[Music] welcome to ear biscuits the podcast where two lifelong friends talk about sex for a long time oh goodness i’m rhett and i’m link this week at the round table of dim lighting we’re getting into part one of four of our sex sub series this episode and then the next three episodes are going to be all based in sex we’ll guide you through based that’s what the kids say based in space that means something that’s bad we’ll walk you through what what each of these episodes is going to be in a second but how did you how did you prep for this i thought a lot about sex and by that i mean did you have sex last night um did i have sex last night you heard me i did not have sex last night because my wife stayed up late and i was like i got to go to bed because i’m going to be talking all about sex in the morning and i want to be fresh well i i had this idea in my mind i was like you know the best prep is going to be like give a little nookie and get a little nooky last night and prep for this but we’re trying to re-watch through lord of the rings is a family and then after that christian nothing will buzz kill a buzz like the lord of the rings we had a show that christy and i wanted to watch so we we stopped lord of the rings and then chris and i watched something and then by the time that was over i was like man i’m getting up i gotta i gotta ride my mountain bike in the morning and that’s not euphemism it’s getting you literally are gonna ride them it’s getting late i mean by that i mean it’s 9 30 p.m so yeah i didn’t get to i didn’t do all of my homework for for this episode but i will say when i when i do sort the mail it’s something to talk about which i guess for something you know in in a subsequent episode it well in the third episode we’re going to talk about our sex lives currently oh yeah and i think i’m ready i’m ready to do that come on uh oh gosh so we’re going to talk about our sex lives in episode three as well as the dynamics of parenting in a in a sex-drenched world oh no talking to our talking to your kids about sex and in the fourth episode the fourth episode we are going to be taking the questions that have just built up like years of sexual tension um and just releasing our answers uh in the fourth episode they’re not our questions your question so use hashtag your biscuits even starting now as you’re listening to this start letting us know tweeting at us what questions you want us to tackle they can be um personal in nature or they can be philosophical in nature well i don’t know i think most of the questions that no no no no bard and you can use what’s the word no no holds bar no holds barred you can use the episodes over the next three episodes that we’re going to explore different themes and different things uh to kind of lead what other you might have clarifying questions i’m sure you’re going to have a lot of clarifying questions but if you want to go ahead and ask us some stuff go for it episode 2 which is the next episode we’re going to be talking about purity culture growing up and experiencing that firsthand within the southern white evangelical church but today we’re going to talk about uh how we first learned about sex and what we first thought about sex as kids growing up uh but before we get into that i do have a theme song that i’ve been working on you have i haven’t told you about this and i haven’t really prepared it it looks like you’re about to sing it it goes a little something like this if you want to hear two straight white sis dudes who only have had sex with one woman each and waited until they got married to have sex with those women that they only had sex with each if they’ve only had sex with one woman each and they both been married for about 20 years if that sounds cool those guys talking about sex for a month i’m trying to find my key then strapping strap on stop and get ready for sex timber i mean i i didn’t really have it prepared but it could have changed you could have sung multiple notes you but you did no no it seemed like it was like one note yeah it’s kind of got that 90s thing that the i hate it anyway uh that’s the theme song i won’t sing it again i don’t think people really understood the substance of what you were trying to say which i think is important because the song was so bad it was kind of a disclaimer uh yes we’re a couple of middle-aged uh straight cis white dudes who both waited until we got married to have sexual intercourse with our wives who we are still married to and have only ever had sex with uh for 21 and 20 years respectively this could be the most boring sex series you’ve ever listened to but i don’t actually don’t think so i think we got some i mean i think we got something for you well and we say that because we reckon this is not a prescriptive sex advice series right we’re going to be answering questions i guess in the fourth episode but it’s really this is just us telling you our story this is one point on the wide spectrum of perspectives uh and it’s not prescriptive it’s just personal and anecdotal and we do what you will we reserve the right to be wrong about things and to change our mind a week after the podcast comes out yeah or longer because we’re we’re we’re still in process yeah second piece of this disclaimer it’s going to get graphic it probably already has gotten a little bit more graphic than you’re used to it’s going to get significantly more graphic so if the idea of your favorite internet dads or talking about brothers yeah whatever you want to call or internet sons talking of explicitly and graphically about their own sexual thoughts and exploits and biographically we we’re going to have graphics that’s what we mean by that we’re going to have illustration we’re going to have animated illustrations some people will not realize that he is currently being uh facetious or sarcastic but he is just short of that it it might make you uncomfortable with your choice we’re going to paint very graphic mental pictures for you and we’re not going to i’m just saying we’re not really going to hold back and it’s going to make you feel uncomfortable if that kind of thing makes you feel uncomfortable and so i’m just letting you know if you don’t like the idea of us talking like that or hearing us talk like that or you got somebody in your family that might listen with you normally now’s the time to stop just skip september and do something in the earbuds because i’m about to say female orgasms yeah if you’ve if if you don’t take anything else away from this series spoiler alert female orgasms right we’re going to get into that let’s go way back before we ever heard about any of that what’s the first thing you remember thinking about sex ah i don’t have a recollection of of first i i can’t answer that you’ve blanked it you’ve blocked it out like i have some things that i think will come up and then maybe it’ll i can backtrack into it but um it was just something that i was gonna say was thrust upon me but i don’t want to use that verb let me put the question back on you because maybe do you have an answer i think i know enough about you to believe that you have probably a handful of answers now that you said both thrust and handful i have to give a third part to the disclaimer and that is we are still at heart 12 year old boys okay and we’re gonna keep seeing the innuendo in things that we say unintentionally and laughing like 12 year old boys they’ve watched good mythical okay they said if that’s not that’s not a surprise that annoys you that’s going to happen a lot too so surprised um you know i was attracted to girls as far back as i can remember i remember in first grade uh we had the split class first and second grade so first grade when i met you uh in miss locklear’s class i remember having crushes on various girls in that class and i would have dreams about them and in those dreams i would i didn’t know anything about sex i had like literal zero idea about the what the penis i knew the penis was involved but i didn’t understand how it was involved and i wasn’t actually that’s specifically curious about it so in my dreams i there was just a lot of kissing or the idea of what kissing might be just being close to a girl right uh but i had no idea but when you said a girl but these are specific girls that you were dreaming i am not going to be mentioning specific names don’t say the names but i’m saying specific girls yeah yeah it was it was specific yeah um and like i would have dreams and i would like because i was in that day i was flying in my dreams and i would realize i was dreaming and then realized i would could fly to their house and then i would and their dad would always answer the door and say she can’t come outside it was awkward and weird but so never really successfully you know achieved anything in my dream but again all i knew that i was going to do was kiss them so okay so i thought you might be getting at nocturnal admissions here but you’re not we’re not going in for a smog check yet uh no interesting i’ll get into because how old how old were you i’m talking like six and seven okay yeah all right so i don’t think it was even possible at that point i don’t i i i wouldn’t think so now i know that my parents had no idea that i was thinking about any of these things because i didn’t we didn’t talk about those things and i’m going to go i’m going to go ahead and say i did not confirm this with my mom and dad because i didn’t want to have this conversation with them as an adult man okay but uh and maybe that says something about me but i do not remember getting the talk from my parents now i’m not throwing my parents under the bus because it was it was the early 80s and i don’t i didn’t know many friends at all who received a talk from their parents it was that’s much more