Latest / The Voyage Cast: Real Talk on Marriage, Mental Health, & Emotional Growth / Porn Is a Monkey's Paw (A Halloween Episode)

Transcript

Porn Is a Monkey's Paw (A Halloween Episode) · The Voyage Cast: Real Talk on Marriage, Mental Health, & Emotional Growth

0:11
SPEAKER_00: Hey everybody, welcome back to the VoyageCast.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: I'm Eddie, your host, as always, and this episode is probably not a kid-friendly episode.
0:21
SPEAKER_00: So here's your warning, your trigger warning from the top.
0:24
SPEAKER_00: And if you've got kids in the car, you know what to do, just kick them out of the car and keep listening because this is far more important than your children.
0:33
SPEAKER_00: I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
0:35
SPEAKER_00: You know what to do.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: Alright, so the main theme of this episode, hopefully everybody's ears are plugged, is pornography and the men who use it and struggle to stop.
0:45
SPEAKER_00: And of course, it's for the women who are married to them.
0:49
SPEAKER_00: This episode will be a little bit longer than usual.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: It will take me a few minutes to get to the porn because I'm going to come at it sideways, because it's Halloween week.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: And maybe a solid description of what porn does to a man is a ghost story.
1:06
SPEAKER_00: So here's how it's gonna go.
1:08
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to tell you the first part of the monkey's paw from 1902 in summary, and then I'm going to read the ending the way it was actually written.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: So don't skip ahead to the porn just yet.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: We'll get to it together, and we'll talk about what this story has to do with it, what the research actually says about porn, and how men get out.
1:32
SPEAKER_00: Alright, you ready?
1:34
SPEAKER_00: It was a wet night in England a long time ago.
1:37
SPEAKER_00: The wind is up, there's a little house at the end of a bad road, and inside it a fire is going, and an old man and his grown son are playing chess.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: The old man is losing.
1:49
SPEAKER_00: His wife is knitting by the fire.
1:52
SPEAKER_00: They are waiting on a visitor, and the old man just made a terrible move, and the second he sees it, he starts complaining about the weather and the road and how nobody would come out on a night like this.
2:03
SPEAKER_00: He is just distracting his son, right?
2:06
SPEAKER_00: So his son won't notice how terrible he is at chess.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: That's what I might do.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: So the visitor shows up, an old army friend, a sergeant major, 21 years in India.
2:16
SPEAKER_00: They gave him whiskey and he tells stories, and the old man says, What was that you started to tell me about the monkey's paw?
2:24
SPEAKER_00: And the soldier goes quiet.
2:26
SPEAKER_00: Then he takes out this monkey paw.
2:28
SPEAKER_00: It's a little dried up thing.
2:31
SPEAKER_00: A holy man, he says, put a spell on it.
2:34
SPEAKER_00: Three men can each have three wishes.
2:37
SPEAKER_00: He wanted to show that fate runs your life, this holy man, and that if you interfere with fate, you will be sorry.
2:45
SPEAKER_00: Have you had your three?
2:47
SPEAKER_00: The son asks.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: I have, the soldier says.
2:50
SPEAKER_00: Did they come true?
2:52
SPEAKER_00: They did.
2:53
SPEAKER_00: And the first man who had it, what did he wish for?
2:58
SPEAKER_00: I don't know the first two, the soldier says.
3:00
SPEAKER_00: The third, however, was for death.
3:03
SPEAKER_00: And that's how I got it.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: And then he throws it in the fire.
3:08
SPEAKER_00: The old man pulls it out and he keeps it.
3:10
SPEAKER_00: Of course he keeps it.
3:11
SPEAKER_00: Nobody in history of the world's gonna hand over a cursed object and say like, yeah, nah, I'm good.
3:16
SPEAKER_00: I don't want a cursed object that's gonna grant me wishes.
3:19
SPEAKER_00: Anyways, after the soldier leaves, the family stands around with it.
3:24
SPEAKER_00: The son is laughing.
3:25
SPEAKER_00: He says, Wish for two hundred pounds.
3:28
SPEAKER_00: That'll clear the house.
3:30
SPEAKER_00: The old man feels foolish and does it anyways.
3:33
SPEAKER_00: I wish for two hundred pounds.
3:35
SPEAKER_00: And the paw moves in his hand.
3:37
SPEAKER_00: He drops it, it twisted, he says it twisted like a snake.
3:42
SPEAKER_00: His son says, Well, I don't see the money, and I bet I never will.
3:47
SPEAKER_00: The next morning, the whole thing looks ridiculous.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: A son goes to work at the mill.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: Herbert.
3:55
SPEAKER_00: His name is Herbert.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: That afternoon, a well-dressed stranger stands at the gate for a long time trying to make himself come up the path.
4:05
SPEAKER_00: When he finally knocks, he cannot get his words out.
4:09
SPEAKER_00: He says he's from the company.
4:12
SPEAKER_00: He says Herbert was caught in the machinery.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: He says he's badly hurt.
4:18
SPEAKER_00: But he's not in any pain.
4:20
SPEAKER_00: The old woman says, Oh, thank God for that.
4:22
SPEAKER_00: And then she hears what he said.
4:25
SPEAKER_00: Not in any pain.
4:27
SPEAKER_00: The man says the company wants him to be clear that they accept no responsibility.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: But in recognition of the son's service, they wish to present the parents with a sum.
4:38
SPEAKER_00: The old man asks, How much?
4:41
SPEAKER_00: Two hundred pounds.
4:43
SPEAKER_00: He falls to the floor.
4:45
SPEAKER_00: And that is where we pick up on the actual story itself.
4:51
SPEAKER_00: In the huge new cemetery, some two miles distance, the old people buried their dead, and came back to the house, steeped in shadow and silence.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: It was all over so quickly that at first they could hardly realize it, and remained in a state of expectation as though of something else to happen.
5:08
SPEAKER_00: Something else which has to lighten this load too heavy for old hearts to bear.
5:14
SPEAKER_00: It was about a week after that the old man, waking suddenly in the night, stretched out his hand and found himself alone.
5:22
SPEAKER_00: The room was in darkness and the sound of sudden weeping came from the window.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: He raised himself in bed and listened.
5:30
SPEAKER_00: Come back, he said tenderly, you'll be cold.
5:34
SPEAKER_00: It is colder for my son, said the old woman, and wept afresh.
5:39
SPEAKER_00: The sound of her sobs died away on his ears.
5:42
SPEAKER_00: The bed was warm, and his eyes heavy with sleep.
5:45
SPEAKER_00: He dozed fitfully and then slept until a sudden wild cry from his wife awoke with a start.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: The paw, she cried wildly, the monkey's paw.
5:55
SPEAKER_00: He started up in alarm.
5:57
SPEAKER_00: Where?
5:58
SPEAKER_00: Where is it?
5:58
SPEAKER_00: What's the matter?
6:00
SPEAKER_00: She came stumbling across the room toward him.
6:02
SPEAKER_00: I want it, she said quietly.
6:05
SPEAKER_00: You've not destroyed it?
6:06
SPEAKER_00: It's in the parlor on the bracket, he replied, marveling why.
6:11
SPEAKER_00: I only just thought of it, she said hysterically.
6:14
SPEAKER_00: Why didn't I think of it before?
6:16
SPEAKER_00: Why didn't you think of it?
