Why Would Any Man Choose To Be Cucked? - Dr David Ley

Dr. David Ley is a clinical psychologist and a board member of the Sexual Health Alliance whose research focuses on issues related to sexuality, pornography and mental health. Your partner being intimate with another guy should evolutionarily be one of the biggest fears of a man's life. Actually encouraging this behaviour seems almost unthinkable, and yet cucking is becoming a much more common pursuit and one of the most popular categories of online porn. Expect to learn the stats around how common cuckolding actually is, whether cuckolding could cover up a husband's desire to be with another man, how often this goes wrong and destroys a relationship, whether sex addiction is an actual thing, some surprising research around porn addiction, how religiosity predicts dysfunction with porn and much more... Sponsors: Get 15% discount on Mud/Wtr at http://mudwtr.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Check out Dr Ley's website - https://www.davidleyphd.com/ Follow Dr Ley on Twitter - https://twitter.com/DrDavidLey Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #mating #dating #men - 00:00 Intro 00:26 Why Dr Ley Studied Cuckolding 04:23 How is it Possible for Men to Find Pleasure from Cuckolding? 15:13 Is Cuckolding Repressed Homosexuality? 22:17 The Weird Dynamics of Female Cuckolding 29:00 Wider Implications of Cuckolding & Porn Use on Society 34:24 How Should Children Be Taught About Sexuality? 42:31 Role of Shame in Men’s Relationship with Porn 49:10 How Porn Use Impacts Motivation to Find a Mate 53:43 Advice for People Who Want to Improve their Relationship with Porn 58:18 Where to Find Dr Ley - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The term cuckolding is related to the cuckoo bird that lays an egg in the nest of other species and then that egg hatches sooner and then the cuckoo chick consumes the food and the resources of the other species. An early naturalist looked at that and said, well, that's what happens if a guy's wife cheats on him. The man is at risk of investing resources in a child not genetically related to him.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Cuckolding. Why did you get into that? Why did? Well, to be clear, why did I get into writing and reading and researching about it and working with people that engage in it? Um, uh, back in like 2007, um, I was clinically depressed. Um, I, in my day job, so to speak, I run a, a large, you know, community mental health center, agency, uh, traditional behavioral health services, lots of Medicaid, HR, budget, all those kinds of issues. Um, and it was really challenging. I was really struggling. So, um, I, I started collecting data for a study about, uh, consensual non-monogamy.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  At the time, very little had been published about polyamory, et cetera. And, uh, I never published the study. It was, it was a crappy little study, probably not very good anyway. But as I was doing it, I ran into these two couples who lived the cuckold or hot wife lifestyle, where the wife was, uh, enthusiastically, um, you know, sexual with people outside the relationship, with men outside the relationship, and the, and the husband was monogamous. And my initial impression and reaction was honestly to say, wow, that, that's crazy. That, that can't work. Um, but what was really remarkable was that

• 1:50Speaker 00

  Both of these couples had been married for decades. They had incredibly successful careers, very healthy, you know, kids, families, incredible communication skills. By every measure that we would, as a therapist, you know, apply, these were very healthy people. And so then I, I kind of questioned myself. I was like, well, why did I assume that, that they're unhealthy? And, and at that point, you know, I'd been working around sexuality issues for a while, but, but I realized that without noticing it, I was applying moral biases around female sexuality, around promiscuity, around monogamy. And those biases had snuck

• 2:32Speaker 00

  into my clinical thinking. And so I went to the literature and there was nothing published about this. There was, there was one study in the nineties by Israeli psychologist who analyzed, you know, letters to Penthouse about wife sharing. And there was nothing else, nothing else published about this. And then as I started, you know, talking to people, I started hearing how common this was. And so I dove into the literature and evolutionary psychology, psychology of monogamy, biology of sexuality, female sexual arousal. And I also interviewed people around the world who were living this, this lifestyle.

• 3:17Speaker 00

  And, and at the end of the day, I found that, you know, there were actually lots of people who, clinicians like me, who assumed it was unhealthy because they'd never been taught how diverse sexuality is. And the fascinating thing is, I mean, you know, when I wrote the book, nobody was really talking about cuckolding. But over the past few years, it's really exploded. I mean, we've got, you know, the Jerry Falwell Jr. scandal, multiple folks around the Trump administration actually involved in cuckolding. And it's super popular

• 3:56Speaker 00

  in pornography now. And we didn't see any of that coming. And, and my book, Insatiable Lives, on the topic, was re-released as an audiobook last year. And it's just like flying off the shelves on Audible because people Love to go on these road trips with their wife and pop that in and then say, hey, what do you think?

• 4:24Chris Williamson?

  There is a very large cohort of men that are listening right now who are thinking, fuck no. How is a man able to get past his inherent concern around his wife going off with another man? We are evolutionary programmed for male parental uncertainty to be something that we are incredibly scared of, right? How is this something not only that a non insignificant group of people, men, can deal with, but can actually take pleasure from?

