Transcription
I love sex. I'm Dr. Trish Leigh, cognitive neuroscientist and author of best-selling porn addiction recovery book, Mind Over Explicit Matter. I love sex. What do you think? Do I or do I not? Well, I was recently on Jubilee Media's The Middle ground Show, and that was one of the prompts. I love sex. Agreers, please step forward. I can go ahead.
It was me with three other people who are proponents of nofap or a lifestyle without porn and masturbation against four porn performers. The prompt came up, "I love sex." I think everybody in that room thought I wasn't going to step forward. Seven of us stepped forward, including me. The person who didn't was on my right, a gentleman I homed up with who was an ex-porn performer, and he honestly had to stand back in the light for a really long time until he was able to join us, cuz such discussion ensued. And the way that the discussion went was this way.
That the two other nofap proponents who were sitting to my left, they, uh, they made the contention for sex from an evolutionary standpoint, that it's the way that we have procreation. It is from God. It's meant to bond two people together. It has an essence of morality to it in a partnered relationship. All of which I agree with. Of course, my contention was sex is amazing. And I already shared this with you, but when I met my husband, we had such a connection. And the truth is, I was coming off of another relationship that I didn't have the connection that I had with my husband. In my former relationship, I was working off of my subconscious programming. I come from a family of six kids, three boys and three girls. I'm number five. So, as number five, I was doing what number one, two, three, and four did. I'm going through the motions with my subconscious programming. I got married. I married my high school sweetheart like all my brothers and sisters before me. And then you know what happened? I literally knew in the wedding that it should not be happening. And I didn't have the strength to stop it before or while it was in motion. But literally right after I started to undo it. It was a big mistake. I knew it ahead of time. I just was going off the subconscious programming. I didn't have the strength to reprogram myself at that point to have new programming to do the things I knew in my heart were good for me.
Anyways, I called that off and we went our separate ways. Honestly, my ex-husband and I have become friends again. It's been more than 20 years. It's been almost 25 years, but we've been friends for a couple years now, which is such a beautiful gift after two decades of life. I always felt bad about how it went down because he didn't want that. But I knew I needed it for my, my true real self, which is so difficult. I was, I'm the only person in my whole family who ever even thought of breaking up with anybody, never mind getting divorced. It created a lot of shame in me. But you know what? As I grew older and more emotionally mature, it was absolutely the right thing to do.
Now, enter my actual husband, Dr. Cosmos Lee. We've been married for 23 years. When I met him, the sexual attraction between the two of us, but the connection, too. We still have it. People say it about us all the time. Even when we're arguing, we have it, which is not often. When I met him, I literally have never felt that attraction to another person, another person since or before, which I think is so cool. We had the sexual attraction. Like I told you, we were partying our booties off, but at the same time, like we were enjoying intimacy in so many different ways. Plus, we had a really healthy sex life which led to our very large family. That attraction is still there. I think it's the greatest gift in the universe that you can feel so connected to another human being above all the other human beings.
Now, this is what porn is taking away from people. This is what hookup culture, dating apps, social media, it's taking away that one person that you feel so connected to. And this goes back to neurobiological mechanisms. Brains attune. And I think a cool thing about healthy sexuality is when you're having sex, your, your, or even if you hug somebody that you love, your brain, your heart, and your genitals are lined up. Your sex organs, those are the energy centers. Or going back to what the one porn performer said about the chakras, all the chakras, the energy centers in the body are lined up and they attune. They have coherence. And I mentioned this on the middle grounds. I love the idea of chakras and chakras are actually energy centers in your body that are aligned with where there's more, uh, nerve energy. But when you overstimulate a chakra, then they're no longer balanced and that is an issue with overstimulating the sacral chakra because then it takes away from all the others. So the brain tunes to each other. We know people become very connected in this way. This is how pair bonding happens. So cool, right? And that's why when you take hypersexualized culture and you add in acts that take away this connection in that way, that it's devastating to relationships.
The one porn performer is like, "I don't want to just have vanilla sex all the time. That's super boring." I'm not saying you have to have vanilla sex all the time. But I am saying when you are aligned in this way, you are attuning your body, your brain, your nervous system, your heart, and your sex organs to your partner. Very powerful magnetism between people and it is evolutionary in nature because it's what keeps people together and it's also, as the mom of five kids, sex has to be pleasurable because childbirth is incredibly painful and I've had five children, so, uh, it has to be pleasurable or you would literally never do it again and there'd be nobody here on earth, you know? So, you know, it's important. My husband still mocks me. It's terrible and I smack him every time he does it. The guttural sounds that came out of this person here when I was giving birth to my children. It's like a marathon and you can't stop it. I gave birth to all my kids at home. Very natural experience. Grueling. And I wouldn't change it for the world. Actually, when my fifth daughter was born, I had a near-death experience. I almost bled to death at home. I had to be transferred to the hospital. These experiences are not for the faint of heart if they're done in a natural way. But naturally speaking, this is a gift from the universe and God to make it so that you do connect with another person. You have high levels of pleasure, but balanced levels of pleasure with connection and enjoyment. It's intimacy, not just pleasure. It keeps you connected. You become a tribe. You become family like us. And we're connected no matter what. No matter how, if there's strife between us, you know what? We're all connected. That's what that connection does and it builds intimacy. That's why people keep going back for sex because if it wasn't pleasurable, none of us would be here, is what I said.
We did have a discussion. Do I believe that just heteronormative, your classic family is the way to go is what's necessary? No, that's not what I believe. The discussion led to polyamory. And I've read the science on polyamory. Typically, the one person who is the partner to all the others or the ringleader, think Jonestown, that's the person having the most pleasure and the other people are the objects of that person's pleasure. And we agreed, the porn performers and I agreed throughout the discussion that of course there's individual cases, but this is what happens on the regular. There's the rule and then there's the exception. And the one porn performer said that she knows a person who has three parents, two moms and a dad, and that they're all very happy. Again, they might be drinking the Kool-Aid, they might be in the goldfish bowl, but they might be happy for now. And it could be three alcoholics, who knows? But the idea is like there is the rule that for most people, they want to have a partner that is they are connected to and they are pair bonded, not tribonded.
One thing that we did agree upon, the porn performers and everybody, is that they kept characterizing porn as a performance, as a job, and that they don't feel connection with the other actors and performers. It is fake. We're here to do a job and that's it. I'm not going to be a strong working relation. So it is, um, it is different in that way. I don't feel like genuine connections as far as like on a deeper level. I guess I usually can't even get off for the person on set. It's an acting job for me. Um, when it comes to my pro scenes, when it comes to my personal site, that's a different, you know, that's a whole different story. But yeah, it's completely different for me. It's artificial. It's fake in the way that it's made. It's fake in the way that it's consumed. That was agreed upon. And that uncomfortable a lot of the time and that it's enhanced to make it look like everybody's having a good time. And then they also agreed that intimacy and vulnerability and connection within a real sexual relationship, that's the spice of life. What I want for people is they can connect with real human beings and have a back and forth of intimacy in the real world. Yeah, I would love that for them. I would agree with that.
All right, moving on to the last and final prompt. What do you think I said? This one's an easy one. Porn is a net negative for humanity.