty four
to seven quick digression. I actually knew a couple where the wife would do
this to her husband. They would sit down at dinner. I heard about
this from their kids, by the way, their grown children, who were
kind of like, oh my god. But they would sit down at dinner
and she would hold out her hand and he would be expected to hand over
his phone, and she would just go through it, checking all of his
text who's talking to him? Checking all of his photographs, checking his browser
history. I guess, And I thought to myself, you know, I
really appreciate the idea of openness and transparency. Right. We don't want we
don't want people who live secret, second or even third lives. But is
this how a healthy relationship works? Now? I'm not talking about somebody who
sees a lot of red flags. You know, you have genuine, sincere
suspicion that there may be infidelity going on or there's there are lies being told,
abuses being covered up in some way, abuses of trust. I think
that's a different conversation. You know, this is I'm not talking about the
CSI where you are having to do some real digging, and maybe that does
include private conversations that have been kept out of your view. I think that's
different. I'm talking about a relationship that is defined by distrust. You sit
down and they say, give me your phone, I'm going to go through
everything. Give me all your passwords. I'm going to go through everything.
Is that a healthy thing? Like a manual version of accountable to You,
which sends out reports daily and weekly to the surveillance team, your accountability partners.
Oh, you want to try to browse the web anonymously in incognito mode.
You try to modify the software, uninstalled the service? Uh uh alarm
bells go off? Big brother knows and I think, most ironically, at
the bottom of the features page of this surveillance service website, they have the
words committed to your freedom. Accountable to You. That'll cost you about one
hundred and fifty dollars a year. Here's another one, ever, accountable same
stuff. Lead me Not is another one. It lets you actually note what
your specific temptations are. What do you struggle with, what's your inclination,
your desire, your lust, your focus, your fetish, and lead me
Not gives you extra material for those specific temptations and triggers. Do you feel
triggered to sin? There's a button on the website. I'm triggered and this
is a bad signal to your accountability partner, whoever that person is. They
see this thing. Ah, Bob's being triggered, Kate is being triggered.
Holy shit, I need to jump in and save the day. If you
don't have an accountability partner, lead me Not, We'll find a person for
you. And I am not making this up. The website says it might
even be Jason Matthew, the founder of the company. If you're more self
sustaining, if you trust yourself just a little bit more, here's a service,
a self control service called Plucky p luck Y. The default setting on
Plucky blocks all images and all videos on all websites, no media, no
media can get through. And then wouldn't this be a joy. You have
to go in and you have to specifically designate and allow each image or video
I guess this may keep you too busy to stream Quentin Tarmantino films and pictures
of bear boobs. You just don't have the time. You're busy allowing the
good content. Covenant Eyes, I think maybe the most popular service of this
kind. Covenant Eye says it as one point five million users and for just
sixteen ninety nine a month, you can experience quote victory over porn, and
that's the main focus for Covenant Eyes. Porn. The homepage says porn creates
shame, shame fuels porn usage. And I think this is hugely interesting because
Covenant Eyes does not mention what the source of the shame is. Right,
they want to install the software, but who installed the shame. Now,
let me play you a clip from three geniuses who were pitching Covenant Eyes on
their show The Authentic Christian Podcast. This is on YouTube. The hosts are
Aaron Gallagher, Scott Ingram and Tucker Wallace. So they were talking about purity
software account of bild the option sexual purbity, especially against porn. Here is
a quote unquote solution to keep yourself from having sex outside of marriage. Check
out this advice. One thing that's that I want to bring some encouragement.
Is that I said, I know sometimes when you look for look forward to
marriage, especially in college, you're like, I'll watch porn for a while,
then I quit it. So what I'm saying is that God designed those
sexual desires for marriage, and and like sometimes we think that God's going to
take away from me. He's the one that designs sex and the enjoyment for
marriage, and so the people in the world are twisting it. Wait for
your wife or your husband, and just a summary of five Proverbs five eighteen
through nineteen's just like, let your found me blessed and rejoice with the wife's
of your youth as a loving deer and a graceful doe. Let her breast
satisfy you all times, and always be enraptured with her love and wooden versions
as intoxicated. Say all that to say that there is like all that stuff
that's been twisted. You can fully enjoy your marriage with sex like it's there's
a place for it. And guess what I mean, I'm gonna say,
you don't have to be thirty. I think our culture is really I'm I
personally think the devil one in this way too, where he basically makes people
think that you shouldn't get married till you're thirty, because if you get married,
you know you want to wait, you to live your life, you
want to go to high school, you want to go to college, you
want to show you're while to I think it's stupid. I mean, yeah,
my wife and I didn't get married till later. That's because it didn't
meet her till later. But like my advice would be me too, Yeah,
that's that's better. My advice would be, don't wait till you're twenty
five, thirty forty to get married if you have it, if you don't
have to, because you understand commitment in what the relationship requires, and it's
a godly, godly in marriage. That's it. Yeah, I mean absolutely.
