The Impact of Pornography on Society, Relationships, and Healing (Episode #48)

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Welcome to the human intimacy podcast, Dr. Kevin Skinner with my friend and colleague Marianne Michaelis. Marianne, how are you?

Good morning, Dr. Skinner. I am grateful to be here again today. I in preparing for the topic that we'll be talking about today, there's a lot of hard information that I know that we'll be discussing. And I noticed as I was preparing, I just kind of noticed a sinking feeling, a heavier feeling. And so I know that I'm coming in today with a little bit lower, bit of energy, a little bit of just preparation for a more difficult conversation perhaps today, but one that I think is so, so incredibly imperative.

You know, in the past we've talked about domestic violence. We've talked about a lot of challenging issues related to infidelity and sexual betrayal, the PTSD symptoms. Today we are going to be talking about pornography and its influence on our entire culture. We're going to do it through a few stories. The average age of a person exposed to Pornography is age 11. Marianne and I just want to share this concept with our listeners. There's individual who's age 11. What does 11 year old being exposed to pornography due to their mindset, how they see themselves, how they see other people and how they see society in general, just off, off the cuff. Marianne, what are your thoughts on that?

Well, if we're looking at a child who's 11 years old who's been exposed to pornography, the data shows that 63% of kids in the last week were on the Internet looking at something and they came across pornography accidentally. So we know first of all they probably weren't looking for it, they chanced upon it they may or may not have known what it was. They may or may not have been coming back because they had chanced upon it at some point. But what we're looking at, usually children developmentally, usually in between ages, I don't know, about 7 to 10 or so, they're usually in a latent stage where they're not really worried about sexuality. They're busy learning, playing, growing, and their sexuality is just beginning to develop. They're beginning that, you know, their bodies are changing and maturing and growing. And so a child who's ex, who's, you know, being exposed to pornography, what we learn is that 88% of pornography includes physical aggression, at least one act of physical aggression. So hitting, slapping, biting, choking.

So, so what, let me back up for a second. So 88% you're saying is related to physical violence of pornography that's being seen?

Yes, that is what this 11 year old child is seeing. And there's more. 76% of that violence children are seeing being inflicted from a male. So it's the male who is the aggressor who is inflicting the violence. And 97% of the time, women or females are the victims. And more disturbingly than all of this, 93% of the time, the responses that are depicted are of pleasure or of neutral to the violence. So an 11 year old is learning that I don't know anything about sex. My family's probably not really talking about it. But what I'm learning and seeing is that males are aggressors. Physical violence is part of sexual sexuality and that women like it. Women and girls really enjoy and like being bitten, being slapped, having their hair pulled. They enjoy sexual addiction, they enjoy sexual abuse. It's what an 11 year old is seeing and experiencing.

So let me, let's just pause and break that down for a second. So I'm going through a story here. An 11 year old is exposed again, that's the average age is exposed to something for the first time. When I first began in this career, I had individuals coming to my office saying that their first, first exposure to anything sexual was the JP Pennies catalog. And today when we use the word pornography, we're not talking about a JCPenney catalog. You see that going through a grocery store today. What they probably saw back then, now we're talking about an escalation of intensity. And I think that that's a very critical part because you're talking about a shift from what we originally may have been nudes in a Playboy or some kind of a magazine to full blown violence in what they're watching through the computer.

Yeah, let me add on to that. And I know this is heavy and uncomfortable. It might be for our listeners, but I think it's really important to also talk about. There's a genre of porn called snuff porn. And snuff porn is focused on murder, violence, abduction, rape, war, torture. That's mainstream. We also have mainstream racist porn that is specifically acting out against certain minorities. We also have animal porn, bestiality. These are mainstream, mainstream. And one of the other really big ones is, is incest porn. And so family relations. And one of the. Going back to our original converse, like that original question you asked, like, what is a child experiencing or seeing or, you know, what's going on for them when they see this? What we're finding is that one third to half of sexual abuse that children are experiencing is happening from child on child. So a child sees it, they're exposed to it, they're curious, they don't understand it, and then they re. We're finding that they're reenacting what they've seen.

