This is never happened before.
Today we have three experts in their field with three different opinions debating the subject of porn.
This is the first time I've gone on Pornhub at work.
In one corner we have Dr.
Reena Malek, the sex scientist helping millions of couples enhance their sex lives.
In the other corner we have Dr.
K. The psychiatrist specializing in helping people with addictions to pornography and more.
Who is up against Erica Lust, who runs a large pornographic production company?
No one can sit on the fence here.
Is porn a benefit to people and society?
Definitely, and especially for people who haven't really had that right to pleasure, to understand their sexuality.
But I think what we're clearly seeing is a trend of it being damaging.
Let me just share with you all what I'm afraid of.
It is doing way more to the brain than we ever realized.
So the first thing that we know is that but there's data to suggest that couples that use pornography together have better sexual encounters and women who use pornography have better sexual satisfaction rates.
And remember that women's sexuality has been so much about pleasing others.
And you see it where the organ has some gap.
But my devil's advocate would say that there is a significant number of women interested in looking a certain way that they're often seeing on pornography.
That's harmful. I'm a bit suspicious about this because honestly that statement is from 10 years ago.
But there's also unrealistic expectations about performance.
That creates shame.
And small penis anxiety is a real thing.
And it's often from watching pornography.
The real problem is we are not giving sex education to our young people.
They are lost. But it doesn't have to be an addiction.
It's the way that you relate to it.
It is something that people can control.
And parents can learn how to have these conversations with their kids.
And there are a couple of really nice techniques that you can use.
The first is that...
Let's start with introductions.
Dr. Rina, who are you and what do you do?
So I'm a urologist, which is essentially a medical and surgical doctor of the genital urinary tract.
But I see myself more as a digital opinion leader in the space of sexual health and urologic health.
So someone who can talk to and speak about complex concepts in addition to sexual health in a way that people can understand.
Can you give me sort of a view of the variety of things that you've worked on in your career, the types of patients you've worked with and the subject matter broadly that you've addressed and are confronted with in your line of work?
Absolutely. So as a urologist, we're trained to treat anything in those areas of the genital urinary tract.
So that can be kidney cancer, prostate cancer, bladder cancer, sexual health, erectile dysfunction, female sexual dysfunction, kidney stones, children's issues.
But then when I did a fellowship in what's called female pelvic medicine, reconstructive surgery or urogynecology.
So I initially trained in dealing with voiding dysfunction and problems with bladder leakage, overactive bladder, prolapse, those sorts of things.
And subsequently extended my practice into sexual medicine.
So I take care of patients with issues with erectile dysfunction, arousal disorders, ejaculatory dysfunction, libido issues, lubrication issues, a whole bunch of different areas of issues that people deal with when it comes to sexual health.
Dr. K, same question to you.
Sure, so I'm a psychiatrist by training.
But I had kind of a roundabout way to get there.
So I failed out of college due to video game addiction and then went to India to find myself, studied to become a monk for about seven years and then wound up going to medical school, becoming a psychiatrist.
And now the majority of the work that I do is actually like focused on the internet.
So what I noticed when I was training was that if you look at like academic psychiatry or psychiatry, we focus on things like depression or bipolar disorder or anxiety.
But I saw that there was a whole lot of evolving mental health problems for the digital generation, video game addiction, pornography addiction.
And I noticed that most of the psychiatrists weren't focused on those.
We kind of had an opioid epidemic that's still going on.
A lot of problems with alcohol and marijuana, but they're all these digital addictions that are emerging.
And those are the people that I work with now.
Erica. Yeah. Who are you and what are you doing?
I'm Erica. I'm an independent adult filmmaker.
I'm an entrepreneur.
I made my first short film, explicit short film 20 years ago.
And then I developed a career in this space of indie adult cinema.
And are you a director?
Yes. Of adult films?
Yeah, I direct films.
I produce films. I also run the company.
To set the stage on where we are with pornography, I found some statistics, which I thought were quite pertinent to the discussion, which is the first statistic is that 30 % of all internet traffic roughly is related to pornography.
35 % of all internet downloads are pornographic in nature.
79 % of young men view pornography monthly.
64 % of young adults actively seek out pornography weekly or more often.
One in five mobile searches are for pornographic content.
58 % of men and 38 % of women watch porn at work.
And pornography websites receive more traffic than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined.
Interestingly, I found another statistic which said that pornography in Poland has increased 310 % between 2004, which I guess is when you got into the business and 2016.
Some other sort of potentially adjacent trends, which I thought were interesting were that the percentage of men aged 18 to 24 reporting no sexual activity in the past year increased from 18 .9 % in 2000 to over 30 % in 2016.
And similar increases in sexual activity are seen in men and women.
Similar decreases in sexual activity have been seen in men and women.
Among high school students, the percentage who have never had sexual intercourse increased from 45 % in 91 to 70 % in 21.
And finally, the average age of first exposure to pornography is now just 11 years old and 64 % of young people report that they came across pornography by accident.
So I guess my first point of discussion that I wanted to raise is, is pornography a benefit to people and society?
And I realized that this question is intentionally short and narrow, but that's the basis of the first conversation.
And I want to start with you, Erica.
Is porn a benefit to people in society?
It can be, it can be definitely.
And especially to the others who haven't really had that right to pleasure, to desire, to the sexuality.
Remember that women's sexuality especially has been so much about pleasing others.
I think that it can help women to find, you know, their own desire to understand their sexuality, to see others, what they like, what they are doing, and to turn their liberty on, liberty on, which is obviously one of the things that so many women are struggling with.
Let's go anti -clockwise.
Dr. K., I'll repeat this statement.
Is porn a benefit to people in society?
The way that porn is being produced and consumed is starting to cause way more harm than good.
I mean, the statistics that you really just machine -gunned out, right?
Like, it's like one thing after another thing after another thing of things that are very scary.
Like, each statement that both of y 'all made, I could think about a specific person that I worked with, where it's like, yeah, I've seen that problem, I've seen that problem.
You know, early exposure.
So when you get exposed to pornography before puberty, so everyone thinks that pornography is about, you know, like sexual lust and this kind of stuff.
And I think in a good way it can be, but what I've seen a lot of - For adults.
Right. Is that children are getting exposed.
And I've seen like a very scary correlation between early exposure to pornography, like seven, eight, nine years old, right?
So I think your statistic was the average is 11.
Yeah. That's average, which means that there are people that are higher and people that are lower.
And when something, I don't know what exactly, but when we get exposed to pornography very early, it makes some kind of alteration in our brain that makes us way more likely to addictions, not only pornography, but other things.
So I think that there, you know, sexuality is a healthy part of human existence.
A lot of the current research suggests that masturbation is also like, relatively speaking, not unhealthy, it's somewhat healthy.
And so pornography can be a part of that.
I think especially listening to Erica and how pornography can be used to elevate horizons, increase awareness, there can be benefits.
But I think what we're clearly seeing is a trend of it being damaging.
So I would say that I agree with Erica completely.
I think there's actually some data to suggest that women who use pornography have better sexual satisfaction rates, have more frequency of sexual encounters, because they're learning about their bodies.
I mean, we can't know exactly why that is, but we know there is a correlation in that specific way.
And so when people are using pornography for sexual curiosity, for pleasure, they're generally showing good, for the most part, without any signs of addiction or concerns of compulsion and use of pornography.
They're using it in a good way and they're having better sex because of it.
Now in terms of using it as a couple, there's also really strong correlations that couples that use pornography together have better sexual encounters and better sexual satisfaction.
So I think there's a lot of ways that pornography is used in a positive way, and not to undermine that there are people who struggle with it absolutely, but I think yes, there are some benefits.
It allows people to experience fantasies, to see different types of sexual cultures, as Erica mentioned.
And I think that that is an important side of pornography in terms of using that to learn what you like and learn what you wanna try in your relationship, if that's applicable.
Much of the literature that I've read about and the studies I've read about show that if you consume pornography, you're somewhat desensitized to the real thing, i .e.
sex in your relationships.
And when we look at those stats on sexlessness, people having less sex than previous years, people losing their virginity later and later.
And I wonder if that is, we've sort of been desensitized to the real thing because of pornography, Rina.
Absolutely, so I think that there is certainly people who they use pornography as a way to achieve pleasure, and that is the sole way that they achieve pleasure.
So they are constantly using pornography and sometimes correlated with a certain style of masturbation, and those things cannot be replicated with penetrative intercourse of any kind, or manual intercourse with another person.
And so in those cases, then it becomes difficult because your brain habituates to that style of stimulation and excitement and visual sensations that they're getting from watching pornography.
And so that does happen to some individuals.
I would say it's not the large majority, but certainly we're seeing more of it.
What is the impact, though, on the brain, especially a young brain that is exposed to pornography?
Yeah, I mean, there's no studies on kids looking at pornography.
So I couldn't tell you exactly, but you may be able to talk a little more about that.
Yeah, I mean, so first of all, I think this is a fascinating discussion, and if I can kind of track back and freestyle for a bit.
So I thought it was so interesting because Steven asked this question, right?
And he's like, you know, is pornography a problem?
And I thought it was so interesting that the two women at the table had the more positive answers, and the dude is like, it's bad, right?
So I think the first thing to understand is that, and for me, it's eye -opening to hear both of y 'all talk.
Because I think so much of it is like your experience of it, right?
We're talking about pornography as if it's an isolated thing, but the biggest takeaway that I already have is that there is a relationship between the human and the pornography.
Erica was talking about, you know, how the pornography can be used to help the human understand sexuality, become more familiar with pleasure that we have this - Connect with your desire.
Yeah, and we have this orgasm gap, and then, you know, she's inherently saying, you know, we don't, I forgot exactly what you said, but something about we don't see it very much.
Or you said that the problems of sexuality relating to pornography, or I thought you said not that common.
Which is something that, I'm not saying it's common or uncommon.
I think that's just such an interesting selection difference because I work with people who have pornography and like death grip syndrome because I've never heard it discussed, is like very common.
What's death grip syndrome?
So it's exactly, it's a Twitch chat degenerate way of describing what Dr.
Malik did a great medical job of describing, which is that, so what happens is our body can acclimatize to a certain kind of stimulation.
So when, oftentimes what happens when, and I haven't worked with too many women in sexual stuff, way more men.
So that there's a selection bias there too.
But oftentimes what happens is that boys or men will start to masturbate without any kind of lubrication.
And so there is a, they almost train their bodies physiologically to climax with a certain degree, like a certain pounds per square inch of force and a certain sensation, which they get used to, not only at the physiologic level, but also at the neurological level, which Dr.
Malik alluded to, that there's a certain kind of visual stimulation that they almost get used to, the brain acclimatizes to, in order to achieve sexual climax.
And then what happens is when these people have a sexual relationship for the first time, the sensations and the, from a visual perspective, auditory perspective, because the sounds that we hear in these big fast food pornography productions are nowhere near the sounds in real life.
And so the inputs of an actual sexual act make it very difficult to have a satisfied sexual life.
And so I think there's a lot of subtlety to, when Dr.
Malik said, when couples watch porn together, there are also studies that show that as you increase your pornography consumption, that correlates with relationship dissatisfaction.
But that could be a chicken or the egg problem.
Am I watching more porn, because I'm unhappy with the sexual relationship?
Or does watching pornography decrease my satisfaction in the relationship?
And so I think there's just like so much here to explore.
Yeah, and I think your point about the couples, usually if there's a discrepancy in one partner is watching more porn than the other, then there's just decreased satisfaction, certainly.
And I think that your point to saying that you're seeing a lot of it, well, these people come to you for this problem, right?
So you're seeing this exclusively.
But I think in the general population, and maybe they're not coming to the urologist as often.
But certainly I'm not seeing as much of it.
And it's not reported in terms of people complaining about it in studies.
And again, these studies are small numbers and they're not generalizable to the entire population.
But I would say that it's not as common as I think we let on.
But the other important thing to add is that because it's so nuanced, there's a big moral component.
People have a belief about what pornography is, good or bad.
And so when they watch pornography, if they have a moral incongruence, meaning they think it's bad to watch pornography, they are more likely to report having a problem with pornography.
So there's a lot of nuance here in terms of how pornography can be beneficial or harmful to a specific individual and how it affects that specific individual's brains.
Whether it's gonna send same pathways, as any sort of strong visual stimuli, the way your body sensitizes to those pathways is very individual.
And what about pornography on the brain then in terms of its impact on dopamine and how that then will cascade into other areas of our lives?
Yeah, so I'll launch this one.
So I think that the biggest takeaway that I have is it is doing way more than we ever realized.
So the first thing is if you get exposed to pornography early on in life and this accidental exposure, by the way, the most common story that I hear, and this is such a weird anecdotal statistic, is if you have an older brother and you're a younger brother, I see so many pornography addicts who have older
brothers. And the most common story that I hear is, older brother is post puberty and is watching pornography, which is like a little bit more understandable and acceptable.
And then your younger brother wants to do whatever you're doing and they get exposed to it at an early age.
So the first thing that we know is that early exposure correlates with an increase in potential for addiction.
That's probably somewhat neurological and potentially somewhat sociological or family oriented.
Because if you think about what kind of seven year old will get exposure to pornography, maybe parents aren't in the house as much.
So there could be other risk factors.
But we absolutely know that when you activate in an artificial way the dopaminergic circuitry of the brain, it sensitizes the dopaminergic circuitry and makes it more vulnerable to dopamine later on.
This is something called the Kinling Effect.
We see this also for example, in like marijuana as a gateway drug.
The reason marijuana is a gateway drug is not because it makes you immoral, it's because once we start activating certain circuits in the brain during brain development, it changes the way that they develop.
The second thing that we see is that pornography is used as a method of emotional regulation.
So if you look at, like I was trying to figure out what effect does pornography have in the brain?
And so I was thinking about, okay, which part of the brain does sex come from?
And it turns out that every part of the brain, every neurotransmitter is involved in the sexual act because the purpose, the evolutionary purpose of a human being is to procreate.