6:18
SPEAKER_00: The other two wishes, she replied rapidly, we've only had one.
6:24
SPEAKER_00: Was not that enough?
6:26
SPEAKER_00: he demanded fiercefully.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: No, she cried triumphantly.
6:30
SPEAKER_00: We'll have one more.
6:31
SPEAKER_00: Go down and get it quickly, and wish our boy alive again.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: The man sat up in bed and flung the bedclothes from his quaking limbs.
6:40
SPEAKER_00: Good God, you are mad, he cried aghast.
6:43
SPEAKER_00: Get it, she panted, get it quickly and wish.
6:46
SPEAKER_00: Oh my boy, my boy.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: The old man turned and regarded her.
6:50
SPEAKER_00: His voice shook.
6:52
SPEAKER_00: He has been dead ten days.
6:54
SPEAKER_00: And besides, he I would not tell you else, but I could only recognize him by his clothes.
7:02
SPEAKER_00: If he was too terrible for you to see then, how now?
7:05
SPEAKER_00: Bring him back cried the old woman, and dragged him toward the door.
7:09
SPEAKER_00: Do you think I fear the child I have nursed?
7:12
SPEAKER_00: He went down in the darkness and felt his way to the parlor, and then to the mantelpiece.
7:17
SPEAKER_00: The talisman was in its place, and a horrible fear that the unspoken wish might bring his mutilated son before him ere he could escape from the room seized upon him, and he caught his breath as he found that he had lost the direction of the door.
7:35
SPEAKER_00: His brow cold with sweat, he felt his way round the table and groped along the wall until he found himself in the small passage with the unwholesome thing in hand.
7:44
SPEAKER_00: Even his wife's face seemed changed as he entered the room.
7:49
SPEAKER_00: It was white and expectant, and to his fears seemed to have an unnatural look upon it.
7:55
SPEAKER_00: He was afraid of her.
7:57
SPEAKER_00: Witch, she cried in a strong voice.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: It is foolish and wicked, he faltered.
8:02
SPEAKER_00: Which repeated his wife.
8:05
SPEAKER_00: He raised his hand.
8:07
SPEAKER_00: I wish my son alive again.
8:10
SPEAKER_00: The talisman fell to the floor and he regarded it fearfully.
8:14
SPEAKER_00: Then he sank trembling into a chair as the old woman, with burning eyes, walked to the window and raised the blind.
8:21
SPEAKER_00: The candle end which had burned below the rim of the China candlestick was throwing pulsating shadows on the ceiling walls, until with a flicker larger than the rest, it expired.
8:33
SPEAKER_00: The old man with an unspeakable sense of relief at the failure of the talisman crept back to his bed.
8:40
SPEAKER_00: And a minute or two afterward the old woman came silently and apathetically beside him.
8:45
SPEAKER_00: Neither spoke, but lay silently, listening to the ticking of the clock.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: A stair creaked, and a squeaky mouse scurried noisily through the wall.
9:00
SPEAKER_00: The darkness was oppressive, and after lying for some time, screwing up his courage, he took the box of matches, and striking one, went downstairs for a candle.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: At the foot of the stairs, the match went out, and he paused to strike another, and at the same moment a knock, so quiet and stealthy as to be scarcely audible, sounded on the front door.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: The matches fell from his hand and spilled in the passage.
9:26
SPEAKER_00: He stood motionless, his breath suspended until the knock was repeated.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: Then he turned and fled swiftly back to his room, and closed the door behind him.
9:35
SPEAKER_00: A third knock sounded through the house.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: What was that?
9:39
SPEAKER_00: cried the old woman, starting up.
9:41
SPEAKER_00: A rat, said the old man, in shaking tones.
9:44
SPEAKER_00: A rat it'll pass.
9:46
SPEAKER_00: It passed me on the stairs.
9:48
SPEAKER_00: His wife sat up in bed listening.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: A loud knock resounded through the house.
9:53
SPEAKER_00: It's Herbert, she screamed.
9:55
SPEAKER_00: It's Herbert.
9:56
SPEAKER_00: She ran to the door, but her husband was before her, and catching her by the arm, held her tightly.
10:03
SPEAKER_00: It's my boy, it's Herbert, she cried, struggling mechanically.
10:06
SPEAKER_00: I forgot it was two miles away.
10:08
SPEAKER_00: What are you holding me for?
10:09
SPEAKER_00: Let go.
10:10
SPEAKER_00: I must open the door.
10:12
SPEAKER_00: For God's sakes, don't let it in, cried the old man, trembling.
10:18
SPEAKER_00: You're afraid of your own son, she cried, struggling.
10:21
SPEAKER_00: Let me go.
10:22
SPEAKER_00: I'm coming, Herbert, I'm coming.
10:25
SPEAKER_00: There was another knock and another.
10:26
SPEAKER_00: The old woman with a sudden wrench broke free and ran from the room.
10:30
SPEAKER_00: Her husband followed to the landing and called after her appealingly as she hurried downstairs.
10:36
SPEAKER_00: He heard the chain rattle back in the bottom bolt drawn slowly and stiffly from the socket.
10:42
SPEAKER_00: Then the old woman's voice strained and panting.
10:46
SPEAKER_00: The bolt, she cried loudly, come down, I can't reach it.
10:49
SPEAKER_00: But her husband was on his hands and knees, groping wildly on the floor in search of the paw if he could only find it before the thing outside got in.
10:58
SPEAKER_00: A perfect fuselade of knocks reverberated through the house, and he heard the scraping of a chair as his wife put it down in the passage against the door.
11:08
SPEAKER_00: He heard the creaking of the bolt as it came slowly back.
11:12
SPEAKER_00: And at the same moment he found the monkey's paw and frantically breathed his third and last wish.
11:19
SPEAKER_00: The knocking ceased suddenly, although the echoes of it were still in the house, he heard the chair drawn back and the door opened.
11:27
SPEAKER_00: Cold wind rushed up the staircase, and a long, loud wail of disappointment and misery from his wife gave him courage to run down to her side, and then to the gate beyond.
11:39
SPEAKER_00: The street lamp flickering opposite shone on a quiet and deserted road.
11:45
SPEAKER_00: So that is the ending of The Monkey's Paw by W.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: W.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: Jacobs from 1902.
11:51
SPEAKER_00: I wanted a scary story for Halloween week, and that is the one that came to mind.
11:57
SPEAKER_00: Here's the thing about it.
11:59
SPEAKER_00: There's no monster in it.
12:00
SPEAKER_00: Nothing ever comes through the door, really.
12:04
SPEAKER_00: We never see what was on the other side.
12:06
SPEAKER_00: That's kind of the best part about the old school scary stories.
12:10
SPEAKER_00: But the scary part of the story is that every wish came true.
12:16
SPEAKER_00: The old man asked for 200 pounds, and he got two hundred pounds.
12:20
SPEAKER_00: The old woman asked for her son back, and something came and knocked.
12:24
SPEAKER_00: The paw never once failed them.
12:27
SPEAKER_00: That's the horror.
12:28
SPEAKER_00: Not that it lied, that it paid.
12:31
SPEAKER_00: And one more thing.
12:33
SPEAKER_00: The paw was free.
12:35
SPEAKER_00: The soldier threw it in the fire and the old man fished it out of the ashes.
12:41
SPEAKER_00: Nobody paid a dime for it.
