Fapping Good Actually: Read the Bible + Research

In this thought-provoking episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the complex topic of sexuality from both scientific and religious perspectives. They challenge traditional interpretations of religious texts and explore how modern contexts might necessitate a reevaluation of sexual ethics. The discussion covers:

* The impact of pornography restrictions on society

* Masturbation and its effects on mental and physical health

* Biblical interpretations of sexuality and their modern applications

* The concept of separating pleasure from procreation in sexual ethics

* The potential benefits of a more nuanced approach to sexual morality

* Statistical data on sexual behaviors and preferences

* The role of technology in changing sexual norms and practices

This video offers a fresh, evidence-based perspective on a often controversial topic, aiming to reconcile religious values with modern realities and scientific understanding.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Why are all of these cultures like breaking apart ? It's because they have equated premarital sexual intercourse as exactly the same. I moral negative weight.

As masturbation, and that's really effing stupid. It made a lot of sense before porn existed, because if you look at the lines, and we'll get to in the Bible about this, they don't talk about masturbation, they talk about prostitutes. Seeing a prostitute actually is just as bad or worse than premarital sex.

You know, from a disease risk perspective, from a pregnancy risk perspective, there is a reason that historically you needed to warrant against all of this stuff. Right? But in a modern context,. when you put restrictions on porn, you increase the rate of sex crimes.

Speaker 5: Just saying, what works on planet Gelgamech isn't necessarily going to work for the rest of us here on Earth.

You see, that's the problem we're having here.

Malcolm Collins: For every 10 percent of increase in internet access in the U S there is a [00:01:00] corresponding regional decrease of 7.

3 percent of grape cases

Speed of light Trekkie! What are you doing? That's gross! Trekkie

Malcolm Collins: UCLA researchers found that sex criminals, on average, consume less porn than the average person and started consuming it at a later age than the average non sex criminal.

Within the Czech Republic, where porn was illegal , then legalized this decriminalization of pornography caused in one year grapes to decline by 37% and child sexual abuse by about 50%.

Similar results were seen when the porn laws were loosened in Denmark, Japan, China, and Hong Kong. Wow. Anyone who is pro pornography restrictions is functionally also pro child. Great

Simone Collins: So the [00:02:00] Bible

Malcolm Collins: says it's best, By their fruits you will know them. How do you know the correct interpretation? It works. If it leads to mass child grief and cover ups, It's not the correct interpretation.

The Bible tells us that. Easy peasy. Right, guys?

Speaker 5: I'm just trying to say that if we don't change then we might lose everyone to atheism. What exactly do you suggest we change, well, for one, no sex with boys.

Speaker 6: The

Speaker 7: holy document of law states that a priest, cannot get married, so where are we to get our sex?

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. Today, we are going to have a fantastic episode. We are going to go deep into research around sexuality into statistics around sexuality into biblical theology, a bunch of lines from the Bible. We're going to go into the philosophy of sexuality, and we are going to be coming up with a model [00:03:00] for the way we will teach our kids to engage with their sexuality, because I think one of the biggest back doors, you know, when a person comes to me in a traditional religion and when they say, you know, when they hear me say, oh, you need to evolve this tradition or you are going to get creamed by the urban monoculture.

Like, well, what do you mean by that? One of the number one things I am going to elevate is Is the way that their religion relates to sexuality, sexual rules that evolved in a time period before basically free internet pornography was everywhere for contraception. When. STDs were running rampant when you had to worry about getting random people pregnant, like at a high level is going to create a very different optimal rule system than a modern system.

And people might be like, well, why not just be stricter? And it's like, well, because that causes really bad [00:04:00] externalities within a modern culture, but also leaves often a back door in a child's brain where you have not built a framework for how a part of the world works. that the urban monoculture can basically install a self replicating mimetic framework that can eventually eat their entire mind.

And that's what all the gender ideology stuff is. But first I want to talk about how. These old rules around sexuality keep going wonky in a modern context.

And why,

as we're going to be arguing here, I would argue that there should be, and I will teach my kids, no cultural restrictions at all around masturbation for pleasure, if it is to any image or video that doesn't use a real human.

I. e. anything that's AI generated or drawn or anything like that. And we'll get to why, if you make this set of [00:05:00] restrictions, it actually solves most of the problems the old restrictions solve, while also protecting against a bunch of the new problems. So, problem number one that you see is The Mormon swinger phenomenon.

Have you been following these scandals Simone? Of

Simone Collins: course I have. In short, a reality TV show, I think on Hulu, right? Came out detailing moms of TikTok, a TikTok group of Mormon mothers who also just happened to turn out to be swingers.