• 5:03Speaker 00

  It's a really interesting question, Chris, and it's one that, you know, I'm starting to think we need to research because you're right. There are many men that when they, the fear of infidelity by their female partner triggers rage and even murderous behaviors. Fear of infidelity is really common in spousal homicide. But then there are these other men that the idea of their wife being unfaithful turns them on. What's the difference between these guys? Right now, we don't know. I will speculate that some of it is about

• 5:48Speaker 00

  openness to experience. There may be some kink in this. Many of the men who explore cuckolding are interested in submission from a bondage and discipline kind of standpoint, but not all.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  There is, what's really interesting, though, is that the men who grow up in highly rigid, stereotyped, masculinized kind of environments are actually more likely to be turned on by the idea of cuckolding, because it's an escape from the constrictive rigidity of, in order to be a man, you know, you must be so manly that your wife would never even want another man. And there are lots of guys that, you know, find that pressure kind of a burden,

• 6:49Speaker 00

  and they, they want to escape from it, or at least a vacation from it. And cuckolding, and the opportunity to kind of sit back and sort of watch, is, is less pressure for these guys. Now, interestingly, you know, cuckolding and fantasies of cuckolding appear to be more common in Republicans than Democrats. They appear to be more prevalent in highly macho kind of societies, Brazil, Russia.

• 7:23Chris Williamson?

  What's the data that you're pulling that sort of stuff from?

• 7:25Speaker 00

  A couple of different sources. One, Justin Lay Miller is a psychologist, a co-author with me on some research around cuckolding.

• 7:35Chris Williamson?

  Great, Twitter, follow. Everyone should follow him.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. And he's, he's got data on the prevalence of sexual fantasies related to politics and, and political stances.

• 7:47Chris Williamson?

  Is that self-report?

• 7:48Speaker 00

  Ah, fourth, yeah, self-report 4,000. I mean, how do you, how would it be otherwise? We, I mean, I'm not sure how we would measure people's sexual fantasies aside from.

• 8:00Chris Williamson?

  I don't know, some like, some implicit bias bullshit on a computer where you're selecting.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Oh, joy, yeah, okay, great, yeah, yeah.

• 8:08Chris Williamson?

  I don't know, but, okay, yeah, cool. So you've asked a non-insignificant sample of people about their sexual fantasies, and in that cuckolding appears to show up, how much, how much does it show up?

• 8:21Speaker 00

  Um, you know, in Justin's research, I want to say he found that, uh, oh, there's a siren going by. Sorry.

• 8:28Chris Williamson?

  That's fine.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Um, in Justin's research, I want to say he found about fifty to fifty-five percent of men were reported that they had had at least one fantasy of watching their female partner with another man. Around forty-five percent of women reported, uh, that they were interested in being watched with another man by their partner.

• 8:49Chris Williamson?

  Dude, that is

• 8:53Chris Williamson?

  unbelievable. Like, I, I don't deny that Justin has got the, the, the data to back this up, but I just think, how is there more than fifty percent of men? Not only that, but there's ten percent more men that want to see their wife get fucked by another man, or at least have fantasized about it once. And the difference between maybe thinking about it

• 9:16Speaker 00

  Right.

• 9:17Chris Williamson?

  and going through with it is literally a universe apart, right? You know, there's a lot of things that we think about doing that we don't.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  Right. And, you know, sexual fantasies are cognitive exploration. Um, they oftentimes are a way we kind of work through things. Um, you know, Dan Savage, um, also a co-author with me on some research around cuckolding. Um, he, uh, he argued that the cuckold fantasy is an eroticization of fear, that because men are afraid of their wife cheating on them, that in order to take away the sting of that fear, they eroticize it and turn it into something that is, that they then sexually fantasize about or sexually aroused by it. I think it's an interesting idea, but we don't see very many people, you know, eroticizing spiders,

• 10:07Speaker 00

  um, and as a way to deal with their fear of spiders. So I don't know that the eroticization of fear, um, strategy is, is, is really a good explanation. I think that there's a lot of explanations. Now, I did, when I wrote the book, um, Most of the men that were into cuckolding were men that already had kids. And so, you know, you mentioned parental uncertainty a minute ago. And, you know, it's interesting to recognize that the term cuckolding is related to the cuckoo bird that lays an egg in the nest of other species. And then that egg hatches sooner and then the cuckoo chick, you know, consumes the food

• 10:48Speaker 00

  and the resources of the other species and even will like push the other eggs out of the nest. And early naturalists looked at that and said, well, that's what happens if a guy's wife cheats on him. That now the man is at risk of investing resources in a child not genetically related to him. So they called it cuckolding. When I wrote the book in 2009, most of the men that were into it already had kids. And I didn't see very many young men that were into this fantasy. And interestingly, just in 10 years, we've seen a big shift. And I'm seeing more young men that don't have kids that are interested in cuckold porn

• 11:31Speaker 00

  and cuckold fantasy and even cuckold behavior.

• 11:34Chris Williamson?

  So that to me, the first instance that you had would make a lot of sense.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 11:41Chris Williamson?

  Because you would think if male parental uncertainty is no longer a concern.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  Right.

• 11:47Chris Williamson?

  These men will be insulated, at least in part from this fear. I mean, again, for me, it is still, dude, it is absolutely blowing my mind that there is not more than like a tiny, tiny handful of guys that can do this. There's a famous YouTuber who put a video up last year, tried swinging, went to a sex party of some kind, and he tells this relatively in-depth story about watching his girlfriend that he loved next to him with some other guy. And he said that he just had to immediately leave. It had traumatized him so much to observe the girl that he was in love with having sex with another man. And it's kind of become a bit of a meme on the internet. But I, you know, some of my friends are incredibly open with regards to their sex lives.

• 12:31Chris Williamson?

