ERP 145 – Pornography: What Are We Really Talking About?
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Hi, thank you for joining today’s podcast episode. Today’s episode is 145, “Pornography: What Are We Really Talking About?” I’m super excited to share today’s guest with you.
Before we get started I would love to set the intention for today’s conversation, as you’re listening to today’s guest and the interview, as well as just contemplating relationship principles, that we are all on this path of seeking to grow ourselves and improve our relationship, so that we can experience happy, lasting love; a love that’s genuine, authentic and life-giving, and mutually rewarding and beneficial. My hope is that you will feel supported in the topics discussed on the Empowered Relationship Podcast. Some topics might address difficult areas that we feel challenged in in relationship, where other topics focus on how to establish consistency, stability, security, and other topics will help us expand our intimacy, love, positivity and connection.
If you would like to access today’s show notes, you can visit DrJessicaHiggins.com To find today’s episode, click on Podcast, and you’ll find the most recent episodes at the top. Today’s episode, again, is 145, “Pornography: What are we really talking about?” Let’s get started.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Dr. Marty Klein has been a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Sex Therapist for over 30 years. He is the author of 7 books, including Sexual Intelligence and the recent His Porn, Her Pain: Confronting America’s Porn Panic With Honest Talk About Sex.
Each year, Dr. Klein trains thousands of psychologists, physicians, clergy, and attorneys in sexuality. He has been an expert witness or consultant in many state, federal, and international trials involving sexuality, and has given two Congressional briefings on evidence-based sex education.
Dr. Klein, thank you so much for sharing your valuable time; I know you’re a busy man. When I contacted you I know that you were somewhere – I don’t know if you were overseas or somewhere in the country, but I know you speak for a lot of engagements, and I feel really lucky to have you on this show.
Dr. Marty Klein: Well, thank you. I’m glad to be here, Jessica.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Wonderful. Today’s topic – I know many people will be enlightened by some of your sharings and just clarifications around pornography. In your recent book, His Porn, Her Pain – can you tell me a little bit more about what you’re addressing in that book?
Dr. Marty Klein: Sure, I’d be glad to. So I’ve been a therapist for over 30 years, and I see men, women and couples – gay, straight, bi, everybody. In the last 15 years, since broadband internet poured pornography into everybody’s home and office, the number of complaints that I get about pornography has gone way, way up.
When I get a couple in the office and one person is complaining about the other person’s pornography viewing, it’s never two gay men, one of them complaining about the other, and it’s never two lesbians, one of them complaining about the other… And it’s almost never a heterosexual man complaining about a heterosexual woman looking at too much porn. So the only configuration really that I see around this issue is heterosexual women complaining about heterosexual men looking at porn. So that’s what I titled the book His Porn, Her Pain.
What I do in this book is I talk about — okay, so when we’re talking about porn, what are we really talking about? For some people, what they’re really talking about is violence; for some people, what they’re really talking about is body shame. For some people, what they’re talking about is the loss of their sexual relationship. I’m willing to talk about any of these things clinically, and certainly, I’m willing to talk about any of these things to the media, but let’s be clear on what we’re talking about. Very little of the conversation about pornography out there is really about pornography. It’s almost always about something else, and that’s what I wanna talk about. What is that something else? Let’s talk about that something else, and if we have enough time, let’s talk about why we talk about those other things in the language of pornography, instead of talking about them in a straightforward way.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Great. Okay, so you’re trying to bring the conversation terms in which you’re seeing — the people that come to you and the pain that they’re experiencing is most of the time in a heterosexual relationship where the female is bringing complaint about her man.
Dr. Marty Klein: Well, a lot of women who are complaining about their partner’s use of pornography, they have a complicated relationship with their own body, and they have a complicated relationship with their own sexuality. Some women complaining about their partner’s porn use are suffering because they’re not having the sexual relationship with him that they want, and I think those are all legitimate things for us to talk about; I’m very sympathetic about all those things. And we used to talk about that stuff before broadband internet brought porn into everybody’s life. Now we still talk about those things, except a lot of people wanna use the issue of pornography to talk about that stuff, which I don’t think is very helpful.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Okay, great. I couldn’t agree with you more in the sense of there’s so many underlying issues often going on, or it’s complex, and I also hear you that the name “surface issue” is being addressed as porn, and that it’s largely not actually the root concern.