12:43
SPEAKER_00: Every man listening knows exactly what that is.
12:47
SPEAKER_00: That's the free trial, isn't it?
12:49
SPEAKER_00: A version of this story kind of lives in my head because of what I hear in my office.
12:54
SPEAKER_00: Not every week, but often enough.
12:57
SPEAKER_00: You see, a man might sit down in front of me in my office, usually a guy who has been maybe doing fine most of his life, and tells me about something he has been trying to quit for years.
13:07
SPEAKER_00: And of course he's tempted.
13:09
SPEAKER_00: But temptation does not explain what I'm looking at.
13:13
SPEAKER_00: What he says is I don't know why I keep coming back.
13:18
SPEAKER_00: He's ashamed.
13:19
SPEAKER_00: He's confused.
13:20
SPEAKER_00: And he's quit a dozen times.
13:24
SPEAKER_00: What he does not say, because most people don't say it, any more than a drinker says it about the bottle, is that this drug, the corn, whatever you want to call it, it works.
13:36
SPEAKER_00: It takes the edge off.
13:38
SPEAKER_00: It's there when nothing else is.
13:40
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't say it.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: I'm usually the one who says it.
13:43
SPEAKER_00: Because until somebody does, he's going to keep treating it like a weakness instead of a deal.
13:49
SPEAKER_00: And then we discover together what it is costing him, and that he struggles to get it out.
13:55
SPEAKER_00: And that he has tried and tried and tried and that he feels like an idiot because he is starting to see and feel the cost and wishing it away isn't working.
14:05
SPEAKER_00: He's talking, of course, about pornography, and that's this episode.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: It's porn as the monkey's paw.
14:13
SPEAKER_00: This one, this episode, is for the guy who has tried to quit porn more times than he can count and keeps ending up back there.
14:20
SPEAKER_00: And it is for the wife or the girlfriend who found it and does not understand why he can't just stop.
14:27
SPEAKER_00: And probably for some of you who have never said a word about it to anyone.
14:32
SPEAKER_00: I see you.
14:33
SPEAKER_00: I think most of what gets said about porn gets the structure of the problem a little bit wrong, not fully.
14:39
SPEAKER_00: Uh and churches and therapy offices kind of get some things wrong too, but maybe in a different direction.
14:46
SPEAKER_00: Church tends to treat it as a temptation, a thing you resist or don't.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: And it is one, for sure, obviously.
14:53
SPEAKER_00: But if it were only that, the sermon would work.
14:56
SPEAKER_00: Therapy tends to go one of two ways.
14:58
SPEAKER_00: It's a shame problem, so reduce the shame, or it's a disease uh or or addiction directly, so treat it as such.
15:05
SPEAKER_00: The first one leaves out uh the cost.
15:08
SPEAKER_00: The second one leaves out the fact that it pays.
15:11
SPEAKER_00: And that's why we keep choosing it, because it pays.
15:15
SPEAKER_00: What they might be missing is the bargain.
15:18
SPEAKER_00: And a bargain has moving parts, doesn't it?
15:21
SPEAKER_00: As described in this story.
15:23
SPEAKER_00: Before I get to the structure though, let's go back to the chess game for a second, because Jacob is doing something there.
15:30
SPEAKER_00: Mr.
15:30
SPEAKER_00: White plays recklessly, puts his king in danger for no reason, sees the mistake too late, and starts talking about the weather so his son won't notice.
15:38
SPEAKER_00: That is the whole man in one paragraph.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: Reckless, doesn't like consequences, changes the subject.
15:45
SPEAKER_00: I have that guy's intake paperwork.
15:47
SPEAKER_00: I have seen that guy so many times.
15:49
SPEAKER_00: I've probably been that guy in fairness.
15:52
SPEAKER_00: Three things in the story to understand though, okay?
15:54
SPEAKER_00: Number one, the paw pays.
15:56
SPEAKER_00: Mr.
15:57
SPEAKER_00: White wishes for 200 pounds, he gets 200 pounds to the pound.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: The wish is not a trick.
16:04
SPEAKER_00: The money is real, and it is even delivered.
16:07
SPEAKER_00: That is the part everyone skips with porn, isn't it?
16:10
SPEAKER_00: And it's the part that matters, I think, clinically.
16:13
SPEAKER_00: The reward is real.
16:15
SPEAKER_00: A man reaches for it because he is lonely or bored or stressed or angry at his wife or hasn't been touched with any warmth in months, or just awake at midnight with nothing holding him, and it delivers, it's fast, it's reliable, and it's available all the time.
16:30
SPEAKER_00: It never says no, it never has a headache, it never brings up the things from last week or the past.
16:36
SPEAKER_00: If the reward for porn were fake, quitting would be so easy.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: People quit things that don't work with no problem.
16:44
SPEAKER_00: But this is hard because the monkey's paw, it pays.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: And I want to be fair to the guy because uh I think shame around this makes it way worse.
16:54
SPEAKER_00: He is not stupid.
16:56
SPEAKER_00: He reached for a thing that works.
16:58
SPEAKER_00: The problem is not that he wanted relief necessarily, the problem is the cost of that relief and who gets to pay for it.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: Two, the cost comes sideways.
17:11
SPEAKER_00: The money comes as compensation for the son's death, doesn't it?
17:14
SPEAKER_00: Nobody looked at the paw and said, This will cost me Herbert.
17:18
SPEAKER_00: They were watching the money, not and not really taking it seriously.
17:22
SPEAKER_00: The cost arrived from the one direction they weren't looking.
17:26
SPEAKER_00: That's the same game.
17:28
SPEAKER_00: The guy is only watching for the obvious costs.
17:32
SPEAKER_00: Will I get caught?
17:33
SPEAKER_00: Is it a sin?
17:34
SPEAKER_00: Am I wasting time?
17:35
SPEAKER_00: And the actual bill lands somewhere way different than he expected.
17:39
SPEAKER_00: His desire for his actual wife can go flat, and he does not know why.
17:44
SPEAKER_00: His capacity to be known by another person gets smaller, his eyes get trained to consume rather than to actually see people for what they really are.
17:53
SPEAKER_00: And for some men, not all, a low grade contempt can creep in toward women, toward his wife, toward himself.
18:01
SPEAKER_00: And none of those show up with a warning label on the box of porn expressing consequences within.
18:07
SPEAKER_00: They show up as I guess I'm just not attracted to her anymore, or I guess we're just roommates now, or maybe this isn't really what it's supposed to be, or how it's supposed to work, it should be easy, whatever you name it.
18:18
SPEAKER_00: If you heard the episode I did on affairs and how Proverbs from the Bible is like a blueprint uh for how they play out, the affairs play out.
18:27
SPEAKER_00: Well, this is a similar move.
18:29
SPEAKER_00: The young man in Proverbs is not warned that he will feel bad.
18:33
SPEAKER_00: He is warned that it will cost him his life, and that he will not see it coming.
18:38
SPEAKER_00: The text says he goes like an ox to the slaughter and does not know it will cost him his life.
18:45
SPEAKER_00: That's the sideways cost, isn't it?
18:47
SPEAKER_00: Number three.
18:49
SPEAKER_00: The second wish makes it worse.
18:52
SPEAKER_00: This is the part of the story that gets me.
18:54
SPEAKER_00: The mother wishes the son back.