So all of our circuitry is designed for this thing.
So we see that there's absolutely an emotional regulation component because when we get aroused, like our brain doesn't care about anything else in our life when it comes to the act of procreation.
So we see a lot of emotional regulation which then becomes an emotional crutch.
So I see a lot of this now where people at work will watch pornography and it's not about masturbation or lust.
It's about emotional regulation.
I've seen a huge spike in second screen pornography.
So we'll be working over here and I'll just have porn like running over here.
Like this is a really common story and it's an emotional regulation effect.
Now the third thing that the question you asked about is dopamine.
So here's a really fascinating thing.
So it absolutely messes with your dopamine.
When it messes with your dopamine, it messes with your motivation because dopamine is the primary neurotransmitter involved in motivation.
So as you watch more pornography, you just stop being as motivated about the other things in your life.
And the really crippling thing, the really scary thing from a relationship standpoint is that if we look at falling in love, falling in love is primarily the function of dopamine.
So when we look at a relationship, there's initial attraction which comes from like the thalamus and our sensory inputs.
What do I see? What do I hear?
Oh, she smells great.
Her laugh is beautiful, right?
That's all sensory.
And then we get into the stage where we're in love when I can't get enough of this person.
I'm just sitting with this person.
We're not talking, we're not doing anything.
We're just holding hands and oh, I'm so in love.
So like literally what creates that feeling is dopamine.
And when we start using pornography on a regular basis, our dopamine stores start to deplete.
We start to develop dopamine tolerance.
And like literally what I'm seeing clinically matches with this because it's harder for people to fall in love.
When I talk to younger people now, we're in their 20s and 30s and struggling to date.
You know, you go on a couple of dates, but what's the problem?
There's no chemistry.
There's no spark. That comes from dopamine.
So I think we're seeing all kinds of really scary downstream effects from unregulated pornography use.
I can't help but feeling that what you're talking about is a very masculine experience somehow.
And that when we're talking about porn addiction or compulsory behavior with pornography, it is very related to men and that we in our society tends to see men's experiences as universal experiences.
And I think that we lack a perspective of really where women get into this construction of addiction, of use of pornography.
Is it? Reena, do you see it as an addiction?
So, you know, this is what I think.
I think that, so it's not been termed an addiction in terms of medical vernacular.
They call it problematic porn use because there hasn't been a clear definition in terms of addiction, right?
But I would say that I think that there are certainly people who have this experience, but there's certainly many, many people who use pornography and don't develop this tolerance.
And maybe it's more common in younger people because they're getting access to it sooner and more often.
And that has yet to play out.
At least I tend to see older patients.
And so that has yet to play out in older generations.
But I would say that I think there's many people who use it fine and don't have an issue.
And so I think that while these issues do exist, there's also a whole bunch of other things that are ongoing in society right now that may make it more difficult for people to connect and for people to feel intimacy with people because it's very difficult.
Currently, more and more people are not getting married.
More and more people are choosing to stay single for a variety of reasons.
I don't think porn is the only factor there.
I do think it is something that people can control.
And so they feel like, okay, if you feel like you have a problem with it and you can control pornography, that allows you to feel like you have control in one area of your life, that then that control can potentially improve other areas of your life.
So I think that there is correlations here, but I think it's very complex.
I think the way it affects our brains is very complex as well.
And dopamine is one way to describe it, but there's different sensitivities in how our brain responds to the same stimuli.
I watch pornography, the way you watch pornography, the way anyone of us watches pornography, our brains will respond in a different way because our receptors are either more sensitive or less sensitive.
And there's no way to really test that on an individual level.
One of the things I found most interesting when I had the first conversation on this podcast about pornography is my team went out and looked at a couple of tools which pull search data.
So what are people searching on the subject?
And the number one most searched term was how do I quit pornography?
And that's quite an interesting thing because there's a certain desperation to that question.
Going to Google to ask Google how you quit a behavior, that makes me think of it in the context of an addiction.
And in fact, the second most popular search term was also about how you quit this thing.
And it speaks to a certain powerlessness that a certain percentage of people feel they have with pornography, throwing that out to everybody here.
Now, but I think this connects also to the stigma, the huge stigma around sex and around porn and this idea that people have somehow that it is bad.
I mean, people want to watch it.
At the same time, they have the moral idea that it's bad and that they shouldn't do it.
But I think we're also talking here, I mean, we end up talking about porn all the time, but somehow porn is now very related to technology and how technology kind of has hijacked our lives.
It's not only porn we're struggling with in that sense.
And when, you know, with young people, they are saying they are not having as much sex anymore.
You were talking about it before.
Kids are not playing as much anymore outside as they used to.
So I think we have a correlation there that we need to think about the role of technology and then how much of that space does really this pornography take up.
And also to have in mind that when we're talking about porn, most people see it as a monolithic kind of thing.
When you go out on the street and you ask people what is porn, they think about the tube sites.
That's what they have in mind.
But actually there's many different kinds of porn existing.
Do you think there's such a thing as good porn and bad porn?
It's a very difficult kind of a distinction to say bad porn and good porn.
Because if you do that, then you classify some type as acceptable and other types as non, and you kind of, you know, grow the stigma around it.
I think that we need to think about porn that is made with great working conditions, taking care of everybody who's involved in that process, especially the performers, made with support by intimacy coordinator, talent managers, where the performers have been able to be involved in the process to give
feedback on what is gonna be made, how it's working.
They know all the conditions beforehand, et cetera.
They can give feedback afterwards.
I think there are ways of producing pornography that are safer than what we have seen in the past.
We were talking a second ago about the impact pornography has on the brain.
And I know some of your work involves dealing with people who have erectile dysfunction.
Some of the stats I read on erectile dysfunction show that there's been quite a significant increase over the last couple of decades in people reporting to have erectile dysfunction.
Do you think porn has played a role in increasing erectile dysfunction as it relates to when I'm with my partner in the bedroom and I'm trying to have sex?
So I think this goes back to the people who are watching pornography and are learning what sex is through pornography, and then they go to their sexual encounter with their partner and they don't respond the way that they do on pornography or their partner doesn't respond the way they do on pornography
and immediately they feel insecure, right, immediately.
And that leads to this psychogenic erectile dysfunction where you are no longer able to perform because you're so stressed about the anxiety of being able to get an erection because maybe things didn't go the way they were supposed to or maybe you're insecure about your body image or a whole host of things
that come from watching maybe some of the big box pornography where we're not really showing real sex.
We're showing a produced product that is meant to entertain and captivate people for a short period of time.
And so I think that is one certainly issue that I do see where people start feeling this.
The other thing is where people are using pornography quite often and then they again are unable to get that stimulation through a partner.
They can't get the same, they're using death grip or they're using the same, this very erotic stimuli, this very intense visual erotic stimuli that they can't produce with a person.
And so then they're like, well, why am I not getting aroused and why am I not getting an erection?
And it's because they've now relied on this solely.
So I do see that certainly as an issue in some people who are using pornography but I don't think it's like pornography use leads to ED.
I think it's these other factors on the way to having psychological concerns about your own performance that lead to issues with erections.
And before we move on Dr.
Kay's point about motivation as well, do you believe that there's a correlation between the amount that we watch pornography and mass debate and someone's motivation based on what you know about dopamine receptors?
Hard to say, I think again, it's very individual.
Certainly some people will take the easy...
There is a availability part when it comes to any sort of addiction type behavior.
So when something is more available to you and you're using it more often, it can become more problematic.
And so certainly I think that plays a role in terms of like, if you're using it a lot and it's very available to you and it's an easy way to emotionally regulate, right?
If you're having stress in life, you're unhappy with your relationship or you're unhappy with other things, people are often using pornography as a way to avoid those negative emotions and really just participate in something else, like take their mind off of that.
And so that is sort of where it becomes this challenge for some people.
Yeah, I just want to chime in.
So this is fantastic.
Cause I agree with everything that y 'all are saying.
And I also kind of come to a slightly different conclusion.
So the number one search term that we have is how do I quit porn?
So when I hear that, and I think Dr.
Moloch has also done a great job of pointing out, there's a difference between anecdotal clinical experience and what we have randomized clinical trials on.
We're not exposing seven year olds to pornography and then seeing how their brain develops by doing MRI scans over the course of 10 years.
So some of this research is absolutely not there.
And we also have the number one search term is how do I quit porn?
What that tells me is that there is a, literally the largest population of what people are looking at is to stop using pornography.
And I think the reason for that is, is there good porn or is there bad porn?
Is it individuals that nuance completely agree with all those points?
It's not a problem for everyone.
But I think what I'm seeing very clearly is that it's getting worse, right?
So it's not an issue of good or bad.
What is the trend that we're seeing?
The trend that we're seeing is that Erica is saying, hey, pornography can be more than the tube sites.
So that then begs the question, why does everyone think that pornography is the tube sites?
Because they hijacked the system.
Exactly. So I think that word is beautiful, hijack.
So I think what we're seeing, what I'm seeing is that pornography is getting worse for sure.
It's becoming more of a problem.
If we look at these tube sites, it's kind of like there's nutrition and then there's calories.
And a lot of what I'm hearing y 'all talk about, Dr.
Moloch is saying, if you watch it as part of a relationship, that's nutrition.
It can be something healthy.
We can learn about ourselves.
We can de -stigmatize various things, fair enough.
But I think we're seeing the same trends that we see with like fast food, where now pornography is becoming mass produced.
And there are actually studies that show there's a really fascinating bizarre piece of research.
Which is where you have to go.
This is where I've gone to find this stuff because we don't have studies.
But there was a particular group of biologists who were noticing that a population of beetles was dying out.
And they were trying to figure out why is this population of beetles dying out?
And what they discovered is there's one thing that's responsible for these beetles not mating with each other, which is green beer bottles that were being littered.
And the green beer bottle, then what they noticed is that the beetles were trying to go up to the green beer bottle and mate with it.
And they were like, what is going on?
You'd see this litter that has a green beer bottle and a bunch of male beetles are clustered around it and they're like, what is this?
And it turns out that there's this concept of something called the supranormal stimulus.
So when a beetle's eyes look at the environment, there are certain signals that indicate this is a fertile female.
And a green glass beer bottle activates those parts of the brain.
And what we're seeing with these tube sites is things are jigglier, things are louder, things are slipperier, right?
We have these 4K, high def, like so we're sort of turning, we're taking what used to be nutritious and we are turning it into fast food.
And that and why, all of these tube sites, why are they successful?
They're in this Darwinian war.
That's kind of like a race to the bottom.
How can I create the pornography that is going to leach the most traffic away from my competitors?
And they're figuring out very rapidly that there are all kinds of weird ways to activate the brain, what our brain looks for and what it gets excited about.
And so it feels to me like there's a race to the bottom.
We're making pornography for money.
We're making it more addictive.
But the thing is that these companies behind these tube sites, they are not interested in human sexuality.
They're not interested in sex.
They're not interested in porn.
They're not interested in the conditions of the people who are working in front of the camera.
I mean, they're selling advertisement.
And what do they need for that?
They need content that is extreme, that has words that are clickbaity, that are kind of small clips that are quick to watch.
They look at their algorithms to see what works, right?
But this reminds me of the food industry.
Yeah, of course, it's the famous big food.
It's the famous big pharma, big fashion, etc.
Big porn is the same.
How does an industry succeed if it doesn't engage in that practice though?
Because think about the food industry, the thing that has the most sugar in, that's the most available, the cheapest, is the thing that's going to succeed the most.
So we think about these tube sites, some of the stats are crazy.
I mean, OnlyFans released their earnings for last year, up 20%, they made 6 .6 billion.
Pornhub, one of the big tube sites, is the eighth most trafficked website in the world at the moment, doing 5 .5 billion monthly visits.
These are the brands that people recognize.
And it's extreme, like if we think about nutrition, high in sugar, it's extreme.
So I get the most extreme sort of dopamine stimulation.
It's so easy to access.
I don't have to put my shoes on and put my aftershave on.
I can just, I can get on there within 15 seconds.
For me to get laid, I'm going to have to put in some work.
I'm going to have to go to the gym, I'm going to have to take care of it, I'm going to have to go get a job.
I'm going to have to get some money.
I'm going to have to learn how to speak to a woman, or 15 seconds and I can see the most extreme.
Yeah, I think that's the problem.
But I do worry to some, I'm going to play a little bit of devil's advocate.
My devil's advocate would say that because there's so much moral incongruence that leads to problematic porn use, porn addiction, whatever you want to call it, right?
That we're creating more of it by disparaging pornography.
Like that everywhere people are saying pornography is bad, pornography is bad, you can't go on any social media platform without somebody citing a study that says pornography is leeching people's lifeforce and their life is falling apart because of pornography.
Porn destroyed lives.
And so then we're also adding to that moral incongruence by saying that all pornography is bad.
Pornography is there because we're watching it, right?
And so people like, if you asked like probably the generation older to me, like would you be interested in watching porn where you're seeing the things that you're seeing now, which I mean, shocking to me, right?
Like they would be like, no, I don't want to see that, right?
Like that doesn't interest me in the slightest.
But like why is this becoming so, you know, people are watching it.
I mean, to me so much of this is totally anti erotic.
I sometimes go there to investigate and to kind of see what's going on and what's happening.
And I feel like, oh no, don't joke, it is.
I don't want to see it.
I rather throw up than, you know, feel excitement and wanting to have sex.
So it has an opposite effect on not to sort the audiences actually.
But again, what is it about?
It's about earning money and concentrating power.
It's about selling advertisement.
That's what they're doing.
It's grow your dick pills.
It stays the sexy Latina in your neighborhood.
It's and as a society, we have been very slow to see what has happened because these sites, they were born, you know, 17 years ago, 2007, they came out.
It happened very, very fast.
So a couple of thoughts.
The first is like, yeah, that's exactly what's going on is like, so if we think about it, we have all of these, every part of our brain, right?
Oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin, estrogen, testosterone.
Right? Those are hormones, not brains, but, you know, every circuit of the brain, all of our neurotransmitters, they're all to help us procreate.