So from a mental perspective, what I'm seeing or thinking is normal, so to speak. What this is, this is just normal sexuality. That's. You're saying it's mainstream. What does that even mean when you say it's mainstream? Does that mean that. That it's easily accessible? Do you mean that's what most people are looking at? What do you mean by mainstream?

So in 2020, there was a journalist named Nicholas Kristoff who read an article that was in the New York Times. It was called the Children of Pornhub. Pornhub is one of the main porn sites. And he told some stories of three individuals who had. They were teenage girls and they had sent their boyfriends some images that were uploaded onto pornhub. And he talked about the impacts that it had on these individuals. And because of this, Visa and MasterCard and several other large companies cut off the their services to Pornhub. And it launched a criminal investigation into Pornhub or Mind Geek, which was the parent company of Pornhub. And as a result of this, Pornhub had to take down 91% of its content because.

95%.

Sorry, 91%.

91%. Okay.

Over 10 million videos had to be taken down because of this. And after they'd taken those 10 million videos down, they found an additional additional 600,000 videos that were still. That were identified as being against the policies against these illegal. And we're talking about people watching child abuse, people watching, paying to watch children being abused online or animals abused or racial things. And so we, these are illegal activities that people are paying for. And so we're looking at what's going on in a child's mind when this is what they're accessing. So mainstream, when I see mainstream, these are the, some of the main genres. This isn't your dad or my dad's playboy. This mainstream is violence against women.

So let's push pause here for a second because a lot of these sites you're saying are they free or do you have to pay for them?

Both. Yeah. So in 2016 I attended the Utah Coalition Against Pornography conference and one of the things the keynote speaker spoke about was that children are being targeted. Children are the target. If I can get a child addicted to pornography, I've got a customer for life and they, so I can start out free, no problem. I mean this is a great business model. I start out giving candy kids for free and then they love it for the rest of their life. And then they turn into consumers when they have money. And because our brains, because our brains are seeking novelty, they want a new stimulus. I can start out as a child, look, you know, there's so much I can find for free. But because it's usually like addiction is usually progressive, eventually I will likely pay money at some point.

So let's go through this story for a second again. I, I'm going to bring it back to the story. So this 11 year old is exposed to who knows what. Let's just say that it's more aggressive. Men beating, slapping, punching, whatever, women. Now we're 14 going through puberty, 13, 14 going through this puberty, pubescent state, maybe it escalates. That's been my experience where because of access and ease of access, we begin to view it more frequently now. 17, 18, 19. What's happened to this individual socially, what's happened to them in relationships, how they perceive themselves? Let's talk specifically to how that then influences the mind of a young man or a young woman, boy, teenager who've been, who've been exposed to this. Because I'm seeing more and more women who've been exposed to pornography than I, I've ever seen before, at least in my clinical career.

Yeah, so I, I think it's important to talk about the confusion. Let's say that I'm a tender hearted, sweet 11 year old little boy and I'm you know, watching my mom and my sisters and I'm also Watching porn and I'm imagining that I'm going to be really confused. They like to be hit and beaten and slapped. They like violence. They find that fun and enjoyable. My sister doesn't like when I hit her. But porns tell me that what I'm watching online is telling me that they do enjoy that. Let's talk about how I'm trying to figure out how to have a relationship. How do I have a relationship? What if I'm not a violent person? What if I don't want it to hit somebody or slap them or bite them? What if that, like I don't know how to do that because maybe I haven't, I haven't had that modeled in my home, hopefully. How do I do that in a relationship with a, with member of the opposite sex? And then what happens when, if I'm in a relationship and I try that out and somebody breaks up with me and they don't like it, what do I do with that then? So one of the things that I see with my clients and I, and I would say I see this more predominantly with my clients who are older who will say, well, that's what women like. And this is consensual. The people who are in porn, this is consensual. They're there because they like it, they want to be there, this is all consensual.