18:57
SPEAKER_00: It is a completely understandable wish.
18:59
SPEAKER_00: If you've ever lost somebody, you know this wish.
19:03
SPEAKER_00: And what knocks at the door is certainly not what she asked for.
19:08
SPEAKER_00: The second wish is the fix attempt.
19:11
SPEAKER_00: And I see this a lot.
19:14
SPEAKER_00: The first wish was porn.
19:16
SPEAKER_00: The second wish is everything a guy does to fix the first wish while still holding the paw.
19:21
SPEAKER_00: He promises, he deletes the apps, he white knuckles a streak and counts the days.
19:25
SPEAKER_00: He keeps it in secret so he can fix it alone.
19:29
SPEAKER_00: He escalates because the old stuff doesn't pay like it used to, and he needs the same reward, right?
19:34
SPEAKER_00: That's the thing with these addictions.
19:36
SPEAKER_00: You need the same reward, you need to escalate.
19:37
SPEAKER_00: And every one of those is reaching for the monkey's paw again to undo what the paw did originally.
19:44
SPEAKER_00: And every one of them compounds it.
19:46
SPEAKER_00: The secrecy, especially, man, secrecy is the second wish.
19:50
SPEAKER_00: It's the thing that feels like protecting marriage, yet it is actually what kills it.
19:56
SPEAKER_00: Somebody's going to say, but the whites didn't know.
20:00
SPEAKER_00: They didn't know what the paw would cost.
20:03
SPEAKER_00: And here's where I want to push on my own analogy because I think um more of the men I sit with are kind of like the whites or in their position.
20:12
SPEAKER_00: They really don't know how this is gonna end.
20:15
SPEAKER_00: Why would they?
20:16
SPEAKER_00: Like they're growing up in a culture that treats porn as harmless or normal, that treats sex work as just a job like any other.
20:26
SPEAKER_00: And if you criticize it, there's a joke to come at you.
20:29
SPEAKER_00: Nobody explained the whole story to any to these people.
20:32
SPEAKER_00: The whites at least had a soldier sit in their parlor and tell them what the monkey's paw had cost him.
20:38
SPEAKER_00: Most of these men never get that visit.
20:42
SPEAKER_00: So for a lot of them, the first time they find out what the paw costs is when the knock comes.
20:49
SPEAKER_00: And by then, they have been holding it for years.
20:53
SPEAKER_00: And then there are the men who do know what they're getting into.
20:57
SPEAKER_00: They have read the ending, they know what's going on, they believe it, and yet they do it anyways.
21:03
SPEAKER_00: So what's going on with those guys?
21:05
SPEAKER_00: My answer, uh, and this is my interpretation, not something I can directly prove, but it's the reward is present tense, and the cost feels like the future tense.
21:15
SPEAKER_00: The relief is right now, the flat marriage is right now.
21:19
SPEAKER_00: It's all happening the whole time, but he doesn't feel it yet.
21:23
SPEAKER_00: So it reads like next year's problem.
21:26
SPEAKER_00: And the brain discounts future costs steeply, and discounts it more under stress, more when tired, more when lonely.
21:34
SPEAKER_00: Knowing the ending does not help you much at midnight because at midnight the ending is not real, is it?
21:41
SPEAKER_00: And the paw is in your hand.
21:43
SPEAKER_00: That promise is in your hand.
21:46
SPEAKER_00: That is why willpower based approaches sometimes fail.
21:49
SPEAKER_00: They assume the knowing uh is the problem, but the knowing is not the problem.
21:56
SPEAKER_00: In the story, the paw was cursed by a holy man who wanted to show.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: I don't really believe that.
22:07
SPEAKER_00: And I don't want you to hear this episode as you're cursed.
22:11
SPEAKER_00: The monkey's paw is not fate.
22:14
SPEAKER_00: Nobody made you pick it up.
22:16
SPEAKER_00: That is the hard part of this, and is also the good news because what you picked up you can put down.
22:22
SPEAKER_00: And I don't mean resist it.
22:24
SPEAKER_00: Night after night, that's the sermon, and we've covered why it doesn't hold.
22:29
SPEAKER_00: Mr.
22:30
SPEAKER_00: White doesn't resist the thing at the door.
22:32
SPEAKER_00: He gets rid of the paw once with his wife in the house.
22:36
SPEAKER_00: That's the third wish, or at least I believe that's the third wish, and we'll come back to that at the end.
22:43
SPEAKER_00: I want to do something here that I don't think gets done much on either side of this.
22:48
SPEAKER_00: I want to tell you what the research actually says on this issue, including the parts that maybe don't help my case.
22:55
SPEAKER_00: Because the people who talk about porn tend to be either selling you a program or defending a habit.
23:01
SPEAKER_00: And both of them can be prone to cherry picking.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: Not saying they are directly, I'm just saying they can be.
23:07
SPEAKER_00: Why?
23:07
SPEAKER_00: There's money involved.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: So here it is, sorted by how solid it is.
23:12
SPEAKER_00: Let's start with the thing I am most sure of.
23:14
SPEAKER_00: Porn use and relationship satisfaction run in opposite directions, especially for men.
23:20
SPEAKER_00: The biggest review on this is from Paul Wright and colleagues out of Indiana in 2017.
23:26
SPEAKER_00: 50 studies, more than 50,000 people across 10 countries, men who use porn report lower sexual and relationship satisfaction.
23:35
SPEAKER_00: For women, the finding is not as consistent.
23:38
SPEAKER_00: And the thing that makes this more than a survey artifact is that it shows up in cross-sectional surveys, in studies that follow people over time, and in experiments.
23:48
SPEAKER_00: All three point the same direction.
23:51
SPEAKER_00: A newer review in 2024, 41 studies and 70,000 people found the same direction, but a small effect.
23:59
SPEAKER_00: A correlation of about negative point zero six.
24:03
SPEAKER_00: That's real.
24:05
SPEAKER_00: It's small, but it's real.
24:07
SPEAKER_00: And across the whole population, it means a lot of people use porn and report being basically fine.
24:13
SPEAKER_00: Now I want to be careful with the wording of this report.
24:17
SPEAKER_00: A small average effect is not the same thing as no effect.
24:20
SPEAKER_00: It could be what a slow burn looks like.
24:23
SPEAKER_00: A man who watches once a month and feels fine is paying a small bill every month.
24:28
SPEAKER_00: And small bills paid for 20 years add up to something they may not have initially agreed to, like in the monkey's paw situation.
24:37
SPEAKER_00: Death by a thousand paper cuts still ends up the same way.
24:40
SPEAKER_00: So if you tell your buddy porn ruins every marriage, you're probably overstating it.
24:45
SPEAKER_00: What you can say, however, is that the arrow points one way pretty much always.
24:51
SPEAKER_00: It has never been found to point the other way.
24:54
SPEAKER_00: And it keeps pointing that way the whole time he's telling you he's fine.
24:59
SPEAKER_00: The second thing I'm sure of is where the damage happens.
25:03
SPEAKER_00: It happens alone.
25:04
SPEAKER_00: Stay with me on this.
25:05
SPEAKER_00: A study out of University of Denver, Maddox Rhodes, and Markman in 2011, almost 1,300 people in relationships.
25:13
SPEAKER_00: There were three groups.
25:15
SPEAKER_00: First group never viewed, second group viewed only with their partner, and the third group viewed alone.