And now what's happened is people have fundamentally hijacked all of these circuits and we're seeing problems.
And I'm with you about the moral incongruence because we see this in other addictions as well, where we tried to like demonize like alcohol usage, right?
And we know that once we separate out the moral incongruence because once I feel guilty and ashamed, this is something I see a lot.
I watch pornography, now I feel ashamed.
How am I going to cope with those emotions?
Watching more pornography.
And so you create this cycle of like more, like this moral focus cycle of shame, and that actually fuels the dependence.
So that's absolutely an issue.
At the same time, like these companies, and they don't care about eroticness or falling in love or whatever, right?
They're interested in making a buck and they're exploiting our brain.
And while we should be a little bit careful about the moralistic nature of it, I mean I've seen it gets so much, it's getting worse.
Like every time, every year, and this could be selection bias, right?
Because I'm an addiction psychiatrist.
But I think it's like even with something like OnlyFans because now what we're adding is a social component.
The one refuge we used to have when it comes to pornography, whether it's ethically produced or non -ethically produced, is that there's no way that this person is ever gonna pay attention to me.
I'm just consuming something.
But now, now I can interact with someone.
Someone can send me a DM.
Hey, thank you for watching my video and jerking off.
That makes me so happy.
But you know it's an AI bot, right?
Sometimes it's something.
So I know it's an AI bot, but I am so ashamed of myself that take whatever water is given to you in the desert.
I am so alone. Yeah.
I feel so bad about myself.
And there's a chance, right?
There's a chance it's not an AI bot.
The real problem is that we are not speaking about sex.
We are not speaking about intimacy.
People don't have the sex education and they are lost.
And they are human beings.
They have this drive and this need.
And we had it in all cultures, right?
Do you think if people had the sex education, they would still be on OnlyFans talking to what's probably, because there are big agencies now.
I've seen on social media, there are big agencies of men who pretend to be these porn stars on sites like OnlyFans.
And I see them bragging about their income.
It's a big thing on Twitter at the moment.
I've made $10 ,000 this month pretending to be this actress speaking to young men on OnlyFans.
Yeah. And I think the reason that men do that, part of the reason is because they know what men wanna hear, right?
There's a part of us that they know exactly what to say because it won't be an AI bot.
It'll be this kind of person.
And now what's happening is we're activating the social loneliness aspect and combining it with pornography.
So now you actually have a relationship with maybe an AI bot, maybe a dude, right?
But there is some amount of genuine human interaction over the internet.
So this is getting worse.
And I think sex education is an excellent point.
At the same time, I don't know if sex education is gonna be sufficient because I think we can teach people about their bodies but we're also seeing a whole scale social skills atrophy where dudes don't know how to talk to girls anymore.
And also media, porn is media.
It's important to understand that.
It's telling us messages about gender roles, how we interact about sexuality, how our body functions, et cetera.
So we have all this misinformation going on on this online huge media of free porn.
And we see women screaming in fake orgasms after four minutes of hard penetration.
And as a woman, you look at her and you say, she didn't even use her fingers.
What happened? And you just know that something is wrong here, that this is fake.
But then there's lots of men out there thinking, this is what my girlfriend should be doing.
This is how it should work.
And then they don't connect in real life.
What kind of porn do you make?
What kind of porn do I make?
I make lovely porn.
I make beautiful porn.
I make cinematic porn.
I make porn with, you know, with intentions of showing different ideas of the siren fantasy where people, I try to work with people who are connecting, who show chemistry together.
I ask my performers who they want to work with.
I try to team them up.
I support them with a system of intimacy coordinator, talent managers, producers in the background that take care of them, that check who they are, what they like, what kind of sexuality do they have?
But if I was a consumer of your pornography, what would I notice?
What would you notice?
Probably the great cinematography would be the first thing.
You would notice kind of narratives that are erotic driven somehow where people explore their desire and their sexuality.
You would notice, you would feel very...
I mean, many people tell me, they go like, Erica, but I watch your films.
Is it really porn? Because they identify porn as something that is kind of tacky, ugly, kind of objectifying, et cetera.
So suddenly when they see people in my films having sex coming together, and everything is kind of, you understand why they are desiring each other.
And I invite them to join this kind of erotic journey of the characters.
Then they go, but this is more like in this cinema, in the erotic cinema.
Can I... Is it fair to assume that?
Because from what I've heard, the pornography you produce has a slower story arc, which is more reflective of what...
Okay, so I'm trying to understand.
Because the things that it sounds like you might have removed from the pornography you make, versus the pornography I'd find on one of the big tube streaming sites, the most popular videos on those tube streaming sites.
It sounds like you might have put yourself at a bit of a competitive disadvantage in many respects, because those streaming sites, if their incentive is purely money, the data is gonna determine what people see.
So it feels like they've really optimized for user consumption, where you've optimized for something around ethics.
Because I care about it.
For me, the money is not the most important aspect, why I created this company, why I'm making this.
I really want to kind of send a different kind of message out to the world.
Does your content end up on those sites?
Sometimes, sometimes years ago, it was taken on those sites, for example, changing the wording of it, because remember that many of these sites also, what they do, is that they fetishize people, they use very racist language, chauvinistic language, etc.
And my movies may have much softer kind of language on the way they are.
So they obviously pirated them, they put them up and they changed kind of the wording for the bits.
It was a very hard process to take them down, etc.
What do you think is better for someone's relationship specifically, men and women, do you think no porn is better for their relationship?
Do you think your porn is better for their relationship?
Or do you think, obviously - I think it's individual.
I think it's a very individual decision, what works best.
Sorry, I can't answer, I've never seen one of your films.
I can tell you, it's her porn.
Better than no porn.
I'm going to go ahead and go out on a limb and saying that if you're someone who's struggling with pornography, watching an erotic film with a glass of wine with your significant other is a great way to transition from bite -sized, fast food, calorie dense, jiggly, slippery, loud porn, to how do we rewire
the brain, right? How do we move one step at a time from this to this?
And because the word erotic seems so powerful to me, it's about anticipation.
Even when you talk about differences between male and female sexuality, the lag time of parasympathetic activation and foreplay is so much more important biologically, and correct me if I'm wrong here, for women than it is for men.
I mean, we're like kind of ready to go and we want to make it short.
And so I think like, it's almost like a part of that sexual education is in understanding, okay, how can we teach men to be erotic again?
Instead of these like very like chicken nugget style, highly processed, like this is what I think it is, maybe watch some of Erica's film.
When we talk about watching pornography with your partner, I wonder if that is the rule of the exception to the rule, you know, because I...
Yeah, I mean, so you're saying, what do we do?
I think we have an erotic film watch party, right?
We have anime watch parties.
We have different kinds of watch parties.
Like this thought had never occurred to me before.
I'm sure it is a terrible idea.
But on that point, though, if you reduce the stigma by having these watch parties, does that then, because you cited earlier that it's a tool for emotional regulation.
So when people are stressed or depressed or anxious, they seek it out.
If we remove the stigma, does that increase the addiction?
So it's a great question.
So I think there's, it kind of goes both ways.
And what I mean by that is see, we run into addictions when this substance becomes or behavior becomes one to one correlated with something else.
So right now, the problem with pornography isn't that it...
Yeah, it's... So the problem is, if I watch pornography and that's the only method I use to regulate my emotions, that will increase the addiction.
Now the flip side of it is also true.
If the only reason I watch pornography is to regulate my emotions, that will strengthen that addictive capability.
So I'll give you all just a simple example from alcohol, right?
So if I use alcohol after a hard day's work to get through the day and calm down, and then I stop drinking for fun, whereas alcohol can be used as an emotional coping mechanism, or it can be used to celebrate a wedding, right?
So the substance can be used in different ways, and the more that we use it in different ways, in healthier ways, the more it actually chips away at the addiction in some cases.
This is also highly individualized.
So depending on your genetic predispositions and stuff like that, you may not be able to drink at weddings.
But we also see the opposite, which is like a huge number of people are qualified for an alcohol addiction in college.
And then most of those people are able to develop healthy relationships with it.
And one of the biggest changes we're seeing in addiction is that there do seem to be healthy relationships that we can develop.
I think it's about changing our relationship to the thing.
Now, seeing someone naked engaging in a sexual act is not solely about getting off.
It's not solely about emotional regulation.
It's not solely about dopamine.
It can now become a film experience that we can enjoy.
So we're diversifying our relationship to the object.
I don't know if that makes sense.
Psychoanalytic. Awareness, mindfulness, understanding of.
Yeah. How you use that.
And then I think this is also great.
Like just the simple idea that like, if dudes are watching this, recognizing that watching an erotic film with your significant other, assuming a hetero -normative heterosexual relationship, you know, may be a great way for you to enhance your sexual experience.
You don't need dick enhancing pills or, you know, whatever else, right?
Like cause that's, and I'm sure Dr.
Molick knows better than I do, but in the majority of the, no, I meant more as a urologist.
I didn't think that but okay.
No, no, so like, you know, my understanding from med school, right?
So back when I was doing urology, and I worked with some things like vaginismists and stuff like that, is you know the majority of the female nerve endings are, you know, at the front end of the vagina.
And if you get all the way back to the cervix, that's like painful.
So you don't actually need a gigantic penis.
I was trying to think about whether I should use some other word, but you know.
Go ahead. And so to help, like, you know, and if men are the ones who are primarily having this addictive problem, then let's call it what it is, which is help men realize that sexual pleasure, engaging in a relationship, that pornography can be a force for good, and doesn't necessarily have to be evil.
But, and maybe like erotic film moves us in that direction and like, I just got to say, man, like my degenerate male brain is kind of telling me like, you know, watching an erotic film for an hour and a half could be the best and easiest foreplay that I could ever do.
It would be a lot easier.
Yeah, pretty quick.
But I would say the other thing I've been thinking about while we've been talking about this is we don't talk about erotic audio literature or erotic books, which is more commonly used by women, but we don't stigmatize that.
Like women are like, oh, I love these books and I read them all the time and nobody is sitting here saying like it's bad.
I don't have thoughts on that.
Because it's not naked bodies.
I guess here, the main problem again is back to our bodies.
We are somehow ashamed of our bodies, of our nakedness, of our sexuality.
I mean, women can show nipples online, we know that.
I mean, I'm heavily censured.
I can't show anything on my accounts.
My social media accounts are cut off all the time.
It's impossible to grow.
Do you think pornography should be banned on social media?
Dr. K? Should pornography be banned on social media?
Yes, pornography should be banned.
I can answer that. I'm making it.
I definitely think it should be banned, but I don't think that the explicit images should be banned.
But the right to discuss about it, to talk about it, to give sexual advice or to discuss different topics around sexuality.
We should be allowed to do that.
We should be allowed.
We're allowed to do that.
No, I get banned too.
Really, because this doesn't get banned.
Maybe you are allowed to.
YouTube is different.
Twitter's fine, Instagram's fine, YouTube's fine.
Instagram. Instagram, that is tough.
We have TED Talks that are censured, so only people who are over 18 and have an account online have access to watch them.
And it's me talking.
Yeah, there is definitely limitations.
The thing that we've noticed is your video just doesn't appear in search in the same way, but they still recommend the video.
So when we had, for example, Andrew Huberman on a couple of weeks ago, and he talked about pornography, because Paul was in the title and the thumbnail, the video got huge recommendations by the algorithm, but if you typed in Andrew Huberman, it would not come up.
Until we took the word porn out, you type in Andrew Huberman and it comes up.
So that's anything we've noticed, but we've been quite surprised actually by...
Yeah, I think it's so cool that like, you know, you asked me that question and she jumped in with an answer.
No, I think it's good.
I think it's like...
Because you asked...
I mean, I think that's the value of this, right?
Because I don't feel nearly as passionate.
I mean, you asked her the question, you know, is it which of these is the best?
And I jumped in with an answer.
I was like, this is clear to be.
And I think just a couple of things that I just want to touch on.
The first is that, you know, what Dr.
Balak was saying about, you know, audio literature, or like erotic fiction, or romance novels, right?
So I think it's harder to commoditize that, which goes back to Erica's point of, you know, like some things are more likely to be turned into fast food.
So I think that erotic literature, it's like harder to do that.
I also do think that going back to this earlier point of like, men are epidemiologically more vulnerable to addiction.
I think it's more complicated than that.
And it just... Psychological hurt or problems manifest in men as addiction and look different in women when it emerges.
So I think it's kind of like, you know, so we're sort of seeing a difference in addictive quality.
It's easier to commoditize more sensory organs.
So I think that's an important point.
And I think in terms of, you know, should it be banned or not?
Like, I don't know.
So I work kind of like more at the individual level and arguably some at scale, but like one of the key things is, you know, I have some ideas about what should be done, but I'm not too sure about that.
I'm curious. You know, I don't know.
No, but I'm saying it basically because it's open for kids again.
This is why I'm saying if we're having social media and it's for people 18 and about, then we're talking about another thing.
But go to Twitter, or it's not called Twitter anymore.
It's gold there. And it's full of porn.
It is. It is. It is full of porn.
You can accidentally stumble across porn.
I was saying this to my partner a couple of weeks ago.
I said, look at how Twitter has changed.
And I said, watch this.
Scroll down my timeline.
And I know if I dwell on something more often, then it's going to show me more.
But I scrolled down.
I scrolled down. I was like, look, porn.
And I was like, oh, look, she's taking a close of it.
Scroll, scroll, scroll.
I didn't realise I was new to the...
It didn't happen. I've actually not seen it, but I've had many people who tell me that it comes up on their feet all the time.
Recent changed the algorithm, which has prioritised viewership time.
So if you want people to dwell longer, show them video, extreme video, people being shot, someone being hit by a car, fights, pornography, you increase your dwell time, you increase your advertising.
And this is just how incentives play out.
So much of the discussion we've had today, much of my like...
Why I refer to it sometimes as being idealistic.
Because sometimes it can sound like, just give them broccoli.