I mean that's why we wonder why people are struggling with pornography. And
you're like, well, yeah, you want a guy to wait till he's
twenty eight to be married. What do you expect? Okay, am I
the only one who brain went to that place when he read the verse let
your fountain be blessed? Is that what that means? I never thought about
it before this moment. Let your fountain be blessed sounds like, I mean's
it sounds like? Doesn't it? Is that what it means? I don't
know. Am I the only one? I guess I just need validation.
I also thought it was ironic that this guy was chiding people for waiting till
they were almost thirty to get married, and then he said that he had
been older when he got married. Someone explained this to me. Anyway,
I sent a message out to the Thinking Atheist Facebook community asking if anybody had
ever had their own experiences with this type of software. I had a guy
named David. He said, my employer has a really good one, but
it's less aimed at morality and more at protecting their computer network and keeping their
employees from wasting company time watching movies or playing video games. So that's kind
of a different animal. Danny said, I used an app once I forget
the name from the website xxxchurch dot com. Now I have not clicked that
link. I'm not recommending you click that link. I don't know what that
link is. I'm just reading. I'm just reading what it is. It
monitored sites you visit in the background, and every two or four weeks,
depending on your preference, it would email a list of the questionable sites you
visit to an accountability partner you designate. The problem was that the software parameters
of what was bad were so loose it was adding lots of harmless sites to
the list that made it worthless to use. Laurie said, Utah is full
of crap like this. There used to be a company, I think,
clean Flicks, that would edit out all the swearing, violence or sex in
a movie. Well, I just did a quick Google search and Laurie is
absolutely right. The company Clean Flicks founded in Utah back in two thousand.
They rented and sold commercially released DVDs and VHS tapes from which they edited content
they considered inappropriate. Now this is a copyright nightmare. They're grabbing Hollywood movies
without permission. They just grabbed them, and they edited those films and then
released them on their own site for rental and for sale. And of course
major film studios were pissed and they sued Clean Flicks in two thousand and two.
They were closed by court order in two thousand and six, but they
reopened the next year with a website called Movies you Can Trust. They no
longer offered edited movies. I guess it was more of a list of tens
of thousands of films that they had reviewed, and then they compiled a database
of a thousand films that they felt met their family friendly criteria clean flicks,
which became movies you can trust. Andrea sent an email she said, when
I was a kid, my parents got a TV guardian. It would automatically
mute the sound whenever a bad word was on the screen via closed captions,
and it would show the words on the screen so you could read it,
replacing the bad word with a good word. So I used to watch the
old Pride and Prejudice BBC series, and it would change sex as in talking
about gender to hugs, and watching it would change Puss in boots to whimp
in boots. It was a bloody nightmare, but at the time I thought
it was wonderful because I was completely brainwashed. In this same house, my
stepdad would also cover the screen with a book whenever a scantily clad woman was
on the screen for himself, apparently because it was just me and my mom
at the time. I want to talk about sex addiction. I was interested
to learn that the diagnostic and statistical Manual of Mental Disorders does not list or
recognize sex addiction as a real disorder, and that sounds counterintuitive to me.
I mean, you see people who are they're obsessed in an unhealthy way,
or they're checking out of their own relationships because they're over here watching porn or
whatever, and I wanted to talk about that. I have an actual clinical
psychologist and sex therapist. His name is doctor David Lay, and he's going
to talk to us about sex addiction, the use of pornography by both men
and women, and we're going to talk about nanny software that's coming up next.
Glad you're here. Thank you so much for listening, and thank you
so much for your support of this show on Paytreon. I see we are
at around seven hundred patrons right now, and I've been working to try to
get this show back to where we were pre covid, which was a little
over nine hundred, and if you'd like to support the show, paytreon dot
com slash Seth Andrews. I want to talk a little bit about sex addiction,
especially in the church. There's so much content video, lectures, conferences,
certainly books that talk about breaking sex addiction. I want to talk to
someone who is a clinical psychologist, a certified sex therapist, supervisor, an
author, and a guy who has talked about these claims regarding sex addiction.
Doctor David le thanks for coming man, good to talk to you. Thanks
for having me, Seth. May I call you, David? Call you?
Yeah? Okay, I want to respect the title. Okay. Yeah.