Okay, so for you, would you say for people that are listening, that are like “Well, is porn a good thing, or…?” It sounds like you’re kind of dispelling some of the myths, is that correct?
Dr. Marty Klein: Well, I’m certainly doing that, but if your listeners’ question is “Is this guy pro-porn or anti-porn?” my answer is no, I’m not pro-porn, and I’m not anti-porn. I’m in favor of clear thinking. I’m in favor of people talking about their lived experience with each other. I’m in favor of people helping their partner understand exactly how they feel.
Talking about porn typically does not get at how people really feel. How people really feel might be “I feel abandoned, I feel unimportant, I feel judged, I feel unattractive…” Those are really important things for people to talk about, and I’ve spent my career helping men and women talk about that stuff, so let’s talk about that stuff.
When people come in to see me and they’re in the middle of a fight about “I want you to stop looking at porn. Porn is crap. Porn exploits women”, there’s a trafficking question and all that stuff… When people talk about porn in those terms, they’re not talking about their own grief, their own sins of lost youth, their own sense of “I don’t feel desired. I wanna feel desired”, and that’s what we need to talk about.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Well, a part of me is like – those topics are all things I talk about, or I feel very passionate about, and I’m also like “You’re such an expert in pornography, so I’m a little hesitant to go to those topics, but… If we can stay on porn a little bit longer…
Dr. Marty Klein: Of course.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: So do you feel like the shame that sometimes men feel as far as interest in watching porn, or their porn use – can you talk about that? Do you feel like that’s largely because of what they anticipate their partner’s response to be? Or if there’s a history of tension, or it’s a sensitive topic… Can you talk about shame in regards to porn?
Dr. Marty Klein: Sure. I think the bigger category is shame about sexuality, and shame about masturbation. Everybody who grows up in Western culture has to wrestle with the question of “Is it okay to masturbate?” and most of us learn growing up as kids that it’s not okay, that we have to hide it… And although nobody ever gives us a good reason for why we have to hide it.
I think it’s reasonable to say that kid’s masturbation is one of those things that we don’t do in church, and we don’t do it at Thanksgiving dinner table, but it’s not because there’s something wrong with it.
Most kids grow up learning that there’s something wrong with masturbation, and of course, most people grow up in the Western culture learning that there’s something wrong with sexuality. That’s the bigger category.
Most people who look at porn, they look at porn as part of masturbating, so they instinctively know that it’s something they need to hide. Then they find out that their female partner maybe thinks that it’s a terrible thing that they do it, and they have to hide it, they have to keep it a secret.
When you have to keep something a secret, it’s hard to not feel ashamed, right? And if the thing that you’re keeping secret is something that you’ve been told for decades is problematic, then of course you’re gonna feel ashamed.
I think partly men feel shame about looking at porn, partly some people are concerned that the content of what they’re looking at isn’t “normal”… When heterosexual men look at porn that shows men being sexual with each other, sucking each other’s penises, I think some men think “Oh, what’s wrong with them?” Heterosexual men think “What’s wrong with me that I like looking at that?”
But I think for a lot of men it’s not so much shame as it is secrecy; they know that “This is something that I have to keep a secret, and that’s really too bad.” Most relationships do not need more secrets, right?
Dr. Jessica Higgins: No. I think you’re touching on two things that I feel like are extremely important, which are the secrecy, and then also the uncertainty of whether or not their fantasies are healthy, or if there’s something wrong, right?
Dr. Marty Klein: The media and a lot of sexologists have something to answer for about this, because too many people mix up fantasy with desire. Too many people think – both laypeople and professionals… Psychologists get very little training in sexuality, and so they don’t understand this any better than laypeople do, that fantasy does not predict desire. Fantasy does not predict desire, and we know this is true when the fantasies are about non-sexual things. Everybody at one time or another thinks “Wouldn’t it be great to rob a bank, take the money and move to Tahiti and never be heard from again?” Everybody has that fantasy, right? But nobody walks around saying “Gee, I’d better keep away from El Camino, because they have a lot of banks on that street, and I might lose my head and break into a bank, and then that would be a great problem.”
