SIO311: What the Science Actually Says on Porn Consumption

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:13 Thomas: This is episode 311 and we got to go. I I don't know any of the words. Remember that song?

0:00:20 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:00:23 Thomas: That's what most songs sound like to me, but especially in the 90s. It's Hey, how are you doing, Lindsay?

0:00:29 Lindsey: You know, I gotta be honest, not great. I've been having a lot of problems sleeping, and I think I know why. I think it's my addiction to porn.

0:00:32 Thomas: Why is that? Wow.

0:00:38 Lindsey: Research. Porn research. I'm addicted to it.

0:00:41 Thomas: Porn research. Is that, does that matter? You know, like, does that distinction matter?

0:00:47 Lindsey: You know, I just read the articles. It's the main thing about the porn.

0:00:51 Lindsey: Yeah no, there's a lot of really weird stuff out there in the porn literature. Get a load of this. So there was a brief letter published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions by Castro and colleagues, and they indicated that when Fortnite crashed for 24 hours back in 2018, Pornhub searches for Fortnite increased by 60%. Isn't that weird?

0:01:11 Thomas: There's Fortnite porn on Pornhub, or

0:01:14 Lindsey: That was my reaction, too. Apparently so.

0:01:16 Thomas: I'm trying to, like, I don't want to say something stupid, but like, what's actually happening is it

0:01:22 Lindsey: I have no idea. I did not look. But fun studies, though.

0:01:26 Thomas: Like, people are searching among each other? They all know they're, like, on Pornhub, they're not, they're Poranhub, they don't, don' each other's comments, or are they literally looking for Fortnite porn?

0:01:37 Lindsey: I mean, I think that these researchers were assuming that they were looking for pornographic Fortnite content.

0:01:44 Thomas: Interesting. I'll never understand all that, I'll be honest with you, because every time you see, like, the oh here's the porn, but it's like the character, you know, whatever, it'll be something like here's this, you know, Mario Brothers, whatever, and it'll just be porn, but then they're wearing like a Mario hat, and I'm like, like, does that, does that do something for someone? That's what I, like, really, genuinely. Genuinely does that do something for someone? I'm not judging, I'm not, it's not like a, I can't, like you're bad.

0:01:49 Lindsey: Apparently Yeah, We don't want to kink shame, I'm

0:02:16 Thomas: No, it is. That. It's like, I just genuinely doubt that could possibly be anything, is what I'm, you know? It'd be one thing if it was like, okay, we've gone to the animation studio, we have worked up a full rendering of these characters, like doing stuff, you know.

0:02:23 Lindsey: With you that

0:02:33 Thomas: Yeah, okay. OK, that's not I'm not saying that's what I'm into, but like I get it at least. But like the whole thing, that's just OK. It's porn. But then someone puts on a hat or something. That's the thing. It's always so low effort when it comes to the thing, you know, the whatever. Maybe that's just because I'm seeing like it in memes and not really actually searching for it. But you've done the porn research transition to today's show. I just want to apologize to everybody for having such a hard time finishing in terms of part two. It is, you know, it's it's both a blessing and a curse.

0:02:32 Lindsey: I could see, yeah, Yeah, the thrilling conclusion to the sex stuff, yeah.

0:03:14 Thomas: But real talk, the scheduling snafus that Lindsey has had to put up with for this on my part are it violates your human rights. Like I'm actually please don't report me, everybody. But I have violated Lindsey's human rights with the scheduling. I had a sick kid and I had like some other nonsense. I'm not going to talk about lots of not like 10 nonsenses. And so that's why this is a late episode. This part two should have been out already. But, you know,

0:03:41 Lindsey: Yeah, it's It's been causing a lot of embarrassment at work too, because I leave and I tell people I'm going to do sex stuff and then come back, haven't done any sex stuff Yeah.

0:03:44 Thomas: Quebec hat in hand. Yeah. Yeah. But

0:03:54 Lindsey: Fantastic.