common now with parents and children than it was at least where we come from also as the younger brother they may have given the talk to my older brother but i think that you just there’s a trickle-down economics sort of thing that happens in uh most families just like we tell the old one and the rest of them will figure it out that’s kind of what i mean that’s in the third with the third episode but that’s kind of what happened in my current family that i am the father of right um i got you so anyway didn’t have a talk so and it didn’t talk to anyone else about it so these things were just happening in my brain but i had not made any connections to the physicality of how any of this works i hadn’t even made the connection between an erection and like sexual like what okay then what happens well why is that thing happening why is this thing hard right now what might that lead to no no connections but so it was a fixation on certain girls that you had crushes on that was that was like the fuel for your there was a lot of for your thoughts sexual energy directed specifically at girls and then at specific girls that you didn’t have wet dreams girl girlfriends at a young age you know yeah i know there are some there were there were some classmates of ours girls and boys who were like they would have a little boyfriend or girlfriend type thing but you never had that i never had that i had a crush on one girl in kindergarten and at nap time i looked over and she was sucking her thumb and that it was i didn’t have a sexual response to that i was just like oh i only very recently stopped sucking my thoughts yeah i get it but i remember like really crushing on her and what did what did that mean but it wasn’t much of a fixation and i don’t recall it lasting that long and it was you weren’t like i want to be that thumb so bad it was it felt it felt weird and definitely something that i would never tell anybody about or acknowledge publicly of course never to her never you know it was i mean years later i was still like i mean the first girlfriend i got was in seventh grade well mine was and i was sixth grade and i didn’t want and i didn’t want any i didn’t want my family to know that i had a girlfriend i was very nervous i was very nervous around girls and i and i felt like they could tell that they were driving me wild you know what i’m saying like i’m this like eight-year-old kid in a conversation with somebody like oh we’re working together on a project and i just know that she knows that i’m crazy about her and that makes me lock up and not know what to say and be super awkward so i i don’t i just it never i never thought to myself oh you can like ask this person to go with you as we used to say until six until middle school so but then without having a talk what was the next thing for you what was the next stage well there is a moment in which the puzzle pieces began to assemble themselves okay and i’m going to tell you the first part of that right after you tell everybody these mugs we have the official good mythical mug right here look at that amazing design and then if you i’m gonna hold yours if there’s no if there’s no liquid in it oh it’s just it’s just a black mug with with some logos a little condensation and then when you add some hot liquid some hot tea or coffee this thing magically reveals an amazing design it’s fun it’s a it’s something to talk about and something to drink from mythical.com i’m estimating that this was about fourth grade which would put my brother in about eighth grade was he seventh grade seventh grade seventh grade seventh grade yeah and uh we were in georgia where we used to visit my grandmother and everybody all our family lives in georgia and my grandmother’s mother great grandmother that we call mama johnson okay had a shed a shed in the backyard and her it i think it it had a but it was a lot of stuff stored in there like i don’t think it was from her late husband because big john he had been dead a long time uh but maybe it was from like remember those shirts that’s where i learned about sex big johnson shirts well you gotta i mean you gotta really piece that together a lot of times there’s a lot of innuendo in those so you’re going you say you’re just creeping it you know there’s a shed with a bunch of stuff in it and we’re boys and so it’s just like well you’re gonna go in there and you’re gonna start looking around sure pulling things out looking at it well a blow up sex doll all of a sudden my brother is like well look at this and he has a calendar a calendar featuring women sports okay naked women playing sports every month it was a different lady in a different sport in no clothes well i mean like the the the girl who was skiing she had on ski boots and she was in skis she had on a beanie she had on a scarf but that was it wow she may have been holding ski poles i hope she was at least one you know what i’m saying there was a girl holding a hockey stick oh yes now that i think about it they were all holding sticks and i never thought about that i mean the girl on the slopes is i mean she had to be a little little cold well it was all like you know she wasn’t really on the slopes it was it was a sort of a set okay but of course a hockey player a skier that was probably basketball i wasn’t focusing on the sports i was focusing on the the boo-boo-boobies and this was 1980 you know five so we’re talking bush city right like we got we got there’s a lot of bush this untamed bush all 12 months okay yeah you’re right it’s a perennial evergreen now i think that’s the right word for it the uh there there’s no talking between me and my brother at this point but we did go through the entire year i mean we went through all the seasons all the months no conversation yes this is your first name he’s probably thinking my little brother’s looking at this with me i definitely don’t need he was like i’m not gonna stop but i’m not gonna like talk about it you know and we’ll never talk about it again and i don’t think we have but let me just say to me it was the most wonderful thing i had ever seen in my life it was the most captivating thing that i had ever encountered and i mean because you can you can put you know like meaningful dates on it and you can plan things into the future and you know you you won’t double book that gets really awkward right you know you get you say yes i’m going to do this to two people and then you’re like oh i should have put it on it wasn’t a naked chick playing sports count it wasn’t the calendar part that was really getting me um but the funny thing is is it wasn’t like there wasn’t a a weirdness or a i don’t know what to think about this it was like i can’t believe that i haven’t really thought about what this might look like like what a woman’s body might look like and it’s better than anything i could have possibly imagined it was kind of like i discovered like a secret to the universe and wow we just kind of closed it walked out and i think a couple additional times during that trip now we weren’t staying at mama johnson’s house we were staying at mamenel’s house her daughter my grandmother but you were looking for reasons to go back if i recall correctly there were a couple of quick trips back out there and be like good lord you know and just revisiting that and again this was super super super soft core just women standing in sports poses naked it sounds like a lot of fun i’d like to google it and maybe find it we can put it in the video version of this okay well we put this on what our only fans well we’d have to start one exactly i don’t think you can put other people on your only fans and kind of defeats the purpose i remember going to my dad’s one weekend and he we rented lethal weapon two i think it was the one where there’s a sex scene in mel gibson’s trailer and i remember that my my dad was like laying on the bed and i was down on the floor at the foot of the bed like sitting sitting on the floor then watching the television from down there and i was really glad that i was down there because i was super embarrassed and i was like i’d i’m not i’m not supposed to be seeing this i i i was probably in like fourth grade-ish and i that remember that was just my reaction it wasn’t like i mean it was it was a sex scene your dad was there my dad yeah i mean this is not i mean my brother was there but your dad was there yeah that certainly made it super awkward and um and it wasn’t just a nude woman but there was like they were they were participating in some sort of act right they were copulating and i just did not i don’t know how much sense i made of it but i immediately knew that i was i should not have been watching this and this is not something i’d be watching back at my house you didn’t even have time to uh consider whether or not you were into the the idea it was more like i don’t think i’m supposed to be watching this i was here i was petrified but you were gentrified of the sex petrified of the situation of of me watching something that was wrong for me to watch this was wrong for me to to see but was there a moment where you were like oh that must be i don’t recall that i don’t i don’t i don’t recall that i think it was like block you weren’t supposed to see that so block it out i might have looked away i wasn’t in especially in that instance i wasn’t intrigued and i don’t know if that happened first or if the next thing i tell you happened first chronologically i don’t know and if they happened in the other direction i had a little bit more information than i recall but the way that i found this the way that i got the sex talk from my mom was my mom uh always worked at the harney county health department yes she did and there was this set of brochures at the front in the waiting area and that was a resource