When the topic is not sex, most people sit around some time or other saying “Wouldn’t it be great to just fly to Paris and have lunch and then come home?” Nobody actually goes and does that, at least nobody you and I know, right? So when the topic is not sex, most people understand that fantasy is not a good predictor of what people actually want… And yet, when the topic is sexuality, people confuse the two.
Lots and lots of women – this is just overwhelmingly clear – have sexual fantasies involving coercion; way more women fantasize about being raped than men fantasizing about raping women. It’s just really common for heterosexual women to fantasize about that, and lesbians, too. But we know that no woman wants to actually be raped. It’s just a really hot fantasy for a lot of women.
So we really have to keep it straight that fantasies are not dangerous, fantasies are not gonna drag you away from your regular life and you wind up doing stuff you don’t wanna do. The only exception to that is when fantasies are repetitive and intrusive and unwanted. Every therapist has to measure that.
When somebody comes in and says they wanna kill their boss, we have to evaluate “How seriously should I take this person?” But for most of us, the fact that we fantasize about our next door neighbor, or our sister in law, or whatever it is, that fantasy has very, very little predictive value.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: And so part of what I’m wondering about is when you’re inviting people to maybe broaden their paradigm about fantasy, just even bigger picture and not just sexuality, that we can draw some parallels here, and maybe give some space to have sexual fantasy without feeling like there’s something wrong, or that it’s unhealthy. Do you encourage people to start — perhaps it’s okay, right…?
Dr. Marty Klein: Oh yeah, I think most people would be better off if they accepted “This is the sexual fantasy that I have, this is what excites me, and that’s okay.” When people talk about how awful it is that porn contains whatever content that it contains, I think they’re really misunderstanding the human race. Pornography is essentially a library of human sexual fantasy, and some people – they look at that library or they think they know what’s in that library, and they say “Oh my goodness, I hate what’s in that library.” Well, don’t blame the library, don’t blame pornography for simply collecting the group of sexual fantasies that people find exciting.
There’s a reason that so many heterosexual men like to watch pornography of two women having sex. There’s a reason, for that matter, that heterosexual men like to watch pornography of two men having sex. There’s a reason that people like to watch pornography of people exhibiting themselves in public. There’s a reason that pornography features some of the coercion that it does, and that’s because those are the common sexual fantasies that people have.
If there are no customers for a particular fantasy, porn doesn’t show it. It just so happens that there’s lots and lots of sexual fantasies that some people object to, but that other people find exciting. As long as we keep in mind that for most people fantasy does not predict desire, there’s no reason that we should object to the content of pornography.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: I totally hear what you’re saying, and a part of what I’m thinking – I just am genuinely curious, I don’t have any idea about this… If someone is looking at something, and then something else pops up, do they then get exposure to new fantasies that maybe they originally have —
Dr. Marty Klein: Yes. I think the important issue is not about pornography, it’s about the internet. The internet provides something that is brand new in human history, and that is unlimited hunting opportunities. Up until recently, for the first 150,000 years of human existence, because that’s how long we’ve been here in our present form – for the first 150,000 years of human existence you could only hunt as far as your feet could take you, and you could only hunt when your eyes could see what was going on out there in the forest.
For the first time in human history, we actually have 24/7 hunting opportunities. If you’re interested in trombones, you could go online and start looking for where to buy a trombone, and that will lead you to the history of trombones, and that turns out to be involved with trumpets, and then you start looking at trumpets, and that turns out to be involved with the Renaissance, and then you start looking at the Renaissance, and you get to the reformation, then you start — so before you know it, it’s four o’clock in the morning, right? You’ve gotta get up and go to work the next day.
Whether it’s in the old days with eBay or whether it’s now with Facebook, or whether it’s shopping on Amazon, or whether it’s following a thread about the latest marathon opportunity to go running – whatever it is, the internet is this incredible, seductive arena in which people can get lost.
