- Hey, guys, this episode is inspired by your comments
on a previous Middle Ground.
- Make sure you stick around to the end
because we wanna tell you
about how you can be even more involved.
- Enjoy the episode
- Because people are anti-sex.
That's why we're having the-
- No, no, no, no, no, no.
- No. - No, I am pro-sex.
- Me too. - I am not ashamed.
- But they say if you're pro-sex, you're pro-pornography.
- That's by your definition.
- Well, that's exactly right.
That's why we're gonna agree to disagree.
(pensive music)
(rhythmic music)
Hi, I'm Buck, and I'm a human rights activist and pro-porn.
- Hi, I'm Abigail, and I'm an aspiring physician
and I'm pro-porn.
- Hi, I'm Riley.
I'm an adult performer, and I'm pro-porn.
- Hi, my name is J.K.
I am a porn addiction recovery coach
and I'm passionate about helping men
who struggle with compulsive sexual behaviors.
- Hi, my name is Maria.
I run a youth organization and we educate on this issue.
- My name is Nicole.
I'm 21-years-old.
I'm headed to law school next year.
I have been a firsthand witness
of the devastating effects porn can have
in personal relationships.
- [Interviewer] Can I have my anti-porn people on the left
and my pro-porn people on the right, please.
(dramatic whooshing)
I have watched porn.
- I've watched porn in the past
and I think I've watched
more than my fair share of it (laughing)
to the point that it changed my life.
But right now I don't,
because I'm at a point where it's been a decade.
I won't be going back to it. (laughs)
- I watch porn.
I also produce porn.
What a great medium to use to help to explain to people
different kinds of bodies,
different kinds of sexualities,
different ways that people fantasize about things
in a healthy manner.
- I started off watching porn as young as 12
out of curiosity
and eventually it led into my sexual exploration
and loving my body.
So I've watched porn
on a daily basis to, you know, satisfy myself.
- Hey, guys. (laughs)
I don't watch porn.
It's not like I don't think about sex
or anything like that
but that's just something I've only seen
cause destruction in the relationships
that I've been close to
and I've purposely stayed away from it.
- Don't you think they already had a problem
before the pornography?
- Sure. Yeah.
- So how can...
Do you think the pornography just pushed it forward
and made the situation worse?
- Yeah.
I don't think it's the cause.
I think it's a symptom of the cause.
It certainly pushed forward into issues of deceit,
of mistrust and broken relationships
that certainly weren't helped by an exposure to pornography.
- But what if you saw a healthy relationship
around pornography?
Would that change your mind?
- I think amazing relationship is subjective.
- Of course. Of course.
- I think you could also direct that to me.
- Yeah.
- The thing is, professionally, I've just never seen it.
We do have cases
where they thought they were open to it
and one of them just got addicted to it.
- What is addiction?
- Addiction is when it starts interfering
with other aspects of your life,
when it interferes with your career,
when it interferes with your finances,
when it interferes with your erection.
I couldn't masturbate for years
unless I was viewing pornography.
- Do you think shame has something to do with
the reason why people feel that they get addicted?
I get shamed all the time for my career
but what I believe
is that people have created this idea
that pornography is negative.
Pornography is bad.
People use these to blame or springboards to say,
well, he used alcohol and he watched pornography.
So that must be the reason.
- If that wasn't there,
if porn wasn't there,
the relationship could be saved.
High speed internet pornography, in my opinion,
escalates the decline of any relationship.
(dramatic whooshing)
- [Interviewer] Porn has directly affected my sex life.
- I developed a sense of entitlement
towards certain sexual acts.
I expected that a woman in a relationship with me
should be willing to give blow jobs
or should want to have anal sex.
And these things came before what
she actually enjoyed.
It caused the women a lot of pain.
It caused them to look at their bodies
and go like, "Well, he likes me for everything else,
but like he's totally not into it,
or he's not with me when we're having sex
because he's somewhere else, imagining that."
All of that, when I measured it and I look back,
it just came back to porn.
I got to a point where I could not have sex
or maintain an erection
unless I was imagining a scene from some porn
that I watched three months ago.
And sadly, I'm not the only one.
It took so long,
in fact, for me, it took 18 months.