for her all types of things you know when i was in um well shoot i guess this was well i think this was fifth grade when i did the drug awareness poster contest and i told mom i wanted to submit an anti-drug poster and she was like well here’s an anti-drug brochure you can just take the illustration from in that and make that into your poster you can plagiarize that even though she nor i use the word plagiarize and apparently didn’t know what it meant right and that’s why you won and that’s why i won and i have it hanging in whole county you won the whole county i still got a laminated version of it hanging in there no one in the county might put together that this is from the official house office this is from the official county anti-drugs brochure which yeah probably we’re gonna take the winner of this and use it in the brochure and they’re like oh this is the same image from last year there’s a lot of fun things to do instead of drugs right was was their tagline and sex yeah she also came home one day and said something to the effect of link i want you to read this brochure and then if you have any questions you you can talk to me about it it’s any questions you have it’s totally fine you can just ask me anything to clarify anything that you read in this amazing brochure what was the illustration on the outside of this brochure i don’t remember but it definitely if it was just text and illustrations it’s i’m pretty sure there was no actual photos this is not and it was and there was no sex positions either this was a very clinical educational brochure did you read it i’m estimating i was still in like around fourth fifth grade and i was like okay mom and i took the thing and i remember i went into my room and i closed the door and then i went into my closet and i closed myself in my closet wow like pushed i i had this little cubby area that i could sit in inside of my closet and hide like push my when you’re doing bad things like learning about sex yes so i went in there and had like a flashlight or something and i read this brochure and i and i don’t recall um any sort of positive reaction any sort of intrigue associated with it i don’t know that there was an aha moment this was not something i wasn’t asking any questions i was not i i was not motivated to find any of this out now i think it was probably a good time for mom to give me the brochure because sometimes you just you need to have some point of reference for things so you can kind of keep up i applaud your mom for this i mean you know yeah i’m not critiquing how she did it well no but it does say a lot about me and how i responded to it i mean it also says a lot about your sort of lingering obsession with brochures like you ended up being a brochure collector well into yeah your teenagers i didn’t go to a lot of uh tourist destinations but i had brochures for a lot of stuff and it’s you know brochures played a really integral role in your life but anyway i do think this one was very biological it i mean it it gave it showed an erection it showed an erection i thought you said there weren’t pictures diagram it showed a diagram of an erection but it was like a cross-section of an entire human being so you could see the inside of the erection but who wants to see inside who wants to see an erection at all but did you know like oh that’s what happens to me i don’t i don’t remember that i don’t remember it i probably did think that i know i was in the closet and i know that i just felt like this was a clandestine thing that it was i mean there was a shame element i don’t want anyone to know that i’m reading this book god forbid find it this is just strange and i think that’s a i i think that that’s a pretty well i may have been a little bit more driven and inquisitive about it i still wasn’t talking to anybody about it for the same reason i was i was i i felt i was going to ask my parents a question about it because i was it’s weird and there’s a lot of shame attached to it and culture i mean i have to conclude that at the time my takeaway was because it was it was just it was so educational in a biological sense like this is this is these are ovaries this is a vagina this is an erection this these are gonads you know that type of situation so my takeaway must have been more this is how you make babies and i don’t want to worry about it i don’t really recall being engaged making a connection between desire pleasure intimacy i i ventured to guess that none of that stuff was really covered maybe more than just a blurb in this thing it might have covered stds but i’m pretty sure that would have lost me right you know because i i was just like i’ll get back to this later i don’t know what i did with the brochure i have to think i hid it somewhere in a stack of stuff in case i needed to refer to it later but i never i didn’t throw it away it’s right better i can’t remember the railroad brochure yeah right i did i mean i would call it a pamphlet it had multiple pages it wasn’t like a three up three right it was a three panel brochure it was a booklet um okay so i didn’t get that and no one gave me any technical education so i should have given you mine yeah i wish you had if we were talking about it but but i think as you’ll see i think as you’ll see the way that my story unfolds there is a i’m not necessarily unhappy with the way that it came together because at least it makes a good story of how i put these pieces together there’s a happy ending definitely the second piece of the puzzle uh came from a sleepover at a friend’s house around that same time i’m still estimating same year fourth grade or whatever you were doing a lot of sleeping around yeah as you as you may know i was not i invited myself over to anyone’s house uh like the first day of school if i met you i would invite you myself over to your house because i was really interested in people’s homes and especially their fridges but anyway this was a a friend and we were there were several people who were going to be staying over at his house and we were all sleeping in uh like a rec room situation and he had an older brother who was even older than my brother who was already in high school and i mean that’s where you get so much information it’s from these older brothers they’re just there’s there’s just you know yeah they got so much wisdom about sex yeah but he had told his younger brother a number of things which then were relayed to us and the one detail that i remember really standing out because it freaked me the hell out was he said yeah i’ll find his underwear and his underwear has dried sperm in it and i was like what’s he doing taking like core samples well and he didn’t you know and he didn’t say dried sperm he just said sperm and at this point i thought for reasons i don’t understand i thought that sperm was a powder okay because that that’s what you inferred from his story yes there’s something in your pants and it’s it’s probably powder so i was just so that was the first time that i was like oh something else comes out of your penis other than pee and that’s got something to do with the sex stuff it’s like bc headache medication but it comes out in like a poop like one of those mushrooms that you find that yeah your kids need yeah give it a little squeeze it’s like squeezing a thing of baby powder it’s airborne oh no anyone can get infected oh god um so i don’t know why but i thought that it was a powder but i i took that nugget with me and again i’m i’m i’ve seen the women the naked ladies playing sports i know that the more that i see of a woman’s body the more i’m into it and now i’m like there’s this second piece of the puzzle which is i’ve got this ability to like puff out some powder from my penis under certain circumstances that i’m not i’m not yet aware of how this is going to happen but apparently it can happen while sleeping that was the whole point of his he was like pumping out penis power but he didn’t call it wet dreams because if he had called it wet dreams i wouldn’t have come up with a powder nope you wouldn’t have you know what dreams and powder that doesn’t mix younger brother looking at older brothers underwear is weird hey but yeah i mean apparently he was inquisitive too okay now i’m this is gonna i’m getting very don’t i’m not gonna go for effort just go forward i know i just um okay so i distinctly remember i had these pieces of information uh in sixth grade like probably summer before sixth grade rolls around and i had not ever masturbated okay okay i didn’t and by that you mean i had i did not know what masturbation was i knew that i would get these erections but it was just like well there’s that thing happening i hope no one sees you know what i’m saying i’ve put up but my back i’m going to carry my backpack really low as i go to the lunchroom or whatever you know hang it right on there like a doorknob yeah um but i never masturbated but again no i it’s crazy how i was piecing this together because it was just based on this these disparate pieces of information but i’m lying there in my bed at night and here it comes you know we’ve got full mast situation and and then i’m like well let’s just let it breathe [Laughter] you know i remember thinking all this stuff like powder and let it breathe yes well i just remember thinking i mean this is the first time it happened yeah so it’s out and it’s in the open air and then i just i just kind of i just i just grabbed it you know i just put my hand around it and the reason i’m telling you in this graphic situation is because of how this happened so i didn’t understand what a fantasy was and i didn’t understand what masturbation was but i began to imagine don’t make me feel don’t make me feel stupid for telling you this i’m not i’m not don’t make me feel super telling