0:03:54 Thomas: At long last, I think the refractory period is more than over and we should give it a go. What do you think?

0:04:02 Lindsey: That sounds great. Yeah. So first of all, I wanted to address some of the feedback that we got. So a couple of folks, I think, were skeptical of the strong line that we took about trafficking. And maybe this is my bad. Maybe it was a bad idea to bring it up at all, since we weren't going to cover it. But it did seem like a relevant background point. And I really wanted to plug that episode of You're Wrong About, because their treatment of that topic was great, it was very, very thorough. Michael Hobbs did a written version of the story that, um, you know, we can direct people to if they prefer that to the, to the podcast, um, but the focus of the episode was never intended to be about trafficking, um, yeah that, that is what I am doing, yeah.

0:04:39 Thomas: Know, are you just referring them to that that episode or that article or there's no claims you

0:04:45 Lindsey: I mean

0:04:45 Thomas: Want to. So you're not backing down from any claims or anything. We're just OK. Just making sure.

0:04:50 Lindsey: I just, like, I, I think I saw some comments that were specifically like, you know, usually I'm sourcing all of the claims that I'm making, and I wasn't really doing that here because I didn't want to focus on trafficking.

0:05:01 Thomas: Oh, I see what you're saying. OK, so that's why it wasn't like here's the studies you broke down on trafficking. It was here's an episode because it wasn't intended to be the focus. Gotcha.

0:05:12 Lindsey: No. But it is relevant background. So, you Know.

0:05:15 Thomas: And, you know, for side point, it's not as though Michael Hobbs would say there's never been such a thing as a person trafficked. It's just that, you know, so many of those, the main point is like so many of those stats you hear are just completely made up. Like, regardless, there may be a problem and it's hard to know how much was my takeaway from the episode. You know, it's probably, it's not zero, obviously, nothing in the world is zero, but, but like the stats that police will tell you of like 60,000 people, you know, in my living room right now, our children have been trafficked, like just really weirdly specific, huge numbers being trafficked every day or something. It's they're usually made up or wrong or like a misinterpretation. So it was fascinating. Go check it out.

0:05:58 Lindsey: Yeah. Go check it out. And again, like Hobbes was really specific in breaking down those specific numbers and being like, here is the original source of this number, and it's just, it's obvious that this is not the epidemic that some groups are claiming

0:06:10 Thomas: It'll be stuff like, oh, this is every single call about a possible missing child sighting, you know, and it would be like multiple calls for one child, and that's counted as like an instance of trafficking. Just stuff, typical, really bad stats stuff like that. Mm-hmm.

0:06:24 Lindsey: Yeah, and and In a lot of like family issues, like, you know, custody kinds of issues. Well, yeah, so anyway, so that's the the trafficking piece. The uh, the other issue, I think that because we got some comments, I think sort of maybe be anticipating what the content of this recording was going to be about. Episode is, no, mature, mature. Most of what I want to do in This episode is dispel some myths about some specific harmful effects of watching porn. So namely that it has a high addictive potential, that it contributes to sexual dysfunction, and that it causes sexually aggressive and violent behavior. But I don't, I want to say at the top that like I don't want to claim that that the content of all porn is completely fine and beyond reproach and there's nothing wrong with it. Like, obviously that's not true.

0:06:43 Thomas: Were They a little premature, mm-hm oh of course not yeah absolutely

0:07:12 Lindsey: I think that there's like a lot of, yeah.

0:07:13 Thomas: Not True. Yeah.

0:07:15 Lindsey: And I mean, even setting aside the fact that there is, you know, very violent pornography that I, you know, I think could be problematic, even like common sort of run-of-the-mill porn has tons of tropes in it that I think are pretty sexist and demeaning. And I think the other is that I noticed there's a conversation happening in the SIO discussion group about the fact that if like the whole of adolescent sex education is coming from mainstream porn, they're probably going to have some misconceptions about what sex is like. And that's totally fair. You know, yet another good argument for comprehensive sex education.

