#43 - Porn as Education | Mythbusters
Ready for myth-busting part 2?
In this episode, Sammy and Andrew continue treading through prevailing myths about porn and sex that are relentlessly hurting and damaging people, especially younger generations. They focused on using porn as a platform for education about sex.
Absorbing all of these false ideas causes viewers to inherit more negative concepts than learnings, and these will only weigh a person down. Remember, relationships and sex are meant to be unique. It's something that you are committed to creating and nourishing on your own.
Be educated wisely by learning how to take care of your relationship first, then real intimate connection through sex will follow.
We are not just about our physical bodies but multi-dimensional being
Wrong assumptions on making porn a safe space for learning
What porn is precisely teaching us
Why porn is created
Porn is not tailor-made to the relationship you're in
Ethical porn?
Porn as distractions on a person’s sexual attention span
Healthy ways to expand the mind in creating a great sexual relationship
Episode Transcript:
Andrew Love: Welcome back, everybody. Andrew Love here along with Mumbly Jack. What's your name?
Sammy Uyama: Hey. It's me, Mumbly Jack. I'm Sammy Uyama. That's me.
Andrew Love: We are, we are here. We are, we are allowed to be here. The cosmos has allowed us, has, has blessed us with the power to communicate today. And we want to start myth-busting part two. We bust some myths last night in the face. We just like busted in the up.
Sammy Uyama: Those balls and its balls. We busted, or the ball busters of myths.
Andrew Love: I was just trying to be decent. But yeah, whatever, whatever you say. Sure. And we got some more, we got some more. There's you know, a lot. There's a lot out there. A lot of misinformation. A lot of totally egregiously wrong information. And then, there's some kind of true information. And then, there's some stuff that's really true. So, we want to talk about prevailing myths that are just hurting people and we want to cut them down to size and chop them up and throw them away. We don't even want to recycle these ones. We want to incinerate them. Okay? And in today's episode, what are we going to be busting? Which method we're going to be busting, Sammy?
Sammy Uyama: Busting, the myth of using porn as education. Learning from porn. Getting cues on how to spice up your sex life or learn how sex work or how to have good sex. And using porn as a reference for that. We want to take that myth. We don't even want to just burn it up. We want to pack it in a rocket ship and shoot it out of this atmosphere until it no longer exists in this galaxy anymore.
Andrew Love: Wow. That's because you send something into space. They're going to be in a galaxy, Sammy. I don't know.
Sammy Uyama: Far, far away. Keep going and going and going, at least to Mars.
Andrew Love: We got a lot of gas in that. Okay, got it. Yes, we want it, we want it annihilated. We want it gone. And the reason is this, there are so many psychologists. I mean, I've read so many articles, especially Psychology Today, that consider human beings to be just mass. You know, just a brain. A mass of molecules and some brains, you know. And completely disregarding the nuance of our spirituality, our hopes, and our dreams. All these things. And so, when you talk about things like pornography as education, it's often not discussed in very personal terms. It's discussed as though we're just one-dimensional beings who are just basically animals. And of course, from that worldview, it makes sense. We're speaking to you at the level of, you know, the fact that you're a multi-dimensional being. You are more than just your body. You are your mind. You are, you know, the potential reality of so many hopes and dreams. And I was thinking about this today, where do ideas come from? They're not already in your brain. So, where do they come from? You can't just think of an idea. Because where is it? Is it already, where, if it's not in your brain, where is it? So, you have your mind and you have access to all sorts of endless ideas that exist all around you when you're tuned in, as they say, but you also have a heart. You have all this connection to emotion. You have a spirit that connects us to each other. Sammy, have you ever had an experience where, where you like, you felt you could, you should call somebody and then, you call them. And then like I was just thinking about you. And you like, I was just thinking about you. Have you ever had that?
Sammy Uyama: Sure. Yeah. But so, I want to share something more bizarre. When that happened the other way. Like my mom, she called me up one day just like that. This is so crazy. I was a weighted school in Korea, and I fell off a fence. You know, climbing a fence fell off the top. I scratched,
Andrew Love: You know, you know when you fell off a fence, right?