me everyone knows am i making you feel stupid what am i doing i told you what am i doing when we started this podcast that in 2021 i’m going to talk about the first time i ever masturbated would you have been like let’s not let’s just stop this podcast now are you like okay let’s see where this thing goes dude i’m hanging on every word i want to know if it was powerful i was hanging onto my dick so uh i’m sitting there and i began to have this i didn’t even understand what i was having was a fantasy i began to imagine that i was lying on a table in a hospital with my full erect penis sticking out like from underneath a sheet and that nurses who just happened to be all the girls from our school who i thought were cute what were coming by and like investigating it and like testing it like putting their hands on it being like yep that’s a it’s a penis yep it’s okay like look i had this weird fantasy and of course the whole time i’m touching myself in a pleasurable way and then about literally like after 10 minutes of this i’m like boy this feels good like this feels so good it feels like something like it feels like something weird is happening like i didn’t you know i didn’t understand what the beginning of an orgasm might feel like one thing led to another so there’s there’s there’s a line up that’s happening yeah and i mean i’m talking listen there’s a batter on deck and and you know and so all of a sudden it’s just like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa what has happened and then poof some powder came out wow no hold your breath uh there was the moment of release and it was not powder so i immediately thought i had broken my dick oh no and i was like is it what it’s good that i’m in a hospital i was i was like is it blood oh god like i i honestly i was like it’s not pee i know that because it feels like soap and i was like i did it did i get soap in there what i did i was freaking you talking about soft soap the first type of liquid soap we had was a brand called soft soap very soft and that was probably what you were thinking and i was like did i did i get some soft soap in there when i took a bath i i was really concerned and then i was like who am i gonna talk to about this and as i sat there in my bed piecing together the calendar the conversation about sperm which then i realized oh do you only assume that it was powder this is sperm yeah and the funny thing is is i you know i’m sitting there i’m a real thing i’m like i’m like 12 years old 11 12 i don’t know and i it was like a cave boy i don’t want to i’m not trying to make the the adults in my life especially my parents like feel i mean that i was just piecing this together but it was like it was like a it was like lord of the flies it was just like cave boy sitting there ooh there were flies figuring out what sex was yeah but the way that it was kind of locking into place it was the complete opposite of a brochure you know i’m saying like you had the brochure that had the technical information i’m sitting there thinking i’ve broken my penis and then realizing that oh sperm is not powder that’s what just happened i can tell you that the brochure did not say anything about masturbation i think i would have remembered that well there was no how-to let me just say once i broke the seal you thought i became a connoisseur so you were a soft soap after that so you on the daily so a long time so you it was so easy but it it wasn’t the type of thing that would ever come up in conversation with your brother hell no and it wasn’t the type of thing that as an older brother he would joke about you jerking off because that would validate it no no no no he didn’t and that is very common that’s very common now i hear those jokes in my own home right um but no um there was there was no external validation and you you certainly you never talked to me about it maybe in like movies maybe like in pop culture you know i was like oh yeah that’s what they’re talking about now i know what whacking off or jerking off is no that’s the thing that i do all the time now it’s my new thing it’s the best thing that i’ve ever done yeah you know okay i uh i i can’t recall the first time i masturbated really i don’t i really can’t i i think that well first of all the older brother of it all of course i didn’t have that i was an only child and then i also didn’t like at this point i had a dad in the house but he was a nice guy but we weren’t that close and there was never and he wasn’t type of guy to like make any off-handed i couldn’t off-handed jokes or anything like that so it wasn’t like i learned anything from him he had a daughter who was much older than me it was you know we weren’t having any conversations there was nothing to be learned there and again i had i was not motivated i was not interested i was not asking questions and i think when i was presented with information even a brochure or a movie i wasn’t supposed to be seen or i remember one time there was like these older kids at my who stayed at the same babysitter as me after school and during the summer and he he was like real sex obsessed and he i remember he used the word clitoris or clitoris as you do i don’t know how he said it i was like what is this guy talking about a clitoris like i mean i was i mean i was i was like what i i did okay it’s like now i’ve heard a word that is something that this raunchy dude is saying that now goes in my pretend you didn’t hear that column it was probably in the brochure but i think that that’s that must have been how i reacted to these things for me to not have these active vivid memories like you do it was a suppression thing it was i’m not suppo i’m this is not i’m not supposed to know about this stuff i don’t care to know about this stuff so i’m gonna act like i don’t know about it and then after a while when you’re not re-accessing those memories and and fixating on it then it kind of fades into the background that’s at least my explanation in hindsight because it feels like i can’t i mean if that was your attitude towards sex then you would have waited so it would have been later like middle school high school whatever and if there was so much trepidation around it it just feels like the moment that you decided to do it would be would stand out um i i think it was there was do you remember that there was a shame associated with it i remember one time in particular um we were being picked up to go somewhere like you you had gotten a ride with somebody i actually think it was these these older girls that were in our youth group and they were old enough to drive and then they came by and and picked me up to go somewhere to go to some church thing and then i remembered that i’d left something at home and i can’t and i was like oh you got to take me back home to get so and so can’t remember what it was so we turn around at the end of the street and we go back and i go in the house to get the thing and i look on the couch and i had left the victorious secret magazine out on the couch okay and i had been looking at the victoria’s secret magazine and i have to believe that i was jerking off you have to i have to i have to believe it i mean at the they would there would be all these it would be the nice lingerie and then you’d get to the back and it would get lazier the back of the victoria secret if you if you made it that far you got into really good stuff right a lot more lace sometimes you you could feel like you could almost see a nipple but you really couldn’t but you almost could i mean and then but like they would have those like stockings that would then come up to like the middle of the thigh and then there would be like a little connector like a strap from the stocking to the panties i’m aware i’m aware of this and i remember i i did fixate on that like that was my jam well the thing is is i got to a place where i didn’t need that it could just be like a woman in the sears catalog holding a vacuum oh and just there’s enough cleavage and i’ll be like i mean literally there was when they talk about like sex crazed sort of when you get like when you’re going through puberty and the hormones or you’re just saturated in hormones it got to it was it got to a place thankfully it didn’t that stage of my life didn’t last where it the the simplest thing could could could just be like oh well yeah you just now you need to go masturbate the thing for me that i remember about that is first of all it could have been eighth grade honestly maybe seventh grade don’t it wouldn’t have been less than that like my mom was at home we were like we were in the the new house course that had been a while i’m trying i i i’m gonna say it’s seventh grade but it could have been eighth grade and i mean i i was definitely suppressing going to any of these places in my mind and you know i was a i was a late bloomer i think you would call it that you know developmentally i was a i was i was behind i believed in santa claus many years later than you thought was appropriate and and and you remedied it right thank you for for letting me know and thank you for not telling me about the powder because that would have really freaked me out and thinking about not telling me about any of your um discoveries or maybe i don’t know maybe i wish you would have told me but i do remember with the victoria’s secret thing in that moment i was like oh if i wouldn’t have come back in here to get my so-and-so i would have then that magazine would have been sprawled out and my mom would know i was looking at it and i put it back where it was supposed to be and put it away i had all of these weird shame things as as around this time like when i started growing my realizing that like i had a unibrow and you told me that i couldn’t shave it i needed to pluck it i didn’t have