Malcolm Collins: The point is that it, this has become common within part of Mormon culture. And specifically what they do is it's not considered cheating if the husband or wife is in the room watching you, which is actually really weird to me because that would Cause a really like, there was a sneko drama where like he was in an open relationship and then he talked about watching his girlfriend sleep with another guy and people were like, That's being cucked.

And he's like, no, I'm in an open relationship. And they go, [00:06:00] yeah, like open relationships are normal. Watching is not. And, and the reason that other guys would say this, and it appears that just Niko either didn't have this part of his arousal pathway or had this part of his arousal pathway inverted.

is a normal male for obvious evolutionary reasons. It's going to get a very strong disgust reaction from watching a partner of his sleeping with another male. That would have been very evolutionarily disadvantageous. Now for women, it's going to be different because women might have existed in a harem environment or something like that.

But for men, this is one of the loudest disgust motivators a normal man can feel. And so I would have to guess that these men might also have had This sort of silenced or muted in them as an arousal pathway If I was going to guess why this would be uniquely common among mormons to have the the cucking arousal pathway silenced It might be a holdover from their sister wife ancestors where the wives who are okay with watching other [00:07:00] wives having sex or who got into that might have passed that down to some of their male offspring as well leading to higher rates of arousal from cuckoldry was in the Mormon community.

Do you understand the logic behind that Simone or do I need to explain it differently? So you're giving a face like you didn't understand.

Simone Collins: Oh, i'm just thinking about it. I mean in in most of the sister wife Arrangements i'm aware of it's the the sex part is not at all shared or communal. What did they tell

Malcolm Collins: you?

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: No! They obviously wouldn't tell you. Like I don't even know what you're on about. Like you think that the sister wives who are trying to show how, and keep in mind the Mormons who still do this are the most religious of the most religious Mormons. Like you think that they are really gonna tell you, like, the things that are hot about the relationship for them?

Come on! Like Yeah, clue in here, Simone, but [00:08:00] anyway to I want to be clear here. This is not a Mormon specific problem. Okay. On the discord, we did a Catholic episode recently, and the first thing everyone was jumping on was like, Oh, all those Catholic girls, you know, acting like the, the butt stuff and the.

The oral isn't going to count when they get to heaven as premarital sexual intercourse.

Speaker: What's going on? I don't know. But do you think if I told him I had an incendiary device to run my niggers, he'd have a look?

Speaker 3: Some of them are, right? I'm willing to admit it.

Malcolm Collins: Because this is common among Catholic girls. Like I have slept with girls in this category myself. There is a common thing where it's like, well, oral doesn't really count. And I really liked a joke that one of them told us, like, you get to heaven.

And God's like, I'm sorry, premarital sex, you know? And then, and then the girl's like, wait, play that video back again. Stop. Zoom in. See, it was anal. And, and then God's like, ah, two heavens for you. That there's like these loopholes

Speaker 4: What in God's name are you [00:09:00] wearing? , I'm putting together my costume for the Halloween dance. , so you're going as a stripper?

No, I am a Catholic schoolgirl.

Thank God. Whatever you do, don't slag off the Pope. We're outnumbered.

Malcolm Collins: or and again, it's not just, you know, The Amish grape epidemic is really bad in the Amish community.

They're really strict rules. Or, you know, in, in the modern ultra Orthodox Jewish community people are breaking the Shoma Nega. I I'm pronouncing it. I'm butchering it. I can't speak other languages, which are their rules against like handholding and touching. Apparently it's really common, but they're supposed to be very, very strictly held.

And it's, Caused by like what leads to all of these rules being so feckless or other mormon stuff like soaking where they just leave themselves inside the girl or what's the other one where they like bounce on the bed?

Simone Collins: No, no, that that is soaking where technically because the male and female [00:10:00] partner Are not in leading the mechanical effort of thrusting for PIV sex.

And instead there is just placement with a very awkward friend, theoretically jumping on the bed to assist that that would work out. I still think

Malcolm Collins: High degrees of, of, of, of, of cuckoldering in the Mormon community. That just seems so apocryphal to me. It

Simone Collins: seems like a joke that somebody made up and it's really caught on because it's just such a funny concept.

Malcolm Collins: No, I think a lot of this stuff, like the oral and stuff like that, this is actually very common. No, the

Simone Collins: oral, the oral I know is super like common where it's like, well, yeah, we don't have sex, but we, you know. Oral doesn't count that I know for a fact. Yeah, oral anal

Malcolm Collins: don't count, you know, so fine.