When actually if you leave them to their own devices, no one's going to want broccoli, they're going to take the cookies if the cookies are available.
And if you equate this to food, we did put labels on food to say, look, this has got this much calories in it.
We put sugar tax on sugar in the UK.
On cigarettes, we say, if you smoke these cigarettes, this is what's going to happen to your lungs.
And we put explicit images of how your lungs will get cancers and things like this.
Should we be doing something similar with pornography?
Because part of me goes, just saying we should just give them broccoli, this kind of erotic, different part.
They're not going to eat it.
No, but also again, adults, I think they have the right to watch pornography, whatever kind of pornography it is, as long as it's legal and well done.
I wish all pornography would be ethically produced.
I know that the industry is working towards more standards, et cetera, because we have been as a society talking about it.
They don't have much of a choice because if they don't go that way.
Should we tell them about the harms of pornography at the point of consumption like we do with cigarettes?
It's a bit difficult maybe.
I think we should talk about what could happen.
Like gambling. What effects like, like gambling, like, but this also happens.
You've been talking about gaming a lot, you know.
There's a way of gaming and healthy gaming, right?
There's a way of video games that is too much and not too much.
What do you think, Dr.
K? Yeah, so I mean, I think it's a great question.
So I've got like a couple of different things.
So I'm gonna about to contradict myself.
So the first is that we know that, you know, putting warning labels on things does move things in the right direction.
But I love to just share a story.
So when I was a medical student, didn't really understand much about medicine or psychiatry or humans, you know, I had a patient who came in and was smoking.
And so I came in and I was like, you know, he came in and I was like a first year medical student.
So I was like, I'm gonna be a doctor one day.
And so this person comes in.
I'm like, sir, do you know that smoking is dangerous?
It can cause lung cancer.
It can do this, it can do this, it can do this.
So the person's like, yeah, you know, I would like that sounds bad.
I don't wanna let cancer.
And I was like, great.
We're gonna give you like a prescription to help you quit and you can get a nicotine patch.
And like, I was like, I'm gonna be a doctor one day.
So a month later, guy comes in and like I ask him, how's the quitting smoking going?
And he's like, well, I'm still smoking.
And then I was like, I don't think you understand, man, it increases risk of heart disease and stroke and all these kinds of things.
Like it's gonna like do all this kind of stuff.
And he's like, yeah, oh, that's bad.
I don't want any of that stuff.
And I was like, cool.
So like, you're gonna quit, right?
And he's like, yeah.
And so I, then he comes in and I comes in the next month.
He still hasn't quit.
And I started to try to figure out what's going on, right?
So one of the key things that we've learned is that if you want someone to eat broccoli instead of cookies, telling them that cookies are unhealthy for you isn't good enough.
So we need, generally speaking, when you look at recovery from addiction and behavioral change, you have to have a good enough reason to do it.
So I was still blunt and I figured this out and talked to my preceptor and stuff.
And then I asked this person, so what's important to you?
And he's like, oh, you know, I love my daughters.
And then I asked them a very bad question.
And I was like, when you, and he was like, I was like, what, you know, tell me about your daughters.
And he was like, you know, I can't wait.
Like, I'll know, I can die a happy person once I've walked them down the aisle and they're married and stuff like that.
And then I asked him a question.
I was like, when you walk down the aisle, do you want to be carrying an oxygen tank behind you?
And he was like, what?
I was like, if you keep smoking, that's what's going to happen.
Or maybe you'll be in a wheelchair, right.
So I was a first year medical student, kind of brutal, but that actually sunk in.
You have to connect with people with what they care about.
That is still a warning though, isn't it?
You've put a warning on that bad girl.
But it's a little different, right?
So it's individualized, but even now when we do, you know, I stream on Twitch and I try to get people to stop playing video games, which is like holding an AA meeting in a bar.
And what I've discovered is I'm with you.
We've lost a lot of faith in humanity.
If you give them a broccoli and a cookie, they're going to take a cookie.
But I'm still hopeful.
I think that we do see the number one search is how do I quit porn?
There's a lot of energy and desire to do it.
They just don't have a path.
And I think one of these very simple things is like emphasizing an erotic film and telling people, hey, if you're lonely, hey, if you're having trouble finding a relationship, hey, if you have a problem with premature ejaculation or you're having difficulty engaging in a sexual act and can't achieve
orgasm, what you need to do is slow it down.
Don't make sex a three minute jiggly slippery experience.
Slow it down, watch an erotic film, reprogram your brain.
Like I bet you money that if we somehow figured out, if we told people you can reprogram your brain by watching erotic film, and we could say that scientifically, that would be incredibly successful.
Because I think people are hungry for this.
They're hungry for what we were biologically designed to do, which is connect and have fulfilling sexual relationships.
What's your take on that?
Yeah, I think that would be helpful, absolutely.
Because I think telling someone to go cold turkey from having something that they do derive pleasure from.
Even if they have addictive potential, addictive personalities towards that behavior, then giving them something else that they can still derive pleasure from and have the benefits of orgasm and have the benefits of feeling that desire and enjoyment is a really great way.
When you tell someone, you take something away that they've used as a crutch potentially, and they have nothing to replace it with.
And we've talked about this before, giving people a purpose.
A lot of times people don't have purpose.
And so they're like, they have nothing else to do, and they're like, oh, I'll just do this thing because I'm bored.
And that's one of the reasons people watch porn is because they're bored.
And so you give them a purpose, something else to do, whether it's an erotic film or actually purpose in their life, maybe it's meeting people outside in the real world, which would be even better that would help our issues with not getting married, having high divorce rates and not having kids, right?
But I think those would be great solutions if we could come up with ways to get people to either find a substitute or find purpose.
Interestingly, there's clearly a two -way relationship with purpose, porn, motivation, et cetera.
So giving them a purpose, one might say, well, then we stop porn because they're not having motivation to put their shoes on.
Yeah, so I think if you look at, there's one study that showed the two strongest variables with pornography addiction or a sense of meaninglessness in life.
And I forgot what the other variable is, maybe early age of exposure.
But so I think it's kind of spot on, right?
So when I don't have a life that's worth living, what happens?
My body and my brain become squeeze bottles of dopamine because what is the joy of life?
So I try to just extract as much dopamine as I can for my brain so that I have some joy in the day, some kind of pleasure.
And then I watch more of this mass -produced supernormal stimulus pornography because that squeezes more dopamine out of my neurotransmitters.
And the more that my life becomes that, now there's a moral component.
Now I feel ashamed.
Now, if I remember looking at some statistics on online dating profiles and like saying that you're a dude who watches porn is like an instant no.
But if I'm watching pornography, it's going to sap me of the motivation to pursue my purpose.
So if I'm extracting all my dopamine through watching pornography, I'm going to have none left for behavioral reinforcement from other activities.
So reading books becomes not as much fun.
Going to a park becomes not as much fun.
So it's absolutely this vicious cycle where meaninglessness, I have no reason to do anything all day.
So I might as well watch some porn, not a Reddit film.
So do we cancel porn, then?
No. No, please. Let us have it.
Yeah, I don't know.
The answer can. The majority of my income and my brand would collapse if you started being so short.
No, I mean, I think we have to, I mean, I think there's a lot of things we've talked about, but I think sexual education, I think understanding that, you know, explaining to younger kids what they're watching, right?
I think adults have a little bit more, their brains are fully developed, they understand what they're watching, they know it's a produced product, they presumably have already gone through the process of finding a job and doing other things that give them purpose.
Maybe they have children, maybe they have a family, right?
But I think it's really in that young generation they're finding themselves, maybe they're going out and they're not finding a partner because we know that there's less people coupling, there's higher mismatch of expectations, we've talked about that too in terms of dating.
And so, you know, it's very easy for those people when they're still trying to figure out what to do with their lives, to fall into something like that.
And I think if we really focus on that generation, I think, and that's a generation that probably shouldn't be watching porn anyways, right?
And I think that would make a huge difference.
And help parents, because parents are really, really worried.
How'd you do it? I mean, there's many way of kind of starting it, but what they need to know really is that you are there for them, you are open.
If they have any kind of doubt, situations, you are gonna be there for them.
This is not a subject that you are gonna bail out because you feel too ashamed or you can't handle difficult questions.
I would tell parents, educate yourself if you're having kids, you're gonna have to talk to them about sex.
So if you didn't get education, what age?
Do you need to start when they're really, really young?
You need to start when they're learning language.
I mean, young kids today, many of them, they don't know the difference between a vagina and a vulva.
Even Billie Eilish in an interview came out saying that she wanted to put her face in people's vaginas.
And you go, what, what happened?
You're talking about vulva, girl, you know?
Yeah, you know, it has to start from, I completely agree with everything you're saying.
I have kids, I've talked to them about sex.
I think you have to start early with at least knowing the anatomy, knowing what their body parts are and what the body parts are of the opposite gender so that they know that they're different and all that stuff.
And then honestly, being open, they're gonna ask you questions.
Kids are curious. And so they'll come home and be like, what's this?
What's that? And not being like, no, no, no, I'm not gonna talk about that.
It's just like, okay, yeah, let's have a conversation about it.
And let's talk about it and realize that it's not gonna be one conversation.
It's gonna be like throughout their development as they become older, you're gonna maybe introduce more topics or they may have a question for you and just never shaming them.
And that can come even early, right?
Kids are masturbating.
Babies are masturbating.
Like as a young child, that's a soothing behavior, right?
And so sometimes you'll see your child doing it, you don't wanna shame them, right?
Because that's already setting up that stage of shame.
So sort of a lot being like, okay, that's fine that you're doing that, but maybe do that in private.
And that's something that you do in private.
But I think it's really important to have these conversations.
And it's uncomfortable.
It's gonna be uncomfortable.
I know that it's gonna be uncomfortable, but like we have a duty because they're not gonna learn it at school in the right way, or enough in school.
Yeah, so I completely agree with what they said.
So it's really interesting because the number one question, so when we started working with gamers, what happened very quickly is parents started reaching out and they're like, hey, I have a son who's got this problem, usually a son, sometimes a daughter, 70, 30.
And how do I talk to them?
So we actually started doing a study in 2020 or 2021, where we started developing different kinds of techniques and measuring what worked best.
So now we have four years of data.
A lot of those findings went into the book about how to raise a healthy gamer, which is actually all about conversational techniques for parents about how to talk to their kids.
So for four years, here are the biggest takeaways.
So that book is like, it's conversational techniques about video game addiction, but we find that this works really well for pornography too.
So the first is like Dr.
Malik said, multiple conversations.
So the first mistake that parents make is that they think that they have to get it all in in one conversation.
The sex talk, not that we all heard about.
No, it's lots of them.
Second thing, start earlier than you think you need to.
So one of the biggest principles that we learn in medicine is that you don't have end of life conversations when someone is dying.
You have to have the conversation before it's an issue.
So I think we were talking about, you said what, 64 % of people get exposed to pornography at the age of 11, right?
Accidentally. Still, but so that what that tells, parents think, oh, I like, I can push this off and wait until they're 14 or 15.
And of course, my beta is not going to watch it.
Oh, he's good, he's so good, not my beta.
Those bad kids, right?
Yeah, right? No, not at all.
Yeah, and I noticed you said you talked to your kids about sex, have you talked to them about porn?
Yeah, my older one.
Nice, good job. Thank you.
Your beta is going to be so good.
So I think it's going to be multiple conversations.
Start earlier than you need to.
And then there are a couple of really nice techniques that you can use.
So the first is asking open ended questions and not about do you watch porn?
It can start with, hey, are you familiar with what pornography is?
Do you know what it is?
What do you understand about pornography?
Another really good evidence -based technique which has been shown to be effective for talking about drugs is do you have friends who watch porn?
Do you have friends?
Do you know people or kids in your school watching this?
Yes or no, what do you think about that?
So oftentimes you don't want to ask the kid directly.
You want to ask about what's happening around you.
And then you can ask them, what do you think about that?
Do you have questions?
So make yourself a resource and signal to them that, hey, we can have this conversation.
And it's preparing them for the world, really.
It's giving them the tools to be able to manage situations that will come up.
Because sex is not easy and they're going to be in difficult moments.
And if they haven't been prepared, they're going to know better how to respond to those moments.
If they're watching that pornography though, the type that's available on those Tube streaming sites, do you believe that it will cause or lead to a rise in violence between men and women?
Because when I look at some of the statistics around this, nearly one in three porn videos contains physical violence.
Almost 90 % of the most famous porn scenes are violent scenes.
18 to 21 year olds, out of 18 to 21 year olds, 79 % had seen pornography involving sexual violence when they were children.
And almost 50 % of young people say girls expect sex to involve physical aggression, such as airway restriction.
And according to a study in 2024, of 18 to 35 year olds, they found that 57 % of young people aged from 18 to 35 had been strangled themselves during sex.
And 51 % had been strangled at least once during sex.
And my last stat on this is, the BBC revealed that 38 % of women under the age of 40 have experienced unwanted slapping, choking and gagging during consensual sex.
And 42 % of these women said they felt pressured or coerced into doing it.
So we can allow people to watch pornography, but is there not a risk that at a very young age, at the age of 11, we're gonna learn that sex is a violent act and that's gonna make us more violent?
Gonna start with you, Reena.
Yeah, this is a really important discussion.
And I think, you know, I actually spoke to Debbie Herbanek, who leads a lot of the studies on strangulation.
And so basically what they found is that very commonly, young people, college age students are having strangulation or during intercourse or during four planets become so common that it's almost like kissing, right?
Like this is something that is so common and often consent is not being discussed or it's like, hey, can I do this?
Yeah, it's all right.
But it's not like a real discussion.
And as you guys all know, and especially asphyxiation can lead to loss of oxygen to the brain and sort of a whole host of things.
And so I think ultimately that is a concern for sure in terms of, you know, we have ratings in movies for a reason, right?
Like we don't show our kids like The Boys, for example, on Netflix, right?
Because it's very violent.
And so similarly, we would like to have ratings on pornography and they shouldn't have access to it, but sometimes they see it.