  I don't think that they're particularly repressed. But I know that if that was a situation that occurred, one of two things would happen. They would leave and get out and be traumatized, or they would smash the guy to bits. Like, those are the only two options that they have. And I think, I wonder whether...

• 12:48Chris Williamson?

  I wonder what is occurring to down-regulate that response. Maybe it is this, like you say, this eroticization of fear. I can see that as a thing. And I think that the difference between the spiders and the cuckold fear generation is that that is already within the domain of sex, right? Spiders aren't within the domain of sex, but watching somebody else have sex with your partner is. And also, the taboo transgression thing, you know, it's the high-powered boss bitch, CEO woman who loves to be tied up on an evening time by her hot playboy, because there is something about the polarity that creates that attraction, right? That's what is exciting about it. It's letting go of whatever you are, the

• 13:33Chris Williamson?

  role that you have to play out there. I think, for instance, one of the side effects that you're going to have of BLM over the last three years is probably an increase in race play in the bedroom, as you make race a more taboo subject in public. I think in private, you're absolutely going to see this go up. All of that rolled together, all of the, all of the, all of the things, I just think it is such a fundamental fear that men have for this to occur. And it blows my mind that guys can get past it.

• 14:03Speaker 00

  And that fundamental fear, though, comes with a lot of energy. And that, that's one of the things that I see in these couples, is that they take that fear and that jealousy,

• 14:16Speaker 00

  and they translate it, transmute it even, into this kind of turbocharged sexual excitement. I mean, we, a guy is, interestingly, when a guy believes his female mate may have been unfaithful, he is more likely to have more vigorous sex with her, thrust more deeply and harder, and more likely to get aroused and, and, and want to have, want to have sex again, right? Now, some of this is the sperm competition theory that, eh, some research around it is not replicated, but I still think that, that evolutionary drive to compete

• 15:00Speaker 00

  is part of what folks are using here, and kind of co-opting it in this strategy to increase their excitement.

• 15:12Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen any evidence suggesting that this could be some repurposed, repressed homosexuality? That men could want to perhaps be involved with another man, but he's currently got a wife and the closest he can get to a man is letting her have sex with another man. And if you were to do some eye tracking during that event, you might find that his eyes are on him more than her.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  Right, absolutely. I mean, first, let me, let me say, you know, as with any sexual behavior, this is complex. There are lots of different factors and reasons for each individual person that drive them into this or make it arousing for them. But you're absolutely right. For a significant portion of these guys, there was some suppressed bisexuality. Remember that most of these guys are coming from more conservative political or social backgrounds, where being bisexual or having same-sex interests isn't acceptable. But, you know, you can have sex with your wife, with another man, through the vehicle of your wife's body,

• 16:16Speaker 00

  interacting with, with his penis sexually, or interacting with his semen by going down on her afterwards. You know, a friend of mine on YouTube runs the Fuck Yeah Friendly Fire web account, where he shares porn of guys, you know, interacting with each other sexually as they are having sex with a woman. And there's a lot of, you know,

• 16:45Speaker 00

  bisexual kind of interest in there that is coming out in these soft bisexual behaviors.

• 16:54Chris Williamson?

  What was the proportion of men that had some sort of bisexual inclination? Can you remember?

• 17:01Speaker 00

  You know, we didn't, I didn't collect numbers on that with the, with the research that I did for my book. It was, it was much more qualitative kind of research.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  I, I would roughly guesstimate that bisexuality is probably 30 or 40% of guys that are into, into cuckolding. Now, Joe Court is a psychologist and a friend of mine. And he, he points out that there are guys who have sex with other guys when they're not motivated from a bisexual kind of place. And I, I've questioned that, but Joe has a good example of a guy who, you know, is not bisexual and not attracted to other men, but he's very into being submissive. And so if his wife or a dominatrix forces him to have sex with another man, even though he's not into it for the other man, he's

• 17:59Speaker 00

  into it because that is the ultimate level of submission. And so it is erotically arousing, not because of this, not because of the guy, but because of the submission.

• 18:09Chris Williamson?

  That is one hell of a level of submission. Wow, dude, some of the like corners of the internet with kinks. I didn't think that I was particularly vanilla sexually, but dear God, this, this makes me think, this makes me think I don't, okay, so.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  Well, you know, that, and that, remember where I started, that because most therapists, and most people don't know this, 90% of therapists and psychologists and mental health clinicians in the United States have almost no training in sexuality. So we've always assumed that vanilla is the norm, but.

• 18:49Chris Williamson?

  It's not that vanilla.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, well.

• 18:51Chris Williamson?

  It's not, I'm not, I'm not that vanilla, right? Relatively vanilla.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  But we, what we know now, actually, research from, from Quebec, in Canada, has found that around 50% of a normative population, non-clinical population, have interest in things like exhibitionism, sadism, masochism, voyeurism, things that we used to think were disorders. And about 30% of people have engaged in those behaviors. And so what we're finding now is that the norm is actually much more diverse than we ever believed, but people kept their mouth shut because they didn't want to be shamed for it.

• 19:35Chris Williamson?

  The sexual Overton window perhaps is a little bit wider than we might have first realized. Okay. Hotwifing. What's hotwifing?