Simone Collins: Well, I don't, I haven't, I think enhance,

Malcolm Collins: love that.

I think anals different.

Simone Collins: I think anals different. But I know that oral is a workaround. That is [00:11:00] definitely. So we're talking about

Malcolm Collins: why this happens. Why are all of these cultures like breaking apart here? It's because they have equated premarital sexual intercourse for pleasure as exactly the same. I moral negative weight.

As masturbation, and that's really effing stupid. It made a lot of sense before porn existed, because if you look at the lines, and we'll get to in the Bible about this, they don't talk about masturbation, they talk about prostitutes. Seeing a prostitute actually is just as bad or worse than premarital sex.

You know, from a disease risk perspective, from a pregnancy risk perspective, from a, you know, there is a reason that historically you needed to warrant against all of this stuff. Right? But in a modern context, if I'm like, in absolute terms. If it is a kid who is not allowed to masturbate, much more likely to engage in certain [00:12:00] types of premarital sex or engage in, when they're married, certain types of sexual exploration that otherwise they would just feel no desire to do, absolutely.

It is a huge moral failing of the way the rule set is working now. And then there's the secondary problem, which is outright bans on masturbation have a lot of problems. Specifically, if you tell somebody, don't think about X, it causes people to think about X. There have been a, this has been studied like extremely well.

So there is the a book on this if you want to read it, that's, that's pretty good called overcoming unwanted intrusive thoughts. A CBT based guide to getting over frightening, obsessive or disturbing things. There is also the white bear experiments conducted by Daniel Weger in the 1980s. And these studies asked participants to avoid thinking about a white bear for five minutes.

And they were very, very bad at it. [00:13:00] Specifically when you ask somebody to not think about something, you are causing them to engage in a form of. Suppression or psychological suppression, which requires cognitive resources. It makes them bad at basically thinking about everything else. And the problem is that some people will be like, Oh, but recent research has shown that this doesn't work around things you're afraid of.

Okay. Yeah. It, it, it doesn't have the same effect if you're trying to get rid of like PTSD stuff or things you're afraid of, but it does. Still hold with sexual things. So here I'm going to read a few other studies. The rebound effect of thought suppression to this is I'm quoting from a study. And this study is called God.

I can't stop thinking about sex. The rebound effect in unsuccessful suppression of sexual thoughts among religious adolescents. I love

Simone Collins: when people who do peer reviewed research do good titles. It's

Malcolm Collins: just a

Simone Collins: thing of beauty.

Malcolm Collins: So the rebound effect of thought suppression refers to attempts to suppress [00:14:00] thoughts that result in an increase in In those thoughts. So in the thoughts that we're trying to be suppressed. The aim of this three study research was to investigate the suppression of thoughts and it's possible importance to cognitive model of predicted compulsive sexual behavior CSB among Israeli Jewish religious and secular adolescence.

The analysis indicates that religious adolescents are higher in CSB than secular ones, and that religious suppression and CSB mediate the link between religiosity and well being. So they actually lower the well being of these students and lower some of the positive effects of religiosity that these students would otherwise be experiencing.

And then a 2019 study reported in the Journal of Sex Research found that Found the attempts to suppress sexual thoughts can result in an increase in those thoughts. This is called the rebound effect. So, here I'm going to quote from our book, the pragmatist guide to sexuality, because we also go into this phenomenon a bit

Some claim that all [00:15:00] arousal patterns not tied to penis and vagina sex between a married couple arise when a society loses God.

Octavian: There

Malcolm Collins: is an element of truth to this when surveyed religious individuals claim to consume porn at lower rates than non religious individuals, though claimed porn consumption by religious individuals 1995.

This is as far as that element of truth extends, as all other data indicates that these individuals are lying. In fact, when Harvard educated Microsoft economist Benjamin Edelman investigated porn site subscriptions and Google searches for porn on a regional basis in 2009, he found that the more religious regions consume porn more than the less religious regions, with the highest rates of all being in Utah.

Specifically, Edelman found that subscriptions to porn based sites and online searches for sexual content were higher in states that had enacted laws to defend marriage. And in which statements like, quote, I never doubt the existence of God, in quote, quote, even today miracles are performed by the power of God, in quote, quote, I have old fashioned [00:16:00] values about family and marriage, in quote, and quote, AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behavior, in quote, were more prevalent.

This finding isn't limited to this one study, a 2015 study, Canadian researcher, Kara McGinnis and Gordon Huddleston, found that found that states with a higher percentage of individuals who self identify as very religious and consider religion to be important to their daily lives have higher rates of searches for sexual content on Google. Studies have shown that people who experience early life stressors and high religiosity may be more likely to exhibit sexually compulsive behaviors.