Now, yeah, that is a concern.
I don't know exactly how to rectify that.
Maybe you have some thoughts.
Is that because we want it though?
Earlier on you said a porn is there because we want it.
So I'm thinking isn't strangulation important because that's the type of porn that people want?
So there is, you know, some people who drive pleasure from, you know, from a temporary occlusion of breath, right?
And so there is some people who enjoy that erotically, but that doesn't mean that that's universal.
And again, it's fantasy.
So just because you watch something on pornography doesn't mean that you should be doing it.
It's a fantasy. It's not real life.
And that's hopefully a controlled, safe situation where they're producing that pornography.
But I think it's very important when we're starting to talk about sexual violence towards women that we understand that that doesn't come from porn, that existed long before porn, sexual violence towards women is a systemic problem we have in our society.
And we all know that the most dangerous place for a woman is her own home.
It's her own husband or her boyfriend or her relatives around her, et cetera.
So the way I see it, porn reflects the values we have in our society.
I think I see porn a bit as a mirror of many of the values in our society amongst them, sexual violence towards women.
But then it's also true, obviously, that nowadays as porn has become more popular, we're getting into a bigger problem, right?
Where their attitudes are also provoked by what they are seeing.
So now it's not that easy anymore to say that porn is just a reflection because obviously they also learn from what they see and then they go into their own lives and they try to reproduce what they have learned online.
And that's - In that case then, if I watch violent pornography, when I meet my partner at 15, 16, 18, 21, I'm gonna have this expectation that pornography looks, I'm gonna think sex has to be performed in this way where I choke them, I hit them, I spit or whatever, because that's the only sexual education I've
had and I got it from Twitter, for example.
So in that case, it will lead to sexual violence, unwanted sexual violence - Well, not necessarily, it will lead to that.
It might lead to a curiosity of trying it out.
Because 42 % of women said that they have been, felt they were pressured or coerced into slapping, choking or being gagged.
Yeah, and I think many women also feel coerced just to have regular sex many times in their own marriages.
What do you think, Dr.
K? So many thoughts and I agree that this is a very important discussion.
So I was kind of curious about this because I've noticed there's this rise in asphyxiation.
So the first question that I asked is, why are people doing this?
So what I found is, once again, not randomized controlled trials that we're gonna take 100 people, split them into two groups and you're gonna - And so the first thing is the physiology is actually fascinating.
So I know this is gonna sound random.
We don't really know exactly what's going on.
So it's really interesting because if you look at states of meditation, so these are states of bliss.
So something changes in our brain when we're in a meditative state.
And what the hell does that have to do with asphyxiation?
So one of the most common trends of esoteric and deeply spiritual meditation practices are a very low respiratory rate.
So one practice that I did had a respiratory rate of one breath every eight minutes.
So that's like the regular respiratory rate is 13 to 14 times a minute.
So what we know is that when the brain runs out of oxygen, as long as we don't damage it, and that's the big problem with asphyxiation is that there's no consent, there's no preparation, people feel coerced into it.
What we know in meditation is that a high CO2 level and a low O2 level cause alterations in the brain that will probably lead to something like a psychedelic experience, a blissful experience, things like that.
So when we're talking about asphyxiation, something is going on in the brain where we're altering the state of consciousness, we're cutting off airflow to the brain, it can be lethal, it can be damaging, permanently damaging, and something can change in the brain that will enhance the experience of sexuality
that people have. So somewhere along the way people got into this idea.
I think the other basic trend that we're seeing is that we're getting sexually desensitized.
So if you look at, this is not just sexual, but like if you look at pornography, what tends to happen is what I find arousing will drift over time.
So I need to watch more and more hardcore porn to get the same level of arousal.
So there's also something that shows, there's studies that show that if you're vulnerable to an addiction, you're also vulnerable to risk taking behavior.
So when you engage in risk, what happens is like, I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but I had a patient once who was working in a jail and he was telling me about when he commits a crime.
And what he loved, he has really bad ADHD.
And what he loves about committing a crime is he is completely dialed in.
Because of the risk, he has a survival reason to pay attention to every single detail.
He is so focused on the task.
And we know that things like flow states involve an intense amount of focus.
And so when we're taking a risk, it's activating our dopamine way more.
We feel, when I've talked to patients who engage in this kind of behavior, they feel the most alive because of the danger.
So there's a lot of stuff that is being activated if it's done in a healthy way.
Now there's all kinds of unhealthy stuff going on.
I think the statistics kind of speak for themselves.
Like my gut check is that while everyone, it doesn't necessarily increase the risk for everyone, I think we're seeing the intersectionality of a couple of things.
So the first thing is that men are angry.
So we have incels, we have school shooters.
Men are resentful towards women.
So I think part of the reason we're seeing this violence against women in the pornography is because there's an angry incel who's home alone who doesn't believe they're ever gonna have sex, believes that women are gatekeeping this.
And so the masculine, predatory, systemic, I'm gonna teach this woman a lesson.
She doesn't get to say no to me.
So these kinds of feelings are being, someone has figured out on a tube site that if I give men this fantasy, they are gonna watch it more and more.
And this is what we see, punish fucking of women.
We see punish fucking on women all the time.
I'm gonna destroy you.
I'm gonna, banging and smashing and...
But you're saying that's a social problem, not a porn industry problem.
Well, so I think what the porn industry is doing, yeah, the porn industry is figuring out.
This is what all technologies do.
The machine learning is figuring out.
Machine learning is figuring it out.
So as you cited some statistic about sexual activity, like more virgins than ever before, more sexual frustration than ever before, more frustration with life than ever before.
And so let's give you this extreme thing that's checking a couple of different boxes.
But interesting, within this, I heard something, which is you basically have described soft, cool pornography as a gateway drug to hardcore pornography because the brain gets desensitized.
It looks for a bigger kick like it was heroin or something else.
You need a bigger, more extreme experience to get the same high.
So if we start people on erotic porn, the broccoli, they're eventually gonna get to the cookie.
That's a great assumption.
I think it's different because I think the desensitization, it's different circuits of the brain.
There's a patience to it.
There's an emotional component to it.
So I don't think, I think you're right that if we talk about squeezing out dopamine, could it be a gateway drug?
Absolutely. But part of the reason that in this moment, I think it could be part of the solution is erotic is moving away from dopamine.
Erotic is not about the orgasm.
The dopamine is the orgasm.
Erotic is about everything else except for the organism.
So even when I'm working with patients who have unhealthy relationships with sexuality, the point is let's move away from orgasm.
Let's recognize that the sexual act and speaking of the orgasm gap, if you're a dude, you can have sex and not have an orgasm and it can still be a positive experience.
And this kind of goes back to the sexual violence.
What really scares me is that as people watch this stuff for whatever reason, what's going to happen is they are gonna start to think and I've seen this a lot recently, it's amazing how much this has spiked, how normalized this has become.
Oh, I thought women liked it.
This is what I'm supposed to do, right?
And then you feel coercion from the side of women.
I think it's interesting, right?
I wouldn't be surprised if, I wouldn't be surprised and this is a bias in the literature.
We ask, do you feel women as a woman, do you feel coerced into doing this?
I don't think we ever ask men, do you feel pressured into doing this?
We don't even ask men what they feel coerced.
Because they're not that many masculine scripts either of having sex.
There's basically one.
That's a great point.
And it's the penetrative sex machine.
That's the script we are being sold.
That must be a reflection of the demand.
Well, I think it's a reflection of who's making the content and who's been making even traditional media, right?
Like movies where you see how people have intimate acts even though they're not showing the act, right?
It's always penis and vagina within minutes, the female orgasms and that's it, right?
That's the whole thing.
That's not real life.
And it's been made by men.
I think it's this two -way dance really.
So I think there's a certain demand that exists because of whatever's going on in the world.
And then we meet that demand with conversation, which enhances sometimes the demand for that content or subject.
And it's this kind of two -way dance where there's more content about it, so the demand increases and people get more interested in it and all sees rise, you know?
Yeah, absolutely. So I think that that's exactly what's going on here.
There's some preset demand, but right now the problem is that the only people who are fulfilling that demand are making highly processed, calorically dense, orgasm masturbation focused pornography.
And we even see this in like other dimensions.
Like if you look at literature right now, you know, the fantasy genre has an injection of female authors.
So fantasy has changed completely in the last 10 or 15 years.
YA has changed completely in the last 10 or 15 years.
I think maybe what we need is dudes writing romance novels.
And consumers, they always have power.
Remember that people who are watching porn, they are part of this industry.
They are voting with their attention, their time, their clicks online, hopefully with their money because everybody should pay for their porn because porn should not be out there for free for anyone.
But it's, people are working in this.
They are, you know, they have lives.
They have kids, they have to pay their rent, the food on the table, their schools, et cetera.
We have to respect the work of those people.
Sorry, I couldn't help but laugh.
I just realized, you said porn shouldn't be free.
We live in a world where food is not a human right.
Water is not a human right.
Healthcare is not a human right.
But porn is free for everybody.
Is porn free? Because it's behind a different advertising.
It's just an advertising model, which means you are the product.
Like, so if you're consuming adverts, you're basically paying with your attention.
It's just a different currency we're paying with.
There's no porn that's free if you think about it.
Fair enough. I mean, you're paying with your attention either way.
You're looking at an advert beforehand.
You're scrolling past a display advert on the right hand side of the page or even on Twitter.
If you're on Twitter, you're consuming ads when you stumble across porn.
It's a different advertising model.
But not the right people are getting the money.
The people making the content you need.
Exactly. It's the dealers who are getting it.
When you look at OnlyFans, interestingly, 6 .6 billion they made this year, and about five billion of that went to the creators.
And that's, you know, OnlyFans has been a real phenomenon in culture of last couple years.
I mean, if we look at the porn industry, so it changed a lot.
I've been in this industry now for 20 years, when I started, you know, there was sites online, pay sites, tubes didn't exist, et cetera.
And then when OnlyFans came around and when they become big in the pandemic, they changed again the rules for this industry a bit.
And I do think that it's better that the people who are making it are receiving their, you know, customers directly, et cetera.
And that they can make decisions for themselves.
I think it's a good part of the industry that it works that way.
NoFap, a term I only came across a couple of weeks ago.
This idea of NoFap, which is I believe, and you clearly know much more about this than I do Dr.
K, but I believe the term is, it's proposing a solution to the pornography challenge that some people have where you completely abstain from watching pornography and all masturbating at all.
Rina, if I recall, and I don't want to mischaracterize your opinion here, but I think when we spoke the first time on the podcast, you made the case that masturbation does have positive impacts.
So what is your view on this idea of NoFap?
Yeah, so I think the movement, so the idea of retaining from, or abstaining from masturbation or watching pornography is a very individual one and it may have benefits for some people in terms of they may, because if they're using these things in a negative way, abstaining from them may allow them to
have more control over other portions of their life.
But a lot of people will misinform people and say, oh, you're gonna have a higher testosterone, you're gonna have all these physiologic changes, which have not been born out in literature.
There's like a very small study looking at men who abstained from ejaculation for 21 days that saw a very small minute increase in testosterone.
I was like 10 guys.
So it's not generalized, well, it's never been repeated.
And testosterone varies as it is, quite significantly over days and throughout the day and one day to the next.
So ultimately there's no evidence to support the fact that abstaining from anything like masturbation is actually gonna have a benefit.
More likely than not, either you're gonna have a nocturnal emission or your body's gonna absorb that semen.
So it doesn't really change what's going on physiologically.
Is there an impact on fertility, if I masturbate or don't masturbate?
Yes, so fertility, we do see that if you abstain for about five days, up to five days, you're gonna see some improvement in the semen volume potentially and also some characteristics of the sperm.
But above and beyond that, you start seeing DNA damage.
And so that can actually be negative if you abstain for too long.
So the sperm are effectively dying in the - Well, you're seeing the commutation.
So they're not as effective.
They're not gonna die necessarily, but they're not gonna create a healthy fetus or embryo.
No, it's okay, no fun.
That's fascinating and really interesting.
So a couple of things to understand.
So there are a lot of traditions that abstain from sexual activity.
I think we don't study those traditions very well.
And I think the key thing to understand, I personally think that celibacy and abstinence from sexual activity can be incredibly powerful.
And so I think part of the, we have to remember, right?
So if we don't have any evidence for something, why do so many people believe it?
So some of it is there's a lot of bad information out there, but people, what happens on the nofap community is that people are having some experiences and they're saying, this kind of thing changed my life.
And there's so many layers to that.
So the first is that I think nofap is kind of a way to wrestle with any kind of behavioral control.
So if we look at like people who are addicted to pornography, we talk about all of these negative impacts of this cycle of I don't have anything to do anything today.
So I'm going to jerk off and then I have no meaning, no purpose, no dopamine.
So I'm just like stuck in the cycle.
So they want to break the cycle and they just pick one thing.
And I think just challenging yourself from a self -control perspective, I completely agree with Dr.
Whatmolloch says, there may not be a physiological thing going on here, but just challenging yourself and saying, hey, like this one thing messes up my relationships, messes up my dopamine, messes up my purpose and my motivation.
I'm going to take control of this and it'll change my life.
So I think if you look at it from an isolated stance of masturbation, it may not have much of an effect.
We'll talk about the exception to that rule in a second in the spiritual traditions.
But I think that a lot of people are just using it as a vehicle to come to terms with something challenging in their life.
And they're like, they're making a commitment, right?
I'm going to do this thing.
And the benefit comes from that, maybe not any physiological thing.
You know, all the stuff about testosterone and stuff, completely agree.
I don't think that there's a clear thing there, but if you look at some of the meditative traditions, one of the really common things, and this is really fascinating because this is true of meditative or religious traditions all over the world.
So you'll see celibacy is a part of some of the Abrahamic religions.
It's part of some of the karmic religions from the East.
So human beings at some point figured out that abstaining from sexual activity can have different kinds of impacts in the organism.
