[Music] welcome to ear biscuits the podcast where two lifelong friends talk about life for a long time i’m link and i’m rhett this week at the round table of dim lighting we’re getting into part two of sex timber in this episode in particular we are talking about what it’s like to be two boys turning into men and all the confusion that comes along with that basically just you know you know sexual stuff in the context of purity culture we are not currently boys becoming men but we’re gonna go back and walk through our house completely that’s true especially after maybe some of the uh criticism that was that that came from last week’s episode i don’t know we’re recording this before the for last week’s comes out so there’s some conjecture but we’re going to talk through our high school experience and college experience leading up to i don’t know i i think leading up to but not including our first time having sex which for each of us was on our wedding night with our wives unless there’s something wedding nights we each have a wedding night yeah you do unless there’s something you haven’t told me that maybe you’ll tell me today did you lose your virginity is that even a thing hmm oh well teeth that’s a good teaser yeah purity culture we’ll get in all that we’ll also describe what it is but i mean first you should sing the theme song oh give it another chance okay uh i don’t really sex timber if you like the idea of two straight cis white dudes talking about sex and the fact that they waited until they got married to have sex and this is coming from a very particular perspective of these two dudes who are not trying to be prescriptive about all the stuff that they’re saying they’re just kind of telling their story and trying to be honest about sex if you’re into that idea tune in for sex timber it’s happening now oh that’s good that was good i like that yeah that’s good yeah this is it there’s no real cadence or a rhyme scheme uh in fact i don’t think any of that rhymed there weren’t a lot of notes either it’s probably a kind of probably a great metaphor for this entire exercise kind of pounding okay i do want to say before we move into today’s episode that having only recorded episode one yeah that was all about our uh you know first thoughts about sex and then first in a sex talk or not and then moving into like our introduction to what sex was and how we kind of pieced that together i bet you they remember uh by the way hashtag ear biscuits continue to let us know uh what you think and also send us your sex questions or things you would like for us to discuss in episode after next yeah uh i gotta say i’ve been i’ve been struggling uh i’ve never been i’ve never been that honest about sex publicly i’ve never i’ve never told i never have told anyone maybe besides my own wife the the story of the first time i masturbated yeah so there’s i i was filled with and still am a little bit like filled with this trepidation of having been so honest about it without really thinking about you know like again the whole point of this this whole exercise is to just put another point on the perspective out there of two guys who come from this particular background we’re not trying to tell you what to think about anything we’re just telling you this is our story this is what we thought but because we’ve never taken the time to be this honest or vulnerable about anything that well this this sort of you know about sex something that is there’s just so much stigma attached to a stigma stigma attached to it not only within uh christian culture but just culture in general right that i’m just i’m like man even though we warn people and we continue to warn you if you’re uncomfortable with the idea of us talking explicitly about sex do not listen to this do not you know because that is unless you own unless you’re like yes i want to be uncomfortable but did i make people feel so uncomfortable who decided to listen that now they’re forever they forever see me differently or like i said something and i had no idea how it was going to be interpreted again i haven’t seen the response yet and so so i was literally sitting there that night thinking oh man should i just edit that whatever i talked about how much i liked vagina i needed i needed we need i got to go back and take that out i thought about a few things that i said and that you said and i lost a couple of weeks of sleep over it um i don’t know it’s out there now and it is what it is um and uh i think that yeah there is a bit of a fear of like is something going to come out wrong or have an unintentional effect um or is it is it going to hurt somebody is it going to grow somebody is it going to change someone’s view of you or me in a way that like i don’t know that it that evokes elicits judgment i think it’s kind it’s part of the fear too it’s like oh this now now he means this to to me like this is my opinion of him has changed it could be me it could be you you know and probably me i’m just concerned so yeah i have been concerned that uh somebody might not know that i don’t know i just don’t know i did you know we can’t be oh god well let’s just let’s just keep going you just never know we you know it’s it’s an interesting time the thing that we want to do as you said is help to dismantle the stigma around having open responsible adult conversations around the topic of sex sexuality and um the good and bad and the ugly of it but we’re only we’re only doing that through telling our experiences and again i hope that it will be two points of view for anyone listening to take into account but never i never hope or expect that someone’s just gonna listen to what we say even if we do give an opinion and just say okay i’m i agree with that hook line and sinker right you know it’s i and that’s what i’m trusting we want that to be true of this podcast in general but i’m tr i’m true it’s a real test i’m trying to trust the process you know but uh and i do think that one of the things that we’re trying to keep in mind and we would love for you to keep in mind as well especially as we get into talking about purity culture this week is that um you know nothing that we’re we’re actually trying to be conscious of this about your biscuits in general right and especially this is a note from me more than it’s a no for link because i tend to get i tend to go into like prescriptive advice mode and i tend to go into like persuasion mode it’s my personality and but i don’t want neither of us want this podcast to be about that you know this is not a well-researched podcast unless the research is the life that we have lived right uh this is kind of a uh this is a conversation between two friends that the internet is invited to be a part of and so we speak from our perspective and we know that our perspective is specific as we said in the theme song but also we also know that our perspectives have evolved enough over time to preserve the right to change our minds and to continue to grow as people yeah and even as we talk about something like purity culture in the context of like evangelic the way evangelicals think or we we thought in that context about sex we’re not here to indict that now some of the things that we say will be indicting because that’s our perspective but that’s that’s not the point is to be like and here’s why this is bad and that’s the point of this episode it’s like no if you are doing your own research about what you think about sex and what you think about purity culture here’s another data point for you as we give our own personal perspective but we’re not trying to give our opinion uh and i think that maybe in the fourth episode when we get into answering questions we may get into a little bit more of like well okay you asked me what i thought about this i’m gonna tell you uh but this we’re trying to kind of keep this centered around telling our story yeah i do want to lay the groundwork for what purity culture is so i’m just going to lay that pipe yeah there you go right now so the purity culture is a a 90s evangelical movement that discouraged dating and promoted virginity until marriage and it did that through what i’ll call gimmicks uh purity pledges purity rings purity dances like father-daughter dances they call them balls actually purity balls yeah yeah