Sammy Uyama: Anyway, I got, I scraped, I got scratched on my back. And then, my mom, she woke up, she woke up one morning and she had, she got this like crazy red mark on her back. Basically, that same day where she was like, she got this weird mark that she couldn't explain. You know, this pain on her back and this marking. And she doesn't, she doesn't just think like, "Woah. That was so weird. Where'd this come from?" She goes, she jumped straight to, "Oh, I need, I need to call Sammy to make sure he's okay." Right? And, and so she called me up and I was like, "Yeah." And she's like, "Hey, how's it going?" So, you know, I fell off the fence. So, "Yeah. I was playing with my friends and I fell off the fence." And then, and then I got to scratch my back and she told me the story about how she woke up with it. That was so weird. So, that's my experience with the connectedness of us as human beings.
Andrew Love: There you go. And so this I mean, there's countless stories like that. I'm sure we all have experienced something to some degree of that nature whether we remember it or not. And then you factor that into sexuality. And then you start to think of what's porn if we are connected to these people on this screen that we're watching in some strange way that we might not always understand, right? So, we are these multidimensional means is what I'm saying. And so, that does not get factored in when you hear the psychologist talking about sex. It's very mechanical. Okay? So I want to, I just want to contextualize that we're not just their bodies. And life would be very different and our understanding of sex would be very different if that were the case, because there'd be no consequence to hurting people. There would be no consequences to ourselves, for denigrating ourselves and our own expectations. But the reality is, we have a lot to us, many facets to us. And we need to factor sex into all of those facets. So, let's get into it. Sammy.
Sammy Uyama: Yes, let's pull us apart. We're not even, this is not about all the ways porn negatively affects us. This is, this is just debunking the myth of porn can be useful as an educational tool. That's we want to narrow scope, we're gonna narrow scope. There we go. The opposite, no, narrowcast, the opposite of broadcast. We're narrowcast on this one topic. So, the first disclaimer I can hear ringing off my head about. People who make this claim. You know, I've also read articles about really accredited people, who people you can't help but make the assumption that they know what they're talking about, it's kind of psychologists and professionals, make these you know, really casual claims that, yeah, porn can be a really useful way for an individual to understand sexuality. Understand their preferences, and what they like, and how it works. And they know what's, how to increase the excitement in the relationship. And this word, like could be, can be is like the first they like the, it's the first a disclaimer of kind of putting themself in safe territory. And so, they're, they're already feeding to the point that it's not always the case. That they're so yes, there's unhealthy, there's unhealthy porn is dangerous porn out there. But it can be if you find the right kind of porn, then you can learn a lot from it. And that in itself, I think it's like really the same argument of saying, if you dig deep enough, in a big enough dumpster, you can find something really edible and delicious, right? And so, so, even which is.
Andrew Love: Which is true, by the way.
Sammy Uyama: Sure, yeah. So even, even the claim in and of itself, I think, is enough to disqualify. It's like, yeah, even if, and I'm saying it's not the case. I'm saying that porn is nothing useful, and helpful to teach about sex. So I'm making that clear. But I'm also, I'm also making the claim that even if it were the case that you could learn something useful from sex. It doesn't justify digging through all the garbage and all the junk and all the poop justifying one little gem. And there are so many, so many more efficient and effective ways to learn about sex even from just that perspective.