So a couple of things that it does is it reduces our thoughts of lust, if we do it the right way.
And we'll get to a couple of specific examples of what the NoFap community doesn't understand.
So when I deprive myself of a particular thing, I sometimes reduce that behavioral reinforcement.
So if I look at someone who's addicted to alcohol, when they stop drinking alcohol at the very beginning, their desire will increase.
But then 10 years later, they don't even think about it.
So if you are someone who is thinking about sex constantly and you stop engaging in sexual perceptions, so remember the thoughts in our brain come from what we perceive.
This is why advertising is a thing, because an advertiser knows, if I can show you this thing, you will think about it.
Now, if I'm fapping and watching pornography, I'm getting this perceptual input, which is then creating thoughts in my head.
Now I'm thinking about this stuff instead of thinking about something else.
So there's that layer of things too.
When I cut something off from my perception, when I break up with someone, why do I block them?
Because if I watch their social media, if I get texts from them, that's gonna enter my perception and control my thoughts.
So they can also use it as a benefit of like thought control if I stop looking at this stuff.
This has also been hijacked by generally speaking, patriarchal structures for like, there's a particular religious sect of Hinduism where the priests are like, I'm never gonna see a woman.
No women are allowed in the house if I'm gonna come visit your house.
So this gets turned into some weird things.
So NOFAP gives us an opportunity for self -control.
It gives us a chance to reduce our sensory input, which reduces our thoughts.
And then there's also these meditative traditions which say that achieving esoteric spiritual experiences, which is a lot of what the NOFAP community talks about, like they become slightly different human beings, celibacy is a part of that.
Now the key thing about the meditative traditions is that they're not taking advice from randos on the internet.
So I'll give you all just one really simple example.
When you do esoteric meditations, spirituality, celibacy kind of stuff, it's usually accompanied in the Hindu tradition or Buddhist tradition with certain yoga postures.
And one example of this is something called Siddhasan.
Siddhasan is a depths pose.
And literally what you do is in this pose, you place the heel of your right foot usually up against your perineum.
So you put pressure on the area between your anus and your scrotum if you're a man.
It's a slightly different location if you're a woman.
And then what that actually does from anatomy, I'm sure you know this better than I, correct me if I'm wrong, is that we know that the blood supply to the scrotum passes through that, right?
It's on the underside.
It's like in that pelvic floor region.
So one of the really interesting things that I remember learning from a yogi who was a medical doctor is that when we compress blood flow through the testes, like if you have gently compressed blood flow that increases over time, you're gonna get less blood flow to the testes.
You may get some kind of reduction in testosterone production and semen production or whatever.
So there may be some physiological things that people do when they're normally like try to be celibate that allow it to be healthy in a good way.
So I think kind of the key takeaway don't disagree with anything that Dr.
Mollick said. I think you've gotta remember that NOFAP is not a surefire solution to fix all your problems.
And at the same time, some people have positive experiences.
Also Dr. Mollick has been emphasizing this point of it's not the same for everybody.
And we know that there are a couple of things working with this community quite a bit.
You know, there are a couple of things that happen about self -control, challenging yourself, setting a goal, creating purpose in your life, changing what your sensory inputs are.
So you're not thirsty all day long and thinking about being horny and all this kind of stuff.
Like sometimes you gotta kind of cut it out of your life.
And so it's almost like this cold turkey kind of approach which can sometimes work for nicotine, can sometimes work for things like sex.
But I think like your mileage may vary and we don't really know exactly what's going on.
Yeah, I think I'll add, I think the problem I have with it to some degree is when people are white knuckling it, right?
They're really, and they're getting peer pressured into it.
Like you gotta stop, right?
And so then they're really trying hard not to ejaculate.
And so they're tensing up their pelvic floor muscles.
They're developing problems because they're tensing up their pelvic floor.
They're developing dysfunctions.
They're getting pain with ejaculation.
They're getting pain with erections.
Or they get so much shame when they have a nocturnal emission, for example.
A nocturnal emission is a nighttime ejaculation.
Exactly. So they're getting so shamed by the community because they've failed, which is completely out of their physiologic control.
Like you're gonna have a nocturnal emission if your body wants to have one.
There's nothing you can do about it.
So, you know, I think ultimately there is a lot of shame and peer pressure that can sometimes create harm in these situations.
Now, if you're using it in the way Dr.
K describes, like that's fine.
If you're deriving benefit from it, I have no problem.
But I do take issue with the people who are harming themselves because they're getting a lot of pressure from the group.
If I can jump in for a second.
So I wanna emphasize this point too.
So this is really weird, but people are white knuckling it.
They may be making their addiction actually worse.
So there's a really interesting principle in addiction where if I'm white knuckling something, like, so like, let's use the example of like opioid addiction, right?
So when I'm working with an opioid addict, at the very beginning, what they have is like a psychological craving.
Like I wanna have an opiate so that I feel better.
I'm mentally, I feel better, I feel euphoria.
And then if I white knuckle it, what happens is things start to get worse.
Then I start to go into withdrawal.
And then my body is like, now I'm going to opioid withdrawal.
So instead of euphoria, now I start to feel pain all over my body.
And as I feel pain all over my body, then finally what happens is I crack.
And then I use opioids.
And then something really interesting happens.
The body learns what it has to do to you to make you use opioids again.
So when you white knuckle and actually crack at the end, what we find is that the body jumps straight to level 10, right?
So it's kind of like, we see this also with like kids and devices.
Mommy, daddy, can I have an iPad?
No. And then they're like, mommy, daddy, please no.
And then they start crying, then they start throwing a temper tantrum.
If you give them the iPad, when they throw a temper tantrum, that encourages them to throw a temper tantrum.
And we see that internally, biologically, physiologically, where if you resist an addiction and then you cave at the end, the body is like, hey, there's no point messing around with the early stages.
Let's just go to hard withdrawal way faster.
So I think it can be so harmful when people are white knuckling it.
They don't realize that every time they fail, sometimes what they're actually doing is training their brain to punish them way harder so their brain can get the dopamine that it wants.
You talk about pornography being a substitute for relationships in society.
Okay. Have you spoken about that?
I don't want to misfracturize your opinion.
I've got a quote here.
Yeah, yeah. But your experience has been that pornography usage is really just a powerful coping mechanism.
And it sort of scratches this evolutionary itch for relationships.
Yeah. Is it therefore not a bad thing for people?
I'm reflecting on the idea which we kind of addressed at the start, but also just what I see in the comments section, which is people really seem to hate dating apps and pornography, but they also seem to use them both.
And I just, as a podcast, we were really surprised the first time we had a dating app CEO on the show because I thought, oh, great episode.
We learned a lot about business and how they built the app.
And then I looked at the comments section and this group of people had shown up with like pitchforks and they were expressing their like desperation and they're feeling that these dating apps and pornography has very much ruined their lives.
And so I just want throwing that out there because it's a reflection of the comments that I see.
Yeah, no. So I didn't say, okay, they're trying to shut you.
I was just like, let's hear the rest.
So yeah, I think what, because once again, remember that the brain, every part of the brain, every neurotransmitter is involved in sexuality and relationships.
So what's happening is when we, this is the, what we see is that when we use technology to activate the brain, there are parts of the brain that don't know the difference.
The problem is that there are other parts of the brain that don't get activated.
So this is, this is going to get a little bit weird, but so if I think about like, you know, I'll give you all, let's just use the example of food.
So when I feel hungry, I can eat something that's calorically dense and that will satisfy my hunger, but the calorically dense food may not have nutrition.
It may not have micronutrients, it may not have fiber.
So when I replace something nutritious with something that tricks my body into thinking, oh, like now we're fine, that can be very damaging.
So one of the things that we see with pornography is that if we look at like, you know, being horny, why are human beings horny?
It's because if we weren't horny, we would never mate.
Like that's like, it's an evolutionary, it's not a bug, it's not a problem, it's a drive to help us succeed.
So then we have this thing called post -nut clarity, right?
Which is like, when we have post -nut clarity, our horniness kind of goes down and then it changes the way that we see the world.
So part of what we see a lot with like pornography as a substitute for relationships is first of all, we've evolved to have these parts of the brain that get activated, right?
Relationships are a healthy thing for us.
And now we figured out how to partially activate the brain through pornography.
This is getting worse with things like OnlyFans because now we develop a parasocial relationship.
There's usually not parasocial relationships with like, you know, adult film actresses or maybe there are, but now we have interaction.
I've seen more marriages ruined through OnlyFans than I have through pornography.
And I've seen a big spike in this recently because now it's not just a physical thing.
There's enough insecurity and physicality and problems in the bedroom.
Now there's an emotional relationship.
If pornography online didn't exist, would we have better romantic relationships in real life?
You've got an opinion, haven't you?
Yeah, we don't know.
Short answer is we don't know.
But even shorter answer is yeah, things are worse with pornography.
And here's what I look at, right?
So like, if we don't have RCTs, what else can we look at?
What's RCTs? Randomized control trials.
You know, what we can look at is global trends.
So what are we seeing?
What's the global trend in pornography and what's the global trend in relationships?
Now this isn't causality, there could be, there's all kinds of, I think one thing that I really appreciated is, you know, my co -guests have clearly showed how nuanced and multifactorial this issue is.
But generally speaking, people are watching way more porn and relationships are getting worse.
We have declining birth rates.
People are getting married later.
You know, there's, we're seeing a kind of global like zeitgeist problem between men and women.
And pornography is like correlated with those two things.
So in my mind, if I say, if I have to put an answer, if we removed all pornography from the world, would things get better?
I would say yes, but that's because the way pornography is right now and I think is, let me finish, I think I'm going to tee you up.
So I think it's because, and the reason removing it would be better is because it has gotten more toxic, right?
So as pornography becomes more harmful, as it morphs and transforms into something that is more damaging, removing it should make things better.
Which is inevitable because of how the brain works.
You said we get increasingly desensitized so we want more extreme.
So if you start here, you're eventually going to end up here regardless.
I would say for who would it be better or worse?
Because for me and my taste, it would probably be worse.
I think that people who are searching ideas, desires, fantasies, scripts outside the kind of heteronormative male dominant pornography that's out there, they have really had the benefit of what has happened during the last years on the internet.
Today, they have access to different role models.
They have access to different stories.
They have access to representation.
They have access to sex education that is not heteronormative and kind of, you know, in a heteronormative script, when it comes to sexual debute, et cetera, people always talk about that that is through penetrative sex.
But it's not necessarily true, is it?
What did we do before porn?
I mean, were we struggling in the bedroom before pornography existed?
I mean, I think people were more open about sexuality.
The way the frigidness around sexuality is a modern concept, right?
Like in ancient civilizations, you were watching people have sex.
It was in life, right?
Like it was - But it wasn't easily accessible in 15 seconds and extreme.
So we're saying we should come off, we should...
We have to mature, I think.
I think we are in a maturing process.
The porn online this way is still pretty new.
And we haven't talked about it much in, you know, general society.
So I think that this conversation that you are having now that you invited us to have a nuanced conversation, taking lots of time to talk about different aspects, that is exactly what we need.
Yeah, I agree. And I would just say, just back to your point, I think, you know, yes, we see the rise of all these things concurrently, but if we got rid of porn, would there be something else that people would be turning to, right?
Like it's chicken or the egg, right?
It's probably not the cause, it's multifactorial.
And so would people then turn to something else?
So would it be only fans instead of porn, right?
Would it be, I mean, only fans can be a variety of different things, right?
But it's now a live person that's communicating with someone else.
Or is it going to be AI robots that have sex with you, right?
Like are we going to turn to something else?
Gaming addiction or some other type of addiction, gambling or recreational drugs or alcohol or...
So it's really, you're saying it's more of just a symptom of a set of challenges in society that people are using it for the emotional regulation that you described, Dr.
K. Yeah. I think there's a little of both, right?
It's easily accessible, it's free.
I mean, your time is time, but like it is not costing you money.
So that is part of the issue.
But I'm saying I don't think it's, I think that there is a bigger problem and that people are using as a scapegoat to avoid this problem.
Just to kind of counterpoint to that, I don't think you'll disagree with what I'm about to say.
So the other thing that we know from addictions is that people have drugs of choice, right?
So to say that it would be completely replaced, I would disagree with, because I think that the way that pornography affects your brain is unique compared to video games.
And at the same time, we also see a lot of stuff to support.
I agree with Dr. Malik, is that like we're seeing a rise in video game addiction.
We're seeing a rise in social media addiction.
We're seeing a rise in pornography addiction.
And depending on your individual makeup, you may be vulnerable to pornography versus social media, right?
So when you need that parasocial relationship without the sexual component, maybe you get addicted to social media.
When you have that sexual component, maybe you get addicted to pornography.
And so I think it is, I do think it's like a pretty unique thing.
So if we just look at the physiology of sexuality and relationships, that's a pretty like, it's a dangerous, dangerous thing to hijack, because it's so like fundamental to like life in mating.
So, I think it's somewhat specific.
I don't think it, I think if we removed it, it would have some effect.
But I think what I'm hearing from my co guests is that, I think this is true of all technology.
It's not that, oh, we should ban it.
That's why I'm kind of reluctant when you ask that question, and I'm happy to say sure on balance, I'll say yes.
But I think the key thing to understand is that we're developing things as the human race without realizing what we're building.
We are developing, so the problem with pornography is almost like an issue of like, you know, when you introduce an invasive species to a new environment, there are no checks and balances.
So I think like there are parts of Australia, for example, where like they introduced rabbits, and rabbits have like just taken over the whole continent.
And so I think what's happened with pornography is we started letting people, arguably the wrong people, start building all of this pornography.
It's ripped through our society.
It's changed the way that now 40 something percent of women are coerced into asphyxiation in college.
Like what the fuck?
Right? Like this is insane.
Like how did we get here?
But it's only just the beginning.
You mentioned that virtual reality, AI, these new technologies.
One of the great things about these new technologies, specifically AI in large language models, is they can have a conversation with you.
And this is something in technology that we couldn't really do before in such a remarkably personalized way.