25:21
SPEAKER_00: The alone group had the worst numbers on every measure communication, commitment, adjustment, sexual satisfaction.
25:28
SPEAKER_00: That is the finding that maps most directly onto what I see.
25:33
SPEAKER_00: A man who watches something with his wife has a different problem from the man who watches at one in the morning with the door shut, and the second man is nearly everyone else who ends up in my office.
25:44
SPEAKER_00: The secrecy is doing most of the harm, right?
25:47
SPEAKER_00: The third finding is strong, and it comes with a catch.
25:50
SPEAKER_00: And I'll get to that in a second.
25:52
SPEAKER_00: Starting porn predicts divorce.
25:55
SPEAKER_00: Samuel Perry at Oklahoma used the General Social Survey, which goes back and interviews the same Americans every two years.
26:03
SPEAKER_00: Married people who were not using porn at one interview and had started by the next one roughly doubled their chances of being divorced two years after that.
26:13
SPEAKER_00: 6% to 11.
26:16
SPEAKER_00: The effect was strongest in the marriages that started out very happy.
26:22
SPEAKER_00: 3% to 12.
26:23
SPEAKER_00: That is the sideways cost in a single number.
26:26
SPEAKER_00: The happy marriage was not watching for it.
26:28
SPEAKER_00: Here's the catch.
26:29
SPEAKER_00: That is an association in survey data.
26:32
SPEAKER_00: It does not prove porn caused divorce.
26:35
SPEAKER_00: It could be that the marriage was going quietly bad anyways, which led to the man using porn and then to divorce, and the porn was just a symptom, which I would say is true, and Perry himself says it's true.
26:46
SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you what I see in the room, which is that it runs both ways.
26:51
SPEAKER_00: And once it starts running, it feeds itself.
26:54
SPEAKER_00: Now the part that's actually contested is it an addiction or not?
26:59
SPEAKER_00: The DSM, the diagnostic statistical manual that we use in this country for mental health, which even has a diagnosis for caffeine withdrawal, does not have one for porn.
27:09
SPEAKER_00: They considered it and rejected it.
27:11
SPEAKER_00: The World Health Organization in 2019 added compulsive sexual behavior disorder in the ICD, but filed it under impulse control, not addiction, on purpose.
27:21
SPEAKER_00: And they put a line in that matters for my listeners here.
27:24
SPEAKER_00: Distress that comes entirely from moral disapproval of your own sexual behavior does not count toward a diagnosis.
27:32
SPEAKER_00: That line exists because a body of research led by Joshua Grubbs at Bowling Green, in a national sample of 2,000 American adults, about 11% of men who had ever used porn said they felt addicted to it.
27:45
SPEAKER_00: And the strongest predictor of the feeling addicted was not how much they used.
27:50
SPEAKER_00: It was what Grubb calls moral incongruence, using something you believe is wrong.
27:56
SPEAKER_00: Religiousness was a big predictor on its own.
27:59
SPEAKER_00: Frequency of use was a smaller one.
28:02
SPEAKER_00: Now, Grubbs himself is careful about this.
28:05
SPEAKER_00: He says there are two different men in this data, the one whose use is actually out of control and the one whose use is moderate, but who believes it is wrong and is in agony about it.
28:16
SPEAKER_00: The people who popularize his work tend to flatten that into the problem is the guilt, not the porn.
28:22
SPEAKER_00: I don't buy it.
28:24
SPEAKER_00: And I don't think the research does either.
28:26
SPEAKER_00: Perry's divorce numbers were worse for the very men this describes.
28:31
SPEAKER_00: The happily married, the church going.
28:34
SPEAKER_00: Their conscience was not inventing a problem.
28:36
SPEAKER_00: It was describing one early.
28:38
SPEAKER_00: A monkey's paw is more painful to hold when you know what it is.
28:43
SPEAKER_00: Now here's my favorite study in this whole area, the Cambridge study in 2014.
28:48
SPEAKER_00: Valerie Voon's lab put men with compulsive sexual behavior in an MRI and showed them porn, which I don't know how you recruit for that.
28:57
SPEAKER_00: And somewhere there is a grad student who ran those sessions and has not been the same since.
29:03
SPEAKER_00: Interestingly, though, the volunteers' brains lit up in the same reward regions as drug addicts, hmm, who were shown drug cues.
29:14
SPEAKER_00: And then the men reported wanting the porn more than the control group without liking it anymore.
29:19
SPEAKER_00: Wanting without liking.
29:22
SPEAKER_00: That's kind of how the monkey's paw works, isn't it?
29:26
SPEAKER_00: You don't enjoy the cash, the 200 pounds, but you just can't stop reaching for it as it promises to solve your problems.
29:35
SPEAKER_00: The caveat on that one, because your brain on porn crowd overreaches with it a little bit.
29:41
SPEAKER_00: It was nineteen men, all of them already in trouble with compulsive sexual behavior, and Voon herself said it doesn't necessarily prove porn is addictive.
29:49
SPEAKER_00: What it does show is that the brain of a man who is stuck on porn lights up the way the brain of an addict does.
29:58
SPEAKER_00: So you be the judge.
30:00
SPEAKER_00: Last one.
30:00
SPEAKER_00: And it is the one you've probably heard the most.
30:03
SPEAKER_00: And it's kind of a myth.
30:05
SPEAKER_00: Stay with me here, okay?
30:06
SPEAKER_00: Porn causes erectile dysfunction.
30:09
SPEAKER_00: The largest study on it, more than 3,000 men aged 18 to 35 out of Belgium in 2021, found that how often a man watched porn was not associated with erectile dysfunction once you controlled for other things.
30:22
SPEAKER_00: So the simple version is wrong.
30:25
SPEAKER_00: But two porn-related things were associated with it, that's for sure.
30:30
SPEAKER_00: Men who scored as problematic users, which you can just use your imagination on that, and men who said real sex was less arousing than porn, which is sad.
30:40
SPEAKER_00: That second group had more than double the odds.
30:45
SPEAKER_00: So it is not the watching so much as it is the preferring.
30:50
SPEAKER_00: It is when the monkey paw wish becomes more desired than the person in the bed next to you.
30:54
SPEAKER_00: So what does all this add up to?
30:56
SPEAKER_00: The honest answer, I think, has two parts.
30:59
SPEAKER_00: The measured effect of the average man, meaning how satisfied he says he is, comes out small.
31:05
SPEAKER_00: Most users report being fine, but look at what the survey can and can't see.
31:11
SPEAKER_00: It can see how satisfied he is.
31:13
SPEAKER_00: It can't see what he has come to expect.
31:17
SPEAKER_00: What porn teaches a man to expect is sex on his schedule at his pace, with nobody else's needs in the room or considered, by the way.
31:27
SPEAKER_00: He has the whole experience under his own control, with no input from another person.
31:32
SPEAKER_00: And that is the opposite, really, of what sex is with a wife or a partner.
31:38
SPEAKER_00: His satisfaction can stay at a fine while his standard quietly turns into a vending machine.
31:44
SPEAKER_00: Put in the quarter, pull the lever, get the sex, or kind of.
31:48
SPEAKER_00: The Belgian study found that the men in trouble weren't the ones who watched most.
31:54
SPEAKER_00: They were the ones who said real sex was less arousing than porn.