Andrew Love: Absolutely. Yeah, you can find lessons and value in misery, right? Like, if you're in a very bad situation, and you have the right mindset, you can glean wisdom from that difficult situation, right? Like being, like Nelson Mandela being put in jail for years for something that he didn't do, like you did not belong there. But he was able to find some way of making that time valuable because if he didn't, he would have become a very bitter, terrible person. But instead, he rose up, right? So there's that angle which is like you can find good in the bad, but why subject yourself to the bad, right? Why expose yourself to harmful chemicals if you don't need to, right? And definitely, porn is like, you might be able to like Sammy said, you might be able to learn something here and there from it but you're also inheriting so much garbage that it's gonna weigh you down. And the things that you could learn in porn that possible. Like, I don't know, practically speaking, you could learn different positions of sex. You could learn, I don't know what you could really learn, but let's just say you're gonna also inherit this really weird attitude towards the opposite sex or the same sex or whatever you're gonna win. Like this entitlement of it's okay to insult them. It's okay and it's not going to be overt. You're not going to say to yourself, Oh, I think it's okay to be chauvinistic. I think its misogyny is pretty okay. You're just going to slowly watch as you don't care as much and it doesn't hurt as much to watch somebody be degraded. When you see it again and again and again, that pain, that, that empathy that you once felt will slowly go away. So, you're inheriting that. You're actually being educated for sure but in a negative way. You're educating your soul to detach itself from your conscience, you know, from the things that guide us towards health. And I was thinking about this a sociopath doesn't feel the emotions of other people. That's like a psychopath, right? What is porn teaching us? To disconnect our emotions from our sex. We're turning into psychopaths because of porn in many ways, right? Sociopathic, we're sexual sociopaths. That's what porn is teaching us. So yes, it is a great educator. Porn is a fantastic educator in that respect. It's educating us how to be psycho and how to, how to do all the, all the things that we could possibly want to do that would damage any potential of intimacy, true intimacy.
Sammy Uyama: Yes. So, another point about porn being an educational tool is that you have to look at the context of like, what's the intention or the use of why pornography is created, right? How do I say it's what's the purpose that porn is trying to fulfill, right? When people create it, what do they have in mind? And it's not education, right? So just the idea of using something that is not designed as education, itself, I think is really flawed. And so porn, I guess, in its, in its purest, if you were to take a pure like a, an innocent and its most innocent form, what porn is meant to be is entertainment. I think that's what a lot of people in the industry would claim that they're in the entertainment industry, like that. And that's kind of a treat as just an enjoyable pastime. And so even, even with that in mind, just the idea of using something that's meant, that's created as entertainment for education, you know, well, how many ways can that go wrong? What else is created with, for entertainment, with entertainment mind? Basically entire Hollywood industry, right? Like, every, every, every action movie with a fast car scene. You know, every romantic comedy out there, right? You know, it's, it's people understand, it's not reality. But you know, it's, you know, for enjoyment that people watch these things. So it's the exact same principle, it's like you. Why would you learn about how to have a healthy relationship with someone from romantic comedy? Or why would you learn how to drive a car from Fast and Furious, right? It's like, why would you learn about sex from something that is not meant to be a realistic depiction of how sex works?
Andrew Love: Yeah, yeah. And I think, I think we, Yuna Johnson, Yuna Johnson was on this podcast. And I think she made this point that when you get together when you marry somebody when you commit yourself to somebody, you're creating something out of nothing. You're creating this garden. Consider your relationship, like a garden, and every seed that you plant, every time you water it, you're turning it into either a flourishing garden or you're letting the soil erode and there's a bunch of vines that take over and it gets really gnarly looking. Just ugly, and gross, and nothing beautiful can grow there because it's overwrought with decay, right? And so, when you watch porn as education, you're all you at most, you can copy what you're seeing, but it's not you. And it's definitely not tailor-made to the relationship that you're in. You're assuming a character and you're kind of thrusting that character physically but also metaphorically thrusting that character onto somebody else. And then, you're not you for you. So you don't get to enjoy it because you're playing a role. But also they don't get to enjoy you because you're not there. You're in character. And I know that to be true. Absolutely. That you're playing a role. Just like when you get a, I don't know if you've ever gotten like, a compliment to somebody like oh, you look like this person when you wear those glasses. And then every time you wear those glasses, you feel like that person, right? I remember one dude is like I had a haircut. He's like, "Wow, you look like Brad Pitt." And I was like, I walked around for days and be like, "Yo, I look like Brad Pitt." And I got into this. It is the furthest thing from the truth, right? But like, I felt like, you know, this big-time celebrity for a couple of days it lasts, right? But it wasn't me. I like, I don't want to be Brad Pitt. You know, I'm happily married yet. I don't want to be that dude. So, the same thing goes with porn is that what you do is you start to assume other people's traits, right? You start to have sex like another person would have sex, not like you. And definitely not in a way that makes sense to your couple. So you're not creating something original, you're copying. This is facsimile sex in a way, right? You're copying somebody else's sex, and it's not going to work for you because sex is meant to be unique. It's meant to be something that's only unique to your couple in all the world that you can create something that makes total sense for your bodies, for your mind, for your hearts, for your souls. And you, so no matter how much you learn from this or that, it won't fit, because it's not you. So education is really, you know, learning how to care for somebody and the sex will follow. And if, yeah, I'm gonna leave it at that.