So you kind of combine these technologies.
You go, okay, I'll add in virtual reality.
Robotics is on the rise as well.
We now have these large language models that can communicate with you in whatever way they need to to make you feel whatever you need to feel.
And I look at that and go, the future's not bright as it relates to sex relationships and pornography.
People, you know, they did a study in 2020 with virtual reality, and they found, the researchers found in that study that virtual reality porn made people feel more desired, more flirted with, and more connected to the actress.
So the more immersive we make pornography, which is the direction of travel in the world generally, the more it's gonna be addictive, the more it's gonna feel like a better substitute than having a real relationship with a real person.
Yeah, I agree. I think it's, unless we develop some checks and balances and we prioritize relationships with other human beings as a society, we're gonna be in trouble.
So what do we do there?
Do we ban it? Do we ban virtual AI porn?
Because there's already websites now, there was three websites that I found that allowed you to make your own partner.
And they're calling this digisexuals, where you can pick their personality, you can pick their physical preferences, you can pick the sexual fantasy that they perform and that you want to see them perform.
And these are becoming increasingly popular.
And the great thing about these, according to the websites that make these sexual characters that you can make yourself, is it remembers all of your previous conversations.
So quote, it can improve communication and cater to what your desire is.
So it can really speak to what you want.
But it can't touch you.
It can't hug you, it can't kiss you.
But the robots can, those big sexual robots can.
So I know this is gonna sound crazy, but like, I think we look at the end of the human race and we look at things like climate change and nuclear war and maybe like some super bug that is resistant to all of our antibiotics.
Like there's a tiny, tiny chance that what's gonna end the human race is something like this.
And I know that's like kind of a bold statement to make, but like, let me just share with y 'all what I'm afraid of.
So what's going on is you're right, it's becoming more immersive.
And the whole problem with like technology and even the virtual world, what we see in video games, is that the immersive world is one that we prefer to the real world, right?
So if you kind of think about, let's say, OnlyFans versus a real relationship, OnlyFans like this person is financially invested to not piss me off.
Whereas I know this is very frustrating for a lot of dudes out there.
Turns out if you're in a real relationship with a woman, there's a human being who has thoughts and feelings and desires of her own.
I know it's tough, right?
And so like, what happens is we, in OnlyFans, like they're invested in making you happy.
And now what we're happening is AI girlfriends, that's just the start of it, man.
Like right now they can try to fulfill your desires.
Someone's gonna figure out that a random reinforcement schedule is better.
So if you want to create the most addictive virtual girlfriend, she's actually not gonna give you what you want.
Some of the time, she's gonna piss you off, she's gonna throw a temper tantrum.
That is gonna trick your brain into thinking this is a real relationship.
Which comes from gambling psychology, right?
Gambling psychology, right?
And so now what I'm gonna do is get more addicted to technology.
And this is why video games are addictive.
There's a really fascinating study where people were like, the reason video games are addictive is because of a denial of a reward.
So if you look at Fortnite, Fortnite is a game that has 100 players in arena.
There's one winner, which means you lose 99 % of the time.
But oh boy, if you're the winner that one time, the dopamine surge that you get is astronomical.
When we deny human beings rewards and then we give it to them, they're hooked.
This is gambling, this is also why we respect people sitting at this table because we've all worked hard.
What we did is not easy to do, that's why everyone values it.
Someone's gonna figure this out with AI girlfriends and then this is the thing they can't hug us, but they can.
So this is happening.
So this technology was actually developed in the early 2000s for medical reasons.
So when we were seeing clinics in remote parts of the world that would have these things called haptic feedback gloves.
So this was back when, if you look at like a doctor who was, this was specifically technology developed around detecting breast cancer.
So what happens is I put on a glove, I'm a doctor, and someone else puts on a glove somewhere else in the world and then they do a breast exam.
So they feel the breast, okay?
And then based on the lumps that you feel, whatever their glove feels, I'm wearing a glove that makes me feel the same things.
So we have some of these sexually assistive devices like for both men and women now.
When we combine haptic feedback and they start throwing temper tantrums, I really think it could be like, there's this tiny chance, it's just the end of the human race.
Because we're not like, why bother with another human?
When I can get touch and I can get activated.
And you can get irritated every so often.
Every so often, which makes it so much sweeter, right?
Makeup sex is great.
The end of the human race.
Scary. I don't wanna go there.
I mean, I think we have to actively work at it, right?
Like we have to teach our children that like relationships are hard and worth it.
And, you know, like, it's hard though.
It's really hard. But I think, yeah, I think it's gonna be a challenge and we have to have some checks and balances.
And we on our own have to work in our own little microcosm to try to continually have the younger generation see the value of relationships and procreation and all those things.
Because that's, you know, on the decline.
Don't people in life typically just go for the path of least resistance, when left to their own devices?
You know, I was thinking as you're speaking about when I was in primary school, they came in and taught me about your five a day.
So like, you meant I have like five fruit and vegetables a day or whatever.
But then if they, they tell you that information, but then they put you in a food environment where every shop is selling me candy and you know, processed foods because it's more nutritious.
My brain spikes more.
There's no, it doesn't matter if what you told me, it doesn't matter if I know five fruit and vegetable, but we still have like this obesity crisis.
And I think if you went up to the average American and said, what food is healthy?
I think a good proportion of them would be able to say what's healthy and what's not.
But then if you ask them what they consume, it's a very different answer, irrespective of pricing, because your brain, especially in a more stressed world than ever before is really driving you.
So I'm picking up the soda, I'm picking up.
And I think about the same in pornography.
We can know something is not good for us.
But if it's readily available and it's low friction to access it, the incentives are gonna win out over the long term.
And I think about this in company culture, I say to people all the time, I say, you know, as a CEO, you can stand there and tell your group of people how you want the team to behave.
But it's almost, it's really naive to assume over any long, long period of time that people will act outside of their incentives.
So you can say, I want you guys to alter innovate, but if your job description is literally rewarding you to do your current job, and your bonuses are rewarding you to do your current job, you're gonna do your current job, regardless of what the CEO is barking at you.
I think about the same in porn, like we can't just rely on telling people that it's bad.
People do do things for delayed gratification, right?
We went to medical school, there is a lot of delayed gratification in medical school.
You're a CEO, you're a producer.
Like these are not easy things to start, right?
And you do it because you know, there's potential reward at the end of it.
So there is, you know, human psychology.
I'm sure Dr. K can talk more about that, like where you can foster this appreciation for delayed gratification.
And also be good food, you know, when you eat well, when you eat green, et cetera, you feel much better and that gives you energy and then you wanna keep going.
The stats just, the obesity stats are just horrifying.
In the U .S. in particular, it's a country where, you know.
Education, education, education.
We tried that, you know, in school, I was told that vegetables are good and this is good, but then obesity stats, since the time I was in school, have just gone in one direction still.
But maybe it's about the practice, we have to learn, you know, how to get into the right practice of things.
And this is a question really about, is it the individual that has to find this discipline or this sort of self control, or at social level, do we need to put things in place to make the environment easier to operate in?
So couple of thoughts.
The first, so the first is I think the answer to that question which we learned in medical school is there's never an either or, the answer is always both, it's always multifactorial.
So I think I'm with you that, so like when I think about like, you know, what is my life's work, it's, I work on the individual level.
So when you ask me should we ban something, it's like, I don't know.
Because my thought is that we gotta save a couple people.
The good news about the human race dying out is that, you know, if a couple people continue to have sex with each other, then all the people who are vulnerable to AI relationships will actually not procreate and humanity will survive.
So maybe we're okay.
But I think that the other thing you have to keep in mind, so this is maybe a little bit more of a spiritual event.
So I'm with you that there's an obesity crisis.
I'm with you that human beings, it's kinda like we treat human beings like the lowest common denominator, right?
We're like, oh, human beings, if we give them broccoli and cookies, like they're gonna eat cookies.
But I think that there are two things.
The first thing is that like Dr.
Malek said, you know, I think even if we look at this podcast, like the people who are watching this are not interested in eating cookies.
And there is an appetite, why have podcasts exploded?
Because people tried to educate kids in school and what we have organically, evolutionarily discovered is there is a different way to communicate information that creates behavioral change.
That's the first thing.
So we're seeing the counterbalancing force of obesity, like the whole world became obese because we had people making calorically dense food without an awareness of it.
But I also see the highest amount of like whole grain advertisement that I've ever seen before.
Now we know it's a problem and now humanity is fighting back.
The other thing, so this is what I think really separates human beings from animals.
And maybe this is an argument that a more competent biologist will say, I'm wrong here.
This is more of a spiritual perspective.
But I think human beings are the only species on the planet that may be able to run against our programming, right?
And you can argue that this is even a deeper level of programming, but like the whole point to being human, the cool thing about being human is my brain can drive me, like you said, in one direction.
But I can say, hey, even though my brain is driving me in this direction, I don't wanna go in that direction.
Human beings are, it's really interesting, right?
Because we're the ones that like, so I remember, you know, watching this TikTok or something about a vegan dog and the someone was like, oh yeah, you know, my dog is vegan, they don't even like food.
Let's do an experiment.
There's one piece of meat and one piece of some weird corn broccoli chowder, right?
Dogs sniffs both, has never had meat for the last two years and eats the meat.
So if we look at animals, like animals, it's not clear to me that animals are able to regulate their impulses in the way that human beings do.
Why have human beings dominated the planet?
It's because when we feel like having a cookie, we have broccoli.
When we feel like yelling at someone, we restrain ourselves.
And there may be some deeper biology evolutionary kind of thing going on there.
But I'd ask each and every one of you to look at your experience for a second, forget about biology.
When you have an impulse, does that impulse control you?
Or can you fight back?
I fight, right? We all fight, that's the human experience.
The human experience is fighting against our impulses every fucking day.
And then we try to learn, how can I get better at this?
Because what my tongue wants, I'm talking about calories, not sex for a second.
What my tongue wants is not, there's a part of me that says, this is not good for me in the long run.
This is delayed gratification.
How many of our impulses do you actually think we're winning the fight against?
Because I would argue that we're losing pretty much all of the fights against our impulses.
In fact, the fact that we're all sat here is probably us following our impulses.
The rise in social media usage is us being a slave to our impulses.
The rise in obesity globally is us failing, losing the fight to our impulses.
The rise in pornography is us losing our fight to our impulses.
The rise in gaming, gambling, alcohol, whatever, is us losing our fight with our impulses.
We're alcoholic people.
So this is gonna sound wild.
I think we're getting better at it.
So I know you're saying we're losing the war, right?
Human being self -control is increasing.
And the reason why?
We're losing the war right now, but the enemy is coming up with better and better weapons.
Technology is getting sophisticated.
Pornography is getting sophisticated.
Social media is getting sophisticated.
And yet the human race, in some ways, we're collapsing, but we're also operating in some ways at the best level that we ever have.
So we're getting outgunned, but I actually think human beings on the whole, what I see in the community, what's the top search?
How do I quit pornography?
So there's something happening on a humanity level where we're like, as human beings, we're like, we gotta start fighting back.
This podcast is a consequence of that.
This is human beings fighting back.
So are we losing the war?
Yeah, but I think we've been like, we got caught by surprise.
We got caught with our pants down, right?
Which may be a weird analogy in this context.
But, you know, so like I'm with you that there's a lot of reasons to be scared.
And also like the reason that people pay attention to me and Dr.
Malik and Erika is because we're fighting back, right?
That's why we're here.
Stephen, this is brilliant, man, because here you are and what are the questions you're asking us?
We're all screwed. We're doomed.
Isn't it all screwed?
Right, so you have become so sophisticated that everyone who's listening to us, you're pulling out the strongest messages of hope that the three of us can muster.
You're figuring out how to give people hope because you keep on asking these pessimistic, pessimistic, pessimistic questions.
So this is what it takes, man.
It takes like people who are like figuring out how this works.
Maybe you're controlling their impulses.
Who knows? No, no, I have to represent the opposite of whatever you say.
So if you say left, I'll say right.
Yeah, right. And so that's beautiful.
So think about it. When you were at school, did anyone ever tell you there's a conflict between broccoli and cookies?
No, they said eat broccoli.
So we've figured out as a human race that we need to represent both sides of the conflict to get the best out of a human being.
That's a critical principle for addiction treatment too.
You can't tell them it's good.
You have to weigh the good and the bad.
Is there any such thing as too much porn, Dr.
Reena? So I think it's really about how you feel about it.
So in all the data about problematic porn use, it's like people who feel bad about it.
Like they're like, oh, I really don't, I think I use too much.
Then you probably use too much, right?
But if you use it and you don't feel bad about it and you're still able to go to work and you're still able to maintain your relationships and have sex with your partner or your partners or whatever, then it's not a problem, right?
So I think it's really, it comes down to how you feel about it and usually you're right about it.
Usually if you feel like something's wrong and you're using too much, then probably abstaining or trying a different alternative may be beneficial.
So just to conclude then, if I made you prime minister, president of the United Kingdom, the world, let's say, and you had to put legislation in place to make our relationship with pornography healthier or to make it a net more positive force for society or impact on society, what exactly would you
do? Dr. Reena. This is a tough question.
So I think I would have some mandatory self -analysis of your porn use that everyone has to take every so often so that people can actually have to look at it with an objective, like not watching porn, but seeing like how many hours do you use it and how often are you using it?
And again, frequency is not always related to a problem, but it is one marker that we can measure.
And then maybe again, have a warning to them that this seems like a lot of use, are you still?
And if they had a certain marker of use, maybe are you finding that you're having difficulties in relationships and whatever?
And that would hopefully alert some red flags to people who may need some assistance.
And hopefully we'd have some sort of intervention for them.
What about you Dr. Kim?
Honestly, what I do is resign, the first thing I would do.
But if you're asking for like a single policy change, I can get behind one thing.
So I think the biggest thing that we need right now from a policy level is social and emotional skills training for all children.
I think we need to reevaluate what we teach in schools and what people actually need to learn today.