• 19:44Speaker 00

  Hotwifing is this kind of offshoot of cuckolding. Cuckolding typically involves a more of a submissive stance by the male where he is taking a submissive role to his wife and the men that she may be with. A hot wife, it looks a little bit more like swinging where the husband is not in a submissive role but is sharing his wife with other men. We're also now hearing about something called stag vixen and that is roughly looking like a hot wife kind of thing, but the man is really taking a stance with that label and

• 20:28Speaker 00

  saying, "I'm not a cuck, I'm not being humiliated, I'm not weak, I'm strong by sharing my wife with other men." And some of this relates to the politics over the past few years where Republicans and people on Fox News and everything else were calling each other cuck if they appeared weak at all. And so I think that guys then that were interested in sharing their wives didn't want people to take that as a coming from a place of weakness.

• 20:59Chris Williamson?

  Does cuckolding ever go wrong and destroy a relationship?

• 21:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've seen couples where the husband was really obsessive and the focus or fantasy of cuckolding became so obsessive and dominant in his sexuality that the wife reacted negatively and in some cases even divorced. I've seen some cuckold couples where the wife falls in love with the other guy and leaves.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  That's the fear. Um, I think that as with any non-monogamous relationship, it can be done right and it can be done poorly. Typically, the relationships that I see fail um for cuckolding fail for other reasons and the cuckold uh you know fantasy or behavior kind of just exposed some of those cracks in the relationship. What we found in research uh with gay cuckold couples was that in general um if it was a healthy couple and that exploring cuckolding was a healthy uh aspect to the relationship.

• 22:16Chris Williamson?

  What is different about gay or lesbian? Is there such a thing as female cuckolding? What's the reverse? Do women have fantasies about watching their husband have sex with another wife?

• 22:27Speaker 00

  Some. It's called cuckqueening um and it's spelled it's spelled kind of funny um instead of Q U E E it's spelled Q U E A for some reason. I'm not entirely sure. Um it's it's much, much, much less common um than the fantasy of cuckolding. But yeah, there are um wives who get aroused at the idea of their their husband with other with other women. Um and you know, I is that

• 22:57Speaker 00

  one of the things that that we see happen in a lot of non-monogamous relationships and in cuckolding especially and and cuckqueening, I guess, is that the more attractive your partner is to other people, the more attractive they become to you, right? Because and there's a lot of um talk online about, you know, women being interested in men that are attracted attractive to other women, right? Um is that some of it? Maybe um I I I called it the queen bee um or the or the or the king bee

• 23:34Speaker 00

  kind of phenomenon in my book where, you know, having having a partner that is attractive to other partners and that you can share with them, but then you get to take them home um feels kind of rewarding and exciting and fulfilling.

• 23:52Chris Williamson?

  What I'm thinking about is how wild and interesting it is that on average females show more bisexuality than males. There's more gay men, but there's more bisexual women in the world.

• 24:10Chris Williamson?

  And ancestrally, polygyny was more common than what's the, what's the one where it's one woman?

• 24:18Speaker 00

  Polyandry.

• 24:19Chris Williamson?

  Polyandry, thank you. So we have, you know, at least some ancestral predisposition to this one man, many women. We also have a increased preference amongst a non insignificant cohort of women for women compared with men for men. At least when you've got the bisexual relationship. And yet you're saying that queen being, whatever it was called, female queening or whatever, is significantly rarer than the thing which seems to be statistically in terms of sexual preference, less likely, and ancestrally in terms of predisposition, less programmed.

• 25:03Chris Williamson?

  That's so interesting.

• 25:04Speaker 00

  It is all super interesting and

• 25:11Speaker 00

  we don't know what it looks like in, in societies where there is greater egalitarian sexual economics. In the polygynous history,

• 25:29Speaker 00

  reproduction and mating was oftentimes women's only kind of economic value or resource that they, that they controlled.

• 25:39Speaker 00

  So, you know, I know, you know, Jordan Peterson got, got in trouble by talking about, you know, the, that we should have, you know, socially enforced monogamy.

• 25:49Chris Williamson?

  Right. Didn't use the word socially, which was the problem. That was why he got in trouble.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  Right. And, you know, and, and he's got a point because historically, you know, polygynous societies had higher rates of violent crime because you had powerful men that had all the hot chicks and you had lots of young men who couldn't date or mate or reproduce. And so they had nothing better to do than start trouble. But again, in that histori- in that historical society, women didn't have economic independence like we have now. What's really interesting is that as men's economic index goes up, infidelity actually tends to go down. But as women's economic index goes up, infidelity goes up.

• 26:37Chris Williamson?

  Female infidelity or male infidelity?

• 26:40Speaker 00

  Female infidelity. So women who are economically independent are more likely to engage in infidelity because they're not going to lose everything. They're not gonna, they're not going to be destitute living in a shelter. The consequences for them are as great.

• 26:53Chris Williamson?

  Would it not also be the case that women who are more economically independent are struggling to find a mate hypergamy that's above and across from them, which means that it is more likely they're going to have to mate down. William Costello's got some new data around this that suggests that hypergamy is actually on the decline a tiny little bit. However, it's also going down in line with female-only infidelity, which is going up in line with rates of domestic violence. So all of this is sort of cascading together.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  And, and, and we, we see, you know, men who are married to a woman who makes more than him are more likely to engage in infidelity with that, whether that's insecurity. Now, infidelity oftentimes is motivated to kind of fill some insecurity. Am I still attractive to other people? Do I have options? Can I explore aspects of myself with other people that I don't get to explore with my primary partner? And so again, you know, that, that's,

• 28:08Speaker 00

  that's the one concern I have about a lot of evolutionary arguments. And Costello is brilliant. He's a good friend of mine and I love his research. But evolutionary arguments can be really great just so stories that explain really complicated behavior. And as a psychologist, as a clinical psychologist, I want to live in the complicated land. I want to, I want, I want, I want to deal with and recognize all of the multiple things that are influencing these issues and not reduce it to, to single factors.