Sammy Uyama: All right. So basically, the fundamental what porn is, it's, nothing inherent in it. It provides anything useful to us as an educational resource. Everything that speaks to what you just said, Andrew, about how trying to mimic and copy, right? That's what sex becomes about rather than creating and inventing from scratch. So another caveat, right? like a direction that people might say, Well, what about this that, you know, there's this whole? So yes, the majority of porn, is a dumpster, right? It's really every, a lot of people would agree to this. It's like maybe 80%, 90%, 95%, 99%, whatever percentage, Calvinistic, it's violent, etc, etc, etc. It's not healthy. But then people like well, but you can find, you know, something that's, you know, sweet, and that's like real couples, and then, you know, they have this whole, this whole niche market development called ethical porn. And, you know, you can learn a lot from these things with real couples having a real intimate connection. And even, even that, it's like the idea of, you know, this, I guess, is fundamental, where you have to just, you have to look at whether do you view yourself? Do we view ourselves as just, you know, bodies with, with mental capacities? Or are we a multidimensional spiritual being? But that, and sex isn't meant to be just two people, you know, humping and rhythm, or is it a real connected experience that something that can bring two people together. That's not just an end goal, but it's a vehicle to accomplish something greater. Accomplish, you know, the real intimate connection between two human beings. And if that's your goal for sex, bringing anything else into that is not productive. Or you're just, your, your mind is preoccupied, and are filled with trying to be like that, or even just imagining that, or, and you're not there with your spouse. So, anything that, and just the inherent nature of porn, it's like, a person is shrunken down to basically a two-dimensional figure. You know, an image or video on a screen. So even the whole looking, oh, it's ethical porn, and everyone there really wants to be there. And they're paired, if they're paid a fair wage, there are all these kinds of arguments that go around. But anything that it's the, it, your, it's any kind of pornography is just the ultimate, like denigration of basic women, right? Where they're just shrunken down to objects. And you're training them to set theirs, not training them swizzle, but they're just treated as no objects to fulfill sexual interest. However, whatever the context is, for how well they're paid, or whether they're into you know, what the story is, and how it's produced. It's like you in a moment, when you're sitting there watching someone having sex, they're not, they're not a person with a history with parents, with siblings, with hopes and aspirations. They're just a body having sex on screen in front of you.
Andrew Love: Yeah. If you really cared about them, then there'd be you know, like interviews with them after about their interests and like how they're going to use this money. What they're doing in school, you know. Where they were raised, a shout out to their parents. None of this none, people don't care about that. They just want, they want what they want. They want to get in and get out. But what you bring up is a great point. And that's supported by every single faith tradition, which is now, right? Like being present is everything. It's like how you enjoy anything is by being present now. You, the future can torture you through anxiety and the past can torture you through reliving bad experiences, and now is all that matters, right? And you cannot be in the moment, you cannot be here and now if you're distracted in any way. Porn, definitely like, anybody out there who's listening, if you watch porn, if that stuff comes into your mind while you're having sex, you are not thinking about your spouse. And they can feel it, especially if they are remotely intuitive. If they're remote, if they're fully present, they can tell if you're not fully present. Trust me, there's something about it. Just like when somebody looks in your eyes, you can tell if they're really getting you or not. If they're really listening. They could be nodding their head and all that but if they don't get it. Like I can tell my wife is good at nodding her head when she's not listening and I'll be like, "Honey, did you hear anything I said?" She's like, "Oh, no. No, I didn't hear." "Why do you nod your head?"