that’s the only ball you can have girl the purity ball um and there’s so it’s it’s seeking to take what the bible teaches about purity and sexual immorality and apply it especially to developing preteens and teens and as it exploded on the scene in like the early 90s we it was directed at us like we we fully experienced it as the target demo of of purity culture and the biblical roots of it there’s there’s a couple of there’s a couple of teachings that that at least stand out for me and my memory and as i like did did a little bit of dusting off the my my bible on google and a couple of articles but there’s this principle that your body is a temple of god that god in the form of the holy spirit actually lives within with inside of each christian and so a pledge of chastity to remain a virgin until you get married uh is is a form of uh allegiance and or love for god and worship of god and saying okay my body is like god’s living with inside inside of me there is there’s there’s places where paul talks about if you take if you take your body and then you go to a and you unite with a prostitute if you have sex with a prostitute you’re basically bringing god into that equation and that is not a good thing that is a that is a sinful thing so that’s that’s the first part of it is that there’s this god’s within inside of you don’t do anything that is is wrong because you’re you’re bringing god along for the ride i guess no pun intended the second point is that when it comes to sex there’s this mis they never use the term mystical that’s how i would describe it now but i’m going to describe it as a there’s a mystical component to sex where um you have a you a soul bond with somebody that you actually have sex with um in genesis it talks about uh the two shall become one flesh talking about adam and eve like that’s the reason why uh you should leave your father and mother and cleave to your wife or husband and so when you get married and when you consummate that marriage in sex there is some some mystical joining your souls are literally intermingling and then you’ve got paul talking about things like well and apparently the soul goes directly through the penis into the vagina i mean just to be frank about it and maybe one called how else does it happen i think the female cell comes out of the vagina and then they like become become one the two shall become one yeah i was just speaking from the male perspective but i yes yeah i think it goes both ways and of course all of this is within the context of a heterosexual relationship only right you know maybe that goes without saying in terms of talking about this evangelical movement but uh i wanted to point that out too so there’s there are these biblical teachings that again in the same way that when we talked about our deconstruction episodes there was this there’s this foundational principle of you’re you’re born sinful and separated from god and you’re destined for hell unless you accept jesus payment for your sins his death and resurrection on your behalf so that then you can have uh an active relationship with god and eternal life with him and escape hell so that foundational principle of hell is in it within the purity culture there’s it’s that is akin to once you have sex with somebody you’re you’re you’re giving up a part of yourself you’re doing something that separates you from god and dan and potentially or i don’t think the takeaway was that it was potential it was that it was actually damaging to you for giving up that part of yourself and so that’s kind of like the the biblical underpinning as far as far as i remember it but there was also um you know a lot of practical motivations the the the people who came up with this movement and then it went through the southern baptist with uh with all the the purity events and rings and all of that marketing stuff these are these are children of the 60s of the sexual revolution and then you’ve got aids is i mean within a certain demographic a lot of people are dying from aids and there’s sti other stis floating around and teen pregnancy is is a shocking problem that people just want to get a handle on it so it was a confluence of taking biblical teaching about purity and combining it with with things that we wanted to protect our parents wanted to protect their children from and being informed maybe by the sexual revolution and just saying okay if from a practical standpoint if i can keep my kids from getting an sti or uh becoming pregnant and we just called we just called it a std yeah we did we didn’t even call it what hadn’t even happened yet so protecting them from that protecting them from uh unwanted pregnancy teen pregnancy and also protecting kids from heartbreak that goes to all the way to the core of your soul i mean it it it felt to us as we were experiencing this teaching it had it carried just as much weight as going to hell or not or almost as much that that’s what i’m saying and i think that it was um for most christian teens it was the most applicable sort of moral teaching because you know let’s face it not a lot of christian kids were doing drugs i mean some of them were but the it was easier it was much easier to avoid drug use even alcohol use than it was to ignore the constant horniness that we were all experiencing right you know this is something you don’t wake up every single day and be like i i need lsd you know it’s like but you do wake up every morning uh look well sometimes literally you know with an erection you know so it’s like you’re you’re faced with this desire on a constant basis and so i yeah i i think what you’re getting at is that and also you said the 90s i think that obviously the idea oh purity had been around for a while but it it took on a new focus and structure there was a market effectiveness there was a marketing plan that was launched in the early 90s that had uh with the purity ring and the purity pledge and the purity balls all that stuff happened then and get what you’re getting at with the the sort of the complexity of this whole thing which i think will kind of come out as we keep talking about it and how we think about it now and especially oh news flash hey we’re bringing our wives in kiko we haven’t told you this we’re bringing them in via a phone call which we’ll work out the tech on that not to freak you out right now but the lives will be coming in next episode uh via the phone and um we’re gonna give them a ring we will uh maybe begin to explore this but this is it there’s a lot of complexity to this because all of religion and all of sort of religious framework for the most part is still designed like the people who are adhering to it and the people who are trying to implement it in their families and with their children most people are doing it out of a of a motivation of love and what they believe that’s right most everyone is motivate motivated by doing what they actually think is right even though their actions may be interpreted as hateful and they may be hateful and they may be harmful they don’t see it as hate and they don’t see it as harmful they see it as this is the best good and this is what society should have and so and in obedience to god it’s not something that in their minds they’re making up even though there’s certainly a lot of extrapolation beyond what the bible actually says to what the practices they put in place i mean there’s no purity ball ring or pledge in the bible uh but there’s you know concepts like losing your virginity um and a lot of analogies came out of the movement in order to get these what i’ll call good-hearted results like it’s good-hearted motives to get good results but you’ve got these like analogies like rose pet like pulling the petals off a rose petal in order to help middle school kids understand what happens when you are deflowered you’re deflowering you can’t put those petals back on that flower no you can’t and who who else would want that flower that flower’s ruined i mean analogies like chewed up gum who wants to who wants to rechew chewed up gum these are actual things that were techniques that were taught almost always these analogies refer to the woman which is very common it is the woman who suffers the brunt of purity culture and she’s the one that is the flower and she’s the