One study found that, quote, states with more evangelical protestant theists who profess beliefs in God or higher powers and biblical , literalists, those who report that they interpret the Bible as the literal word of God, are significantly more likely to have higher aggregate results of online searches for pornography.

States where people attended religious services more frequently were also significantly more likely to have higher rates of searches for online porn. [00:17:00] Finally, we find that states with higher percentages of residents unaffiliated with any religious group have significantly lower levels of searching for porn.

These findings are interesting because at an individual level, people who a Affiliate with evangelical Protestant groups, attend church, read the Bible literally, , or believe in God generally report much lower levels of pornography consumption, end quote. This quote is from an interview with Andrew L.

Whitehead of Clemson University in Psy Post. And we also just see this generally in the data. Once. A during a broadcast of good Friday mass from the Vatican. And this was at 2 a. m. The girls gone wild ad accidentally aired and they received right

Simone Collins: accidentally.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. They, they received a record sales for, for the girls gone wild.

That was, it was an old, like soft porn thing that existed for people who don't know, I remember girls.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I guess for the younger people,

Malcolm Collins: From a side post titled quote, A [00:18:00] conservative religious environment strongly increases the chance of adolescent porn viewing study finds in quote, quote, without controlling for individual religious identity.

However, it might be possible that those who have searched for porn and evangelical Protestant states are people who are not evangelical Protestants, but live in predominantly evangelical Protestant states. So they checked the individual level data from 3, 370 use and their parents allowed researchers to control for age. Religious service attendance, importance of religion in life, parental education attainment, and several other religious and demographic factors. Even after accounting for the confounding variables, the researchers found that county level religious adherence rates still increase the odds of watching porn during adolescence by 66.

53 percent regardless of religious identity. Similarly, youths were more likely to report viewing porn and continue to do so, with a higher share of conservative Protestants, especially among youths who were not conservative Protestants themselves. So a, [00:19:00] a, a 66. 53 percent interest that is insanely higher.

Like you are, and, and here are just note from the Bible, from your fruits, you will know them. Is this a good practice? So if I'm making a judgment biblically, I need to say, does it lead to the intended outcome? No, it leads to the opposite outcome. So it is not a good practice. But it gets even worse than that.

You are probably hurting kids more than you think by making these requests. It's specifically here. And if people are like, okay, well, from a religious system, then how do you handle this? You've got to really worry when you're building your religious system against a phenomenon called scrupulicity.

Scrupulicity is the pathological guilt and anxiety about moral issues. Although it can affect non religious people, it usually just affects religious people. So it's like when you become obsessive compulsive about following a deontological religious ethical [00:20:00] framework and it leads to extremely negative life outcomes.

So how do you avoid this? How do you avoid this focus on pornography and stuff like that? Well, what you do is elevate the types of thinking you want to elevate rather than suppress the type of thinking you don't want. And we'll get to how you can do that around sexuality at the end of this particular, I guess I'll call these lectures, whatever they are.

But Simone, do you want to give your thoughts before I go further?

Simone Collins: Yeah, I mean, I, I don't know if you want to discuss this later, but I Think that also we're not trying to say shove Your kids into erotic material and tell them to have at it and that there are no problems if they start consuming it in excess consumption of anything in excess Is a sign of a problem and it's something I think we would discuss with our kids But within the broader context of excess of anything where you find that you are

Malcolm Collins: you might be surprised but excess [00:21:00] porn consumption Is incredibly rare outside of religious communities Secular porn addiction seems to be specifically related to moral bans on pornography.

Simone Collins: And that's a sign of a larger problem that appears to need to be solved. But I would just say that, that I wouldn't even warn our kids about consuming too much. I would warn our kids about anything where you start to change your daily habits and to prioritize. I agree, but this is like,

Malcolm Collins: so, so I would say that I would categorize porn consumption in the same category of immoral action as video games.

Simone Collins: Oh no, I was thinking exactly the same. Video games, food, even exercise. Basically anything where you are Other things in your life are suffering because you are so obsessed with getting in more of an action and it could be anything, then you have to worry about it. So we don't even have to have that conversation [00:22:00] around sexuality.

We have that conversation around addiction, period, or habit forming, period.

Malcolm Collins: And I, and I will note here, I love when people, when we have takes that are, because I know that this take is going to piss off a lot of our listeners, but it's just so based by the data, like the data on this particular subject is so overwhelming and they're like, well, you're not based.