And that's an interesting thing. I want to address that real quick. A few years ago I was at a conference, it was at the time called End Sexual Exploitation and they had three individuals who had been in the porn industry who had gotten out of the industry itself to share their stories. And I will never forget the story of one of them. She said, I was 16, I grew up in a home that was quite abusive, lots of drugs. And I met a 19 year old guy and he was like my knight in shining armor. He was kind, he was caring, he was considerate. He was the guy, right? And I'm like, how can I be so lucky? And, and so they, you know, basically he says, look, I, I know home is rough, you can move in with me. So she moves in with him and unbeknownst to her, he was recording every sexual activity that they had and then uploading it to a website. Now this happens for two or three years. She's now 19, she gets pregnant and she's now pregnant and discovered that he'd been uploading these videos of her. Doesn't know what to do with it. The moment she gets pregnant, he dumps her. Can't Go back home. The only world, she said, the only world that I knew to survive in was prostitution. And she said, I had a kid and I could go make in one night enough to take care of us for a week. And she said, so I went from these videos, now I'm in this industry of being a sex worker. It's the only way I know how to get out of this or how to take care of my child because I wasn't going to give my child up. I loved my child and I'll do anything. So when I trapped, felt absolutely trapped, I. Her story is incredible. Here she has somebody who steps in and it's a religious organization steps in and they say, we understand what you're going through. We have a daycare that you can bring your child to and we have a job. You can work 40 hours a week and we will help you stabilize. They helped her out of it and she's sitting here telling her story of how destructive that industry is. And then we hear statistics that most porn, most porn, most is actually like paid prostitution. They're getting paid. And then they said, all three of them, the things that are being done we could not do if we were not drunk, stoned, high. There's no way we could engage in those physically painful behaviors if we weren't intoxicated or if we didn't have some high. No way. Across the board. That's what they said.

Now we're talking about the degradation of humanity. One of the things that I with this, this conversation with my clients, when we talk about the consent, I do not believe that it is ever any little girl's dream. No little girl, when you say, what do you want to be when you grow up? No little girl will ever say, I would like to be online having millions of viewers watch me be raped or hit or abused in any way, shape or form. That is not any, any human being's dream of what they want when they grow up. Yet when we talk about what's the impact on that 11 year old child, somehow the porn industry, we are allowing the porn industry to groom our children to believe that this is consensual, to believe that this is something that this sexual exploitation that's occurring is something that someone is wanting or choosing of their own volition, saying, I think this would be a great idea for me. Exploitation is what the word means. We are being exploited. We are oftentimes we're stuck. See any other way out?

And so, Marianne, I want to. Now let's take this a step further for a Second, in terms of just like, I'm in the industry or I've been watching porn and I'm stuck in it because like you said, you know, you give them candy and they're like, where's the candy? Where's the candy? And so not only have we normalized whatever this aggressive violence type of porn is, and I'm going to say that in my clinical experience, not all people choose to look at that kind of porn. Some people that's, they see it and it's like, but, but because of exposure, there gets to be a numbness. That's how I'm going to describe it, where it's like you start to see things and you're numb to it. And that's how many of my clients describe this experience. It's like, oh, I've seen that, but that wasn't really arousing to me. But they have seen it.

If our clients are watching porn, the people in that porn probably aren't there because they want to be there. There's oftentimes this rationalization. Well, I'm not crossing any lines because I have clients who'll say, no, Marianne, I draw, I have standards, I, I have things that I won't watch. So it's okay for me to watch this, but, but I won't watch that because that's worse. And my pushback to that always will be, it's still exploiting human beings.

And that is what we. Again, I'm just, here's the arguments of my clients, right? This is it. Right. It's, it's just, it's just this, at the end of the day, we, we are now in a society that porn has become the norm. Like I said, I mean, again, early in my career, I mean, this is the watching the Internet grow up and growing up with the Internet in terms of clinically. Right. So my first year of doing therapy was the same year the, roughly the Internet was born. And so 1994, 95. I began doing therapy in 95, the first time I ever knew that there was such a thing called the Internet. And one of my professors, he sent me this thing and it was like, what is this? It was crazy. And over the next few years getting my PhD, we began to see more and more involvement with people coming in Internet pornography, the dial up modems, I mean, everything was slow. Today it is a completely different world where you can, with technology's advancement, anybody could access anything. And we've seen an escalation into that anything into a world that's pushing the boundaries beyond anything that I think we could have ever, ever imagined. And the consequence of it is our entire society has become sexually confused. What's normal? What's normal? Going through that 14, 15, 16 year old boy or girl's experience, what's normal? Is this normal? So who's educating our children?