31:59
SPEAKER_00: Spread that across 60 million men, and you get something that looks like what we've been seeing in maybe modern days.
32:08
SPEAKER_00: We're seeing fewer marriages, less sex inside the ones that we have, fewer kids, more sex with no commitment attached, which is basically the same thing as porn.
32:17
SPEAKER_00: There's a study of young American men that found porn use predicted being unmarried more strongly than anything else did online.
32:26
SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to claim porn caused all that.
32:29
SPEAKER_00: Smartphones and dating apps and the price of a house are in the same line up here.
32:33
SPEAKER_00: But a technology built to give a man sex without a woman in the room is not helping anybody build a family.
32:41
SPEAKER_00: And nobody has found evidence that it does.
32:45
SPEAKER_00: And then inside that, there's a group of men, somewhere between three and twelve percent of users, depending on the study, for whom it is exactly the monkey's paw.
32:54
SPEAKER_00: It pays.
32:56
SPEAKER_00: They want it more than they like it.
32:58
SPEAKER_00: They can't put it down.
33:00
SPEAKER_00: And it's costing them in the one place they weren't watching, which is their marriages.
33:06
SPEAKER_00: If you are listening to this and you have tried to quit more than a couple of times and couldn't, you're probably in that group.
33:13
SPEAKER_00: And you should stop measuring yourself against the guy who quit cold turkey or the guy who does it once a month and says, quote, he's fine.
33:21
SPEAKER_00: He's paying too, slower, and he'll find out later down the line and later than you will.
33:27
SPEAKER_00: But he's not holding the paw the same way you are.
33:29
SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about your exit plan.
33:32
SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to give you the version that has some evidence behind it, and I'm going to give you what I think can also work too.
33:38
SPEAKER_00: First, what the evidence says.
33:40
SPEAKER_00: The best tested treatment is acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT.
33:45
SPEAKER_00: Michael Twoig at Utah State ran a randomized trial in 2016, 12 sessions, 28 men who had been struggling for an average of 13 years.
33:55
SPEAKER_00: Nearly all of them were Latter-day Saints.
33:57
SPEAKER_00: So strictly speaking, the trial proves that this can work at least in Utah.
34:02
SPEAKER_00: Now I'm going to assume it travels beyond Utah, maybe even globally, who knows?
34:06
SPEAKER_00: 93%, though, reduction in viewing by the end of the treatment in this in this test.
34:12
SPEAKER_00: Against 21% for the men on the wait list.
34:15
SPEAKER_00: Half of them stopped entirely.
34:17
SPEAKER_00: At three months, it had slipped.
34:20
SPEAKER_00: About a third were still at zero.
34:22
SPEAKER_00: And three out of four were still down at least 70%.
34:26
SPEAKER_00: Most men get a lot better.
34:29
SPEAKER_00: A minority get all the way out.
34:31
SPEAKER_00: And the gains can fade some unless somebody's really holding them steady or they're really dedicated to this process.
34:37
SPEAKER_00: What ACT does, in Tweleg's words, it changes the way a man reacts to the urge.
34:44
SPEAKER_00: Not necessarily the urge itself.
34:47
SPEAKER_00: The urge is going to come whether you want it or not.
34:50
SPEAKER_00: But it trains him to accept that he will have the urge and not act on it.
34:55
SPEAKER_00: And to put his efforts into what he actually wants in his life and what he wants his life to be rather than to fight the urge, which is a losing fight, because fighting the urge is still a relationship with the monkey's paw, right?
35:09
SPEAKER_00: Now here's a bigger picture.
35:10
SPEAKER_00: There was a meta-analysis this year of 20 studies.
35:14
SPEAKER_00: About 2,000 people found that therapy, mostly ACT and cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT, produces large reductions in problematic use and in compulsivity and the within person gains held at follow-up.
35:28
SPEAKER_00: The authors also said that studies are small and the risk of bias is clearly high.
35:33
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's like any mental health study.
35:35
SPEAKER_00: So we've got to take everything kind of with a grain of salt.
35:37
SPEAKER_00: So the conclusion that you can make is that therapy does work, but the evidence base is still thinner than you really want it to be.
35:43
SPEAKER_00: Now you might be asking, is there a way I can medicate myself out of this?
35:47
SPEAKER_00: Just take drugs and solve my problems.
35:50
SPEAKER_00: Well, there was a placebo-controlled trial in 2022 looking at 73 men over 20 weeks testing naltrexone and an SSRI against the placebo or sugar pill.
36:01
SPEAKER_00: On the questionnaires, uh nobody beat the placebo.
36:05
SPEAKER_00: So the medications held up as well as the placebos, in other words.
36:09
SPEAKER_00: So on the clinical interviews, the two drug groups pooled together did better than placebo, and the trial did not report an a trexone on its own.
36:18
SPEAKER_00: Everybody got better, including the sugar pill groups, which tells you something really important.
36:23
SPEAKER_00: It tells you that sugar pills might work.
36:27
SPEAKER_00: Okay, I'm just kidding about that.
36:29
SPEAKER_00: Um, then there's everything that has not been put in a trial accountability software, 12-step groups for porn, church men's groups, uh, the 90-day reboot.
36:38
SPEAKER_00: And from what I could find, nobody has tested them.
36:41
SPEAKER_00: So I can't give you specific numbers.
36:44
SPEAKER_00: Uh what I can tell you though is that I have watched men uh get out of this problem uh with aversions of those.
36:51
SPEAKER_00: And what they have in common is the one thing the research does point at.
36:56
SPEAKER_00: The men stopped being alone with it.
36:59
SPEAKER_00: He got put in a community.
37:01
SPEAKER_00: Somebody knew, he got better.
37:04
SPEAKER_00: So leverage your community or find one if you don't have one.
37:08
SPEAKER_00: There's no excuse for that.
37:10
SPEAKER_00: The one that fails is the one that doesn't reach out.
37:14
SPEAKER_00: The only caution I'd give is not to let an attendant streak or a filter or whatever become the whole plan for this, because a tool is not a person, and the monkey's paw is beaten by a person.
37:27
SPEAKER_00: One more thing from the evidence, and this one cuts against people like me.
37:32
SPEAKER_00: The sexual medicine researchers who wrote the ICD criteria explicitly oppose abstinence-only addiction model approaches.
37:42
SPEAKER_00: Their arguments is that for most users, the problem is the shame and the secrecy, not the porn itself.
37:48
SPEAKER_00: And that treating every user like an addict makes it worse.
37:53
SPEAKER_00: I disagree with them about where the line is, though.
37:56
SPEAKER_00: And I'll admit I have been wrong about where the lines are before, but they are right about one thing, which is that if your whole method is shame, you are just adding a second wish on top of the first one.
38:09
SPEAKER_00: So what do you do?
38:11
SPEAKER_00: One, tell someone safe today, not just an app, an actual person.
38:17
SPEAKER_00: The single thing that separates the men I have seen get out from the men I have seen stay stuck is whether they're willing to tell somebody or stay in secret.
38:28
SPEAKER_00: The Denver study said viewing alone was the damage.
38:32
SPEAKER_00: The secrecy is not protecting your marriage, it is the thing killing it.
38:38
SPEAKER_00: It has to be a person who can see you, not a stranger on a forum.
38:42
SPEAKER_00: A friend, a pastor, a therapist, a group of men who are doing the same work.