It’s interesting to me that some people, they select that pornography and they say “That’s the problematic aspect of this”, when I think the whole enterprise is problematic. We’ve been given the internet – we adults; forget about teenagers for a second… Adults have been given the internet without us having the emotional skills that we need to deal with the internet; we are like children. Adults with the internet are like children, with a sophisticated toy that can do things, that we don’t know how to control. So it’s commonplace for people to laugh and say they’re addicted to their smartphones, it’s commonplace to see couples on a Saturday night date looking at their phones instead of talking to each other. I take this really seriously. And to pick out pornography as the one place that’s problematic says a lot more about us than it does about pornography.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Gotcha. I couldn’t agree with you more, and I’ve done episodes about technoference, and how this is incredibly interfering and eroding at people’s ability to be present with one another, so I couldn’t agree more. It sounds like what you’re saying is that pornography is really being targeted, but yet there’s a larger issue or a larger aspect about the internet and just the information that’s so easily accessible to us, and that that’s something to maybe look at.
Dr. Marty Klein: That’s absolutely right, Jessica, and we see it across multiple domains. There’s a lot of conversations – social, cultural conversations that are being talked about through the vehicle of pornography instead of being addressed directly. For example, people who are too involved with the internet – instead of us talking about that, we are talking about people who are too involved with pornography. Instead of talking about the very legitimate issue that a lot of middle-aged couples have little or no sex at all, and they don’t talk about that, and they didn’t choose that, it just sort of happened – instead of talking about that, we’re talking about how supposedly porn pulls men away from their sexual relationships with their significant other, which simply does not happen.
So you’re right, porn gets “blamed” for a lot of stuff, and what I call that in my book is porn panic… That pornography is the latest moral panic about sexuality; we’ve seen this before, we saw it with the satanic ritual abuse back in the ’80s and ’90s, that supposedly there was all this crazy stuff going on with child molestation in day care centers, which turned out to not be true; we saw it with the burning of rock and roll records, which most of your listeners don’t even remember this – in the 1950s and 1960s there were huge bonfires of rock and roll records, because rock and roll was supposedly destroying the morality of young people. Before that, it was comic books; there were comic book burnings, because supposedly, comic books led to juvenile delinquency and early sexuality. Before that, there was a big panic about the movies.
In the United States, we had incredibly harmful censorship of commercial movies, from the early ’30s in to the mid ’60s. So every 20 years or so there’s a new moral panic in America about sexuality, and now we’re going through one with birth control, for God’s sake, where people are saying that birth control actually damages people, which is crazy…
So pornography is the latest moral panic about sexuality, and instead of people talking about what really needs to be talked about, they’re talking about how damaging pornography is, without any data whatsoever, and claiming that all of pornography is violent – which, of course, it’s not. Most people don’t wanna look at violent pornography, so there is not that much.
I mean, now there’s so much pornography that a tiny little bit of that is a lot, but most people don’t wanna look at violent pornography, so they don’t. Most people who have a vibrant sexual relationship with an actual woman or man, they’re not gonna go off and abandon that just to masturbate to pictures online; that just makes no sense.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: And what do you feel is really helpful in assisting couples to engage with the topic of their own sexuality, and really facing a lot of this shame, a lot of the cultural – all this stuff. What do you do to help people start to feel some level of safety?
Dr. Marty Klein: Oh, I don’t need people to feel safe, I just want them to talk. [laughter] Let’s not wait around until you feel safety. What I do is pretty much what you asked in your question – I tell people they need to talk about their lived experience with each other. When she says “I don’t want you looking at porn because you’re looking at all those beautiful 25 year olds, and then you look at me and you’re not gonna wanna have sex with my ugly, old, middle-aged body.” I say “Talk with him some more about how you feel about your body.”
When women talk about “We have to get men to look at less porn”, that’s a solution; that’s a solution to a problem… And I wanna know what problem is it a solution to, and then let’s talk about that problem.
Couples come in, and whether the issue is sexuality or not, whether it’s about money, or chores, or this, or that, time, or whatever it is – couples come in and they’re frequently arguing about a solution that one person has proposed and the other person rejects. So one person will say “You have to stop going to Nordstrom’s, because you’re always spending too much money” or “I’m gonna take away your credit card because you spend too much money”, or “You have to quit membership in that golf club, because you spend too much time playing golf.” Those are all solutions to a problem, and then people argue about that solution: “You have to.” “I don’t want to.” “You have to.” “I don’t want to”, and they never talk about “Wait, first let’s agree on what the problem is.” Until couples agree on what the problem is, they’re not gonna agree on a solution, right?