So school, when knowledge and information was not easily accessible, school was about learning information.
But I don't need to learn the capital of any state or country now because I can look it up.
So I think what we really need is social and emotional skills training.
There are also studies that show that this is very, very helpful for people.
So how do you regulate your emotions?
How do you form connections with other people?
These are the two biggest things that we need because our emotions, when they get out of whack, they're the birth of all addiction.
And media training.
So young people can understand what they actually are watching.
And that media is sending out messages to the world and that we are decoding those messages.
I think that is absolutely necessary.
But what I would do, I think porn should be behind a payment barrier.
For me, that's, I believe that that's the way it should be.
And better sexual education.
Better sexual education.
I would add that to the mandate.
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What's the most important thing that we should have talked about but we didn't talk about as it relates to the work that you do and what you've seen as it relates to sexual health, relationships, love, and dating?
I think what we didn't spend enough time on is how pornography changes our body images.
So I think there's a significant number of people, men interested in increasing penile length, women interested in maybe labioplasty or looking a certain way that they're often seeing on pornography.
And I think that creates a lot of dissatisfaction, a lot of shame, a lot of small penis anxiety is a real thing.
And it is very detrimental.
People are so focused on the size of their penis that they are now thinking about or ruminating about it, potentially doing harm to themselves to try to increase penile length.
And so I think that this is something we didn't talk about but that is another potential harm of seeing people who have chosen to be pornography actors who have on the high standard deviations of size, that's not normal, right?
And so they're not seeing normal anatomy.
And I think that's potentially harmful.
I agree partly, but then also I hear many people when they're talking about porn, they're saying porn creates unexpected kind of ideas of your bodies and et cetera.
But I'm a bit suspicious about this because honestly, look at fashion.
What is fashion doing?
I think it's worse.
I really think it's worse many times.
In porn, there are so many different people today, different body types, different ages, different everything that are being represented.
So I think that that statement might be from 10 years ago or something.
Where does that statement come from?
Just, I mean, we know that there is small penis anxiety.
We know that people are sure you can say my highest viewed video is about increasing penile length.
There's over 30 million views.
So it is clearly something that people are searching.
Now, is it from pornography 100 %?
No, not necessarily, but that's where they're seeing these very large organs is typically on pornography.
Yes, you can see a whole host of a variety of different types of people, but I think they're seeing it there and feeling inadequate.
But probably when it comes to men, there are less variety important than when it comes to women.
Erica, do you use large penises in your work?
I don't know how to say that.
Is part of your sort of...
Do your shoes stand by the size?
No, I do not. I look for people's personality.
That's what I'm after.
I'm looking for people who feel like real people.
I mean, beauty and energy and passion and chemistry, these sort of things.
But does the penis size matter?
No, to me, it doesn't matter.
But then if we're going to be 100 % honest, it's true that many of the performers have slightly bigger penises than what is considered average.
What's the average penis length?
It's about 5 .1 to 5 .5 inches erect.
And is there a gap in the perception there?
Do men think the average penis length is bigger?
Yeah, actually, both genders do.
So when you look at studies where people look at a penis and estimate the size, both genders tend to overestimate average penile length.
But they also are not really great at looking at a penis and telling the size.
So sometimes they'll see like a 5 .5 inch penis and they get six inches up to an inch in variability, basically, when you get on the above average sizes.
So there is, obviously, perception issues.
But ultimately, I think the people who tend to want to be...
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Who want to be performers who are male will generally have something they want to show off and they will think they have a larger penis.
What about the length of sex, though?
Is there disparities between how long we think sex should be and how often we think we should be having it, which causes a lot of dissatisfaction in relationships?
Yeah, absolutely. So the average time to ejaculation for a man is about five to six minutes.
The average time to orgasm for a woman during partnered intercourse is about 14 minutes.
So there's definitely a disparity there that needs to be addressed if you have average duration in your relationship, then the female partner needs to be prioritized so she can reach climax.
And that's not the end goal for everybody.
You can still have a great relationship and have a great experience without an orgasm.
But if you want both people to climax, you need to stimulate the female partner a little longer.
You're going to say something that...
Yes. What is she saying?
That's not the priority.
She looks at Eric and it's not.
I'm sorry, like my brain grew up on the internet and there's like a sub track that's running this whole time.
But so I think what I teach my patients is almost identical.
So if you look at the average sexual intercourse, like people don't realize it's three to seven minutes.
Even really fascinating is that speaking of misperceptions, about 50 % of women start...
don't want sex longer than 15 minutes.
So I didn't know what the average time to female and male orgasm was, but I know what people prefer.
And half of women, like they don't want, you know, if you watch like a two film or something, like sure, sometimes there's shorts and stuff, but there's also like, you know, porno is like 45 minutes of all kinds of stuff.
Like it's like three to seven minutes and women start complaining after 50 seconds.
So I see a lot of this, you know, this like body dysmorphia almost, it's like getting to that level in both men and women, unrealistic expectations about body, unrealistic expectations about performance.
That creates shame.
Once I feel shame, then I want to watch pornography.
Then, you know, I want to watch Dr.
Malik's video that has 30 million views or get pills to increase my penis size on the advertisers.
You know, so I think that there's just a lot of bad information out there.
So does this mean that we need to make pornography that is reflective of reality, i .e.
make it three to five minutes long for men and 14 minutes for women, but also, does it mean that we need to introduce pornography that's reflective of all body images?
Because I'm going to go back to this like broccoli cookie analogy.
So I don't think it has to be pornography.
So I had an interesting experience.
So like I was in Europe and I went to a co -ed sauna, right?
So like we don't have that here in the United States and the co -ed sauna was like mostly like older people.
So you see, like, you know, the majority of people there were like 60 plus.
So you see like, you know, a hundred naked bodies of like old men and women.
And it really puts things in perspective.
I think part of the problem is with things like fashion and things like pornography, we don't, you know, we just don't see what a normal naked body looks like.
So what's the only we see two kinds of naked bodies.
We see our own and then we see, you know, highly produced or highly selected.
We don't see normal naked.
But if I made a porn film that had reality in it, would anybody buy it?
Well, I think if you made a porn film...
Yeah, explain. No, that was so loud.
What are you talking about?
No, but the answer here is yes, I made a film with a couple who are 70 plus and it's very successful.
There's a very popular, older female.
I don't know her, but I've seen her on social media who's a porn actress and she's, you know, she's a normal looking person.
There's quite many, actually.
But why don't the industry make videos then of people with normal bodies and normal sized penises?
But those videos aren't the popular ones according to the data.
Not necessarily. If you don't want any streaming website and you click the popular button, what you'll see is idyllic bodies.
Now, if people were searching out the pornography you were saying, those would be the most popular because the companies would make more money from them.
I mean, there's so much content.
I think that that really lots of it is popular.
I mean, there's, you know, one of the things that they are doing on this site is that they are categorizing people by their primary features kind of.
So you can look for porn with bigger bodies, for example, and it's quite a popular category accident actually, but you can also look for tiny teens.
You can look for milfs.
You can look for cougars.
You, I mean, people, many people, they have kind of gotten away from what is kind of desire and connecting people and has gotten into this way of kind of having their favorite kind of people, their favorite kind of people.
Would your business be more or less successful if the bodies were reflective of society and the penises were reflective of society?
Would your business be more or less successful?
In my case, I don't think so.
I think we already show a great diversity of people.
Is it reflective of society?
100 % not. But who is?
Is Netflix reflective of society?
Is Vogue magazine reflective of society, et cetera?
I mean, I think that we do tend to look for beauty somehow, but beauty doesn't mean stereotyped, model liked people.
Yeah, just to chime in.
So I think I'd challenge your question just a little bit, because I think when you say like I'm I get what you're saying, but I think we can also see amateur porn is on the rise.
Yes. And if we look at when you say only fans made six point six billion, I think a big appeal in only fans is that you have much more normal looking people.
And so when we look at the success of a business or not, I think there's also like a varied market.
So people are looking for different things.
And I think we're seeing that there like even as porn becomes highly overly produced and stuff, there's kind of this like almost paradoxical upswing in amateur content in things like only fans, where you have someone who really is closer to the girl next door when we're talking about a heteronormative
sort of situation. And I think we also see that in we see that trend all over the place.
Right. So as we get short form content, we're also seeing an explosion in podcasts.
So I think there's a variable consumer there.
I was looking, as you were speaking, at the top ten earners on Onlyfans.
And I have to say, none of them look like they reflect the average person.
Yeah. So the top ten earners won't.
Top 20? No, no, no, you can't look at the top.
You have to look at what percentage of the six billion comes from the top ten earners and what percentage comes from other people.
I can't. So so as only fans of the kind of thing where it's like, you know, the majority of the revenue is earned by the top ten earners.
Or is it this kind of thing where the top ten earners get maybe 50 percent?
But then 50 percent is like a pretty wide variety.
That's the statistic you need to look at.
I can tell you that what we do see is that people search a lot on our sites for real sex.
It's a concept that people are really looking for.
I also looked at Pornhub.
This is the first time I've gone on Pornhub at work.
Just to see again that the most viewed porn stars on Pornhub.
And it's the same reflection.
None of them look like the average person.
You know, I'm looking at the heterosexuals.
I'm looking at women and men, and they all look like mannequins, all 30 of them.
Well, I think you and your team need to do more research.
You can't accept an answer to face values.
OK, closing statements, closing thoughts.
We've talked about it a lot today, so I want to go clockwise, starting with Dr.
Reena Malik. What are your closing thoughts and statements?
The wide variety of people that would have clicked on this video for the wide variety of reasons, whether they're parents, whether they're the young men that struggle that you often spend your time dealing with Dr.
Kay. What are your closing thoughts for them?
But also we have a lot of people that are in government that listen, and we only found that out because sometimes they reach out to us.
Doctors reach out to us.
People in parliament, in Congress, etc., reach out to us.
So what would your statement be to all of those people?
My closing thoughts are invest in education about your body and about sex.
So whether that means learning what your anatomy is and learning what real sex is.
And I think that is of paramount importance to having a successful relationship with yourself and your partners that you can enjoy sex and use pornography for curiosity and not for boredom.
Yeah, I think remember that your body is learning all the time and that we think about pornography in its negative effect, which it can have a negative effect.
So I'd start with really understanding what pornography is doing for you.
What's the root of your relationship with it?
And also recognize that I really do think after this conversation that pornography can be a force for good.
And many of the reasons that you may be watching it, if you transition to erotic film, if you use it in a sexual relationship, like it doesn't have to be a bad thing.
It's the way that you relate to it.
And really think about how you can utilize it in a healthier way.
And if you are a consumer, think about what you are watching.
See if there's an about page.
Can you learn anything about that company, about these directors, producers, performers?
Can you watch them behind the scene footage, something that makes you feel that you align with the values of the people who are creating it?
Because not all porn is monolithic.
There is many different kinds out there and there's many great people working in this industry to spread the sex positivity and a better acceptance of our desires, fantasies, sexual lives who are interested in the erotic aspects of sexuality.
I also think it's worth saying we've talked widely about the subject of pornography.
But one of the things that I really did come to believe and I saw when there was a call to ban OnlyFans was that OnlyFans as a website and as a platform is allowing porn stars and adult actresses and actors to have a safer way to make their money and to do their business.
And previously what you'd seen is there was much of the escorting industry which was much more of a dangerous industry have now moved over towards these platforms which do provide greater safety for a behavior that is going to happen irrespective of whether there's a ban in place or not.
We have a closing tradition on this podcast as you all know.
You might not know this.
No, I don't. Where The Last Guest leaves a question for the next guest and because The Last Guest was you I'm going to skip past it.
And I opened up the book to a question that's landed before that.
So I'm going to ask you all this question individually and I'd love to hear your answers.
What can you do to improve humanity and the life of all the people that are listening?
I think continue educating people and empowering people to know what their bodies are doing and how they can relate to the opposite sex if they're heterosexual in order to have a satisfying sex life.
It's not just an extracurricular activity.
It's something that we do that's a part of our innate biology and it's important and valuable.
Yeah. I mean, I think showing up tomorrow is like the most important thing.
Like not here. But like just, you know, if we think about improving humanity, like human decisions are made by those who show up.
So I think the most important thing that I can do is just showing up and continuing to do what I think is best.
The most important thing that all of us can do is just continue showing up.
The majority of the people that I work with in my community, the biggest problem they have is sometimes not showing up.
I would say connect with other people on a deep level.
Dare to have difficult conversations.
Dare to be wrong. Because I also think that we live now in a society where so many people are so afraid of being wrong, of saying something wrong, of that sometimes they don't even dare to connect on a deeper level with other people.
Your point, Erica, your answer about being OK to be wrong, I think is really, really important to a lot of the conversations we've had today.
Because most of the time people don't want to have these conversations because they're sort of ideologically attached to a certain position.
Typically the position that's associated with whatever their job is or their incentive structure.
And I think sometimes it's important to have these open, nuanced discussions like we've had today, because we can all start to learn a little bit about other people's worlds and bring down some of those sort of ideological wars that keep us imprisoned.
And all progress, I think, is happens when you have this sort of this conflict of ideas.
But with the purpose not of proving someone is wrong or you're more intelligent or whatever, but through the purpose and the lens of progress.
And that's why this conversation has been so enlightening to me, because I get to see a bunch of different worlds from a bunch of different perspectives and I can use that to form my own opinion on the subject of pornography.
And I will start by saying that my opinion of pornography has actually changed in this conversation because there was clearly parts of my understanding of pornography that were in the dark.
And those lights have been turned on.
So now I have a more contextual picture of the industry.
Thank you so much for your time today.
I really, really appreciate it.
It's as I said a second ago, it's super inspiring and super enlightening for me to get all of these perspectives and to use all of this new information to reform my own opinion on the subject matter.
And it's a much more naive sort of biased way.
So I really appreciate the time that you've all given us today.
And on behalf of all my audience as well, thank you so much.
Appreciate all of you.
Thank you. Thanks, Armin.
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