Letters on the subject

(December 22, 2003)

> I have found that the feeling of guilt usually masks the real problem. So if you sin and feel guilty as a result, in order to fix the problem of feeling guilty, you don't worry about the feeling, you worry about the sin. It's the difference between treating a symptom of a disease and the cause of the disease. You can suppress specific symptoms, but the disease will find other ways to express itself. If you take care of the cause, the symptoms disappear without a trace. The guilt is not the problem; it's a clue.

Sin and guilt aside, let’s look at the facts.

Humans are the hypersexual species. Almost without exception, other animals mate only at certain times of year and strictly for purposes of reproduction, often as rarely as once a lifetime (or less, for the unlucky males). For many animals the reproductive act itself lasts only seconds. Males will often risk their lives in battles and territorial postering for the right to inseminate at least a few of the females. The layout is different for each species, and some ape species do engage in sex for nonreproductive purposes. (Yesterday I happened to watch a documentary on animal mating behavior.)

When left to their own, humans, on the other hand, would have sex anywhere from one to ten times a week at nearly any time of year, depending on age, health, and sex hormone level. Biology has a number of explanations available for this anomaly of the animal kingdom, but that's a different topic. The desire to engage in sexual behavior comes from levels of sex hormones in the blood that rise and fall almost completely independent of the individual's conscious will. That is to say that even an individual who does not display sexual behavior openly is carrying around these hormones and is in a sense consciously or unconsciously preoccupied with sex. Those who are least preoccupied with sex are in fact those who have a regular partner or partners that more or less fill their need for sex. Sexual energy in these people rises and falls unimpeded.

However, many people do not have this luxury and are preoccupied to some degree with sex, i.e. have a certain amount of unrealized sex hormones. It would be one thing if experience showed that people are largely successful in bottling up or "subliminating" (as psychoanalysts would say) their sexual energy completely. However, experience shows that hardly anyone is able to do this completely. The statistic is that something like 95% of all males aged 15-70 have masturbated in the past year and that most males view some pornography at least occasionally (of course, masturbation and pornography are just two ways -- comparatively harmless -- that repressed sexual energy manifests itself). The numbers for women are around half that. My experience at BYU as a roommate, friend and priesthood leader lead me to believe that the statistics are hardly different among LDS youth. A number of mission and BYU friends have opened up to me and I have heard remarkably similar stories from each of them. Considering the great effort these people put into living a chaste life, this leads me to believe that our sexual drives can be partially, but not completely suppressed. If the sexual drive really is subject to conscious control, why are not more LDS youth able to come completely clean??

Now, what does one do when all of this is considered sin? How much inner resources does one possess to confess sincerely to a bishop and face possible negative social consequences (no sacrament, peers finding out, exclusion from activities, parents...)? After all this ordeal, does one have the resources to do this twice? five times? ten times?...

And you say guilt "usually masks the real problem"...

(December 24, 2003)

> One question I'd like to pose in the meantime: does porn have good effects/is it useful?

Here's how I would approach that question. Let's imagine a society without pornography. They have no Internet and no printing capabilities and no contact with societies that have pornography. Or there is some very harsh and effective law against porn producers and, hard as that is to imagine, the people really have no clue that such a thing exists. Nonetheless, boys still do things like make "dirty" symbolic pictures on walls or make obscene carvings, develop obscene gestures, words, and so forth. Because of human psychology, the nature of male sexuality, and examples from every civilization that ever existed (okay, I am making a bold statement here:), we can be absolutely sure that these things will exist no matter what. You can look at the art of any primitive (or modern) civilization and see that humans everywhere attach special value to reproductive organs, secondary sexual traits, and reproductive processes.

This is a roundabout answer to the question "is porn useful." I guess I'm saying that pornography has existed in some form in every culture and is a necessary attribute of human society. Likewise, we could ask, "are swear words useful?", "is depression useful?", "is gluttony useful?", "are plays on words useful?", etc. These things are a part of us because they are the reflection of our own psyches in the outside world.

Now imagine that we take a boy (girls aren't nearly as hard-wired for visual pornography) from a primitive society with primitive forms of pornography and take him to a society with more advanced forms of pornography. What will happen? First of all, if the boy came from a society where everyone walks around naked, the porn wouldn't interest him much (at first) until he adjusted to everyone wearing clothing. But if he were used to clothes already, he would find the porn very interesting. No boy with normal sexuality can be utterly indifferent to porn. Especially since pornography takes normally arousing things and creates exaggerated versions of them that are sure to draw attention. Just as things sweet are pleasing, and modern food production creates exaggerated sweetness (chocolate...) that is sure to stroke our pleasure centers. To a point, of course. There is always a point when enough is enough and more is no longer better...

I forget where I was taking this...

Anyway, I can make a pretty good case for desensitivization. This might not sit well with all of you, but I'll try to argue my point anyway. If you find you are tempted by something, you can free yourself from the temptation by allowing yourself to give in to it. This isn't an axiom, but it holds true if an individual is sufficiently self-aware and internally independent (otherwise it might not work and "trying" might lead to "addiction"). In other words, if you find yourself, say, obsessed with the thought of finding some porn and "trying it out" (meaning that you are psychologically dependent on the pornography, whether or not you are actually viewing it!!!), you can go ahead and satisfy your curiosity. Methodically, unabashedly. Find out if it's really what you imagined and whether it really satisfies the need that drove you to it.

Much of temptation comes from prohibition. Social norms and expectations create a sort of third parental eye in us that monitors our own behavior, causing self-consciousness and guilt. Energy that can potentially be used for self-realization turns inward against the individual himself. Chastity norms induce people to put up big ugly signs around the field of sex in their minds ("STAY OUT!" (don't even peak), "BEWARE OF DOG!" (Satan and hell), "NO TRESPASSING!" (before marriage), "PRIVATE PROPERTY!" (God and his angels can see you), etc.). This means that whenever the individual comes across inner impulses or things in the outside world that relate to sex, he attaches special significance and energy to them. "Oh no, better not look at that or think about that, because that all leads to..."

Don't understand me wrong. I'm not arguing for a norm-less or no-holds-barred society (which would be impossible). I'm saying that human co-existence leads to varying amounts of social norms that often are at odds with a person's own biological/psychological interests. Even within a single community you can find those who are relatively uninhibited by norms (to the point of lawlessness) all the way to those who are literally in a psychological prison of others' rules and expectations.

I think that porn preys on the internally dependent, just as all potentially addictive things. People who are truly guided by their own internal needs rather than external norms, I think, tend to move on to bigger and better things that better satisfy those needs. Like women.

One other thing. FYI for the girls. Boys reach sexual maturity before their minds are truly able to control and use their sexual energy (as do girls, of course). But it is hard for girls to imagine the truly raging tempest of hormones guys have to deal with (think back to the kind of male sexual behavior we observe in the animal world...). Teenage boys in unpermissive cultures are tormented by social norms that do not allow them to act on their impulses. And teenage boys in permissive cultures are still tormented if they lack the social skills to find a girlfriend. In other words, sexual drives "torment" the majority of teenage boys and many young adults. After a certain age, the tormentation quiets down somewhat because the psyche has now matured enough to mostly control such impulses. Even so, a 30-year-old guy who has not had intimacy with a woman is not a pretty sight. The psyche knows when it is losing the reproductive war.

That's all I can think of for now.

Rick the sexologist (haha:)