one that’s the chewed up gum there’s a double standard and the the principle of whatever you do with someone that you’re dating and that you don’t marry you’re robbing your future mate of that experience um and that ultimately there’s this message of if you do something you shouldn’t do then you’re damaged goods and then and then maybe you know what and you know what that’s why jesus died and you’re forgiven and you need to experience grace and you need to and you can move forward but it’s kind of like when you say part a that tends to stick in your mind a lot more than the grace part b does and i think that ultimately a lot of people and i we can talk about our own experiences there’s a takeaway of fear of something happening spiritually physically or otherwise and shame associated with everything that is act that you’re actually dealing with and trying to discover and develop through so i i will say that there’s a there’s an entire spectrum of people who grew up like we did under purity culture who have now landed in different places about how grateful they are for it or how damaged they are by it and and and so i i just want to acknowledge that that maybe that there could be some really ugly parts of it and then there there can be some parts that are really uh that could be helpful and it it varies from person to person and i feel like i’m i’m somewhere in the middle on that spectrum you know i’ve experienced some good and some bad but i know that it’s been a lot worse for other people and some people they maybe they still swear by it i guess um but one thing i’ll add to that before we get into you know talking about our stories um is that i do while these are two points on our perspective i do think that there is some compelling sort of holistic uh data in the like how how effective is it in telling kids these things and trying to get kids to adhere to these things when you think about it it could be some other correlation that i don’t understand but i do find it interesting that a lot of these places where culturally purity culture is very very strong where there’s a sort of evangelical stronghold tend to be places where there are also high rates of teen pregnancy and stds or sdis uh you know whereas a lot of places that kind of take a little bit more of a secular approach where there’s a lot of sex education and there’s birth control those places in sex you know in protected sex those places tend to be like the northwest there’s less teen pregnancy and stis in the northwest than there is in the southeast you know so the studies are out there uh yeah again that’s not the point of what we’re talking about but i just want to make i think what you what you’re ultimately saying which i agree with is that we’re not here to say that every single thing about it was bad we’re going to give you our perspective and talk about the ways that we may have been damaged and the way that we may have escaped some damage whether or not we still adhere to any of those beliefs the the the sort of the spiritual underpinning as we’ve made clear on this podcast before we’re we are not christians we do not call ourselves christians anymore we do not subscribe to the ideas of purity culture we do not have a biblical uh i do not have a biblical world view when it comes to sex and that’s not what i teach my children but you know i and i it’s complex yep i’m coming from the same place we’re doing something new and exciting this month using the facebook live audio tool which is a new tool that allows you to have a live conversation as people kind of listen in we’re going to be talking to some celebrity fathers about fatherhood about parenthood and some of the lessons they learned maybe exploring some different aspects of that some things that we’ve learned over the course of being fathers for 18 and 17 years so look out for that that’s gonna be over on the the mythical facebook page yeah check it out and while you’re checking out stuff on the internet go to the mythical amazon page there’s lots of stuff there that’s different and fresh or rejuvenated i don’t know you’ll have to check it out all the stuff the amazon.com mythical you can get that prime shipping on some stuff and rep your boys all right in your hand and your in your body and you’re everywhere amazon.com so last time we ended up kind of talking about essentially the process of going to puberty becoming sexually mature and what was happening with us and how we were beginning to understand what sex was going into high school uh i think i speak for both of us when i say that we both did understand what sex was i did yes and uh were very enticed by the idea of it but the other thing that was happening was we were getting very serious about our christian faith like that was something that was happening um you know we didn’t i didn’t get you got the pamphlet i didn’t get the talk but what i did get was my parents were you had me in church and they had me in a youth group and they had a good idea of what was being taught in said youth group and they were talking our youth pastors were talking you know pretty directly and explicit not explicitly but directly about sex and so it wasn’t like we were just walking around having no idea what we were supposed to be doing they were going they were taking the the steps to connect what was being said in the bible with like okay but what does this mean for 1990 kids and and we were just soaking it up it was very much don’t have sex until you get married and here are the reasons why a lot of which i’ve already gone over i remember we talked about but then how far is too far you know we’d be given books and we’d have conversations about well you and it would be analogies like well don’t you know if don’t get so close to the edge of a cliff that you might fall off you want to stay back from that cliff a good number a good number of yards at least in order to protect yourself from what what might what might be near that cliff which would be an i guess an accidental falling over and the campaign around and so it was like don’t do anything if you can help it but the campaign around like keeping you from the act of sex you covered a lot of that with sort of the spiritual stuff and sort of the biblical framework that was added on i would say the other piece of this is something that was very common which is there was this sort of information or might i say misinformation that was added on to it from a practical perspective things like condoms are not effective right like it it wasn’t like okay well condoms are like 99 effective when used properly it was like no no no condoms are not effective condoms are not the answer in fact the hiv virus can which is repetitive it’s like saying atm machine i understand could go through right through a condom because it’s so small things like that that are actually not true that you begin to absorb you’re like well my friends are my friends are having sex using condoms but i already know that like basically they might as well they might as well be having sex without condoms because i know that those are not effective like it was that sort of misinformation that began to take place uh even things and this was a little bit later that we started getting this information but the idea that even the birth control pill was capable of inducing abortions do you remember this oh yeah um i actually held on to this belief well into even the beginning of our marriage it’s the reason that Jessie didn’t go on birth control pills was because it would present it would prevent implantation of the fertilized eggs in the wall of the placenta and since life began at conception the prevention of implantation of a fertilized egg in the lining of the uterus that itself it is a form of abortion which is murder right that was so i didn’t have to worry about that until i was married we were about we were engaged but then i real i went to the library like i started reading things that’s the only time i’ve gone to the library and pulled out medical books and read stuff and talked to my and then took that to my pastor at the time and basically i was just losing a lot of sleep over that yeah and just wait you know just trying to get my pastor to tell me you know what it’s actually you can go in birth control it’s okay