There's so many people who call me bad words that just call me David
is good to go. I'm sure you're an agent of debauchery and immorality,
lust sin. You know, you're a sort of a crusader for the carnal.
Have you had these types of interactions out there? Yeah? I mean
my favorite are the people that say, simply by virtue of me challenging the
validity of the concept of sex addiction, I must therefore be a sex addict
myself. Oh thou dost protest too much of tours of course? Yeah.
The fact that there's legitimate scientific and clinical concerns here, that doesn't matter.
And interestingly, the reverse also doesn't matter, because it turns out that religious
therapists are far more likely to diagnose sex addiction than lay therapists, and the
overwhelming majority of self identified sex addiction therapists are themselves self identified sex addicts.
Neither of those issues apparently seem to matter in terms of the validity of sex
addiction. But me not believing in sex addiction clearly means I'm just a proverb.
Well, before I do my due diligence as a host and give you
some pushback or play Devil's advocate, I'm going to ask the questions I wonder
if some of our audience members and I have about all this, Why is
sex addiction not a thing? Well, for a variety of reasons. The
research at this point is really really clear that people who self identify as sex
addicts or people who get labeled as sex addicts, don't actually have more sex
than anybody else, but they feel worse about it now. The reason that
they feel worse about it is overwhelmingly due to a moral incongruence, typically religiously
based. These are people who grew up with pretty strict religious sexual values around,
for instance, heterosexuality, monogamy, not masturbating. Now as adults,
they find themselves interested in sex and sexual behaviors that they were taught made them
a bad person. They feel bad about it. They engage in the behaviors,
and that afterwards they feel guilt and shame, and because they are struggling
to prevent themselves from engaging in these behaviors, they feel like they are out
of control. But the feeling of being out of control is different from actually
being out of control. So the reason that the concept of sex addiction is
just not a good scientific or clinical label is that it points us at the
wrong target. It points us at the target of the sexual behavior. You're
a sex addict, you need to stop having so much sex. Well,
wait a minute, if this guy isn't having that much sex, and the
problem is the moral conflict, we need to deal with and examine that moral
conflict. The label of sex addiction is what I call a sexy shiny object.
It distracts us, unfortunately, from dealing with and addressing the real conflicts
are going on here. Well, let's say there's a partnership, a romantic
couple, and one of the two is always thinking about sex. They are
masturbating, how many times a day, they've got pornography on the computer.
They seem compulsive, they're obsessed with sex in that way, and the partner,
their partner has real concern like this doesn't feel healthy? Would that not
be a sex addiction of some kind? First and foremost, it is what
we call a desired discrepancy. It is one individual being in a relationship with
somebody who does not share their level of sexual interest. So I've treated that
couple multiple times, and oftentimes, as one partner becomes less and less interested
in sex, more and more resistant to engaging in sex, the other partner
paradoxically increases their focus on sex because it's not what they're getting. Because as
they run into the brick wall of getting their sexual needs fulfilled or affirmed,
they want it more and more and more, And we end up in this
situation where the two partners in the couple are battling with each other over sexuality,
when really this is coming out of the the unfortunate situation that many people
get married and commit to monogamous relationships without ever really contemplating the fact that they
may end up with different sexual desires or interests in their partner. And how
are they going to deal with that? Well, if I can jump in,
doctor lay quickly, what would you say to somebody who countered that this
sounds like partner blaming? You know, you're not giving me what I need,
So I'm going to go over here, and hell, it might even
result in extramarital activities and fidelity, etc. What would you say to that
sexuality occurs within a system, and the match between partners on these sexual variables
impacts how the sexuality is experienced by both partners. So, for instance,
couples that watch pornography together have healthier sexual lives and more satisfying sexual relationships.
But couples where one partner is watchingnography in secret from the other partner, or
where one partner is watching more pornography than the other partner tend to be relationships
with a sexual mismatch that are sexually unsatisfied and sexually unhappy. But the pornography
is an expression of unmet sexual need that the couple typically is not effectively negotiating
or discussing figuring out how they're going to address this discrepancy between them. I'm
going to continue my church lady questions for just a second, because I hear
them so often. Pornography distorts notions of healthy sexuality. I mean, you
see all kinds of stuff play outs in porn videos, porn movies, porn
in prints, and there are many concerns inside and outside of religion that porn
creates unhealthy notions of what sex is, of what consent is, etc.
Does porn stort healthy sex? You know? I mean the biggest problem with
pornography is that it presents an unrealistic idea of how quickly the plumber is going
to show up when you have I mean, in porn, you know,
the sync breaks and five minutes later the plumber is there. I mean,
holy crap. Yeah, But I mean one of the concerns is is that
how do everyday people compete with the perfectly shapely, sexy, red hot porn
star. You know, how does how does real life compete with that?