tweezers but i knew my mom had tweezers because i had like gotten the toenail clippers from her drawer in her bathroom and i saw that there were tweezers in there so what i would do is i would just go borrow my mom’s tweezers but i wouldn’t do the thing that seems totally normal which is tell my mom hey mom i want to plug these eyebrows can i’m going to use your tweezers i would when my mom was in another room like in the kitchen or something i would walk from my bedroom across the living room remember how it was all the way into her bedroom and her bathroom and i would take her tweezers and i would sneak back out into my my bathroom and pluck my eyebrows because i was ashamed that i was doing that i just like so if i was ashamed of plucking my eyebrows in front of my own mom which is kind of sad how much more when it came to this this unknown world of sexuality and you know going through puberty and and so much unknown and yeah my mom my mom did a good job of saying hey we like she used proper terms growing up like penis we didn’t talk about vaginas ding-dong um did you say ding-dong in the brochure she fostered open communication when it came to biology and things like that and she left an open door for questions and so i’m not putting any of this on my mom but something about the way that i was and what i don’t know everything i’d gone through there was like i had a predisposition towards shame i think in in other areas so you you layer that on this and i’m like the last thing i want anybody to know is that i masturbate and i’m so i just kind of have this innate belief that no one can ever know no one can ever know well it’s interesting because i am a deeply shameful person like as an enneagram three shame is your main vice um and as we will get into an exquisite detail in the next episode shame is sort of the linchpin of the purity of purity culture itself so i was dealing with intense amounts of shame as i was beginning to p i was piecing together the sexual sort of facts in my experience and then coupling that with the christian worldview that i was saturated in and then would really embrace as i got older but at this point did you experience shame you were keeping it secret you weren’t talking to anybody about it i i think for well i’m not again i don’t i’m not i’m not diagnosing me or diagnosing you i’m just saying that it’s interesting because i don’t feel like the main difference was no okay yeah i plucked my eyebrows and i had a conversation with my mom about that so i wasn’t ashamed about that but when it came to the sex the idea that anyone would know that this stuff was happening that i was thinking these things i had no way to know that it was a completely normal thing i i for all intents and purposes i thought that i was strange and weird and all these desires were bad and wrong but they were so intense that it didn’t matter you know what i’m saying like i mean as we’ll talk about next episode the the idea of both at the same time holding the idea that masturbation is sinful and wrong and then holding your penis and masturbating a lot at the same time for many many years creates quite a christ create that attaches so much shame to sex so that was happening at the same time so i guess i’m just throwing that i’m adding that piece of information because it feels like you’re tying your shame to the way that you uh like saw it but like i had a lot of shame around it too but at the same time it was just so intense that i couldn’t i couldn’t stop it do you know what i’m saying yeah and i i did i didn’t have that much of a drive and it did happen much later for me but i did like get hair on my legs earlier right and that kind of thing so what what so what is the next what’s the next step in your process um and i’ll i’ll tell you where you know if i’m if i’m later well i’ll jump in when it when i can relate to it again so this was this was sixth grade if and again i’m i’m a year or so off probably in these but so yeah this whole the pieces of the puzzle coming together is like fourth fifth sixth grade like getting ready for middle school sixth grade uh at a party that i could have sworn you were at birthday party overnight sleepover at somebody’s house uh it was the one where we put someone’s hand in the warm water trying to make them pee on themselves um and we and and again just so you know what’s this chainsaw mask that’s exciting okay yeah just so you don’t think we’re bullies we all talked about it ahead of time whoever falls asleep first is gonna this is going to happen to them so it was agreed upon it didn’t work by the way it doesn’t work it’s like an urban legend now there was a moment where we went outside in the birthday boy was like i’ve got something i want to show you guys and he broke out a penthouse magazine i don’t remember this i i do not remember this oh i remember it if i was there maybe i was like i’m gonna i’m gonna go inside and not be a part of this or it may have been two different times but go ahead and we all gathered around five six boys with a flashlight and we turned the pages and uh for those of you who are not porn initiated uh the calendar showed bush penthouse showed what the bush was hiding yeah you can get get it get in the bush and uh exquisite detail and which i think is the second time i’ve used it from exquisite detail in a short period of time uh but i remember another kid there made this specific comment no one understood the placement of the vagina to be graphic we didn’t we didn’t under we kind of thought that it was like oh it’s just where the penis is but then we’re like oh no it’s not it’s like it’s lower and i remember one kid saying it extends it extends so like it extends because it was like you know you could see like it’s you could see the whole anatomy the relationship of the different orifices yeah and there was this like conversation about it but this like stand by me level of like wonderment being exchanged by these middle school boys so amazing that you don’t remember this i did that you like i was not there you must have just i was not there but i would not have said it extends i might would have said it opens it blossoms no meaning it extends further than anybody understood you know what i’m saying it’s taller than i thought well it goes lower than anyone thought okay okay and i just remember like it was like the final piece of the puzzle had fallen in place and i remember thinking to myself i feel like i have found my purpose in life and this is what my hand is simulating and it is a vagina and i i mean i’m just i’m not trying to i’m not trying to be funny here like it was so crazy like exactly more than i could ever imagine it was like i was a space traveler going throughout the galaxy looking for my home planet and finding it and like this is the place i came from and this is the place i must return you know it was oh it was so powerful and it sticks out in my memory and again i also was just thinking this is gonna be trouble like because this is the only thing i’m gonna be able to think about the fact that this exists and you can just get a magazine and look at it again i know it might feel and i i this may seem crazy to some some people who don’t who don’t have that much sexual attraction but like it was overwhelming to me i i totally get it at this at that point in my life i certainly did not but i i mean i i totally understand now just for the record between then and now there was a point closer to then than now that i did figure all this out and i was uh a lot more motivated than i was when you started that’s the reason i say that because i don’t again i’ve never talked about any of this publicly and i’ve only talked about it with a few people privately you don’t want to seem like a creep uh like just being just seeing a vagina and thinking that it’s by far the best thing that the universe has ever created like by far the best thing it’s ever created and i still believe that to this day the vagina is the pinnacle of creation okay you say it again the vagina is the pinnacle of creation i still believe that i still feel that i am a cho does that make me i just say i feel i just say in my humble opinion i still have oh yeah in my humble opinion i still have there’s shame associated with that like am i a creep for thinking that or is it the shame that we’re going to explore in the next episode where it comes from my world view that like was paired with this no there should there’s we we do know that there should not be and yeah so there’s nothing to apologize for okay good here but it i mean i it it’s extraordinary how different we were at this time that if i was there it i probably physically got out because i just didn’t feel like i could allow that it wasn’t allowed that was off limits that was x-rated i’m almost willing to say that this and again i’m not trying to be facetious but for me as an agnostic my best evidence for the existence of god is the vagina okay and now you’re if you keep going you are gonna get it’s like okay dude we get it it’s cool that’s cool no but let me just give my theory real quick because okay it’s sort of shaped like it’s kind of shaped like a a bean right like it’s it’s oblong there’s a there’s a bean that’s part of it again you know as you said the clitoris earlier and then this whole shape is reminiscent of the shape of the galaxy which is probably the shape of the universe you know what i’m saying it’s like i just think it’s all it’s like it’s like a uh this shape within a shape within a shape within a shape it’s just like i i think that i’m not joking when i say that like i’m you know i’m like okay this feels like an intentional creation yeah if that’s your thing great i won’t say anything else about it right it’s just you know it’s to me it’s not about oh does that