right uh we but we didn’t we used condoms for a long time in our in our marriage yeah we that’s all we used up until like a few years ago when we got i got a vasectomy because by that point it was like what you can go on the pill now exactly yeah the reasons changed but we waited all that but we waited so long to have sex without a condom that’s yeah the other well we can come back another thing another thing was the idea that uh if you have sex with somebody you’re having sex with everyone that they’ve ever had sex with you know in terms of uh and that’s just not a purity culture thing that’s like a 80s and 90s sort of sexual education thing um which is not exactly true i mean there’s these cultural constructs of virginity in general that aren’t just an evangelical or a christian thing that’s like you know i guess it you could you could care about that it could make sense that like oh i want the first person i wanted to you want it to be special you want it every i think everybody would want their first sexual experience to be be special and meaningful definitely not uh a negative experience but also it it seems kind of sweet for it to be in the least sweet to be their first and your first or you know if you have certain opinions about it’s like i don’t want to i don’t want to be any i don’t be second to anybody but the but purity culture really leaned into that because it said that like god is there and this this this is irr it’s implied that it’s irreparable yeah that there’s some sort of damage that is gonna be lasting my application to this as you getting back to what you were saying with the you know where do you draw the line like how do you do this because we weren’t at that point we’ll talk about once we got to college it got even more explicit and straightforward in terms of being advised as to what you should do and what you shouldn’t do we were still a little bit on our own we knew we shouldn’t have sex and we knew that it was they would say it’s like lighting a candle it’s like lighting a fuse and once you light the fuse the bomb is going to explode right so don’t even light the fuse meaning like kissing right well or that was what i’m saying potentially dating it was up to your own interpretation at that point yes for me i did a little bit of like internal thinking on this and i came up with my own standard and my own standard was okay it feels like um i can’t get aids from boobies and i can’t get a girl pregnant by messing with her boobies um now i also want to preface this with the fact that i did not have a lot of opportunity as much as i liked women i did not have a lot of success with actually convincing any of them to be in a relationship with me there was you know it happened a few times but it wasn’t like i was a casanova by any means but in the few relationships that i did have in high school i think and again it’s implied but i’ll say it just because consent was always a part of this it was not something that was doing to someone it was something that we were doing together but i think that a lot of the girls may have been like wow he’s really into boobies he must be a boob man and it’s like well i’m not really you know i mean i like him i’m not a boob man that was you going all the way but it was like all your way that’s as much sex as i could have at the time and so there was a lot of focus on the boobies probably excessive uh but it was because i had drawn this imaginary line at the waist okay that was my that was my application to that but you weren’t having conversations with your girlfriends to to like like about those boundaries no at that point i wasn’t saying and it was a it was certainly a corrective thing you know i’m not really i’m not really a boob man but i’m gonna seem like one i know i wasn’t having those conversations but this was a this was a tightening up of your of your standards from yeah the previous episode yeah i had done more at a church lock-in than i was willing to do later once once my own personal standards started i started like kind of waking up and saying oh no i’m heading down the wrong road and listen we were involved in a you we were really tight with our our youth group within our church and then we go to high school and we all started you know dating people but you know the people from our youth group and like there’s like this oh they’re they’re keeping an eye on us we’re keeping an eye on them there’s like this built-in accountability like well you know that we were kind of all praying together at our church meeting and like agreeing that like yeah true love waits and we’re gonna stay as far away from temptation and sexual immorality as we can so there were other people from other other schools and other churches and who who were doing different things and it was easy to say we are not like them we are we’re going to serve we’re going to serve god we’re going to we’re serious about this and if you really love god and he’s inside of my body like like i need to i need i need to honor that and i’m serious about it and we were serious about it we increasingly so i mean when we started the band the wax paper dogs it was a christian rock band we would we would like preach from the stage like give an invitation all the songs were written about uh your relationship our relationships with god in very in one form or another very weird ways very weird 90s alternative rock ways but we kind of set ourselves up first with the youth group and then and the mission trips we would go on and just our identity was very wrapped up in our our christianity and then in in being in a band and inviting all of our friends to our concerts by the time we were in our junior year of high school i mean we kept holding ourselves to higher and higher standards we couldn’t be going around having sex with our girlfriends because it would be super hypocritical but what we could do and what i was doing regularly was masturbating right which again we had not really started to talk about now what we what we what we did know is that you know jesus said that even when you just look upon a woman with lust you might as you basically have had sex with her in your mind like you’re guilty in the same so christians take that verse which i did not quote i just paraphrased and they say basically this is why masturbation is wrong because in order to masturbate there’s got to be a lustful sort of seed of a thought that you’re acting upon right and so masturbation is seen as sinful in most especially back in the day but most christian circles so and then when it’s when it’s something that’s wrong it’s something that needs to be confessed because anytime you sin you are putting you’re building a barrier between you and god that then the way you remove that barrier is you you confess your sin you acknowledge yes i did this i mean in catholic circles they’ll go to a priest in the closet or whatever they call it but we would just do it in the privacy of our own bedrooms every night before i’d fall asleep i would say all right i need to clear the slate of everything i did that i know of and i’ll also confess to stuff that i don’t even know i did just blanket confession in order to remove any of that barrier so that i can still have a relationship with god and so that and then i guess that starts to bleed into so that i can be good or so that i can experience the benefits of that whatever it is making those connections as much as i was like you should you shouldn’t be doing this and you should feel guilty and shameful when you do it to the point that i actually remember writing on my ceiling at a popcorn ceiling yeah in my room and i was able to write on my ceiling in pencil as i’m lying in bed i can look up and see it and i wrote you better not really yeah you better not better not masturbate and didn’t write masturbate because i knew that’s what i was talking about and so that work hell no it didn’t work i mean i mean yeah it would here’s the thing better not i was this is where we’re going to talk a little bit about shame because the thing that was happening for me is that you begin to operate in secrecy because at this point we’ll talk about college in a second but at high school we were not confessing to each other or other people about masturbation we were just struggling with