Taking that a little bit further, there's two, there's two directions I'd love to go with this conversation. One is I'd like to talk about where we're at now. But before I go there, I really want to talk about the shame. We haven't talked about that internalized shame. The shame of that 11 year old child saying, this isn't something like, I see this and I probably don't feel super good about it. I know my mom, I wouldn't want my mom to be watching this with me. And so I need to hide it. And so I create and develop some hiding and secrecy behaviors. A lot of my clients will say, marianne, if people knew what a monster I am, they wouldn't love me. I see so much internalized shame. I invite my clients to go to a group. Their biggest fear is that other people will see and know and that they will be unlovable. So there's this internalized shame. And I see clients who will say, I don't know what's wrong with me. I am a decent, great human being in all aspects of my life. But there's this one part. I don't know why I go to this. I don't know why I watch this. It goes against my value system. It's not who I am. I protect women. I protect the sanctity. I believe in the, the beauty and sacredness of a human intimate sexual relationship. And I don't know why I go to this, because it's not okay for my partner and it's not okay for me. Yet. Why do I keep going back to it over and over and over again? There's this deep, deep internalized shame about who I am.

That's an interesting question. Why, Marianne? Why shame? Because it's. We're afraid to be seen. What people are, what I'm actually doing, the secretive world. And so when individuals actually get into the healing process, the recovery process, they don't suffer in silence anymore. That's why we see groups that are so powerful and accountability with a sponsor. But what's interesting here is it often makes my clients feel out of control, like it's gaining control over their life. I have the privilege of running men's groups who've been involved in this. And one of my favorite experiences is when they come into the group, they're so nervous, they're so scared. They're just like, how are people gonna see this? What's gonna happen? And all of a sudden their light click on and they're like, I'm not alone and I'm here in this group. And they're like, okay, I can actually talk about this now. And they're talking about it in ways. I just recently had a phenomenal experience where individuals that I was participating with in this group, they're sharing their stories of their sobriety and their confidence and their joy in sobriety and the way that it's changing their relationships. Because a few years ago I did an interview with a guy and he was, he was by his co workers. He was challenged to go porn free for a month and maybe even a little bit longer. And he's like, oh, not a big deal. No big deal. He had been. I said, well, so in this interview he's interviewing me. I said, so how often were you looking at porn? He said, every day. Every day. I said, so what was it like not looking at porn? So I'm now turning into the interviewer and, and he's telling his story and he said, I didn't think it would be that hard. I didn't think it would be that hard. And then he said, and this is the observation of his co workers, they said, hey, you seem more kind, more attentive, more aware going away from that. He literally, he didn't, he didn't know he was doing it, but others saw him differently when he was not involved in it. And that was outside observers.

What a validation. You know, as you're, as you're sharing that. Dr. Skinner, I think about all of my clients and I'd love to hear what you've experienced and seen with your clients, but I cannot think of a single client I've seen in, in my career who struggled with porn, who did not start as a youth, who was not exposed, and it didn't have its roots there in youth. Most of my clients don't show up as a 35 year old man saying, yeah, I just decided to go check out porn on the Internet. I thought it might be a good idea and I got sucked. It's usually at least the clients that have shown up in my office. It started when they were an 11 year old and they were exposed to something and they were trying to figure it out and they didn't know who to talk to. And so they had A lot of shame. And it came from there. It started there. What's your experience on that?