• 28:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I understand that. I think what's happening in the mating market at the moment with this sort of ever increasing group of educated and employed women, and it is, is pretty fascinating.

• 28:52Chris Williamson?

  And also terrifying at the same time. One other thing that I had in my mind with regards to cookholding generally, and the practice of non-monogamy more broadly, and I've got a ton of friends, I'm here in Austin, which is like the non-monogamy capital of America.

• 29:05Speaker 00

  Right, yeah.

• 29:07Chris Williamson?

  But here in San Francisco, there is an element of, of fear that I have around a kind of chestnuts fence analogy going on here, that there are things which can be enjoyable, pleasurable, and even good for the individual, but which can be damaging when you smear that across an entire society. You know, for instance, monogamy is pretty good for societal stability. You know, if you have, it's a sexual redistribution strategy. If you do have that polygynous society, you are looking at young male syndrome, you are looking at higher rates of loneliness, of reduced health span, of reduced birth rate, all the way down. I'm not saying that we need to start enforcing, like you can't do

• 29:50Chris Williamson?

  cookholding in the comfort of your own home. Like you can do whatever you want.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:54Chris Williamson?

  But I do think that it's an interesting, whatever ethical or philosophical question to ask. You know, we put warnings on cigarettes. We put warnings on foods that aren't particularly healthy for us. I don't know. I wonder if there is an equivalent type of relationship setup that could be enjoyable to an individual, but could be corrosive to them perhaps in the longer term. It could be corrosive to them, but we don't allow young people, we shouldn't allow young people to watch porn. Like for a similar sort of reason that exposing people to sexualized content at a young age isn't necessarily good for them. It's just a thought that I had in my mind.

• 30:32Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. I think the issue is that one relationship type doesn't work for everybody. And a lot of the problem here has come from a historical approach that monogamy is the only right way to do it. And the more taboo you put around, you know, violating monogamy, the more exciting it's going to be for some people. Also, the more social structures require that, or at least the appearance of it. I mean, I, you know, as Dan Savage, you know, calls it monogamish.

• 31:14Speaker 00

  Turns out to be much, much more common than we've ever talked, than we've ever recognized. And again, I think the part of the issue is that when we, when we use the term monogamy, we're meaning sexual fidelity. But that's not actually what monogamy means. Monogamy means life partner.

• 31:34Chris Williamson?

  What's sexual fidelity?

• 31:36Speaker 00

  So not being, not having sex with other, with other partners. But you can be monogamous to the definition of monogamy and still have sex with other partners. A lot of the birds, for instance, swans and geese that people have said, oh, they're so romantic, they mate for life. Well, yeah, they partner for life, but they still have sex with other, with other animals in the species. So.

• 32:04Chris Williamson?

  And 95% of birds don't have penises, I think. So I'm not sure how much we can draw across.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  That's fair. Now, you know, a comment that you made though, just a moment ago is, and I think it relates, you know, should, should kids, you know, be allowed to watch porn or have access to porn? I think it's a very complicated and challenging question. But what some research has found though, is that the more parents try to prevent kids from seeing porn.

• 32:34Speaker 00

  The more the kids want to see it, the more the kids work to seek it out. What we find is that the kids that are younger and seeing porn, or reports seeing porn at younger ages, tend to be higher sensation-seeking kids already. They are kids that were already interested in sex and the reason they saw porn was typically because they were seeking it out at younger ages. So, the, you know, the whole social dialogue right now about, you know, the whether pornography is damaging for kids or not, not all kids are the same. And the other thing that we find is that the kids who are harmed by seeing porn, who learn unhealthy lessons, right?

• 33:16Speaker 00

  They learn that to have anal sex, you don't need lube or prep. They, they learn that, you know, to, to give a girl an orgasm, you just jump on and pump away. These are unhealthy lessons. Kids that learn those unhealthy lessons tend to be kids who think pornography is realistic sex. So, kids that think pornography is realistic sex tend to be kids that have poor levels of sex education or have grown up in societies or cultures or communities where you don't talk about sex. The way we can protect kids from any harms from pornography is through giving them good sex education. Emily Rothman is in Boston, she's a psychologist and colleague brilliant,

• 33:59Speaker 00

  and she's got really remarkable research on an evidence-based strategy called porn literacy, teaching young people, adolescents, what porn is and isn't, what they should or shouldn't learn from it. And that remarkably has very, very strong success for preventing kids from learning unhealthy lessons from pornography.

• 34:21Chris Williamson?

  I think definitely, given the increased prevalence and ease of access, that anybody that's got a smartphone and, you know, nine-year-olds, 10-year-olds now are getting iPhones for Christmas. So, I don't know, you put the parental block on and you've got some smart kid at 12 years old that knows their phone better than their parents. Like, what are you gonna do? So, in that regards, I, I suppose it's an unwinnable war. I do think that porn literacy would make a lot of sense. I do. There is something really brutal, unfortunate about the way that the human mind works, which has been, so you brought up a bunch of times today.

• 35:03Chris Williamson?