And I'm like, well, We're not going along with the Urban Monoculture's framing on this stuff either, as you'll see. Our hidden conclusion is quite offensive to them. Being based doesn't mean agreeing with everything your group thinks. It means, you know, saying what is true, even when it might lose us subscribers.

As this episode probably will. But! That's how we keep from getting audience captured. You just got to keep plowing through.

Simone Collins: Keep pissing people off. That's the secret

Malcolm Collins: evidence isn't in their favor. And when the biblical text isn't in their favor, as we'll go over, it just very clearly isn't you know, it's important that we not only do what's best for our kids, but give other people the tools to do what's best for their kids in terms of the, the [00:23:00] way that they teach them about this stuff.

Simone Collins: Oh, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But it'd be quoting for the pragmatist guide to sexuality again.

Masturbation may contribute to a decline in many social ills. UCLA researchers found that sex criminals, on average, consume less porn than the average person and started consuming it at a later age than the average non sex criminal. Had today's sex criminals been able to explore their sexuality, through masturbation?

through their imagination earlier, perhaps they would not have felt compelled to commit their sex crimes later. So I should note here, when you put restrictions on porn, you increase the rate of sex crimes. In fact, the data bears this out for every 10 percent of increase in internet access in the U S there is a corresponding regional decrease of 7.

3 percent of grape cases suggesting the internet and its facilitation of masturbation may provide an outlet for sexual energy that might otherwise cause serious damage. Okay. Across nations, more permissive attitudes towards pornography are correlated with lower rates of grape and less [00:24:00] violence against women.

A great study of this can be seen within the Czech Republic, where porn was illegal under communism, then legalized when the party fell. This decriminalization of pornography caused in one year grapes to decline by 37% and child sexual abuse by about 50%.

Similar results were seen when the porn laws were loosened in Denmark, Japan, China, and Hong Kong. Wow. Anyone who is pro pornography restrictions is functionally also pro child. Great. Period. We have seen this happen multiple times. When you implement those laws, the result is children getting raped.

Simone Collins: I forgot just how striking the data was.

It's insane that people are still, that there's any ambiguity here. It just seems so obvious. There's no

Malcolm Collins: ambiguity at all. I mean, regardless, [00:25:00] if you, if a person wants to, at an individual level, say they believe in restricting access for them or their kids to pornography, I'm like, okay. I can get behind that, but when somebody begins to push laws around this at the state level, they are now, in my mind, around the same category of morality as a child trafficker. Because they just, Or somebody who facilitates laws that facilitate that because they just show that they do not care about the actual results of what they're doing and they do not care about the actual Children who are going to suffer because of the choices that they are making for essentially virtue signals.

And we, you know, we've seen this within some conservative events in the UK, and it's like the 1 thing where I just want to like. Oh my God, or even that when Project 25 suggested pornography bans in the United States, I just wanted to slap the person who wrote that. I was like, do you understand the consequences, the consequences of the laws that you are suggesting be [00:26:00] put into place?

But they don't care. They don't care. These, these, these virtue signalers do not care. Everything for them is this bizarre virtue spiral.

Simone Collins: Well, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't necessarily put it as not caring. I would put it as not thinking about it and not orienting around truth or evidence based decisions because humans aren't nether, there's a portion of us.

That's the, of our ourselves, I would say our prefrontal cortex, which is all about evidence based decisions, but that thing came last and that thing comes online fully last. And most of us barely get out of like our limbic system. So can you blame us? We have the potential, but it's not the default. So I don't blame people for, for, for virtue spiraling and focusing on social conformity.

Malcolm Collins: You, you say you don't blame people, but the result, you've always said things happening to kids is your line. Yeah, no, that's

Simone Collins: my line. Well, and also I see the only thing that makes us human as our prefrontal cortex. So at the same time, I don't blame them, but I also [00:27:00] dehumanize them because I think that they're reverting to that, which is less human.

But I still understand, I guess I should reword it to, I understand why they do that. They're, they're failing to rise above, but they are doing what the default is. So.

Malcolm Collins: Well, they're acting like animals, and I believe people who act like animals should be treated like animals.

Simone Collins: Well, okay.

Malcolm Collins: And thought of as animals, because they are not rising above their animalistic instincts to think through and look through what are the results of the stuff that they're proposing.

And I think people often are surprised, like, why are we so viscerally against porn bands? And that is why. Because of the consequence.

Simone Collins: Well, which is kind of ironic because what people think of when they think about indulging in porn is people succumbing to their animalistic instincts. And indeed that is a part of it, but it's more like acknowledging that they're presently.