I can count on one hand and it doesn't fill up my entire hand. Maybe two or three cases where somebody was exposed for the first time in their 20s. I've had probably two or three cases like that. Everybody else, I mean, again, I've been doing this for 30 years. 30 years. And again, it is profound, the influence that it has on a child's brain. Now let me give an example of this because I want to speak to our listeners. I want to just. I know this isn't an easy topic, so thank you for listening. But I want to put it in context. Would you give an 11 year old whiskey? Would you give an 11 year old marijuana? Would you give him cocaine? The research shows that the earlier we are exposed to something, the earlier we're exposed to something, the more likely we are to be dependent upon it as we get older. Now, alcoholism, we call it, you know, alcoholism, but in reality, in our professional terms, we call it dependency, were dependent upon the drug or the alcohol. When I expose a child's brain to pornography over and over and over and over and over and over, that dependency becomes a coping mechanism for how I deal with stress. Now I'm older and what are my perceptions of my sexuality? What are my perceptions of the people? And you describe the shame of. Right, that shame of people. If they knew that I was whatever, a monster. If people knew what I was really like. If people. If people. If people. And what happens, Marianne, is you begin to see this concept that I've began to realize. I'm not like others. And now I'm more isolated and I'm away from or I'm living in a completely fabricated world where I know something's not right inside of me and I'm putting out a Persona that everything's well, which is a separation from self, which is a trauma when you separate self from self because you don't like being with yourself. And that is what it does to many of the clients that I've seen. It's a separation from self. They don't like themselves. And yes, they can put on an outward Persona, but they know that there's something going on in their life that they don't feel in control of, that feels, makes them feel out of control. And that's what I have found, that some of that influence of pornography on that 11 year old, on that 15 year old, on that 25 year old, on that 14 year old, 45 year old, not on that 60 year old. The probably the most painful stories I've heard are individuals who are in their mid-60s, late-60s, 70s, and it's influenced their live lives for decades.

Yeah, I've seen the same thing. You know, Dr. Skinner, I want to share, if I can, some statistics about that 11 year old that we've been talking about. The statistics show that when we look at children who are looking at porn, minors who are looking at porn, 22% of them are under the age of 10 and 36% of them are between the ages of 10 to 14. So when we're looking at minors who are looking at porn, children who were looking online at porn, and 63% of them say that they accessed it accidentally last week, not looking for it. When we're looking at. So these minors that are looking at it, 58% of them are under the age of 14 years old. I think that's significant. 14 and under, not looking for it. And I want to maybe use this as a bridge because I really want to make sure that we talk about another part of this. And we've talked a little bit about the grooming, we've talked about some of the mainstream genres. Today, 19 states in the here in the US have age verification laws saying, you know, we feel like it's really important, like we don't want our kids to have tobacco, we don't want our kids to have alcohol. We don't think that's appropriate for 10 year olds. So we have age verification laws. You, you can't go to the grocery store and buy any of those things without showing an ID of proving how old you are. And so 19 states have said, we, we think the same things. Currently on January 15th of 2025, the Supreme Court will be hearing a case that the Free Speech Coalition, which is a coalition of the adult entertainment industry, they have brought against the state of Texas. Looking at whether or not age verification laws are constitutional. And what's really important right now are the precedent that all of the laws in our nation that they're based on, they're based on a ruling from 2004. It's ACLU versus Ashcroft. And what they determined in 2004 is that filters are adequate. And in 2004, 73% of teens that were interviewed in the research said, yeah, my family has one computer and it's in the living room or it's in a shared family space. Facebook and LinkedIn had just barely launched in 2004. Kids did not have cell phones. Kids did not have their schools saying we're going to give you laptops that you need to use because we want you to be digital citizenships. We want you to know how to use a computer. Our landscape has changed incredibly. I invite our listeners to think about, when did you first experience the Internet? I know mine was in 1991 on a university campus. And this nerdy guy said, hey, do you want to access the Internet? And I said, sure, I don't know what that is. And we went to this one room, there was one computer at my university campus, and I had to sign something saying I'm 18 years old so that I could access the Internet in 1991. It's changed so much.

Well, okay, so, Marianne, how many devices do you have in your home to access the Internet?

Oh, my goodness. So I have my personal cell phone. I have my work cell phone. I have an iPad I use for work. I have a couple laptops. That's just me. What's that? Is that six right there? Just Right.

And now you're a family of four or five. That's my point. Right. There's no way to control, monitor whatever you want to call here, every device, how it's being accessed. You might have a filter, you might not. Right. You might just have your carrier, your provider. The thing is, is the concept of filters are enough is woefully inadequate. A few years ago, I was talking with a individual, he actually owned a filter company, and we were just chatting back and forth, and he said, on our best days, in our best times, we can filter out about 91 to 92% of what's available on the Internet. How many pages are there? Millions and millions and millions of pages. All right, so what is 8 or 10% of millions and millions of pages that you can get around? The filters are not adequate. Now, some of them, they do put up barriers, and they are somewhat helpful. But my point is, if you're relying just on a filter, you're more likely than not going to have problems.