So if she feels that her body is unattractive, and she says “Here’s my solution – you stop looking at porn”, let’s talk about she feels her body is unattractive. Let’s not talk about “Here’s the one solution that she says is gonna fix this problem” and then he says “I don’t like that solution” and then that’s what they end up arguing about.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: And they’re stuck, and they go in a vicious cycle. So well said.
Dr. Marty Klein: That’s right. The question is what does a 50-year-old man do when his 50-year-old wife says to him “I’m afraid that you don’t find my body attractive. I personally don’t feel that good about my body; I, as a woman, I go out into public, I see all these 25-year-old women, and I feel unattractive. What are we gonna do about that? What do we wanna do about the fact that I feel unattractive? What do we wanna do about the fact that you don’t hold my hand in public like you used to? What do WE wanna do about that?”
That is a completely different conversation about “You have to stop looking at that crap, because it’s giving you ideas about women’s bodies that I don’t like.” It’s a completely different approach, and it calls on the empathy and the affection and the connection of this couple, of this man.
If you have a husband who just doesn’t care about you one way or the other, you have a much bigger problem than porn, right? But if you have a boyfriend or a husband who actually cares about you, and you say to him “Look, I don’t like my own body. What are we gonna do about that?” or “Look, I’m afraid that you don’t find me attractive anymore. What are we gonna do about that?” or “I’m afraid I’m never gonna have the sex that I wanna have in my life ever again?” If you’re in a couple with somebody who cares about you half-way, they’re gonna say “Oh, geez, you poor thing! Come here!”
Now, that will be a hard conversation to have… Sure, let’s do a doctor-client. We don’t have to feel safe; we could just talk about it, right?”
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yes. You know, I don’t talk about porn, but I feel like this is often what I’m directing people, similarly, to do, because I think it’s really honing in on where they can actually feel that they’re addressing what’s going on, and then there’s also a solution. The quality fo the question… If you’re focusing on the solution, that’s just a distraction; in a lot of ways, it’s actually not addressing the actual route, and it can just spin people endlessly. Yeah, it’s a sweaty 10-minute conversation, but it’s really where it’s at.
So when it comes to the secrecy, is this just part of — I mean, can you talk a little bit about the secrecy? Because some people feel betrayal, or there’s the hiding part… Is that just a side effect of what we’ve already been talking about?
Dr. Marty Klein: You know, I rent an office where I do therapy, and I have a lease. The lease is 8 pages long. It lays out everything. Now, most people when they couple up, they don’t have an 8-page agreement, do they? The marital agreement or the couples agreement when people move in together or whatever it is, is generally pretty short. It’s “So we’ll get a dog at some point, and we won’t mess around with anybody else, right? Great. That’s it.” That’s the whole contract, right? And that’s supposed to run an enterprise for years.
Most couples when they couple up, the woman generally doesn’t say to the man “Oh, one more thing – no porn, right?” The woman generally doesn’t say that. She may assume it, but she doesn’t say it, so the man never agrees to that.
Then at some point the man gets busted, or however she initiates that conversation, and she says “I don’t want you doing that”, and he says “Well, but, but, but…” and she says “No, no, no. I don’t want you to do that”, and he says “Oh…”
So what most men do at that point is they say “Okay, I won’t do it”, and then they hide it. Or what some women say is “I forbid you from doing it”, which is almost invariably a mistake in an intimate relationship with an adult, to say you forbid them from doing something… Because as my colleague [unintelligible 00:29:02.09] says, that’s just an invitation to secrecy.
So a lot of men, they will respond to that by saying, “Okay dear, whatever you say”, and they figure “I’m gonna do it privately anyway, so I’ll just take an extra step and make sure she doesn’t find out.” Invariably, she finds out sooner or later, and then now she has two complaints. Before, she had one complaint – “You’re looking at porn.” Now she has two complaints. Number one, “You’re looking at porn”, number two, “You broke your promise.”