Is not a convenient way around these animalistic instincts, at least for some [00:28:00] people of certain hormonal profiles. And of course there are things you can do that can suppress that, but they have side effects that can be dangerous. So if we have to live with these instincts, the better thing to do is to grab control of them and exercise them in ways that are minimally damaging, which per our policy around erotic material, no human actors.

And in moderation, it is 100 percent the most optimal way to deal with these urges. It makes perfect sense. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: without any of the negative externalities. Exactly. Because when you remove human actors, then you remove the, the any trafficking problems, you remove any problems with prostitution, you remove any problems with impressed labor, you remove any problems, like, you remove Pretty much all of the moral quads.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So when I model the argument of someone who's opposing us, what they're trying to say is, Oh, you say we're supposed to rise above with evidence based thought, but we're trying to rise above our basis, human instincts by simply abstaining [00:29:00] from all of it altogether. I think what we're saying is you can't do

Malcolm Collins: that.

Yeah. It doesn't work. Yeah. It

Simone Collins: clearly doesn't work. And when you try to do that, it backfires. So what we need to do is acknowledge where our limits are. Yeah. Prepare for our limits, build around the limits and then rise above in more meaningful ways until we can fully extinguish this. And we've in other podcasts even talked about how when it gets to be possible to safely suppress human sexual instincts, we will 100 percent do so.

And already all of our kids have even been created in the complete absence of, of actual sexual intercourse. I mean, like we have But our kids are not created using sex because we feel that there are better ways to do that.

Malcolm Collins: There are ways to already mute sexual impulses. Well, there are.

Simone Collins: It's just that the side effects, like, for example, me starving myself as a teen 100 percent worked because it just took my entire, entire hormonal system offline.

And then I had the hormonal profile of a prepubescent child, essentially. So there are ways to do it. I just think the side [00:30:00] effects. And also like you can go on you can, you can delay you can, you can go on gender affirming care and delay.

Malcolm Collins: It obviously works. It has almost no side effects.

Simone Collins: But would now, now truck zone.

Stop, not stop arousal for the

Malcolm Collins: government mandating naltrexone. But what I am saying is technology already exists, but

Simone Collins: naltrexone, that, that deals with, with addiction pathways, not with arousal. I can

Malcolm Collins: very, if, if, if I was to masturbate while on Naltrexone for like three days in a row, I would stop wanting to masturbate.

Simone Collins: Would you stop having interest in?

Malcolm Collins: Yes. You had stop having interest in women? Yes. That's the way naltrexone works. It works on your opioid pathways and removes

Simone Collins: Arousal is just 100 percent on that system, you're saying?

Malcolm Collins: 100 percent on that system. Oh,

Simone Collins: okay. Okay. Fair point then.

Malcolm Collins: We already have the tools for doing this, but [00:31:00] do I think it's ethical to mandate everyone take something like this?

Or even pressure our kids to take it? No, I would say it's an option if they think it's the best way to control a certain impulse. But no, I'm very against mandating any of this stuff. All right, now back to what I'm reading here.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Other studies reinforce these results, such as one in aggression and violent behavior that found a weak inverse correlation between porn consumption and violent behavior towards women, specifically grape and sexual assault.

The study's findings suggest that the more porn a man consumes, the less likely he is to commit these violent acts against women.

Despite what we had assumed, masturbation and porn consumption do not lead people to think less of women. People who watch pornography hold views of women as more equal to men than those who do not watch pornography. Consumers of porn are no less likely to describe themselves as feminist and actually express more egalitarian ideas about both women in positions of power and working outside the home, [00:32:00] according to results of a study published in the Journal of Sex Research.

We did, however, find a study showing that men who were low on the trait of agreeableness did increase already existing sexist attitudes when exposed to pornography. So basically, you need to get incredibly in the weeds to show any, when you have these individuals, like Louise Ferry, who I love, but you know, I think she has some stuff like porn causes men to think poorly of women, or like do these derogatory sex acts towards women, and it's like, that is factually untrue.

And I will never, never get over these women today, because I hear this in conservative spaces. They're like, men choke women during sex because of porn and then women learn to like it because of that. And I'm like, we did not make you all turn Fifty Shades of Grey into a best selling book. That stuff is coming from women.

As a guy who has slept around a lot, that stuff is coming from women. Okay? That's not coming from the male side of the sexuality spectrum, [00:33:00] and you can see this in our data. It is the women who aren't consuming as much of the traditional pornography who are more desiring of the violent category of, of sexuality.

You are just denying their experiences, and likely haven't felt them because it appears, and people can watch our other videos on it,

That that form of female sexuality might be triggered by a high body count But I don't want to get into that if you want to get into that you can go to our video on What's a good one on this?