Yeah? Pornography is fantasy, and we all have to be clear about that.
The problem and the challenge is that the people most affected negatively by pornography
are the people who believe that it is a realistic depiction of sex. So
people who are inadequately educated around sexuality look at pornography and think that's how real
sex works. They don't understand that pornography doesn't show the negotiation, the aftercare,
the prep, the lube, the discussions, the sex education that performers
have in order to engage in these behaviors. They think, oh, you
know, you just jump in and pound away. But good sex takes a
lot more than that. But pornography is a fantasy that we watch to relieve
and escape from some of the burden of real world sex. Real world sex
takes work. The same thing is true of romance novels, for instance.
They depict a fantasy world where people engage in behaviors and relationships are not possible
in the real world. The same is true in Hollywood, I mean the
X Men movies. These are fantasies and we watch them to escape from reality
for a little while. The problem, again is when people are watching pornography
and thinking that they can translate those elements into the real world without all of
those components like negotiation, preparation, discussion, integrities, respect, et cetera.
We can mitigate the potential harms of pornography on relationships and on young people
by effectively addressing sex education. Unfortunately, our country has engaged in grossly,
frankly, in my opinion, criminal neglect of sexual education. And then when
people go to pornography and learn lessons that we don't that are unhealthy. We
blame pornography. Pornography was never intended to be sex education. It became that
way because we allowed a gap to exist, and then we, ohso conveniently
blame pornography instead of taking responsibility for our failure to address these critical issues.
I remember being a teenager my parents, you know, hardcore Bible believing Puritan
types, and you know, sex was a dirty word. And if it
had not been for cinemax, I mean, you know, just like,
oh, well, that's what that looks like. I mean, now,
is that typical? Dude? I want to get into these accountability services nanny
software type stuff in just a second. But I'm just fascinated that the very
puritan United States, especially the churched portion of it, seems to want to
rush people into marriage because only in the marriage bed is sex legitimate. So
you know, we just mentioned that verse out of First Corinthians, Right,
don't burn with passion, You've got to get married. And this breeds a
whole new level of dysfunction. You want to speak to that. Yeah,
there's a couple of really important things here. First, the religious states in
the country do view internet pornography as a threat and an assault on their way
of life. I get it. And Utah, which was the first state
in the country to pass legislation identifying pornography as a public health crisis, they
explicitly identified in that legislation that pornography led to young people wanting to get married
and they can't keep this material out as they allow the internet in and in
the modern world beneath the Internet, and so they are seeing young people adopt
sexual values that they don't embrace or agree with. Now, the interesting thing
is, as people watch pornography, they become less religious, and they become
more accepting of sexual diversity. And so there really is there really is a
fact here that you know, pornography does lead to changes in the values and
beliefs of young people watching it that are discrepant from those of religious communities.
But interestingly, a colleague of mine, Sam Perry, who's in Oklahoma,
he has done fascinating research looking at all these issues. And he did this
one study where he looked at men who watch pornography and is it the case
that because pornography is cheap and accessible, that men are more likely to watch
pornography rather than want to get married and have sex. And in fact,
he found the opposite, found that men who watch pornography are actually more likely
to express desire to get married because men who watch pornography are men who value
sex and libido. They want to have real sex. They're watching pornography as
a filler, as an alternative to the sex that they're not getting to have.
Is it true that the Bible Belt states, I mean you mentioned Utah.
I remember reading this was years ago that Utah was like in the top
three for peorn usage. It just feels like the more they try to restrict
it, the more people find a way. Oh your experience. Yeah,
So absolutely, this has been studied a couple of different times, a couple
of different ways, and consistently, more religious, more sexually conservative states consume
more pornography, both historically in magazine subscriptions and currently in internet searches for pornography.
Now, I will say there is some question, there's some conflict here
because religious people overall want less pornography. So then why would it be the
case that religious states are drawing or watching more pornography. And what we think
is is two things. One is the less religious people in those states are
experiencing the sexual suppression in that community and seeking pornography as outlet. And then
secondly, the highly sexual people that are in the religious community and keeping their
sexuality secret are using pornography as an outlet to pursue the sexual experiences that they
can't get in real life because of the religious suppression. Talking here with clinical
psychologists and certified sex therapist doctor David lay one more before the accountability software,
is it true that men gravitate more to pictures while women gravitate more to literature
when it comes to getting turned on in fiction? Yes and no. In
fact, research suggests that women actually may have a stronger physiological sexual response to
visual images than men. However, women are more likely to experience psychological distress
or lack of arousal to those same images, particularly when they a feeling of
disgust comes up. Women are more likely to read, for instance, as
I mentioned, romance novels because it feels less challenging and threatening than visual images.