0:07:51 Lindsey: So I wanted to put those things at the top, right? Those are all great conversations, But that's not what I prepped for today. So, yeah.

0:07:59 Thomas: But it's it's hard to make every caveat in the world at any given time. You... We should replace sex ed with just the front page of Pornhub and let kids poke around. I don't remember her saying that. I think I would remember.

0:08:20 Lindsey: I hope I didn't say that.

0:08:21 Thomas: But it's okay. You know, I get people want to give feedback and we want to receive feedback and I get it, but I don't know. Some days when it's a little, you just get a slew as a podcaster, a slew of stuff that's all based on like a very easily fixed, know, misunderstanding or like something that's omitted that you could just assume we didn't say. Or didn't mean to say rather than assuming that we meant something by omitting something that kind of, I don't know, it gets a little, it's a little exhausting, but that's the that's the job we're in. That's OK. I saw another one. Here's one thing I'm no longer going to do. I know Lindsey will do your homework for you, everybody. That's something she prides herself on. And mainly if Brett and Heather are listening, Lindsey will be it. Brett and Heather's homework for them, but I'm not going to. And I got a comment that was like, "Oh, I can't believe you, you know, mocked the feminist anti-porn views and it's actually well-researched position" or something. And OK, fine. But I'm not I didn't there's nothing in that for me. I don't know what to tell you, commenter, because like you didn't provide anything like even an argument or a link or whatever. And I'm I'm just not going to do your homework for you. I don't know. If you think that, that's great. Right. Now we've both said the things we think. But it's it's not as though we're saying that all or I'm saying that all porn is hunky dory and not harmful and doesn't deal in harmful tropes. It's that the language of what I read, I laughed at that op ed and I stand

0:09:51 Thomas: By that because the language was so wide and inclusive to include all porn. Porn. It just said porn. And it was, that article was absurd. Like I will continue to laugh at that article and I stand by it. Maybe there's some better formed position that's anti some amount of porn or some kind of porn like that. Sure. I'll totally, you know, like that I'm wide open to those links if you include them or whatever, but like that article's was absurd and it said all porn like it very clearly You you can't do that. Like there's no way like we could categorize hardcore, you know, like torture porn in the same category as like a calendar that has topless women or something that was like the height of porn that like we can get in the 80s and 90s. Like there there's no way that's the same thing or should be treated as the same thing. So at the very least the article was absurd for that reason if nothing else. Like, like, come on.

0:10:50 Lindsey: And that is that is how I took your comments at the time, was that this this editorial was making a lot of really sweeping claims that are not backed up by evidence. And actually, a lot of what we're going to talk about today is directly addressing those claims about whether, you know, all porn, right, including like nonviolent porn, that kind of stuff, whether all porn actually has these negative consequences. There's not very good evidence for that. So, no, no.

0:11:10 Thomas: Okay. Well, let's get into it. Enough griping unless you had more gripes. I'm always here for gripes, but if we're all done griping, let'S do sex stuff.

0:11:21 Lindsey: Let's do sex stuff. OK, so the first thing I want to talk about just real briefly is kind of a coda to some stuff that we were talking about in the last episode. So I wanted to talk about non-consensual pornography, commonly known as revenge porn, because this was central to a lot of your discussion with Tom. And it's definitely one of the arguments that have been used to justify like boycotting pornographic websites or inflicting other major penalties on porn sites, And, you know, my position based on my reading is that like, yeah, non-consensual pornography is a real important problem. I don't get the sense that it's a problem that's unique to porn sites, but it's a problem needs attention. Survey from 2016 suggested that about 3% of internet users just in the US had had someone threaten to distribute nude photos of them without their consent, and about 2% had actually had someone do that to them.

0:11:35 Thomas: Mm-mm. Yeah.