And I would say, I would ask our listeners, how many of you have filters on your kids cell phones? If your kids have smartphones, how many of them have filters?

I don't even know that filters exist.

Yes, I went to a conference back in 2016, Utah Coalition Against Pornography Conference. And there were many providers of filters that were there. And I approached them and I said, my daughter's been accessing. She's been getting around some of the things we've set up in our home. This way, this way and this way. And they said, does she want A job. They said our filters, our filters can't catch that. Does she want a job? She sounds like she's pretty smart. Filters have been, have, have been proven inadequate. 31% of teenagers reported viewing pornography while at school and nearly 44% indicated that they had found it on school owned devices. So we've got kids using school devices, looking at porn at school.

You know, I actually had an experience with one of my children who was in her computer lab at school a few years ago and we'd had this conversation about pornography and its influence and said, if you're ever exposed, just come talk to us. Because we, you want it. We just want to be open. This is reality. You're going to be exposed. It's not if, but when and when you are. Let's just talk about it so you understand what it's doing to you, how it's making you feel and what you, what you're experiencing. And there's nothing wrong with having this conversation. We want to be open about it. She comes to us, not too much longer and she's at school. One of her friends got a computer and she said, hey, look. And on her computer was pornography. My daughter, you know, having. We'd had this conversation, she said, I don't want to see that. That was at school on the school computer. Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, it's in our faces, it's in our world. It's been literally, it feels like it's here now. Marianne, I think this is important to our listeners. What can we do? Like, I mean from a perspective of yes, we can protect our own families, yes, we can be. Because I don't want to say that all filters are bad. I think filters can be gates or fences to help prevent rapid access. But if someone wants to get around it, they will find a way around it. Now, some of the best filters that I've seen, I really like Covenant Eyes because it basically shows what's happening on your devices. I, I like that personally. But, but what about, you know, how do we get involved on a bigger macro level to say we don't want this in our lives, we don't want this to be a part of our lives. What do we do there?

You know, Dr. Skinner, I'm really passionate about this subject. In 2017, our school district decided to give all of the students laptops and they decided to require that the students have, have these school issued devices. And my friend contacted me and said, my son has just been exposed to pornography through the laptop he was given what Do I do? And he had typed in the word beautiful woman, and full porn showed up. And the mom had tested some other ways. And. And we reached out. We stormed the school board meetings for months and months and months. There were recently the state of Washington had put in some new bills about digital citizenship, about online safety. And so we went to the school district and said, what are you doing about these bills? For 18 months, I advocated in my community, with neighbors, with parents, friends, raising awareness. And the school board ultimately didn't. We asked for some curriculum that would address it. White Ribbon Week has some great curriculum that teaches kids how to look at information. Say, is this helpful or is this harmful? Teaches them how to really judge the content that's coming at them. So one of the. I think we can start in our homes by helping our kids to understand how to decipher the information that's coming at them. Give them basically like an inner compass. I think that's one place to start, just in our own micro space. Part of my passion for this is after 18 months of working with my community and advocating and trying to work with the school board, nothing happened. They ultimately said, we're not going to even mention or say the word pornography. We refuse to even say that word to our students. And they chose a curriculum that did not support the education that we were wanting to have that would go along with this. And they agreed. They said, our filters don't catch everything. Absolutely. There's no way for our filters to get this. And so those experiences have really created a passion for me about saying, hold on a second. We've got to become more aware. As I mentioned previously, on January 15, the Supreme Court will be reviewing a case. They'll be reviewing. Do current age verification laws like the state of Texas and 19 other states, are these constitutional? And that's a really, really big deal. They won't give their ruling until maybe June or May. May or June. Usually in the spring, they give their rulings. However, becoming educated about this, becoming a. You know, when we work with addiction, we often minimize and we often stay in denial. I don't want to see it. I don't want to talk about it. And it's really not that big of a deal. And I think as a nation, I think we've done a really good job with that. I think if, you know, any parent you meet, if you say, hey, you know, did you, you know, here's your newborn baby. Congratulations. This is what you're going to be. You know, your child's going to be exposed to Any parent would be livid. I. You know, I talked to a friend recently who's. She's. She's admittedly very radical. And I told her about my school district and this experience, and she said, you know, I would have put some excrement and lit it on fire. Like, this isn't okay. And I thought about it later that you're right. Why were we as much as we did. Why were we so calm about this? Why didn't we get more involved? Why. Why didn't we speak out and really scream at the top of our lungs, this is not okay. These are. This. I do not want the porn industry to groom my child and to teach my child about sexuality. That is not healthy.