it on our own feeling horrible like the moment that you’re done the clarity that comes right comes is probably not the right word the clarity that arrives um i guess there’s an evolutionary reason for that that’s like oh you better get your wits about you and just be ready to defend yourself yeah or something um but the clarity that arises accomplished when you’re an evangelical christian or just someone who just believes that masturbation is wrong that’s where the guilt comes in that’s where the shame comes in and you keep it to yourself and then you go back to the struggle and it hits you like a like a brill it’s like it’s like back up the truck and i mean sometimes you get to a point where it’s like you i mean you would know it’s you’re just seconds away from just being hit with the shame and guilt of it yeah but it wasn’t i mean and then that might be enough to say i’m pro i would say i promise i’m never going to do i’m never going to do it again i don’t want this to be the reason that we’re that i can’t talk to you god and that i i love you more than this but what you’re beginning to do what you’re beginning to do then a few days later here here we are again because it was it was such it’s biological that’s what happens yeah that’s why you’re back there not because something’s wrong with you but irresistible instinctual draw you’re a human with sexual desire now and you’re also of an age when from an evolutionary standpoint you would have been using these tools to to propagate the population i mean that’s just his biological history of but we didn’t have any tools to to cut ourselves any slack because there was no communication the only person i was confessing it to was god yeah and then i knew that there was grace and forgiveness technically but i just but i knew what it what it meant i think the bigger thing that was happening i think to god the the thing that became became a long-term thing that i feel like is still a part of my brain today is that in a yeah you know i read an article recently i’ll make the connection to this in a second about some urologist was saying here’s why you shouldn’t pee in the shower it’s like well i got hoppy in the shower on a pretty regular basis let me read this and he was like the reason you shouldn’t be in the shower is because you’re basically reinforcing this pavlovian response of feeling water on your body or hearing the sound of water making you want to pee and so this is going to become more difficult because you’re associating this sensation with needing to release the pee i don’t think that’s that big of a life problem if you hear running water and you need to pee i think you’ll be okay but when you think about when you are masturbating thank you for letting me off the hook with that when you’re masturbating in this uh purity culture framework what you’re doing is every single time that you are experiencing sexual pleasure you are heaping the most intense portion of shame that you have is available to you onto that and associating shame and sex together wow that is not something that you easily get rid of no well first of all i’ll say now it makes a whole lot more sense why whenever i hear running water i jerk off right exactly uh-huh that’s i was hoping you had made that i mean the shower is the place to be well at least at first i mean that was what that like my mom’s not gonna walk in the shower and catch me right and so i was really concerned about that especially after leaving the victoria’s secret out last week but i mean you know but you don’t want to get soap and you don’t want to get soap in the urethra that can cause problems yeah if you were to if we were training notes i could have learned that the easy way the other but the point that you’re making is that yeah you you associate shame with that with that experience with with a pleasure and also an exercise in self-discovery you know masturbation is an important part of self-discovery that leads to empowerment of and control of yourself whenever you’re you start to engage sexually with somebody else it’s like you you know what works and you first of all you don’t require anybody else all right there’s a there’s a line in the first wonder woman movie that basically says that you know i don’t have to have a man to experience pleasure i don’t know how exactly she said it but i was like i i love the fact that she that that was a part of the movie let’s keep going there’s there’s more masturbation talk to be had but yeah yeah well the other tiny point that you’re making now about it well the the other p i mean obviously there are some neurological things that i don’t fully understand that are happening as well when you’re associating so much shame with sex you’re you’re putting things into your brain that you can’t just get rid of it’s not if there’s a physical manifestation happening in your brain tissue when you do those kinds of things but the other thing that was happening was i was continuing to look at porn and um that this is an inch there’s an interesting evolution of what was happening just with porn and the internet in general that we happen to live through like as we were literally maturing and going through adolescence the nature and the availability of porn was going through like we were right in sync with these monumental changes that you had to be you basically have to be about 43 44 years old in order to relate to this because it was very clearly just physical magazines that you had to have of source in the woods you had to go to the woods you had to go to the grock and work for a dollar an hour to just look at porn in the bathroom you had to find the porn but then in high school there were a few rich kids who had compute who had computers that had an internet connection and at this point you you basically could look at pictures not videos talking the mid 90s pictures of porn on the computer and now you had to have a friend which we had a mutual friend i’m not gonna name him and i don’t know if you ever partook but he was my source for both additional porn mags that i would he would be like i’m done with this one i would take it i would take it home i would put it under my mattress now i had porn like on standby in my own bed oh in the bed where the on the ceiling says you better do it you better not you better not pull that porn out that your friend gave you but the other thing that i bet it was like the princess and the pee you could feel that porn just under that mattress well i could put the magazine in front of the you better not and just look at the boobies and not have to worry about that you better not i eventually i did i never got any of this like it was never offered to me and i never asked for it and i never i never got it well and we never talked about it i was i was ashamed of it but i was going you know i mean we looked at porn together at the grock but yeah i i don’t know we kind of took turns in the bathroom yeah so not really but at that point we were a little bit more serious about things and this friend was not a christian and you couldn’t tell me because i would be like you got you you better not yeah but the thing but then his computer which it was funny because it wasn’t like we went to a website i don’t think i understood what a website was in like 1994 but what i did understand is he was like i’ve got this folder of all the pictures that i’ve downloaded because you had to wait a freaking f and he didn’t have any shame about it you had to wait five to seven he was like i’m done with this or hey here’s my folder right to get a high-res picture you had to wait five to seven minutes and it would like slowly unfold but oh there’s the nipples okay like a dot major there’s the bottom of the booby all right how long is it gonna take to get to the vagina you know it’s like because i’m waiting for it because you know that’s what i’m waiting for because that’s what i’m about yes right i think i established that in the first episode but that wasn’t good enough so he’s like listen i’ve gone through the trouble of downloading all these you can just look at them and uh sometimes he would be there and sometimes he knew i needed my own time oh gosh no but i did not no to be clear just you know you might already think i’m a freak and a creep but i did not then