  As you try to wall off a taboo, the typical response from at least a non-insignificant cohort of people is to try and seek that out more, right? I remember I used this story a few years ago where if you've ever been stood with somebody next to the edge of a cliff or whatever, and you just think in your mind like, I wonder what would happen if I pushed them over? And then you can't stop thinking about that thought because you think, oh my God, that's so terrible, I mustn't think about it, I mustn't think about it. Well, I'm thinking about how I mustn't think about it, so I'm thinking about it. And you continue to refer yourself from the thought you mustn't have. That being said, as far as I'm concerned, exposing anybody that legally can't have

• 35:47Chris Williamson?

  sex to videos of people having sex seems to cross a line, as far as I can see. Unless it is like very structured, therapeutically done in an evidence-based way with the blah, blah, blah. I don't, I struggle to see how we would be able to justify exposing kids to videos and images of stuff that they, that would be illegal for them to enact.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, this famous sex educator years ago, though, he said, what if we taught kids how to swim the same way we teach them about sex? We tell them, well, you can't do it until you're a certain age. We can't expose you the information about it. You can hear us in the room having a lot of fun, but you don't get to know what's actually going on until you're 18, and then we throw open the doors and you can jump in the pool. How many kids would drown?

• 36:48Speaker 00

  I think that, and I'm not advocating that kids see porn, by no means. It's for adults. But I think that there's a very significant kind of moral panic around this that is significantly exaggerated. Alexander Stulhofer is a Croatian researcher who's looked at, for instance, you know, the relationship between, you know, consuming violent pornography and sexual, engaging in sexual violence, specifically in adolescent males. And what he found was really interesting. He found that

• 37:25Speaker 00

  young men who watched less pornography were at greater risk of engaging in sexual violence. And that the young men who were interested in watching sexually violent pornography actually stopped watching sexually violent pornography as time went on in this longitudinal study. That, you know, the access to pornography correlates with a very significant decrease in sexual violence in our society, and in every society where this has been studied.

• 38:01Speaker 00

  There's a lot of fear about pornography that is, just like me, when I was, when I was reacting to those early couples that I saw, that is based on morality and these intrinsic kind of intuitive fears. But the data typically doesn't hold up.

• 38:21Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the other biggest myths that people hold around porn?

• 38:26Speaker 00

  Well, one of the ones that is, you know, all over the internet right now is, you know, porn-induced erectile dysfunction, that watching too much porn causes erectile dysfunction. And so you've got these guys saying, "Well, porn broke my dick, and I can get hard when I'm watching porn, but I can't get hard when I'm having sex with my, trying to have sex with my female partner. It must be because of pornography." And there's absolutely no scientific evidence to support this, and there's lots and lots of evidence showing that, you know, watching porn is always going along with a certain behavior, right? Jerking off. And we talk about porn, but we don't talk about masturbation. So whenever we talk about porn, we have to talk about masturbation.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  Now masturbation and sex are two different things. What we know is that...

• 39:16Speaker 00

  Roughly half of men under age 45, around 40% of men, will report at least one episode of erectile dysfunction. And the number one predictor of that is anxiety. Anxiety, obesity, drugs and alcohol, and limited sexual experience. Now, watching porn and masturbating is different from having sex. When I watch porn and masturbate, I don't have to buy the internet dinner. I don't have to worry about finding its clitoris. To turn it on, I just have to push the button. But when I'm with a partner, I need to be mindful. I need to restrain my own sexual desires or behaviors and be sensitive to theirs.

• 39:56Speaker 00

  And if you are an anxious person with limited sexual experience, that can be challenging. Research just last year showed that in men that have any sexual dysfunction, delayed ejaculation, premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction, the men are about 50% more likely to experience symptoms of that dysfunction during partnered sex and not during masturbation. Because again, during masturbation, you can sit back and relax. So how do we, how do we address that? By trying to reduce the anxiety, by trying to help guys learn to not be so penis focused in their sex, to learn other behaviors, expand the definition of sex.

• 40:38Speaker 00

  But for these insecure guys who are on these chat rooms and no-fap rooms and every other darn thing, where they're being told, "If your penis doesn't work every time, then it's broken and you're less of a man", it creates this anxiety shame spiral that increases iatrogenically the occurrence of that anxiety.

• 41:04Chris Williamson?

  What's iatrogenically?

• 41:05Speaker 00

  Iatrogenic is when a intervention that is supposed to help something actually creates more harm. So if you go in the hospital for appendicitis and you get your appendix taken out, but then you get a staph infection, that's iatrogenic, where the healing actually caused another problem. So the intervention of trying to prevent erectile dysfunction appears to actually be increasing it. And now there's one group that we, one group of men that we do see struggle with erectile function when they are...

• 41:36Speaker 00

  Um, with a partner, uh, but not when they're watching porn, but it's driven by shame. Guys who are ashamed of watching pornography are more likely to have difficulties performing um, or getting erect when they're with their partner because they're ashamed of their private sexual behavior. A lot of this is, is the shame, not the porn. Typically, watching porn, and again, accompanied by masturbation, is an indicator of libido. Guys who wa-watch more porn have more sex. This is data that comes up consistently because watching porn and masturbating to it is an indicator of your overall desire for sex.

• 42:19Speaker 00

  And those guys overall are more likely to pursue sex or value it um, and, and so enact it in their life.

• 42:30Chris Williamson?

  If shame causes erectile dysfunction and stopping porn stops the shame, then surely proximally stopping porn stops erectile dysfunction?