What I say to guys is do not promise that you’re not gonna look at porn unless you are 100% sure and you really mean it that you’re not gonna do it… Because once you make a promise and you break your promise, you have lost the moral high ground, and then when she says “I don’t trust you, I don’t believe you” or this or that, she has every right to say that, because you just broke your promise.
So in terms of secrecy — and what a lot of guys say is “Well, the reason I keep it a secret is because I don’t wanna deal with the conflict.” I say, “Look, I really understand that, but would you rather have the conflict between two equals, each of whom has a legitimate point of view, or would you rather have the conflict later on, where she’s okay and you’re a liar?”
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Right. Right.
Dr. Marty Klein: So couples come in, and frequently, the woman is a little hesitant to trust me, because they think, you know, I’m apparently a man, so therefore I’m gonna side with men… Which is a terrible insult, if I were to take that personally, because I’m a professional… But most women, when we talk about porn, they’re pleasantly surprised that I am more ambitious for the couple than they are. They just want the guy to stop looking at porn. I want the guy to start understanding what the woman’s lived experience is around sexuality, and I want the guy to talk honestly about his own experiences in the moment with sexuality, and that’s a much bigger agenda than simply “You don’t look at porn.”
If we settle for “You don’t look at porn”, that means that whatever concerns that the woman has about her body – those remain; whatever concerns the woman has about her sex life – those remain.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Whatever his feelings are about sexual inadequacy, or fear of rejection…
Dr. Marty Klein: Exactly, all that remains. That all stays in place. So I want a lot more from my couples, and for the amount of money that they pay me for therapy, I think they deserve more. They just don’t realize that they can get more. So that’s how I work with couples, and every once in a while I do get an individual who looks at porn in a self-destructive way, and we deal with that. The porn is generally not the issue. Generally, the issue is that people are using porn to either medicate their depression, or medicate their anxiety, or deal with their loneliness, or maybe somebody has bipolar disorder, or maybe somebody has OCD, or something like that… Maybe somebody has Asperger syndrome…
So when I get people coming in who think that they’re porn addicts, or people who come in and say that they look at way too much porn, I say “Tell me all about it. Tell me all about it, and tell me about how you lose track of time… But tell me about the rest of your life, too. Tell me about what makes you feel good. Oh, nothing? That’s interesting. Tell me about what makes you feel connected with other people. Oh, hardly anything? That’s interesting. Tell me how you feel about sexuality. Oh, you feel powerless to create the kind of sex that you want in your life? Oh, that’s interesting.”
So we talk about all that stuff and we see their self-destructive use of porn in that context… In the same way that if somebody came in and they said that they were addicted to golf, they’re always playing golf, sometimes they cut out of work early to play golf, they leave their muddy golf shoes in the kitchen and get in trouble for that, they subscribe to all these golf magazines, they buy new golf clubs every six months, even though they don’t need them… What I wanna know from that person is exactly the same stuff – what makes you feel connected with other people? What else gives you pleasure? What makes you feel glad that you’re alive? What makes you grow? And if the answer is “Other than gold, nothing”, then we have to talk about the rest of your life; golf is not the problem, the rest of your life is the problem.
What enables me to do that is that I’m not seduced into this panic about pornography the same that most therapists are not seduced into a panic about golf. Well, it’s just that I’m not seduced into it about porn either, so I’m able to talk to people about their humanity; people who look at porn – they’re not only porn consumers. They’re fathers or they’re mothers, or they’re siblings, they’re workers, whatever it is. So I try and see people’s sexuality in general, and porn use in particular, in the context of the rest of their lives, which honors people’s humanity and helps make sense out of what’s going on with them.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Absolutely. And I do understand – I mean, I’ve heard one of the things that’s talked about a lot in the way of pornography is the neurological impact, right? The dopamine…
Dr. Marty Klein: Oh, that’s just silly.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Well, I’m listening to you and part of what I’m thinking is, well, so would eating a really heavy dessert, or so would going to exercise… You know, there’s other things that are also happening neurologically that we get certain hits from, but I guess I was curious — you already just answered that…
Dr. Marty Klein: Well, you basically took my line there, Jessica. Now I get to say I’m in agreement with you. I mean, I’ve heard people say with great seriousness “You know, when people look at porn, the part of the brain that lights up is the same part of the brain that lights up when they use cocaine”, and I say “Well, of course. Of course.” That’s also the same part of the brain that lights up when you cuddle your grandchildren, or when you walk on the beach. I mean, the brain is a pleasure-processing instrument, and there’s a part of the brain that lights up when we experience pleasure, whether it’s the pleasure of masturbating, or the pleasure of looking at naked people we wanna look at, or the pleasure of cuddling our grandchildren.