I I believe it's like raider versus homesteader sexuality

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-6: I'll try to quickly and briefly explain how the theory works here. So essentially we argue that in a historic context,

Women could have found themselves in multiple scenarios for which a different arousal profile would have been optimal specifically. They could have found themselves in a monogamous cultural group. They could have found themselves in a polygynous cultural group, or they could have found themselves as a, well, essentially a [00:34:00] slave taken during a raid or a war or something like that.

We argue that women evolved a changing arousal pattern. Based on specific environmental conditions. And that we can actually see this in the data and know what those conditions are specifically when a woman hasn't slept was a lot of people. she will. Have a release of oxytocin during intercourse, which causes a. Involuntary, you could almost argue bonding with the person she is sleeping with.

I E she is very likely to fall in love with that person. Just because of the act of sex, , and that sex modulates, it makes it much faster that she forms a love bond with an individual. But that this no longer happens, the more partners she has, and we can see this from a lowering of oxytocin. , during sex when women have had lots of different partners.

And this is because in an evolutionary context, that would have only happened in a polygynous society. ,

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-7: In a monogamous society. [00:35:00] It is very advantageous for a woman to fall in love with and build an emotional bond with the individual she is sleeping with, but in a society where she is sleeping with a large number of men, this is not advantageous.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-6: and if you're talking about a very large number of partners, that would only happen if she was a slave. , now in that letter case, we actually see, and this is backed up by data that ALA collected that women who have lots and lots of partners actually get turned on by violence, much more than women who have had few partners. , and that. This would make sense if this hypothesis that we have is true.

And so when these women say, , I can't imagine any woman being turned on by this. , and they are a low partner count woman. It's like, well, that's in part because you are a low partner count woman that you can't imagine that.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-8: But it's leading you to misdiagnose where the things are entering our culture from it is not from a men. It is from a women. And through [00:36:00] that misdiagnosis and putting the blame on pornography, you put children at risk.

Malcolm Collins: All right And now back to reading. We did recall reading about a study conducted by the Max Planck Institute showing that intense porn consumption in men was associated with lower gray matter volume in the brain. So we went back to the study only to realize that what it actually found was that men who consumed lots of porn had lower amounts of gray matter in a specific part of the brain, the right striatum.

The problem is that this part of the brain is also involved in reward processing. All the study says is that men who have deficient reward processing pathways consume more porn. Well, and this is very similar to

Simone Collins: people Who, who are overly addicted to social media or video games and all you have to do at that point is don't they call it dopamine fasting where you just sort of stop it for 30 days?

The point

Malcolm Collins: I'm putting is if you have a broken reward pathway, it's very likely that you're going to become addicted to behavior [00:37:00] patterns that are meant to satisfy that reward pathway. This doesn't show causality. It shows causation. It shows people born with a broken reward pathway follow that reward pathway in a broken fashion.

Simone Collins: What I read from that, are you sure? Because what I read from that was it indicated that maybe they'd been overexposed to the point of numbness because they

Malcolm Collins: No, it didn't match. So you're assuming that what it's showing is that when men consumed more porn, Their gray matter decreased, which isn't what it showed.

It showed when their gray matter decreased, they consumed more porn.

Simone Collins: And

Malcolm Collins: in exactly the part of the brain, you would expect this to happen.

Simone Collins: Interesting. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: But there's actually data that this isn't correlational. Because we're going to get further here. A study conducted on college students found that those who masturbated more actually had more sex than those who masturbated less.

Another study [00:38:00] found that people who masturbate more often have happier marriages and more satisfying sex within those marriages. Masturbating, well Fantasizing about one's partner has also been shown to improve the quality of relationships and reduce relationship damaging behavioral patterns. Studies have even shown that the concept of building up tolerance to vanilla porn, suggesting that that is why some people go into increasingly weird porn, is false.

And this is something we were formerly certain was true. So we are quite excited to learn that we were wrong. Specifically, people who like weird porn still get turned on by vanilla porn at an even higher level than people who prefer vanilla porn. Statistically speaking, of course, this isn't true for every single individual.

 Essentially, escalating weirdness in porn tastes may be a product of a higher affinity for porn in general. The underlying arousal patterns experienced by weird porn aficionados don't shift in response to [00:39:00] exposure to weird porn. They merely are able to tolerate more obscure content.

Octavian: We

Malcolm Collins: do not start to see Any consistent negative effects for masturbation and porn consumption until we get to studies looking at masturbation three or more times a day, and even those seem a little cherry picked.