38:46
SPEAKER_00: Safe means three things.
38:49
SPEAKER_00: He will not be shocked, he will not use it against you later, and he will not let you off the hook.
38:55
SPEAKER_00: That's what that's the kind of person you want in your life.
38:58
SPEAKER_00: Most guys have at least one of those people and have been avoiding them on purpose because of that shame.
39:05
SPEAKER_00: And eventually your wife, though probably not first and probably not alone.
39:10
SPEAKER_00: Unless that's all you got, then tell them alone.
39:12
SPEAKER_00: I want to tell you what this looks like.
39:14
SPEAKER_00: A friend of mine, James Michael, wrote this years ago on the Good Men's Project.
39:20
SPEAKER_00: He lay awake at nights imagining the look on his wife's face if she knew what he was doing.
39:25
SPEAKER_00: Disgusted, he figured.
39:27
SPEAKER_00: The end of things.
39:28
SPEAKER_00: And one day he sat her down and told her he was struggling with porn.
39:33
SPEAKER_00: She was, of course, angry.
39:35
SPEAKER_00: She was sad.
39:37
SPEAKER_00: She asked a lot of questions, she cried, and then changed the password on the computer, which is completely reasonable, by the way.
39:43
SPEAKER_00: And then they went out for Chinese food, which is a bit unexpected.
39:46
SPEAKER_00: And that's it, that's the whole story.
39:48
SPEAKER_00: Nobody left.
39:49
SPEAKER_00: The worst night of his marriage ended with Chinese food.
39:52
SPEAKER_00: He wrote that being a man means being brave enough to be weak.
39:56
SPEAKER_00: He's still married.
39:58
SPEAKER_00: And he's still honest with her.
40:00
SPEAKER_00: I'm not promising anybody else listening to this that they're going to get Chinese food as an outcome.
40:05
SPEAKER_00: Maybe.
40:06
SPEAKER_00: Some of you are going to get much harder consequences the night that you share.
40:11
SPEAKER_00: And frankly, some of you've probably earned it.
40:14
SPEAKER_00: But the picture in your head where you say it and she walks out the door, that's the deception of the monkey's paw.
40:21
SPEAKER_00: Most of the time, what's on the other side of that door is a woman who is hurting and angry and still there.
40:27
SPEAKER_00: But you can't find her unless you are vulnerable enough to say it.
40:31
SPEAKER_00: Two.
40:32
SPEAKER_00: Stop fighting the urge and start studying it.
40:35
SPEAKER_00: This is the ACT piece.
40:37
SPEAKER_00: In plain language, every man I sit with can tell me when he does it.
40:41
SPEAKER_00: Late, alone, after a fight, after a bad day, when he's been scrolling for 40 minutes already.
40:46
SPEAKER_00: The urge is not random.
40:48
SPEAKER_00: It is a schedule in a lot of ways.
40:50
SPEAKER_00: Write the schedule down.
40:52
SPEAKER_00: I know that seems strange, but you got to get control of this, right?
40:55
SPEAKER_00: You're not going to beat the urge with just willpower alone.
40:59
SPEAKER_00: I will not do this in the middle of the night, especially when you're tired.
41:04
SPEAKER_00: You're going to beat it at nine o'clock when you're planning it, when you decide where the phone sleeps through deliberate effort.
41:13
SPEAKER_00: Number three, the paw has to leave the house.
41:17
SPEAKER_00: This is where I part ways from the kind of harm reduction people.
41:21
SPEAKER_00: For the man who is in the 3 to 12%, uh, moderation is kind of the second wish sometimes.
41:29
SPEAKER_00: Every one of them has tried it.
41:31
SPEAKER_00: If you've tried to cut back more than twice and ended up back where you were, you are not a cutback guy.
41:38
SPEAKER_00: The thing has to go.
41:40
SPEAKER_00: Phone out of the bedroom, browser off the phone.
41:42
SPEAKER_00: If you have to, filters.
41:44
SPEAKER_00: Not because they necessarily stop you, uh, because I mean any 12-year-old can get past a filter these days, but because they add 30 seconds.
41:52
SPEAKER_00: 30 seconds at midnight or when you're tired or when you're stressed is something, uh sometimes enough to remember what you actually want.
42:02
SPEAKER_00: Now, number four, find out what the porn feeling or urge is pointing at.
42:09
SPEAKER_00: This is something I say to a lot of men.
42:12
SPEAKER_00: The porn is pointing at a longing that is not being fulfilled.
42:17
SPEAKER_00: It is a bad answer to a real question.
42:20
SPEAKER_00: The monkey paw pays, and the question is what is it paying for?
42:24
SPEAKER_00: To be wanted, to be touched, to not be alone in the house at eleven at night, to feel something after a day of feeling nothing?
42:33
SPEAKER_00: To be a man somebody is glad to see those are not shameful wants.
42:39
SPEAKER_00: They are the wants a man was built with.
42:42
SPEAKER_00: And the paw is counterfeiting every one of them, by the way.
42:47
SPEAKER_00: So if you take the monkey's paw away and put nothing in its place, you have a man with a hole in his evening, in his heart, and his reward system knows exactly how to fill it.
42:59
SPEAKER_00: Each of those longings has a real version.
43:01
SPEAKER_00: The real version is slower and costs more, and that is exactly why the paw wins.
43:08
SPEAKER_00: But what do you got?
43:09
SPEAKER_00: Build a real version anyways.
43:12
SPEAKER_00: This may be difficult to hear, but it is the only part that lasts.
43:17
SPEAKER_00: Number five, count the costs out loud sometimes.
43:22
SPEAKER_00: Even when it's quiet, when it's loud, doesn't matter.
43:24
SPEAKER_00: The reward is present tense, and the cost is future tense.
43:28
SPEAKER_00: So make the cost present tense.
43:31
SPEAKER_00: Not at midnight.
43:32
SPEAKER_00: It won't work at midnight, but in the morning with your friend or your therapist.
43:37
SPEAKER_00: Say what it is actually costing you.
43:40
SPEAKER_00: Face it.
43:41
SPEAKER_00: Your desire for your wife, your ability to look at her, the version of yourself you were supposed to be.
43:46
SPEAKER_00: Say it in words.
43:48
SPEAKER_00: The whites did not say Herbert's name when they wished.
43:52
SPEAKER_00: Say the name.
43:54
SPEAKER_00: You're hearing it now today, you're no longer ignorant.
43:56
SPEAKER_00: Say the name.
43:59
SPEAKER_00: Six.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: Expect the knock.
44:02
SPEAKER_00: You will, of course, slip.
44:04
SPEAKER_00: 35% in three months in the best trial we have.
44:08
SPEAKER_00: The slip is not a failure.
44:10
SPEAKER_00: A failure is the second wish.
44:13
SPEAKER_00: The secrecy that comes after the slip.
44:15
SPEAKER_00: The promise to fix it alone.
44:17
SPEAKER_00: The escalation to feel hold reward.
44:21
SPEAKER_00: When you slip, the first call is the person from step one.
44:25
SPEAKER_00: That is the whole method.
44:27
SPEAKER_00: Everything else is detailed.
44:30
SPEAKER_00: For the wife listening, I need to say two things.
44:33
SPEAKER_00: And I need you to hold both of them because people tend to drop one.