masturbate at this dude’s house just so you know i just kind of took these images in my and implanted them in my brain and then took them back home but that there was a lot of that happening like seeking out those opportunities which we’re still we live in a completely different world now where you have access to it and it’s it’s explicit and it’s any sort of flavor that you want and it’s on your phone at any time which will get into like what that might mean and what that might be doing to society or our opinion on that at this point it was still difficult to access but it was still this thing that i was like i wasn’t in any relationships where i was sexually active i wasn’t going to do that with an actual woman for two reasons number one i didn’t have much opportunity and number two i was pretty good at holding myself to the not below the belt standard in any relationships i was in but it felt different i was like well i can go and kind of literally release a lot of this tension by looking at porn and masturbating and so that’s what i kept doing even though i felt horrible every time it happened for me in high school i mean i i was i was just frightened of conducting myself in in a dating relationship and so i i never worried about i might have sex with some girl i knew that wasn’t going to happen but even the physical relationship it was kind of like a high school was kind of like a reset for me the few girls that i dated right at the beginning i was just so in my own head like i couldn’t kiss them i got dumped because i didn’t want to want to want to kiss a girl who really wanted to kiss me um i did eventually dabble in physical relationship with i guess a couple of girls i dated and it it was a cycle of is this okay do i feel guilty i’m just going to confess to god anyway but it wasn’t i would i just wasn’t i still i still was had so much trepidation that it overrode most of my drive i got in a serious relationship my senior year of high school and that’s that’s when i mean it’s like we were in love with each other and it was really serious and it was going really well and then within the safety of that relationship all of the our physical relationship progressed and yeah it progressed further and further and of course we were in the we were in the band we were preaching from stage we we would talk as a band when we get together and rehearse we would have like basically accountability and if you’re if you’re not from the evangelical movement you hear that word and you know what it means but it means something more specific within our world it’s a little it’s more systematic and it involves saying like there’s you say what you need help with and then you basically when you get together with your accountability partners then they start they’ll ask you questions you’ve given them permission to ask you questions about it to hold you accountable that you’re keeping your commitments you better not so i have to think well i don’t know if we talked about masturbation in those meetings i i don’t think we did i don’t think we were comfortable enough but we talked about like i’m struggling in my relationship with my girlfriend like i want to make sure that like i’m honoring god and we were just so serious and we had we had put ourselves out there that like if if if we were hypocritical then it might ruin someone’s chances of coming to coming to jesus we’re very serious about it and i brought that into this very serious dating relationship but we were making out and trying to just stop it at that so so my line was at the collarbone whoa yeah wow that’s where mine should have asked me where the line could be that’s where my line was and that line has a tendency to move down i would say i remember we we were having conversations but you had had girlfriends earlier and then your the well kind of dried up for you like by senior year you weren’t dating anybody right not senior year junior year yeah but not senior year i remember we would we would hang out in the walmart parking lot and we would talk about like we would talk about the like the hypocrisy that’s on the line we would encourage each other to be chased and you’re like man i’ve you know you would talk i think you would talk about your line and you would tell me about some of the things that you had done and then we would encourage each other not to do those things and then within the band we were really we were trying to do that too because the band was kind of on the line in this if i screw up literally in my with my girlfriend does the band fall apart you know and does my relationship with god fall apart i mean one thing i will say about us um is that we we have always been and i actually think this is the thing that drove our deconstruction um we have always been pretty concerned about truth and integrity like you know uh it’s it’s it is something that has the idea of saying this and doing something that was different and not representative of that thing was something that we couldn’t really live with so it was it wasn’t just this sort of pressure of the culture that we were in because listen there were lots of christian kids who were part of that same culture and were like guys you actually you mean you take you you literally take this seriously i’m screwing my girlfriend i mean of course i know i’m not supposed to but i’m not gonna not do it but we were like no no you like you can’t do that thing because it’s wrong and you’re not supposed to do it and it would ruin your witness if you were to if you were to do it and i don’t hold i mean i think that that’s that’s a i’m proud of us in that way yeah um because i think that we took it very seriously it was the framework that we had committed to and it came with consequences and it came with standards that were you’re supposed to follow you know and at certain points they felt impossible i mean and so there were there were times when when i if you’re making out with your girlfriend when i was making out with my girlfriend it would get you know it your collarbone gets old your body kind of takes over because your body is telling you what it wants and you can find yourself doing things that it’s it’s it’s almost like an out-of-body experience especially when it is such an existential crisis like you’re i’m i was making out with my girlfriend and i was having this internal conflict and i felt like it was satan versus the holy spirit and it was don’t do don’t do this that the cycle of shame um with masturbation would have happened in our relationship whenever we would cross a line but we were so infatuated with each other that we kept we would make rules keep doing it we wouldn’t we’re not going to touch each other and then it’s like it was just hard to keep your hands off sometimes they don’t i mean setting that boundary and drawing those lines it is human nature to then go and cross the lines so on a physical level it was a complete struggle and so frustrating but on a spiritual level it was just as much anguish if it definitely more because every night after i was hanging out with my girlfriend it would just be like all right i’ve got to confess and make these promises to god and to myself and it it got to our relationship continued through my freshman year in college so every weekend you know we’d we’d make sure we spent time together and it it was just i look back on it and i just feel so sorry for us because we it became this obsession like we we were motivated to to to connect but yet and we had all these struggles and we would slip up and we’d go too far and then you know i would be like i i’m not only sinning against my own body and god but i’m i’ve i feel like i should be stronger and i should keep now i’m dragging her down too i’m because every time i did something it put up that wall of separation with god that then i had to have a conversation with him in order to tear it down and after a while it’s like god has to get be getting tired of this i’m freaking tired of this you i also think when you’re just making out and you could do it we could do it for hours and it would be so much tension and struggle and then the other way way i just look i look back and i’m sorry for us is that like if we had just gotten it over with we probably could have had a much more vibrant relationship