One study found that pornography negatively affects working memory, though the effect holds only while one is watching it. Thanks, Captain Obvious. We'll be sure to remember that the next time we decide to take a test while masturbating. We also found some studies showing that when a woman knows her boyfriend is masturbating, it can hurt her body image.

And some studies indicate that poor masturbation technique in men gripping too hard can lower a man's sensitivity. Still, none of this really seems to paint even fairly frequent masturbation as being bad on the whole. And the thing that gets me is just like everything they're saying, like, oh, if you masturbate, you'll be worse It's like, well, Factually, that's untrue.

People who masturbate were rated. It's also like

Simone Collins: saying, well, if you, if you run poorly, [00:40:00] you know, and, and you have bad running shoes, then you're going to, your ankles will become injured chronically and it's like, well, yeah, true technique is important with anything. Moderation is important with anything.

And I think the whole female body image thing has more to do with culture. And quite frankly, the toxic culture and discussion around porn that makes women feel bad about it. This is also, this is somewhere else in the prime goodness guide to sexuality, but the data that we found when doing research for the book also found that women who consume porn tend to be more sexually comfortable and enjoy sex more.

So in general, as a female, even getting into porn seems to just be a purely additive to your sex life and your confidence, which is, I mean, it makes sense when you actually look at porn that's designed around women. But I think given the toxic discourse around porn as it stands, yeah, it makes [00:41:00] sense way.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and this, and this is unfortunately being perpetuated by some of our friends. Which is, is very frustrating to me that they don't just look at the research, you know? Well, it could also

Simone Collins: just be an audience capture thing because when we went, for example, to the ARC conference in London last year, which was supposed to be like the conservative Davos, that subject came up so much.

And it was such a crowd pleaser that it was hard to I mean, it would be really difficult for these people who are trying to rise as conservative thought leaders, especially in the United Kingdom and Europe, which has that sort of curmudgeonly form of defeatist form of conservatism that you can't take the other stance because you would be shadow banned from those communities.

You would not be invited to speak. They don't have a choice.

Malcolm Collins: Well, thank God we're not there. They're all going to die out anyway. I really care very little about them because they're so obviously going to die out. They don't have the fighting spirit to get [00:42:00] through for the valley of the lotus eaters. Well, it's true these people who are up there Whinging about banning porn have like no kids like i'm like, okay Clearly you don't like have good solutions to this.

Do you? Anyway, all right. Okay. Okay. Okay, but what about addiction masturbation addiction is destroying the lives of millions of young americans, right? You The answer here is a resounding Anecdotally, masturbation is not recognized as addictive by the American Psychological Association, APA, and was not categorized as a mental health condition in the latest standard diagnostic manual, DSM 5.

We readily admit that this seems a little weird that there isn't much research showing masturbation can be addictive, as it seems to affect opioid pathways, i. e. the brain. The naltrexone thing. And most things that affect opioid pathways enhance one's ability to learn a behavior and thus cause addiction in a subset of the population.

Think gambling, alcohol, morphine, etc. Because porn affects opioid pathways, it causes the [00:43:00] parts of the brain to light up when exposed to opioids. So people often be like, do you know that that porn also affects the parts of the brain that are affected by You know, what, you know, like, opioid addictions, right?

It's like, well, yeah, that's because it affects opioid pathways. That doesn't mean you know, this also does that for me. Okay? You know, a lot of things we do on a daily basis. The question is, is, are you susceptible to addictions to that particular chain of opioid pathways? And it appears that masturbation addictions outside of individuals who are banning masturbation, which means it's likely something other than a standard addiction, so if you don't have a religious thing against it, are astronomically worse.

It seems that your brain essentially down regulates a desire to masturbate if you are doing it two or more times a day. But anyway, back to the, the topic here. Instead of being thought of as an addiction, the current consensus seems to be that frequent masturbation should be categorized as a compulsion.

This is the same categorization Given to what is [00:44:00] colloquially called a quote unquote sex addiction. In this case, there doesn't seem to be anything Neurologically speaking at least, that differentiates someone who has a quote unquote addiction to masturbation versus sex. Meaning the negative effects resulting from masturbation too much would arise after too much sex.

Even then, calling masturbation addiction seems tenuous. For more on this, read The myth of sex addiction by David Lee, PhD. Now it gets worse than all of this. Like when you're talking about the benefits of masturbation, there's a great paper the role of masturbation and healthy sexual development perceptions of young adults.

This came up in 2011 and showed that frequent masturbation was associated with higher educational outcomes. So you get more sex, you get higher educational outcomes. You get well I can go through other things. It has been shown to improve sweet sleep quality it has been shown to reduce the probability of prostate cancer has been shown to re