And this involved a lot of work
to know that it takes 18 months of journaling (laughs)
before I could have a regular sex life again.
- Do you think that there's a way
that we, as pornography creators,
could create content that would help them?
- It's noble.
I wish that I, years ago, I tried to believe that,
but once I realized how big the porn industry machine is,
I just realized that that is not going to be the solution.
I've yet to meet a client who told me like,
"Yeah, J.K., I downgraded my porn to missionary.
I started watching vanilla stuff."
No, because it no longer starts with the vanilla stuff,
and y'all know that.
- I will a hundred percent agree with you.
There is bad pornography.
I will 100%.
But that said, that doesn't make all of it
the case that it's causing people
to have erectile dysfunction.
Now, me, I'm a transgender man.
So I was born a woman and I became a man.
I kept my vagina.
I kept my vagina for a reason.
But that said, I use it within my pornography
and I use that specifically to teach the world
about sexual experiences with a man like myself.
And it is sex educational on some level.
It's also body educational.
- But the question that I have for all of you would be
what are we doing for the 11-year-olds
who can one moment are playing Fortnite or Minecraft,
and the next, they are watching someone of your gender,
which they have no understanding of what it is,
and using that to determine
what their sexual identity is going to be.
What are the ethics of it?
- [Buck] Are you kidding me?
- Is it, at all cost, I must educate people?
- When I was eight, I never got to see anything like that.
So guess what I did when I was eight?
I cut my arms.
I tried to commit suicide.
I hated myself because I was a man with a vagina
at eight-years-old.
That was horrifying for me.
Now, if I was an eight-year-old,
and I got to pick up my phone and I got to see me,
I would be like, actually,
"Wow, I can actually be this man."
But I never got that opportunity at eight-years-old.
Now, I agree with you.
Pornography for an eight-year-old
is probably not the best thing in the world
but let's talk about the parents.
If I had an eight-year-old,
I would never let that eight-year-old have a phone
or be on the internet.
- It was so interesting.
I wanted to run over here.
So interesting.
I actually remember this story.
In like the middle of the talk,
a mom, she stood up basically
and raised her hand and grabbed the mic.
Her son, who was eight-years-old.
He had Googled sex.
So he was curious.
He wanted to know, you know, like any other kid.
But what he found then was porn.
And I would argue that the mainstream pornography
does not actually show sex, if you know what I mean.
He was not so upset about like what he had seen.
He was more upset about the thing that he had seen,
he thought, this is what my parents do to each other in bed.
- But why is he fearful?
That's the thing that I want to understand,
why kids are fearful of sexual interaction?
I noticed in Sweden and Norway
and that particular part of the world-
- Way more open.
- Much more open about bodies.
What I thought to myself was,
well, what if children on some level
were taught about sex as a positive thing?
- Absolutely. - As a beautiful thing.
- Absolutely.
But that's kind of the,
I think, perhaps you're missing the point of the story
because he was looking for sex.
- Yeah. - You know?
- He was, yeah. - He was.
- [Buck] But what he saw was not nice.
- Was not what he, exactly.
But I would assume
and I would guess that it was quite aggressive.
- I think I wanted to add onto something you were saying.
You have to have some level of maturity to watch it.
I remember coming across a video
where a girl was masturbating with a Sharpie marker
and I thought, "Oh, look, she looks like she's having fun.
Let me grab a Sharpie marker.
Let me try this."
Made absolutely no sense.
I remember doing it and I remember thinking, "What is this?"
Like, this makes no sense.
So me doing my research,
I realized certain masturbation techniques
and then I realized, "Oh, pornography isn't real."
This is just a show.
And unfortunately, not everybody has that realization
and I'm not saying that's the cause of the addiction
or whatever but there should be some level of understanding.
- Yeah, so I said no to the prompt
because I currently do not have a sex life
but I've definitely experienced emotional intimacy
with somebody
who was addicted to pornography
and absolutely experienced
hurt within that
of him not being honest about the fact
that was something he struggled with.
And that similar to you, it sounds like,
had expectations of me that I couldn't fulfill
and that I didn't even know where they were coming from
until a year into the relationship.
So yeah, I think pornography can affect intimacy
without affecting particularly a sex life.