So the fact that it’s the same part of the brain that lights up doesn’t tell us anything. In fact, if somebody says “You know, I look at porn and I don’t get any pleasure from it, and that part of my brain doesn’t light up”, I think “Hm, what’s up with this guy?” I mean, why are you looking at porn? Is it for the music? For the costumes? What’s up here?
So I’m not at all impressed with that, and the data on this neurological stuff is so weak. The sample sizes are like 9 people, and there’s no differentiation between masturbation and masturbating with porn. I mean, if you really wanna measure the impacts of porn on people, for starters, you’d have to get them to masturbate without porn, and at this point it’s very hard to find people like that.
It’s true that when people masturbate while they’re looking at porn they get involved in it, and there’s pleasure and so on, but that’s true if you masturbate without porn as well. A lot of the effects that people are claiming – neurological effects that people are claiming for porn – they’re just about masturbation. In fact, people say “You know, when people are heavy porn users and they stop looking at porn, they go into withdrawal.” Well, first of all, that’s an insult to drug addicts who go into withdrawal from drugs. I mean, going into withdrawal from drugs is hell on earth; going into withdrawal from porn – people get crabby. You just can’t compare the two. But the thing is, these little experiments or these little anecdotes about people stopping porn use for a while and then they get really crabby, well that’s because they’re not masturbating; it’s not because they’re not using porn, it’s because they’re not masturbating.
Somebody masturbates, say, 4-5 times a week, which is really common among men… If somebody masturbates 4-5 times a week and then they stop masturbating, well of course they get crabby. I mean, that makes perfect sense. If you take away potatoes and rice and past from me, I get pretty crabby. So porn, again, is being blamed for stuff that we could be talking about, but we’re not.
I find it really disingenuous that people are willing to talk about the so-called neurological impacts of porn use without ever saying a word about masturbation. That’s just beyond, beyond, beyond basic 101 kind of social science research.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Right. I’m listening to you and your earlier point – if you take away the porn, there’s still a lot going on in their brain and their fantasy, and that likely is somewhat similar, or even more racy than perhaps even the porn that they would have looked at.
Dr. Marty Klein: Well, you know, before there was porn, people didn’t have any trouble masturbating. Before there was porn, people didn’t have any trouble masturbating, fantasizing about Cleopatra, or Queen Elizabeth (the 1st, not the 2nd), or Kind Henry, for that matter, or the woman/man down the street. People had no trouble fantasizing and masturbating 100 years ago or 500 years ago or 2000 years ago… So blaming porn for fantasizing or for masturbating is kind of funny.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Okay. And then one question I had, which relates to interactions where — I wonder if porn impacts people’s expectations… If we’re talking about men in this scenario, and men expecting maybe a woman to be really aroused quickly – that would be my only… And it’s not even porn, it’s just in the media, it’s everywhere – if there’s a sex scene, there’s little display of the interaction around sometimes a woman needs a little more time to warm or to be really aroused, and sometimes that’s not depicted.
Dr. Marty Klein: Well, there’s about seven questions in one there. Let me say this… So I’ve been a therapist now since 1980. That means that I was a therapist for 20 years before broadband internet brought porn into everybody’s life, and I’ve been a therapist for 18 years since broadband brought porn into everybody’s life… So my career is a natural experiment in the effects of porn on the public, right? I was a therapist for 20 years before internet porn, and I’ve been a therapist for 18 years after internet porn… And the complaints that I get from people are pretty much the same.