Well, and as professionals who've been in this field for many years, I can tell you when a grown man is in your office crying because he's about ready to lose everything that matters to him, that. That tells you that something is a society. If we let these individuals down by not taking a stand when somebody comes and says that, this has ruined my life. This is. This has taken over my life. In my book, Treating Sexual Addiction A Compassionate Approach to Recovery, I share a story of an individual who. I just asked a question on one of my surveys. I said, could you just tell me how pornography's influenced your life? His answer was profound. He said, I've been married 40 years. My wife won't have anything to do with me. My children don't want to talk to me. And it's. For years and years this dominated my life, and I was not available. I missed all of these things. What do I have for it?

And that's not a new story, Dr.

Skinner, over and over and over. So I want to leave our listeners with a sense of hope. And so I, I, we. Again, difficult topic, but my invitation is to stand up, be aware. Thank you for being a part of the podcast and listening to us today. But you know, those 19 states, if you live in, if you know what's happening in your state with this, say, in Texas, what's happening with the Supreme Court and the aclu, you can contact your senator, your congressman. You can. You can reach out and say, hey, I just. I just want to know that I support these verifications, this age verification. I just want you to know this. I want you to know that we, as a people, we want more protection, and we invite you to get involved. You want to say something there, Marianne?

I. I do. I want to break this down a little bit. I can imagine being a listener and saying okay, yeah, but what do I do? And, and I can share what I've learned. Here's what I've learned. If you go online and you type in find my representative or find my congressman, just Google that. It'll come up with a link that you type in your zip code and then it will show, it will show your district, it will show you the email addresses and the phone numbers of your representatives and your congressmen. So you start there, just find out who your representatives are and then you contact them. When I emailed my, when I sent out my initial email, my representative, her name's Stephanie Barnard, I reached, I sent her an email and it said, oh, do you want to include these other people as well who are also your representatives? Sure. And my congressman. I just clicked a button and it also cc'd these other representatives. It couldn't have been easier. And then I called my representative. I just thought, well, her phone number is there. I'll make a phone call too. I called and I said, hey, this is important to me. She actually called me back about 15 minutes later and she said, oh, this is so important to me as well. There are 19 other states who have already, they already have the legislation, they already have the bills written. So for another state to take this and say, oh, we've already got a framework, there's a template, we can create this ourselves. There's one place, there's one way to get involved. Another way to get involved is to go to exoduscry.org or to NICOSI, the National center on Sexual Exploitation. Go to either of those websites. Exodus Cry, they're a non profit organization and they do documentaries, they do research, they do documentaries. And so just go to their websites and you can pick up some really quick bullet like speaking points like here's, here's really important data. Then when you reach out to neighbors, friends, social media, or even just calling your representatives, great. Here's some data, here's some talking points that I can really talk about really quickly. Then one of the things that I've, I've also been working on. So I'm a therapist. I have a therapist Facebook page. I have some therapist contacts from a couple of different consult groups and I'm on some listservs. And so I reached out to all the therapists in my state of Washington. My state representative, she says, I'm ready to do this. This is great. This is important. Nobody's going to argue that it's important to protect children. Even this case that the Supreme Court will be viewing, they're not the opponent on this is not saying, no, we think that it's okay for kids to view this. They're not arguing any of those points because nobody argues about protecting children. Everybody says, yeah, universally, kids need to be protected. However, my state representative said, I'm a Republican and I can't do this. I need some Democrats who can help with this because of the way that my specific state is. And so finding the, finding other individuals who live in another part of my state, that's what I've been focusing on. Who are some people who can reach out to their state representatives and say, this is important to me. How can we get this to happen? So reaching out. I've been surprised. This last week, I didn't think I had anywhere to speak out yet. I found so many places that I could just send an email saying, hey, this is important. Is this something that you would be willing to get involved in? So get educated, spend a little bit of time, get some information and just start talking about it. The article that I referenced earlier with Nicholas Kristof, you know, he, he did some research. He told the story of three people who'd been impacted and it created a snowball effect. One person speaking out, telling their story. When we step into the shame or we step into the fear or the pain, when we do that, we, we can create impact and change.