does that make you look like a creep it’s like does something like this do people map that on their own experience and then judge themselves and i get concerned about that but i’m actually not going to oh yeah i’m not saying i’m not saying you should feel this way i’m just saying i’m trying to just articulate my own experience and you may not have thought about it to that degree at the time but you did think about it almost to that degree and then and you experienced this reaction and then there might have been a secondary or tertiary reaction that was i’m not going to tell anybody about this or talk about it i mean the guys on the trampoline you were you were there was a lot of conjecture but then in all in our friend group there was never there was there weren’t there wasn’t joking about uh masturbation or i think it just started body parts until high school in my recollection yeah it got very prevalent in high school but there was something to socially connecting with other boys about it and again uh we talked about our we were still best friends at this time we’ve always been best friends and the only the other person i was really close with was ben and we didn’t like ben and i didn’t talk about it and you and i didn’t talk about it and it was kind of like something reserved for a few friendships that like due to you could like you set down a porn magazine in front of and you just all start kind of just doing it on and there was some sort of connection at that point um which began to sort of break down some of the bonds for me it was oh these guys are just as fascinated by this as i am and that makes me feel normal that was that was an important step for me i remember seeing porn whenever we would go in the woods we would find porn and we would we would look at it some in the woods and then yeah in between the school and home is there was there was a stretch of woods where we found and then re-hid the porn because you don’t want the porn at your house you want the porn in the woods so you and then so i remember thinking and again we were the church stuff does start to come in even in middle school it’s like all right we definitely knew you should not be looking at porn this was wrong that’s why you hide it in the woods but you hide it under like a piece of metal so when it rains it can stay dry even though it still gets really damp and every time you come back to it it’s a little more decrepit and then you finally get so guilty that you go out there one day and you’re like i’m going to burn it and then you don’t burn it and then you come and then you just look at it and then you go out there the next time and you’re like i’m really gonna burn it and you look at it and then the third time you’re like okay i’m just gonna burn it i’m not gonna look at it well it begins to lose its effect you’re like oh yeah i’ve seen the girl with the hockey stick yeah yeah and then i burned it yeah and then you can burn it but i remember i we both knew it was there and i think i remember having a conversation telling you that i burned it and i didn’t care because i had found porn stashes not not in my own home okay but at other people’s houses like other kids i was friends with had found their dad’s porn stashes yeah i remember one of those and of course porn stash sounds like a porn mustache but i’m talking like a stash of porn a stack of playboys in in the walk-in closet and it’s like behind most kids knew where their dads kept the porn stash and they would you know gladly share it because it made it it was it made your house cooler so nicki minaj is pre-internet we know obviously nobody had internet so this brings me to the grok because i think there’s still when do you okay so are you ready to tell that story sure yeah i’m trying to remember when this was this is you know summer of couldn’t drive yet i know that it was i mean i’m guessing this is summer after seventh grade that sounds about right and we would just ride our bikes around bowie’s creek all hot summer long because this was also before we got summer jobs we weren’t old enough to get summer jobs which i think happened after my eighth grade year started working for my dad or maybe it was ninth grade so anyway we’re in the right territory and at the edge of campus there was a now torn down and totally rebuilt with something fancy there was this really old gas station building that didn’t have a gas pump in front anymore it was just a convenience store no longer serving gas and it was called the grok short for grocery and we would go in there and play the gilligan’s island pinball machine and baseball cards were a huge craze and that’s where you would go to buy and sell baseball cards at the grock and there was some some what i felt was like some shady dude who worked there definitely shady and then all summer long all these baseball cards would be coming in and going out because there would be camps all summer all types of sports camps but no naked sports camps in retrospect and the guy kind of knew that we weren’t campers because we were there week after week after week playing the gilligan zion thing and he was like hey if you guys want to sort my baseball cards for me i’ll give you a dollar an hour like hell okay that’s good money and i was like i wonder is this okay can i do this and we’re like yeah let’s do this so he said just go to the back there’s a bunch of baseball cards that need to be sorted and you can do it on this pool table use the pool table as your desk there’s all these baseball cards up there we’re looking in the pool table and where all the billiard balls would gather like underneath the the pool table like those cubbies there whether you would hide all the the pool table accoutrement yeah there was pouring in there lots of pork i mean like if you if you ran and bumped into the pool table porn would just fall out it was i mean it was coming out of every orifice of this pool table if i remember correctly yeah it wasn’t like one magazine or three it was like every orifice was rolled up shoved in stacked up smushed just in there yeah it was strange and that was when we began to piece together that we were gonna get paid one dollar an hour to just look at porn yeah and which is a good deal which is a really you usually have to pay for it yeah and we so we had we had to we had to work out some strategy you got to do some baseball card stuff you got him you got to demonstrate some sort of progress to actually get paid but we do need to look at all of this porn but we’re working for a really low this is a doom too much basis i mean this is a treasure trove of porn do you remember okay so i have i remember this i remember what we did the system well okay we’ll talk about the system and then i i’ve got a specific thing i remember the solution was i’m going to sort baseball cards while you take your pick of the porn magazines you take one and you’ll go into the bathroom right over there right that was the nastiest bathroom and we only made it i had ever been into yeah it was so gross this one guy who worked was the a slob yeah i mean shoving porn into every place been sent in a couple of middle schoolers the bathroom had not been washed for decades it was scary but we would take shifts so that if at any point he came back there he can’t he can’t know that we’re looking at his porn in my mind right but he of course because that would be embarrassing and we probably get fired and it seemed wrong i didn’t i didn’t want this slob of a person to judge me what so we always had an alibi if he came back there i’m sorting the cards oh he’s in the bathroom and vice versa so we would take shifts you’d go in i would go in you would go in i would go in i could only go in a few times before i couldn’t go in anymore you know what i mean i never once masturbated in that bathroom what never once i thought that was the whole point we didn’t we we talked about this system but we never talked about jerking off and i feel like we had to talk about it i thought it was understood and i’m telling you right now this is a this is kind of like a a key date in my memory because if we’re saying this is summer after seventh grade maybe i haven’t done it yet i hadn’t done it yet you hadn’t done it yet if i had done it i would have done it i mean that kind of bathroom those kind of magazines if i knew that you were prime location i didn’t i didn’t think you were doing it well i was because i didn’t know but i was quiet i didn’t know it was a thing to be done and if i hadn’t known you were in there doing it i certainly wouldn’t have kept going in there right that’s gross man no let me to be clear i was respecting the system and i did not i touched the magazine with one hand in the my own self with another hand i mean i didn’t there’s no cross-contamination you have to worry about that with me i’m a professional i’m getting paid a dollar an hour to masturbate okay i’m one of the only people that’s ever just gotten paid to masturbate i was so frustrated and scared of getting caught but i learned a lot and i were and it this this porn was not this was a label this was um this is this was like there are some porn and again we only had images we did not have uh video at this point yeah but there was it was a magazine at the time where the people who made the porn had come to understand something some people are only interested in seeing [Music] the stuff they want to see do we have to put them in sports equipment do we have to make it look like she’s skiing naked do we have to write an article do we yeah can this and again i have i’ve seen a lot of porn in my life but there are certain images that stick out and one of them is it was the first time i ever saw the two-page spread i remember that one and let me tell you when i say two-page spread i mean