Sammy Uyama: Has this ever happened to you, Andrew. My wife's called me out a couple of times were like, we're making love, and then afterward I just like rollover. And all right, good night. And then she's like, say, "Oh, is that it? Was, was that?"
Andrew Love: No.
Sammy Uyama: Is that just sex for you? I like completely forget about the aftercare, right? And the cuddling.
Andrew Love: For us, it's always more complicated, because we have three kids, and there's and there's a lot of, anyway. We have a lot of adjusting we have to do, regardless. So. But. no, I don't have that problem. But I get what you saying. But that, that idea of presence is really, it's really hard. Harder and harder because our attention span is shorter than ever as humans because of social media, because of our phones. And then, you add porn into the mix. Then, your sexual attention span becomes, I mean, how much, when people watch porn, they're not watching one porn movie for an hour and a half like we watch a normal movie. The clip to clip to clip the clip to clip. That affects your sexual attention span. And absolutely does. And so, it's like, can you go long-form, right? With your, when you're together with your spouse, that's totally different, you have to develop a different part of your brain which is to tune into them. Tune into the breathing and all this stuff that you never learned with this, you know, broken attention span. So, it's really bad education. The more that you ingest quick clips, like the soundbite culture that we have, it's in a sexual sense, it creates sexual ads, right? And that's really not good. That's not, that's not where passion lies. It's not where real intimacy, sexual intimacy is like long-form. It's like sitting down and reading a book. It's like really getting immersed into it, right? It's not Facebook. You don't watch Facebook for like 45 minutes of a bunch of little clips and get up and be like, "Yes, now I can take over the world." You, you walk away feeling like garbage, right? It's cheap information. And it's cheap sex when you are, when you treat it like that because you're not, you're not into it. You just kind of search for something, but it's not, it's like junk food, it's not giving you what you really want. So, there's that too. Like, I've never really thought about it in those terms, but there's a definitely sexual attention span. And the further away you are from porn, actually, the longer your sexual attention span can be. And you can really focus for the entire time just on that one person and you don't need any extra frills or anything like that. You can just be there. Two people really enjoying each other. And I remember seeing some statistics that they compared the amount of joy that couples were experiencing in their sex lives and they're comparing couples that have been married for decades. And then, couples that were new and hot and fresh. And just like, you know, like Tinder. And the couples that had been married for longer, we're enjoying sex way more. And it's because of that freedom that comes with getting to know somebody and creating sex that is totally unique to you. Whereas, if you're in the hookup culture, you don't have the liberty to kind of get to know somebody. You're just kind of reenacting either what you saw or what you've done before with the new person trying out new stuff, and it's not real, nothing's real. You're putting on a show.
Sammy Uyama: Yeah. That's the best you can do. Because it's like, I mean you're performing. This is like you only have one, one instance with this person, right? So, what else are you going to do?
Andrew Love: Yeah, yeah. So it's all, it's all, it's all really the pretense for it is all false. And that's what again, porn teaches you to really just pretend you know, and to make it all the show. But the real exchange isn't made. The exchange of connecting at the deepest level to where intuitively like. I've been experiencing a lot with my wife lately. Just like that sex is so much beyond the body. It's hard to explain what it is if, if you're not kind of like spiritually inclined, right? But there's like an exchange happening. There's a higher dimension of sex and it will always elude you if you rely on sex, or porn to educate you. You won't ever get to that point at all because you'll be chasing after moves. Like, "Hey, try this move. Maybe that'll make me good." No, it's not enough. I didn't try this move to do this, where this and it's like, it's all sexual fast food. But the long-form true sex is, is really building this you know, my wife and I, we've been married for over eight years now. It took us maybe seven and a half years to kind of build a rhythm that really likes we're both really into. So imagine that porn does not teach you that at all. And teaches you how to have sex now because your body wants it. And it doesn't think anything about what is your sex going to be like, in 10 years? It should only get better. It should only get better.