but it actually began to completely define our relationship because it was i want to be with you i want to i want to enjoy you relationally not just physically but we have but the desire is so strong and it’s right and the rules we put in place just it was it was torture it was a form of torture well the interesting thing again kind of looking at this from a strictly biological standpoint if you think about what is actually happening you’re doing something that the two human bodies are not really you know have not adapted to do which is to just live in this foreplay place just indefinitely right which is where the whole i kiss dating goodbye thing came about which we got more into in college where it’s just like don’t even do anything physical because and that was a christian application was you’re basically just sitting there with the end of this burnt fuse just lighting and lighting and lighting it and it’s getting super old and it’s not even that fun anymore and it feels like all the focus of your relationship is on not letting the fuse burn down to the bomb and blow up right and but it’s just interesting to think about it in a secular context now to be like you got these two sexually mature people who have all the equipment and all the hormones in order to then move towards a procreative act who believe that they shouldn’t do that but are kind of just starting with this starting in this place that naturally leads to sex but they don’t go there because of this other philosophical framework what is that i mean that’s that’s a hellish place to be ultimately what i’m saying it definitely was and then so by at a certain point it it it became this struggle became such a cornerstone of our relationship that i began to believe that i it was creating an insurmountable barrier like i couldn’t confess at a rapid enough rate to to keep that wall between me and god down and i assumed that i was doing the same for her or that again there was consent she was on the same page so i she was having a similar experience it that that defined our relationship to the point where we broke up just because we couldn’t handle that anymore and you know what it did it absolutely broke my heart because we broke up because we were so into each other that we were doing things that that you know were dismantling our relationships with god it didn’t it wasn’t about anything that happened between us otherwise you know and i can i i’m i probably spiritualized it at the time and said well you know if i can’t if i can’t be someone who keeps my my standards and my boundaries and also does my part to to keep her pure as well then i don’t need to be in this i don’t need to do this to her and i don’t need to do this to god and that’s the reason why we broke up it’s really tough to it’s like when it felt like you’re really in love with somebody that you and you think maybe you want to spend the rest of your life with them but then it’s like okay they they move away and you don’t and so you break up for some tertiary reason yeah but you didn’t actually have a um you didn’t have a normal breakup process of like realizing that you weren’t right for each other there was some nothing insurmountable it was like a sort of emotionally stunted process because of this other factor it consumed our relationship and just like a wildfire i just feel like it it burned us to a crisp and so we broke up and uh that was probably the and i’ve said this before i feel like that’s the most prolonged experience of depression that i’ve had in my life except uh for uh parts of kovid and and lockdown um and so you can see as i that entire experience going into my sophomore year and then like we broke up at the beginning of the summer before sophomore year and then the first half of sophomore year was like this depression and then i met christy and everything from that experience impacted how i would approach it so you know and we laugh about all the things that and christy and i can look back and we do laugh when we tell people our kids and other people or write about it in the book of mythicality the things that we didn’t do we didn’t kiss until we got engaged well i want to stop all of that type i want to stop you there just because one of the things that’s hitting me i’m going to throw this out there to you is that we haven’t even gotten into the college experience which was a completely different level of focus being in campus ministry and we haven’t talked about what it’s like to be people who come from that environment and then get engaged and try to keep from having sex with your fiance during that i feel like we’ve just crossed the our threshold here we’re going to go either we’re going to go another hour and this is going to be a two-hour episode or we can make this episode of two-parter and just september it becomes five episodes i think the next episode we’re going to be having the same conversation so all of a sudden you’re talking about well but i think we’re gonna be talking a lot about you know uh when we finally had sex or our wives are gonna be talking about when they finally had sex we’re gonna be talking about parenthood we’re gonna be talking about sex within marriage i mean i listen i think sex timber is just too much to contain in september in september i think sex timber lives in september but then the q a actually reaches out into october i mean i think that’s what’s happening it’s like the sex cannot be contained there’s just so much of it we haven’t even gotten a cop we haven’t even gotten to college and i don’t want to give that short shrift because my i got to tell the whole reason that me and Jessie became boyfriend and girlfriend which is largely related to the standards that i had set and how she didn’t even understand them like there’s a lot to unpack and i just think that you gotta give it its own pace all right i think that’s fair um so what so what is your take away from from from this because i feel like i might be saying since we have some more time now if i go back to that high school relationship i don’t know there’s part of me listening to myself and saying well if you just put more boundaries in place like you would have a better relationship it’s like you’re you’re not the victim here you’re the problem i think and that’s definitely what i felt at the time i strongly believe that if someone is committed to an evangelical worldview then they will use the stories that we tell to uh reinforce their position right again our our point is not to make you question what you think it’s just we’re giving you our perspective i think that your story about your relationship where you got to this place where it became consumed by trying to hold each other holding hold yourselves back from each other physically to the point that you couldn’t even have a real relationship and you and it literally killed your relationship to me like i was saying earlier that’s the reason that the whole josh harris ikis dating goodbye movement happened because it was a recognition that like hey the whole problem is dating the whole problem is relationships like you’ve got these people who are uh you know ready to have sex and and everything about them is geared towards having sex with each other you just shouldn’t be in a relationship and that’s where dating became a bad thing and the idea of courtship became the thing that we started talking about in the late 90s and early 2000s it was the idea that you really shouldn’t engage romantically with someone until you’re in a place where that process will over a relatively short period of time actually lead to marriage and the consummation of that physical relationship and so that’s where the idea of having your parents involved in the courtship and helping you think through this and you know the whole idea of like spending time on the front porch with a girl that you might be it’s the old way of thinking about things right spending time on a front porch and seeing if you and your families get along and are we right for each other and if we are right for each other let’s begin dating or let’s begin courting with the idea that we’re moving towards marriage and we’re not we’re moving towards that physical relationship then we know that it’s going to happen we’re getting ready to set a date really