spread definitely and i just that image sticks out in my mind and i’m just like i mean it could it could have been in a biology class the universe is happening right here in front of me um so that’s what i remember about that and i it’s funny we’ve never talked about the fact that i just assumed you were going into the bathroom to whack off as well i didn’t even know i’m sorry man i feel like i should have told you but that would have been weird i mean it was weird anyway because it’s like here i am just waiting for you to i was interested and i was you know and i do remember the next phase was let’s i’m gonna steal one of these i’m gonna put it down my pants and we’re gonna walk out of here with it yeah good idea and and i that may have been where the one in the woods came from actually right get the glossiest one because that one will resist the rain the longest do you remember stealing it uh yeah now that you said it you do it’s interesting because i’m the one who stole it i it went in my pants and i walked out and that’s that’s the only time i don’t shop i don’t think i would have stolen it was that shoplifting i i mean it wasn’t for sale here’s the difference between me and you it was stealing but it wasn’t shoplifting i was afraid of my dad right and so i felt like yeah i could go into this bathroom and whack off for days especially at this rate but if my dad knows that i stole something yeah i’m gonna be i i got in so much trouble when i did things wrong so i was very good about not like breaking i would never tempt fate in that way so by that age i was certainly motivated to have unfettered access to pornography yeah uh because here i was hiding it in the woods right i i remember walking out with that thing down my pants and just being with a limp just a little bit just clean it close the stiff leg ah you could pay me tomorrow slob i’ll be back and maybe i was thinking every day i’ll walk out with one down my pants he’ll never notice there’s ourselves 85 of them right um well right around that same time and we can kind of use this as a way to sort of uh set the stage for what we’re going to talk about in the next episode so you got all this stuff that’s happening privately between you and this woman in a magazine in your own hand and that’s the experience for so many people but then you start to realize that oh no like i could have a girlfriend and i and at this point i had had you know i had been in relationships that were not physical not because of my choice but because they didn’t last long enough right but around that same time i i got into a relationship that was a little bit longer term and more serious and it was with someone who had kissed other people before right and so yeah that was when i began to think oh my goodness it’s just like these unreal sort of these women in these magazines are not real but this girl that i’m in a relationship with is real and but you’re you’re making this weird connection now as a young christian boy who is in the youth group the one thing that i know definitively is that i’m not supposed to have sex and i and i took that and as you did as well very seriously as she will come to find out over the next few episodes so seriously that the possibility of having sex with a girl wasn’t even on the radar it didn’t feel like something i remember yeah specific conversations uh in our friend group about what the the kids and dunn were doing and do you remember that one story there was one story that one of our friends told us about how the the middle schoolers in dunn which was the big city would go to the dunn twin plaza which was the movie theater and they would do the heavy petting hands down the pants and he told the story that one girl had taken a i can’t believe that this is a story but had taken a barbie doll’s hair and cut the hair off what yes cut the hair off the barbie doll and glued it down there to make it seem like she had hair like i remember that i don’t remember i was like this is so my what like what is what is happening and done like done the place of debauchery right i mean the barbie got some long hair that’s weird that’s a that’s a damn curtain there’s no way that was true it was just one of those middle school things that people make up the dumbest it’s just like and i believed it like done they’re doing crazy and done but i be like i was getting into like third fourth fifth month of a relationship and we were doing lots of lots of kissing we’re talking you’re talking about eighth grade eighth grade lots of kissing i had a girlfriend too and we would we would go to i mean the guy’s house that with the trampoline he would have he had a party these these were makeout parties at this point right so if you had a girlfriend um then you all those people would go to a room and start making out with each other right my interaction with that was oh i have a girlfriend i’m going to this party oh now i gotta i’ve gotta meet expectations i’ve gotta fit in i’ve gotta like it it wasn’t about an internal motivation and seizing an opportunity it was about meeting expectations in in and fitting in despite being very anxious about it but still intrigued and there’s i started to be motivated but i would observe you know it’s like okay this is the room that i’m supposed to be in because we’re a couple and everyone all the other couples are funny that’s what the the sort of the framework of the setting was what was driving your actions yeah where i it was like okay they’re already in here and they’re already making out so i just got to find another place that we’re gonna sit or like lay down on this couch and make out with each other and hope to god that the parents who live here don’t come in here observe something and then report it to some authority yeah and i felt like i just had this engine that was just full like 5 000 rpms all the time but i was a respectable good kid and so it wasn’t and again i had this standard that was like well i’m not going to do and at the time i was like i’m not going to do anything uh besides kiss her right because i can have a lot of fun kissing and i just but i but the real the only thing that i had definitively thought in my i was like i know we’re not gonna have sex so i don’t even have to even think about not having sex because i’m definitely not going to do that yeah but for some reason the church lock-in rolls around i mean talk about a setting not our church it was the other baptist church in town yes that felt a little bit more liberal and maybe that’s why i got a wild hair literally that night you know it’s so weird the way lock-ins work and i don’t know if this is still the case but like you put a bunch of kids in like the fellowship hall in sleeping bags just next to each other everybody’s supposed to stay awake all night and do stuff it’s keeping kids off the street and hopefully introducing them to jesus but then there’s this other room it’s like well if you are sleepy you can lay down on the floor in this room and if you want to lay next to your girlfriend well i guess we didn’t address this so it’s kind of your discretion remember they were older they were older there was an older couple in there they weren’t watching too closely but you don’t i mean you can watch closely they were they were in high school and they were laying down next to each other and i was like why are they in the same sleeping bag what what’s happening awkward i gotta get out of here well i just wanna i wanna make a couple of things clear that consent was part of the equation for this okay so this was not this this was there was consent we were in a uh our relationship had been physical up until this point we had done a number of things but for some reason and you had some discussions about it yeah we talked about it we actually talked about it very openly i i mean in some ways i think it’s a very healthy relationship when it came to that stuff because we talked about things every step of the way but for some reason we took this opportunity at the church lock-in again the other churches lock in gosh in front of all these other people i mean you were right next to me and this was my first experience with heavy petting underneath the sleeping bag both ways me to her hurt or me okay we’re sitting there at the church locking like the the youth pastor from the other from that church were like come in and like make an announcement and be like maybe as the youth pastor is talking to me maybe i shouldn’t be in the act of heavy petting i’ll pull my hand out like i don’t like the term heavy petting but i do like the fact that you’re using it instead of being more i just i’m just i’m not i don’t want you to be more graphic but i do i don’t unders i don’t like heavy petting but is there another name for it no i’m gonna stick with heavy petting don’t make don’t don’t derail this um but because you weren’t making out i mean no no you couldn’t make out because that’s not allowed because that would be unkosher for people to sit there watching you make out so you just stick your hands down it wasn’t a temple yeah we didn’t even know what kosher was jewish right uh but jesus was a jew so i think you can still use the term kosher okay but i think that what this illustrates because i be i began to please when you look at it well other just parts of the church you were like is it were you whistling don’t look at my hand um like you weren’t making eye contact with her well no cause i think if we were looking at each other and doing that at the same time i think it would have been a little too obvious it’s so awkward it’s so it’s so not the right way to do it oh of course it isn’t but again it’s not the right place again and and again this was going this was going both ways uh it wasn’t like i was this crazy sex crazed kid and she