I mean, the question of, for example, “He gives me one kiss, squeezes my breasts twice, and then wants to stick it in.” That’s not a new complaint. I’ve heard that complaint the first week I was in practice in 1980, and therapists in 1950 were hearing that complaint… And people in the letters to the editor, in the Lonely Hearts columns in the newspaper in the 1930’s were complaining about this… So this is a very — and in Shakespeare’s time, Shakespeare depicted the exact same thing in his plays… Women complaining that men take about two seconds, and then they wanna stick it in.
So the fact that this is modeled in porn doesn’t mean that that’s the only place that men get the idea to do that, and it doesn’t mean that this is the first time in history that men have been doing that. So the idea that it’s only porn that gives men bad ideas about sex is just kind of silly.
Now, I will say this – there are more men today, more college guys today asking for anal sex than 30 years ago. However, when I was in university, while most guys didn’t ask about anal sex, most guys asked about oral sex, and that was a change from 20 years before that.
In the 1940s/1950s men were not asking for oral sex, they were asking for intercourse. In the 1960s/1970s they were asking about oral sex, and that was not because of pornography. Now men are asking for anal sex. So there is that cultural progression.
Women didn’t ask for oral sex back in the 1950s, or for that matter, in the 1970s. They sure as hell are asking for it now. That’s just the development of the culture. What I find interesting is that women today are still having trouble looking at men saying “Sweetheart, there’s lots of kinds of sex I’m perfectly happy to have with you. Anal sex is not one of them, and don’t bother asking me again for the next 1,000 years. Do we understand each other?” I find it interesting that women are still having trouble saying that.
They had trouble saying no to oral sex back in the ’70s, and they had trouble saying no to intercourse in the ’40s and ’50s, and now they have trouble saying no to anal sex in 2018.
I think it’s a shame that we’re not teaching our daughters to say no in a simple, clear, straightforward way, and to say “And you don’t have to ask me again, because I am simply not interested.”
I don’t know what it’s gonna take parents to sit their daughters down and say “We need to talk… And we need to talk about how you talk about sex.”
I get people coming into the office and they’re perfectly willing to have sex with people who are practically strangers, but they can’t say “Please move your hand a quarter of an inch”, you know? But again, that’s a bigger question than pornography; that’s a much bigger question.
Now is probably when you would ask me about my current book – His Porn, Her Pain, and I’m happy to tell you about it. It just got on my website, MartyKlein.com. There’s information about this current book, and lots of people saying wildly enthusiastic things about it. It’s “His Porn, Her Pain: Confronting America’s Porn Panic With Honest Talk About Sex.” That’s available in paperback.
It has an FAQ section, it has sample dialogues for couples to have… It even has a section on how to talk to your kids about porn, because we want our kids to be porn-literate. Everybody’s concerned that porn is sex education for their kids; I’m very concerned about that too, so this book adresses that question.
What else…? Oh, and on my website you can see my other books, too. In fact, since I like you so much, since you’re such a good interviewer, Jessica, I’m gonna give all your listeners a discount code to buy anything on my website; just use discount “10p” and you’ll get 10% off whatever you buy on my website. It’s MartyKlein.com.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Wonderful. I definitely am gonna be one of your customers; I look forward to engaging with more of your material. I am so grateful to have you on the show, and I know this has been a huge gift for all of us, so thank you.
Dr. Marty Klein: Thanks very much for educating the public.
I hope you have enjoyed today’s interview. I have appreciated Dr. Marty Klein’s perspective, as he invites us to really look at the underlying concerns. If in relationship we can talk about the pain, the insecurity, the fear, we’re much more likely to work together in a collaborative way, in a win/win way, to address that concern, to generate solutions together.
Rather than confronting the concern, one partner with an idea of how to address that concern, but then come with force, expectation, and even ultimatums at times, which generally leads to power struggle, tension, conflict, and one person has to really mold and sacrifice, which long-term does not work.
To connect with Dr. Marty Klein or the links that he has mentioned, please visit today’s show notes on my website, which is DrJessicaHiggins.com click on Podcast, find today’s episode #145, “Pornography: What Are We Really Talking About?” If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Again, my e-mail is [email protected].
Until next time, I hope you take great care.
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