quickly so you don’t end up in this place where you’re just burning the end of the fuse all the time now here’s what i’ll say i think that the whole i kiss dating goodbye movement did irreparable damage to a lot of different people and by the way josh harris recognized that and went on a whole like you know apology tour and he senses deconstructed and i don’t know josh and i don’t know his story and i’m not speaking on his behalf but he’s taking the book out of print he quit printing the book yeah i think and i think a lot of people recognize that that mentality was actually not an effective way to really meet the needs of young men and women but you understand why it happened it happened because of the story that you just told is a story that was happening with so many young people i mean and there’s totally different type applications like you hear about the the the back door policy where it’s like we didn’t know about garfunkel and oats yeah where girls won’t give the they feel like they’re dating a guy that they have to give them something so so they have anal sex instead of vaginal sex and then that’s okay because that’s the loophole yeah literally that was the joke in their song um for yeah for for putting them in a position where it’s like well i got to conduct this relationship and i but i got to be i got to be right before god you know i mean there’s all types of horror story applications where it’s that aren’t our stories well and i mean you talk about someone who’s queer and they’re coming to grips with that let me just acknowledge we we’re talking about all this within a very strictly heterosexual context because that’s our experience if you were you know anything other than that going through this environment this evangelical environment like you there what there was they weren’t writing a book for you you know there no one was even wanting to talk to you about it like if you if you were like and the way that we would have said it struggling with same-sex attraction struggling right like that’s how the evangelicals framework puts it is like that is just strictly a sin and that’s a whole different thing that you got to deal with in a different setting whether that’s like you know now we got to pray the gay away or whatever so we acknowledge that we’re not talking about that but that’s a very real and and by the way much more difficult experience than just trying not to screw your girlfriend uh not having had that happen to me i i’m just saying i can imagine that being in a place where your very sexual identity is not even acknowledged as anything other than a sin like because the the benefit and the privilege of being you know a heterosexual person in this context is like the youth pastor would say listen your desire for your girlfriend is good it is natural and one day you will be able to consummate that physical relationship but it only should happen in the context of marriage so you’ve got to so again your desire is validated if you’re queer your desire is invalidated yeah which is a completely different amount of damage that happens uh in the in the christian context a lot of times there were so many ways that we were spoken to in order to just it’s like well it was kind of like try this analogy on try try the anything that would keep you from from slipping up you know it was they would just invent all it’s not easy and but like i remember thinking when i was making out my girlfriend is like if she’s not my wife my future like picture there was like advice to picture your future partner picture your wife of the future and what you’re what you’re robbing her of by doing this now and i was like maybe i’ll try that this is someone’s future wife what if this was my sister well i probably wouldn’t be kissing her well i you know the interesting thing we’ll we’ll get into a couple episodes from now is that you know this is not a problem that is only being [Music] addressed by the evangelical community right yeah we live in a culture where uh again the the biology is such that you’re basically you know you go through puberty at what 12 13 14 and then if you’ve if you’ve rewind 10 000 years at that point in like your early teenage mid teenage years you’re basically pairing up or maybe getting into some sort of polyamorous relation you’re having sex at that point right that’s just that’s why the sexual maturity happens at that point because from just a pure biological standpoint that’s when you’re ready to right but cul a cultural framework apart from any sort of christian ideas has been put on top of that where it’s just like hey you know you definitely as a 15 year old in the year 2021 shouldn’t be going out and making babies right like just culturally this is not the way that we’re doing things right now people don’t get pregnant when they’re 15 for a lot of really good reasons so you have to deal with that like there has to be an answer to that because the answer is not do whatever the hell you want to and deal with the consequences because the consequences of sex continue to be stis which continue to get even more and more scary with just the way viruses and bacteria evolve but also unwanted or just so i could just say team i could just say pregnancy right uh so you have there is there’s got to be a framework just because we’re not christians anymore doesn’t mean that we don’t have a framework for trying to address these things personally and for our families it’s just the underlying framework changes right but the intention the intention of like we kind of want people to avoid the these risks is sort of the it is the underlying motivation and you just we have experience with this very specific expression of that and all these oth this other mess that got put on top of it where it’s like we got to get the we got to get the shame on top of this we got to get the guilt on top of this and then you you just had to you know i didn’t have i wasn’t in a relationship at that point in my senior year it wasn’t until later once we got into college and a whole new set of standards and a whole new level of accountability and transparency was put on us because we got in campus ministry that it began to impact my relationship my relationships in college that’s what we’ll talk about next time because it was a it was a whole different world at that point yeah yeah so um we’ll we’ll get into college i think you know you can see where this is going the systems that we had in high school and were just amped up on on a collegiate level and the things that we put in place the systems that i put in place in my dating life and with christy and all the systems we put in place for accountability it’s just kind of mind-blowing charts there’s charts charts involved yeah if you’re interested in charts so yeah i’m glad i’m sorry to uh to frustrate you to give you uh listening blue balls so to speak uh push half of this to next week’s part of the analogy i don’t want to give it i don’t want to give our college uh experience short shrift because i think there’s a lot to explore there and as we keep going i guess we’re i i want to fully process this well we’re slowly revealing we’re slow it’s just like striptease just like a picture of a naked lady in 1995 being downloaded by a like a modem 56k mode 56k modem we’re revealing ourselves to you over time slowly i’ve got a a wreck for you this is just another gentle nudge i know you might roll your eyes but you know what it might be time to pick up that journal try try journaling again i feel like if i just had a a reminder every six to nine months it’s like you know what why don’t you try journaling again hmm that’s so i’m taking this rec spot to just say you know what just try it you wanna maybe you try journaling again i’m definitely gonna look back through my journal and experience some of this anguish as i prepare for the because i was generally hot and heavy in uh in college oh yeah and so i’ll go back to that uh with the sex filter on and see what i can come up with all right keep the questions coming hashtag ear biscuits uh it it extends and i’m talking about uh the podcast sex timber it extends it’s gonna go through october at this point or into october it’s gonna penetrate october yeah right yeah 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 [Music]