• 42:41Speaker 00

  Not so much because um, the, there's this interesting phenomenon of uh, it's called a flattening where um, the more conservative your attitudes are about, about sex and porn, the more you start to view any kind of uh, sexual stimuli, whether it's Fredericks or Hollywood catalog, I don't know if they make that anymore, um, uh, as, as porn. And we see this huge number of religious men who identify as addicted to porn, but report that they haven't watched porn in the past month. In fact, there's a significant number of religious men who identify as addicted to pornography,

• 43:24Speaker 00

  but have never watched porn. So it's, the porn starts to become this stand-in for sexual desires or thoughts that they feel like they're not supposed to have. The number one predictor of identifying as a porn addict is not how much porn you watch, but whether you were raised religious. Um, so when, when somebody comes to me and says they, they're addicted to pornography or they're addicted to sex.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  What that tells me as a therapist is that they have thoughts and feelings and desires about sex that they wish they didn't have. As a therapist, I now want to try and understand,

• 44:07Speaker 00

  why do you think you shouldn't have those thoughts? And what do you think those thoughts mean about you as a person? Can we explore that? The research on effective treatments for people that struggle with these sexual behaviors or desires is not actually getting them to stop the sexual behavior, but instead engaging in cognitive behavioral therapy or acceptance and commitment therapy, which are strategies that try to change the function of the behavior and try to address the meaning and the cognitions that we put to the behavior.

• 44:43Chris Williamson?

  You could imagine for a large group of probably secular, probably mostly nonreligious guys who are in no fat subreddits and whatnot, that the choice between I have shame around porn use and masturbation that makes me feel like I shouldn't do it, and it has potentially caused me to perform more poorly with a partner or make me feel like less of a man, I can go through ACT or CBT, or I can stop watching porn and stop masturbating. For many of them, that is a much simpler, easier to control, more immediate return. So I can see, I mean,

• 45:25Chris Williamson?

  the evidence with regards to no fat, I don't know. I mean, there's some of it that's a little bit overblown that you're going to levitate and that women can smell your pheromones and stuff like that. That did always seem a little bit far out to me. But I can also see how the level of shame that you have, or the level of self judgment that you have around anything can manifest in as real of a way as you want due to an expectation effect, right? You know, the placebo effect, if we could bottle it, would be the strongest effect in pharmacology. And there's an equivalent in psychology as well with the expectation effect. If you are expecting to feel bad because of doing a thing, and you stop doing the thing, the alleviation of feeling bad by no longer doing it is going to not be insignificant.

• 46:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, again, though, what is the definition of the behavior? And so a lot of the, a lot of the, the folks, you know, online that, that want to stop masturbating, they unfortunately will now frame as a relapse, any sexual thoughts, any, any sexual fantasies, a wet dream that, that biologically is going to happen if you stop having regular emissions. Your body is going to get rid of old sperm by having, by having a nocturnal emission, a wet dream.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  The, the, the, the, the abstinence only goal increases distress, depression, and suicidality, unfortunately, because it-

• 46:56Chris Williamson?

  That shows up in the data?

• 46:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, in study after study. And people that participate more and more and more in these abstinence only forums are, they're showing higher levels of anxiety, higher levels of depression, and, and more and more thoughts of suicide. It's unfortunate because the goal, the abstinence goal, it's not necessarily a healthy one, right? How many, how many, how many ejaculations or orgasms should a man have every month to have the most healthy prostate, right? Twenty-two, a man should have, you're logically recommended, twenty-two orgasms a month for the, for the healthiest prostate. Now, my prostate effectively, at this point, is immortal.

• 47:43Speaker 00

  When I die, my prostate will probably live on for another hundred or 200 years. There's no point at which sex stops being healthy. People who have more sex live longer. Now, we don't know if that's because healthier people have more sex, or because having sex makes you healthier. It's probably both. But there's no point on that curve where it all of a sudden goes down, where, okay, that's too much sex.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  Sex appears to be a very healthy human behavior. And masturbating appears to increase sexual desire, increase testosterone levels, increase sexual performance. Men and women who masturbate more tend to have more sex and tend to enjoy sex more. Again, there's a chicken and egg kind of phenomenon. They're masturbating more because they like sex, because it's a valuable experience to them. They're more motivated towards it. But sex is also a muscle. The more sex you have, the more you want to have sex. The less sex you have, the less sex you want to have.

• 48:55Speaker 00

  And so the idea that, you know, if I stop masturbating, that then I'll be a better lover in sexual medicine is simply not true.

• 49:07Chris Williamson?

  Have you looked at how porn use affects single people's drive to find a mate?

• 49:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, actually, well, I mean, I have not. But a guy named Sam Perry is a researcher in Oklahoma, and he's looked at this. And a really interesting paper dropped, I think just last year, where basically, you know, looked at the question of, because porn is a cheap and easy sexual outlet, does it, you know, is it like fast food? So the guys will stop wanting the steak dinner, they'll stop pursuing marriage. And found no evidence to support it.

• 49:55Speaker 00

  That, again, watching porn is an expression of libido and desire for sex. And people who watch porn and masturbate want more sex. And sex is different than masturbation, because in sex with a partner, we have touch and we have another person there and we can smell them and all of these things that all of these stimuli that are not present in masturbating to pornography. So masturbating to pornography is not something that blocks interest or takes the place of sex. Now, I will give a caveat in that I do see...