You know, when Tumblr banned pornography on that site, it had a
disproportionate impact on women who were using Tumblr to watch curated pornography. What we
think is going on there is that again, when a woman encounters something in
a pornographic video that they find, you know, unarousing, you know,
a big hairy guy, somebody engages in a violent or humiliating behavior. The
woman is more likely to experience that as a turn off and they lose their
mojo and they don't want to keep having sex or masturbating. Men appear to
maintain sexual arousal through that get over that hump, so to speak, a
little more easily. This is one reason why we think that women tend to
be a little less likely to watch pornography than men. However, when women
watch pornography, they watch pretty much the same kinds of pornography that men do.
Covenant Eyes is an accountability software, a surveillance program reporting to spouses.
Maybe I don't know children, parents, friends, Sunday school teachers, pastors,
et cetera. Someone installs this on their computer to try to block out
temptation. What's your thoughts on that? Uhhh So, over the past couple
of years, we've actually learned a lot about these these programs, and it's
not good. Wired magazine has an expose about the incredible security problems in these
softwares that they open up your computer and your Internet usage to almost anybody.
They create significant vulnerabilities for hacking and for viruses. Secondly, they typically recommend
that you not have your spouse as your quote accountability partner, that is,
seeing all of the pornography or all of the sites you may go to on
your computer. However, when people use their pastor, for instance, as
their accountability partner, there's a lot of evidence that religious leaders are using this
software to enforce heteronormative and socially conservative values. So even if you don't go
to a gay porn site, but you go to a site, for instance,
about gay sexual health, there are lots of examples of pastors coming to
the person and expressing concern that they are, you know, homosexual or experiencing
homosexual urges, and that they should stop them. Interesting that the culture encourages
people to give over the keys to their most private spaces, like I have
to submit to an authority with a capital A to monitor me. It seems
like a violation to me. It is. Now I'm telling you another violation
that I'm actually more concerned about, and that is that these softwares are overwhelmingly
created and supported by moral and religious and spiritually based organizations, and yet there
are parole and probation officers and judges across the country that are ordering sex offenders
to have these softwarees installed on their sites. I'm concerned that this is number
one, you know, a violation of church and state, but number two,
these authorities have unrealistic ideas for the reliability and effectiveness of this software.
They are thinking that this software helps the public to stay safe, and there's
no evidence of Thatjosh Dugger is a really good example. Josh Shugger actually had
Covenant Eyes installed on his computer. Josh Juger from that reality team Kids and
Counting, Yeah, Yeah, and he was convicted of child sexual abuse.
Then he had this software installed on his computer. He created a partition so
that he could use the other part of the computer to look at and download
child pornography, criminal child sexual abuse material. His wife was his accountability partner.
She had no idea that he was still looking allegedly. He had no
idea. She had no idea he was still looking at this material, and
then the FBI tracked him down. That software did nothing but allow him to
manipulate people into thinking that he was not engaging in criminal and immoral behavior,
when in fact he was. It was like a shell company. Yeah.
One final question. You've been very generous with your time here. So if
we see someone who has let's say they're thinking about sex and acting out on
impulses regarding section NonStop. If this is not sex addiction, would you say
this is another type of issue and sex is just a symptom of it.
Absolutely, I mean that's what I say all the time. Sex and porn
related problems are never really about sex. They are about moral conflict and shame
about your sexual desires. They're about unregulated anxiety and people using masturbation and sexual
fantasy as a way to manage anxiety. They're about depression, They're about desired
discrepancy within the relationship. The problem with the sex addiction or porn addiction label
again is that it leads us to say the answer here is to stop having
or wanting sex. But that's not going to fix the problem that the sexual
behaviors or desires are actually being used to try to manage or regularly. We
need to help people with the real problems rather than blaming sex. You have
written a book called well, the Myth of Sex Addiction. I'd be curious
to read that, sucker. You were recommended to me by a buddy,
doctor Daryl Ray, who is the author of Sex and God and host the
Secular Sexuality podcast. But this has been an interesting conversation Doctor David jay Ley
l e y you you've been terrific. Thanks for talking to us today.
I appreciate you. Thanks for having me Seth. I appreciate what you're doing.
This is important. I hope you found the show today interesting, compelling,
educational, whatever. Leave your comments in the comments section and I will
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