(dramatic whooshing)
- [Interviewer] The stigma around porn is too negative.
- What I see when I meet kids and youth,
especially like in the classrooms,
is that the stigma and the kind of shame and the guilt
is exactly what is kind of hindering the conversation.
I'm all about like lifting that off of their shoulders
to have, you know, the conversation be open and honest.
That's why I think it's so important
that this is happening,
you know, that we're talking about this.
- I believe the stigma should be negative.
I think pornography is simple.
The reason I did come over
and said it's too negative
is because especially in the church,
there's the stigma of shame that comes
after asking for forgiveness.
I just think that there should be an easier way
to move on and grow out of that experience.
- So we've talked a lot about the way that stigma
and consumption affects the consumer,
but we haven't really talked much at all
while we've been sitting here
about labor and the people who make porn.
And from my point of view,
I see firsthand so much the way
that stigma against porn affects the lives
and the safety of porn performers.
It is near impossible to get a decent OBGYN.
It is hard to find a mental health care professional
who will not pathologize you for your choice of occupation.
It leads to a well-known phenomenon
people losing their families
just by virtue of what they do for a living.
It's the palpable discrimination
that sex workers of all kinds face
because of this kind of negative stigma.
- Hi. - Hi.
- No, this was a good one to watch from the outside.
This is the first moment standing there
that I was able to see like, "Okay, wow."
Because I could feel it this time instead of just listening.
I feel the human part.
And that's why I say that
the stigma hurts. - Right.
- That's what I see.
The stigma hurts,
but the stigma needs to be there
because sometimes, it's the only way
I can get my point across. - Yeah.
- Right, so I think what you're saying is that
to help the demographic that you need to help,
it needs to have that stigma.
But stigma in any way, shape or form
is not good for anybody.
Once stigma is there,
it's just gonna create a negative space.
I agree with you.
You don't ever have to accept what I do.
Only thing I ask for is respect.
And respect means no stigma.
- While I would maybe not give you
exactly what you want as respect for your profession,
I absolutely respect you as a person.
And I think that your opinions, while totally wrong,
(Buck laughing)
you have the right to have that opinion.
(dramatic whooshing)
- [Interviewer] Our society needs better sex education.
- Don't just teach them how sex works biologically.
Teach the children about consent
and autonomy over their bodies
and communication with their partners
and how to do that in a healthy way.
- Emotional intelligence is one of the things
that is lacking among men who watch a lot of pornography.
Society, the ways we were raised,
Disney and then PornHub.
And then you get this messed up
emotional intelligence thing. (laughing)
You know, it all conflict.
- That dang patriarchy again.
(panelists laughing)
- You have to understand,
it's true because I was born as a woman.
I was not born as a man.
It's dominance taking.
That's what we see as masculinity
and I totally disagree with that.
It's very toxic.
And so we do need to talk about that.
But for myself and my particular porn
and my desire to create education around it,
was specifically targeted to people like myself.
It's because I didn't have sex
till I was in my thirties
because I was too freaked out about my body
and too freaked out about how people would feel about me.
And so I was not comfortable sexually.
So I knew once I became sexually comfortable,
thank God. (laughing)
For that,
because that gave me a space to be the man I am today.
- Tell me if I'm wrong,
but I think we basically all agree
that at the end of the day,
we recognize sex as something that should be beautiful,
that should be a form of expression,
just who you're expressing it to
and when you express it, we all kind of disagree on.
- I think all of these views were necessary
to create something nuanced.
And I hope that it improves
the mental landscapes of the folks
who consume what we produce.
- All right. - Right on.
(panelist indistinctly chattering)
- Thanks, again. - Yes.
(panelist indistinctly chattering)
- It was totally insane. - It was.
- I love how respectful of a conversation that was.
- That was awesome. - Yeah.
- I think this is one of the best representations
of what Middle Ground is supposed to be.
As you guys know,
Jubilee, we are trying to create
a movement of change makers for human good.
And that means you guys, you guys are the movement.
So we love hearing from you.
- Send us all of your ideas,
the good ideas, the bad ideas,
the like, ugh, okay, ideas.
We love reading them.
As always, subscribe, like us on Facebook,
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and we'll see you next time.
(gentle rhythmic music)