Sammy Uyama: Yeah, so that's right, with three ways in which porn is a bad form of education about sex. Let's end with so where can people go to learn about sex? What are the healthy ways to expand your mind, to learn how to create a really great sexual relationship?
Andrew Love: Well, this is a great time to push my new YouTube channel called puppet show sex where I show people out of sex and puppet. I don't, well, again, we brought this up in the last myth-busting episode, but people talking to people, people who are in healthy relationships. Because they will give you a more in-depth answer about what sex really is. Don't try to learn on an online course. And if, especially if you're single, because it's just transactional, it's like intellectual. But you talk, it's like the difference between "Hey, what was World War II Like ?" And, and then you read a book about World War II or you ask a veteran who is there. And you say, "what was World War II like? And they take you there. They were there and they took you there. It's like you are all in and you can feel what they feel. And that's why humans are so amazing because we tell stories. So, to plug into somebody as well that you feel that you can trust to, to ask these deep questions. That's where you'll really get the contours of what is sex, really, you know. What can it be? Because it's not always great. Sometimes it's very complicated. And that's important to know, too. And that's real education is learning from people's experiences.
Sammy Uyama: And, yes. And not just from real, like people in your life, like actually having a conversation with someone. Not, oh, let me go on this forum and see what people said and experienced it. Let me ask them to read it. But like, yeah, yeah, but like sex is, it's not, so sex, it's not just, it's about connection. And doesn't have to mean in a weird way, like, having sex with other people. But like the world of sex, it's like to experience it in a relationship with the people who are important to you. And yeah, who you, who you trust, and who care about your well being and care about you having a great healthy sexual relationship. That's, that's all part of healthy sexuality.
Andrew Love: Absolutely. Yeah. So that's, I mean, people are always the answer. If you can, you know, ask people. And if you can't, try to find people that you can. You should always have somebody in your life that you can talk to about deep stuff, right? And if you don't have any role models, well, guess what? You need them. We all do. You need real people. They help us to understand what's possible. And when they're really healthy and in a good place, it shows us the possibility that we can have a healthy, in this case, healthy sex life with a long-term spouse. So, seek these people out and plug into them and ask them, you know, what, what's it like? And that's real education. And if you are married, you know, talking to other couples is really important. Taking, taking, you know, like the marriage course, and stuff like that is really great. But it's, it's honestly so helpful to hear from other elder couples. And, you know, if you're a younger couple than to have others, because there are common struggles that people face, and they're like, I thought I was the only one, right? As if. The postpartum depression, like all sorts of stuff. It's very common. A lot more than we would suspect. But if we don't talk about it, we never know.
Sammy Uyama: Yeah, there you have it, folks. That's our answer. So, check out a new YouTube channel puppet. But uh, yeah, we hope it's useful. And if always you can connect to us, right? You know this is our world. It's why we do this. If you really have nowhere else to go to, you know, you've known you're comfortable with to discuss sex and get all your questions answered. Now, that's what we're building is a community of people who can comfortably share and talk about these things. So, connect with us at highnoon.org. Developing a whole platform for people to be able to connect about these specific topics and get their questions answered.
Andrew Love: Yeah. We love you guys. We want you it's, it's all about connecting. Sex is about connecting with the person you're with and then sexuality is about connecting to people you love, trust, and respect about sex. And that's how God starts to work really cool miracles in our life. So, reach out to us. Reach out to somebody. Connect. And if you want to join High Noon Connect, go to highnoon.org and find out more. It's a really cool service.
Sammy Uyama: Alright, see you guys next time.
Andrew Love: Bye.