So, and, and to our listeners, you might think, I do, I want to get involved, you know what for, for all of us to be involved in something like for me personally, this podcast is important because to our listeners, you've got children, you've got grandchildren. We need to take these actions as we can, to educate, to inform. But the biggest part that you can do to that you can contribute, start with yourselves, then reach out. And what's going to happen eventually there's going to be enough people saying this isn't okay.

And so a simple way to do that would be even just sharing this podcast with somebody. I don't have all the talking points or all the information, but here, would you listen to this and let's talk about it.

Yeah. All right. Final thoughts that you have, Marianne. Individuals, they're stuck, they're trapped. Or any final thoughts for them.

I want to share hope. We talked about an 11 year old boy as we began and throughout this podcast talking about the impacts. And I want to share hope. There I see. And you mentioned this earlier, I see so much joy and I'm not sure the word that we'd use, but you reference it in your book on treating sexual Addiction recovery looks like recovering relationships, it looks like picking up things that were lost. And I want to share the hope and the joy of recovering oneself, of recovering oneself to a state of congruence with values, congruence with thoughts and beliefs of, oh, wait, this is who I am. There's joy and there's peace there. And I do see it. And so if you are struggling, reach out, speak out. One of the biggest cons, I would say, of the, our modern day porn industry is the, the deceptive belief that we're alone, that nobody gets us, nobody understands us. And this is so shameful. And so it keeps us in secrecy and silence. And the more that we can talk out, talk and say, here's where I'm at. We've been living in this gigantic experiment of the Internet that there was never a template for. And we're seeing some of the poor outcomes of this, this giant social experiment. And you're not alone. It's not because you're defective, it's not because there's something wrong with you. As we've been Talking about that 11 year old boy, there's an awful lot of influence, or that 11 year old child, whoever they are, there's an awful lot that unfortunately we didn't see, we didn't know. And so now we know we can do better.

You know, as a, as I have looked at my career and I've seen individuals, I, I can tell you that most of the individuals that I've talked to, they absolutely despise what it does to them. They don't like how it feels, they don't like things. There are individuals who say, I really enjoy it, I don't like what it's doing to my life and my family. But for the most part, people feel sick, they feel gross, they feel their stomach, their muscles are tense or tight, they don't like what it does to them. There's a reason for that. There's an absolute reason for it. And I think it has something to do with, it's a, it's a cubic zirconium of true human intimacy. It's a false diamond. It appears one way and it leaves us with empty calories. It's empty now. In contrast, learning how to be relational, learning how to connect, learning how to develop your relationship skills, put your energy into that and I promise you, you will have better outcomes. All right, Marianne, this has been a weighty topic to our listeners. I would just want to express our gratitude knowing that this is not an easy topic. But we can't sit on our hands and do nothing. We can all have an influence on society in some way. Take your stand and take the opportunity to reclaim your life if you're trapped. Marianne, your final thoughts?

Thank you for being here. If you've made it through the end of this podcast, thank you for joining us and for being here. And I encourage you to use your voice, especially if you've been a betrayed partner. This is one area this oftentimes it feels like I'm stuck. There's nothing I can do. And this is something you can do. You can protect future generations. You can speak out against the things that have impacted your life in a negative way. And so I would encourage and empower you.

All right, thank you very much. We appreciate your time, your energy. We appreciate you being a part of the Human Intimacy podcast. And just real quick as we close up, we have the first annual Human Intimacy Conference in March, 14th and 15th. Put those dates on your calendar. If you want more information, just send us an email@questionshumanintimacy.com we would love to send you information about our upcoming conference. You can also find us at the human intimacy.com website. Anyway, Marianne, thank you so much for your time today. Very important topic. And thank you for our listeners.

Thank you.

Something surround you. It's like you're shining, you're staring.