44:38
SPEAKER_00: The first, you are not the cause of this.
44:43
SPEAKER_00: His reaching for the monkey's paw is his own choice, his wish.
44:48
SPEAKER_00: Most of the men I sit with started long before they ever met you.
44:52
SPEAKER_00: Usually his teenagers, and a lot of them would be doing it married to anyone.
44:57
SPEAKER_00: And the research, frankly, backs that up.
44:59
SPEAKER_00: The men most stuck are the ones in the most distress about it.
45:04
SPEAKER_00: Not the ones who have written you off.
45:06
SPEAKER_00: If anyone, including him, tells you that you drove him to it, that is the second wish talking, isn't it?
45:14
SPEAKER_00: It's the fix attempt that puts the monkey's paw your hand instead of his.
45:20
SPEAKER_00: The second thing to think about.
45:22
SPEAKER_00: You are a partner in this marriage, if you're married.
45:26
SPEAKER_00: And the monkey's paw pays for something.
45:29
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes what it pays for is loneliness.
45:32
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the loneliness is inside the marriage.
45:34
SPEAKER_00: I sit with a lot of men who have not been touched with any warmth in years, who stopped asking because the answer is always no, or I'm too tired or I have a headache.
45:43
SPEAKER_00: And you end up roommates.
45:45
SPEAKER_00: That is not an excuse for the porn, don't get me wrong here.
45:48
SPEAKER_00: It is simply a description for the grounds that you were on.
45:52
SPEAKER_00: And that ground is something two people have to tend if you're going to make a garden or if you're going to make something beautiful of your life.
45:58
SPEAKER_00: So if you're angry, and maybe you should be, I would ask you to be honest with yourself about what the marriage has been feeding him.
46:07
SPEAKER_00: Because the way out for him is to get the real thing he was going to the paw for, to be wanted, to be touched, to not be alone in the house.
46:16
SPEAKER_00: And frankly, you're the only person he has.
46:20
SPEAKER_00: Now, this is not a command from me.
46:22
SPEAKER_00: Don't get me wrong.
46:23
SPEAKER_00: It is just the reality that you live in.
46:26
SPEAKER_00: Now, both are true at the same time.
46:29
SPEAKER_00: He is, of course, responsible for his choices, but the two of you are responsible for your marriage.
46:36
SPEAKER_00: And the marriages I see that come through this are the ones where she does not take the job of being his accountability partner because that makes her the warden, and he does not ask her to.
46:47
SPEAKER_00: And they are the ones where she does not take the job either of being only the injured party, because that makes her the judge.
46:56
SPEAKER_00: And a marriage cannot live with a judge in it either.
46:59
SPEAKER_00: I know this is messy.
47:01
SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to get to all of those details in a podcast episode, so take some of this with a grain of salt, okay?
47:08
SPEAKER_00: Now let's get back to the story for a minute.
47:10
SPEAKER_00: Mr.
47:11
SPEAKER_00: White is on his hands and knees in the dark, looking for the monkey's paw, while his wife is downstairs pulling the bolt.
47:18
SPEAKER_00: He finds it and he makes the third wish.
47:21
SPEAKER_00: Now the actual story doesn't tell us what he wished.
47:25
SPEAKER_00: But I think it's fair to say he wished for the monkey paw to go away, for it itself to be gone.
47:32
SPEAKER_00: And when he did make that last wish, the knocking stopped, and the door opened, and the streets were empty.
47:40
SPEAKER_00: So here is where that leaves you if porn is the thing in your hand.
47:46
SPEAKER_00: You made a bargain.
47:47
SPEAKER_00: You probably didn't know you were making it, and nobody read you the terms of agreement, but you made it anyways.
47:55
SPEAKER_00: The paw gives you relief tonight, on demand, no questions, and in exchange, it will take something from you.
48:06
SPEAKER_00: Your desire for your wife, maybe, your ability to be known, probably, your expectation that sex should cost anything at all.
48:15
SPEAKER_00: It takes those slowly enough that you can tell yourself it's not really happening, it's fine.
48:22
SPEAKER_00: And it keeps paying the whole time.
48:25
SPEAKER_00: So you never want to look.
48:28
SPEAKER_00: And I know you've been trying to fix it the way the whites did, with another wish.
48:33
SPEAKER_00: A streak, a promise, a filter you can get around.
48:36
SPEAKER_00: Every one of those is still a deal with the monkey's paw.
48:40
SPEAKER_00: And the paw honors every deal the same way.
48:44
SPEAKER_00: It pays, and then it collects.
48:48
SPEAKER_00: The only move that works is the one Mr.
48:51
SPEAKER_00: White finally made.
48:52
SPEAKER_00: Not a better wish, but the end of wishing.
48:56
SPEAKER_00: The paw out of the house, somebody who knows.
48:59
SPEAKER_00: And then the long, slow work of getting the real version of what you were actually paying the paw for, the real longings.
49:06
SPEAKER_00: From the people you were supposed to experience those longings from.
49:09
SPEAKER_00: And that's complicated.
49:10
SPEAKER_00: It requires a lot of negotiation and it's never exactly what you want it to be.
49:14
SPEAKER_00: It's always a version of.
49:17
SPEAKER_00: So, tonight before you go to bed, two things.
49:21
SPEAKER_00: Put the phone somewhere that it isn't in your bedroom, and pick the person you were going to tell.
49:27
SPEAKER_00: And tell him or her tomorrow.
49:29
SPEAKER_00: Not after you have a good week.
49:32
SPEAKER_00: Tomorrow.
49:33
SPEAKER_00: That's the third wish.
49:35
SPEAKER_00: It is the one that ends the knocking.
49:38
SPEAKER_00: It ends the ghost story.
49:41
SPEAKER_00: If you are the wife, you are allowed to be angry.
49:44
SPEAKER_00: And you are allowed to hope at the same time.
49:47
SPEAKER_00: And you may need somebody to talk to who isn't your husband.
49:51
SPEAKER_00: Probably a good idea sometimes.
49:53
SPEAKER_00: If you are the friend who gets that call this week, pick up.
49:57
SPEAKER_00: Try not to flinch or be disgusted or bash anybody.
50:02
SPEAKER_00: But that doesn't mean you have to let anybody off the hook either.
50:06
SPEAKER_00: Alright, well, that's it for this episode of the Voyage Cast.
50:09
SPEAKER_00: I hope you liked it.
50:10
SPEAKER_00: I know it was a bit different, but I had fun doing it.
50:12
SPEAKER_00: So if you didn't like it, I had fun anyways.
50:14
SPEAKER_00: Alright, like, subscribe, share, remember the algorithm overlords.
50:18
SPEAKER_00: Need that so that we can help our community, right?
50:21
SPEAKER_00: The more you do those things, the more our community finds out about these episodes and about what we're doing on the Voyage Cast.
50:28
SPEAKER_00: If you want any of the details on this research that I'm citing in this episode, or if you want to get that article from James, that will also be linked in the episode as well.
50:39
SPEAKER_00: Happy Halloween.
50:40
SPEAKER_00: Put your phone away unless you're taking pictures of your kids or people are in silly costumes and you're getting candy or whatever.
50:46
SPEAKER_00: Have a good night.
50:47
SPEAKER_00: Enjoy your life.
50:48
SPEAKER_00: Be well.
50:49
SPEAKER_00: I'll see you next time.