• 50:41Speaker 00

  People oftentimes where a man, for instance, is choosing to watch pornography and masturbate rather than having sex with his wife. And there's this kind of idea then that, you know, the porn and masturbation has become, has taken the place of sex with his wife. But what I consistently find in those cases is a couple of things. One is that the couple stopped having sex as frequently, and so the guy is watching porn and masturbating to compensate for the decreased sex frequency. But two, the wife is not interested in the same kind of sex that the husband is interested in.

• 51:21Speaker 00

  Oftentimes, the wife is more shaming of sex and views masturbation as shameful or immoral. And so more and more and more, the guy is now faced with, well, it's not that I don't want to have sex, but I'm not sure I want to have sex with you because of conflict in the relationship or because of sexual mismatch. Again, Sam Perry found that early, his early research in 17, he found that watching porn predicted later divorce. He went, now, he's a great researcher, and he went back to that research later on as suggestions of folks like me who were saying, you know, there's more to the story, and

• 52:06Speaker 00

  found that if you separate out the variance of masturbation in those couples, that actually porn watching had a neutral to slightly positive predictive relationship with the marriage. But masturbation frequency predicted later divorce. Now, it's not that masturbation is causing divorce, but masturbation and increases in masturbation frequency reflect a mismatch of sexual desire within the relationship. And it's that mismatch that is causing the later divorce and relationship problems. Typically, you know, and this is, this is my mantra, is that, you know,

• 52:47Speaker 00

  Porn-related problems, sex-related problems overwhelmingly are symptomatic of other issues. And unfortunately, when we focus on the porn or the sex, I call it the sexy shiny object syndrome. We get distracted by the sex. We blame the sex or the porn for everything. Yeah, I see, I see many men who come in and they're struggling with porn and they're watching porn too much and they identify as porn addicts. Well, these are guys with OCD or really significant anxiety problems that they're not treating. Watching porn and masturbating is a great way to turn off your anxiety

• 53:27Speaker 00

  for a little while, but they need other ways to turn off that anxiety. And they need help dealing with the anxiety. But they get distracted and people around them get distracted by blaming the porn.

• 53:43Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What, what would you say to somebody that's listening to this and says, I don't like my relationship with porn. I don't like my relationship with masturbation. What would you tell them?

• 53:59Speaker 00

  So I see a lot of those guys and I, and I, and I talk about this a lot in my, in my third book. It's called Ethical Porn for Dicks, A Man's Guide to Responsible Viewing Pleasure. And first, I think that's actually a really good question to ask yourself. Unfortunately, many people don't think about their sexuality when they're not turned on. They don't think about how they feel about their sexual desires, behaviors, or interests when they're not turned on. Now, when we are turned on, our sexual disgust and our disgust reactions go down. Our friend and colleague, Dinah Fleischman, has remarkable

• 54:43Speaker 00

  research on this, showing the relationship between disgust and sexual arousal. When we are turned on, we are less disgusted by things that we find disgusting when we are not turned on. So being turned on changes the way we think.

• 55:00Speaker 00

  I want people to think about their sexuality when they're not turned on. And I want them to think about how it makes them feel about themselves. But then I also want them to ask the question,

• 55:14Speaker 00

  where did I get that? Is that right? Do I believe that? Many of us were raised with racist and sexist values, homophobic values, as children. But many of us now reject those values. We don't believe in racism or homophobia or sexism. So our values and our attitudes can and do change. If you were taught that masturbating made you less of a man, I want you to ask where you got that idea. And I want you to also think about,

• 55:58Speaker 00

  why did the people who told you that think that? What were they wanting? Now, I hate to say this because it sounds ridiculous. But in fact, the Nazis told Hitler Youth that they shouldn't masturbate and that wanting to masturbate made them less of a man, because it was a way to create insecurity that they could then capitalize on and use to manipulate the young men. Churches, I mean, the Christian church has gotten thousands of years of control over people

• 56:41Speaker 00

  by creating sexual insecurity and by framing masturbation

• 56:48Speaker 00

  as unhealthy. There's a remarkable researcher in Israel named Yana Vifardi. And he's got this incredible paper called "Oh, God, I Can't Stop Thinking About It." And he actually showed that the more religious a person was, the more they tried not to think about masturbation. And of course, as you and I have said multiple times today, the more you try not to think about something, the more you think about it. And the more distressed and anxious and ashamed they became about it.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  So if somebody's telling you these things, why? You know, Kellogg's Corn Flakes was invented as a food, as a bland food that wouldn't trigger physical hedonic pleasure and lead to people wanting to masturbate and have more sex. Because again, there's this, there's this idea that masturbation somehow depletes you. Samuel Tissot was a Swiss physician in the 1600s who first argued in European literature that masturbation depletes men of some essential kind of element. Turns out not to be true. Turns out, you know, the, the, the stuff that comes out of your penis when you have

• 58:02Speaker 00

  an orgasm, it's not your brains. It's not, it's not energy. And masturbation appears to be a very, very healthy behavior that has been socially stigmatized.

• 58:17Chris Williamson?

  David Ley, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do, where should they go?

• 58:22Speaker 00

  Uh, you know, you can find me on Twitter, @DrDavidLay on Instagram, Davidlayphd. And I've got a website, davidleyphd.com. It is important to know though, that Ley is spelled L-E-Y, not L-A-Y. Sounds like getting laid.

• 58:36Chris Williamson?

  David, I appreciate you. Thank you.

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