was just like i don’t know what to do like right this was you were we were kind of crazy about each other in this way yeah and um the interesting thing is that there was this intense physical connection and sort of exploration that was beginning but it was also the same time when i was beginning to understand or become as we would say convicted about what i was doing i knew that it was wrong right i knew that i was breaking some the moral code because and i think this is one of the reasons that we probably i probably didn’t get a talk because i think my parents philosophy was well if he’s in if he’s involved in the church and he’s involved in sunday school and the youth group we know that they’re going to be talking about these things and the fact is they were right because we were having we were being told very specifically what we should not be doing by our youth director at the time and so i beg i began to understand that what i was doing was wrong and began to associate a very high level of guilt and shame with those actions yeah to the point that eventually we broke up and it was in large part by how guilty i felt about the way that the relationship had progressed uh physically and now of course in the next episode we’ll talk like all about the purity culture and that we were in and and the emphasis that the the applications that we made but for now i’ll say i remember this was the point where we did start talking about this like when we would go to the makeout parties and even with the lock-in you you told me what you did and i don’t quite remember if it had gotten to the point that it got to later which we will discuss which is like formalized accountability where you were like confessing to me and asking for some help to to not do that again that eventually happened but at first there might have been a little i think that might have been part of your motivation i don’t know if you recall when we first started talking about it that it was like confessional confessional but it was also hey i just i i did this and i’m like it’s great you know it’s crazy and i remember my application was i’m behind sure you know i’m i thought they were i thought at the makeout parties you were just making out like you’re doing stuff with your hands dude yeah it’s like and i was yeah just trying to figure out before it all became about let’s we have to not do this we have to help each other not do this it there was that moment where it was like ah should i be doing more of this should i oh gosh and then it was i mean my girlfriend at the time we were we were a pretty good match in terms of not being too driven or aspirational it was more just about making out aspirational if i flirted with a boundary then she let me know and great for her you know there was communication that was like uh i’m not this is not for me kind of a thing but we didn’t have this we weren’t com we weren’t communicating it to the point or or getting communicated to by anyone who said this is how you’re responsible person in a relationship this is how you communicate um we were we were going on we were just kind of like feeling our way through it i guess literally at times uh but yeah i never i was not nearly as experienced as you were going into high school well it’s one of those things where the timing of the the engine getting started and then the rpms getting really high and then the opportunity of being in a relationship with someone who felt the same way that was all sort of headed towards the end zone or the you know the home plate so to speak in a in a very intense way but it was the sort of assembly of the christian worldview that just stopped it like stopped it really really abruptly you know what we’re gonna get into next episode is what it was like to navigate you know that engine was still revving it started revving even more for link a little bit later uh and it revved all right up until our wedding day and like what was it like getting from that place where you began to buy into this idea that sex is wrong sex outside of marriage is wrong but to be an adolescent kid with all the sex drive and all this well you had more opportunity than i did but i made some opportunities for myself um what was it like to navigate that through high school and then when it got even weirder in college when we went all in with purity culture so that’s what we’re going to talk about next time yeah and i’m i’m just struck with how different our experience was i mean it it’s the thing you know but then it’s very palpable like that how people develop at different rates you know and it’s it’s one of those areas where at this particular time frame we were so different and yet ultimately hey i did catch up and i we arrived at basically the same place it’s just a matter of timing and of course people arrive in all different types of places too we’re only speaking about our experience which ultimately got more in lockstep as we’ll talk about but from a from that developmental prepubescent puberty stages yeah we were in such different places it’s very fascinating and it does impact it does make me start to think about what we’ll talk about episode after next which is how how do we approach this as parents yeah you know and i i i’m i’m very much informed by how a lack of communication and just this feeling of awkwardness and shame these are things that i’ve tried to be very pointed about heading off at the pass if one of my kids happens to be like i was but even if it they’re totally different like like how you came up in your experience it’s this the answer is still wrapped up in communication i think you know we both talked about how it would have been helpful and i think that’s something that we’ll get into week after next and i think one of the really interesting aspects of that conversation about parenting um is really rooted in the sort of crazy upheaval of our christian worldview that christian worldview oh wow that took us all the way up into marriage and well into marriage that was then stripped away um and the underpinning of sort of the what led to the purity culture was no longer a part of our worldview what does that do as you approach parenting kids through you know the desires stay the same but the framework the philosophical framework changes well what does that mean uh so we’ll get into all that i’m excited to have these conversations i mean this one didn’t make me nervous i’m trying to figure out which ones do we’ve had good conversations with uh Christy and Jessie the four of us talked about our approach to this so i actually feel pretty good i don’t i don’t know if i’m nervous about any of it but i don’t know what their questions may be so again hashtag your biscuits uh go ahead and start giving us your what’s on your what’s on your mind if you want to create a dummy account to do it that’s totally fine hashtag your biscuits you got a rack i got a wreck now let me just give my non-wreck what i thought would be perfect to tie in with this is a book that has been many years since i read i was going to recommend sex at dawn which was a fascinating look at sort of the evolutionary origins of monogamy that was just kind of it was just a really crazy read that i was just intrigued by but then as i was getting ready to look it up for a wreck i realized that oh this is a very popular book but the scientific community has poked a bunch of holes in this so you just made an anti-wrap so if you want to read something that’s probably not true according to many scientists but it’s really fun read sex at dawn but my real wreck is completely out of left field because i was running low on ideas and i thought i was gonna wreck that i’m gonna recommend the eye drops that i use not a sponsor but i have been accused of uh looking old tired and high many times in the history of the internet and uh i got so tired of those accusations that i started to use or high i started to use eye drops in order to look alive and bright and because i now have naturally sort of dry irritated eyes and i have allergies so my eyes always look a little bit red if i don’t take some sort of precautions and for years i just used to like you know when we would shoot i would use like visine but i started feeling i’m not i shouldn’t be using these like visine type things because there’s this thing called the rebound effect that if you can overuse them and then your eyes actually become dependent on the the way that the blood vessels are constricted so you use powdered sperm yeah right in the eye there’s a new product it’s not new but it’s a couple years old i’ve been using it called lumify which operates on a different receptor has the same impact on your eye actually in my case makes my eyes even wider than any of those other products does and it does it acts on receptors that do not have a rebounding effect so you’re not going to become dependent on that sounds like an ad so it does sound like an ad but i’m just giving you the facts about this product that they may end up finding out that it causes some other thing but so far it’s it’s safe and uh that’s why i can say that kind of thing when i’m not being paid to say it uh yeah that’s right lumify uh it’s a little bit more expensive than normal eye drops at least last time i checked it was uh try that if you’ve got really bad eye problems and you don’t want to look high or old or tired on camera all right see if you can hang on until next week we will totally blow your load oh gosh to watch more ear biscuits click on the playlist on the right to watch the previous episode of your biscuits click on the playlist to the left and don’t forget to click on the circular icon to subscribe if you prefer to listen to this podcast it’s available on all your favorite podcast platforms thanks for being your mythical best