0:12:15 Lindsey: So that's millions of people. Well,

0:12:15 Thomas: That feels lower than I would have thought, but okay. Maybe people... Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Also, maybe people don't want to talk about it or admit it.

0:12:17 Lindsey: 2016, I mean it's possible that that's

0:12:23 Thomas: I don't know. Well, also, I mean, again, there's the sexist nature of what we call revenge porn, like not that it doesn't exist for men, for cis men. But like typically this is a, you know, something that is used against women. It's not really used in the same. So I guess population wise, that reduces the number, the percentage of people that are usually going to be subject to this problem. Them.

0:12:49 Lindsey: That's true, yeah, mm-hmm.

0:12:50 Thomas: What I was going to say is that my main point on the revenge porn aspect, which, you know, absolutely, I've advocated on opening arguments in different times, like we should have strict revenge porn laws in every state or even, you Know, federally, if if that's the way to do it, because that that strikes me as interstate commerce, like it's internet, like, obviously, maybe it should be a federal law now that I think about it.

0:13:11 Thomas: So I would strongly advocate for that. That, I bet you, if you had a, I don't know what they call God's eye view or something, a lot of that, like a ton of revenge porn is going to be distributed on like social media messages and stuff. Like that's going to Be where it really is. And focusing on Pornhub, like I don't really think that's gonna be the main or, you know, some sort of hub site like that. That really doesn't seem to me.

0:13:38 Thomas: I don't have the evidence on hand, but that doesn't seem to be prima facie to be anywhere near like the top of the list in terms of solving that problem.

0:13:47 Lindsey: You are anticipating my point beautifully. You're absolutely right, yeah, because from what, from what I've read, I've been reading, it seems like, yeah, historically the biggest issue, the biggest problem surrounding this has been its treatment in the legal system, um, and I went back and like re-listened to, uh, I think this was the first time it came up on OA, back in 2017, episode 87.

0:14:10 Lindsey: Yeah. So I, you know, I went back and listened to that and, um, the situation in this country in terms of its legal treatment has appears to have actually, uh, rapidly improved in the past few years.

0:14:20 Thomas: Good. Uh-huh.

0:14:21 Lindsey: So at the time that you you all recorded that first episode, um, 39 states had specific revenge laws. And today there are specific revenge porn laws in 48 states plus D.C. You would guess the two holdout states, by the way. One of them surprising.

0:14:36 Thomas: Wow, yeah, is it Alaska, I don't know, okay.

0:14:39 Lindsey: No. Yeah. So South Carolina, that one didn't surprise me a lot. But Massachusetts is the second one.

0:14:46 Thomas: Wow, yeah, that I never would have guessed that in a million years, huh. Weird.

0:14:49 Lindsey: Yeah, so anyway, a lot of progress has been made on this front. I think that, you know, there's still some ways to go. I've been persuaded that there probably should be be a federal law against it. And, you know, a lot of people have argued that this should be considered a form of sexual violation. And I think that

0:15:06 Thomas: Yeah. And, by the way, I think wasn't there some asshole who made like a whole website on this, like that guy, I hope he's in prison or still in prison, was that the focus of that episode? I can't remember, it's been a long time, okay, well I feel like there was a guy who made a whole website of revenge porn, that shit should be shut down immediately, that person should be in prison, like that's, that absolutely, like those should be shut down, yeah, oh, okay, well,

0:15:15 Lindsey: There's not the one I listened to, but there are, yes, there are specific websites just for revenge porn. Yeah. Not just one. Yeah. Yeah, but to your point, right, so the case that I've seen made about this is that, yeah, we should be pushing for strong penalties for people that do this and good enforcement, and that that's really where the progress is being made. And so what advocacy organizations like the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, which is this nonprofit that was started by Holly Jacobs, who personally suffered immense harms from when an ex posted a pornographic video of her, organizations like hers are doing to fight against non-consensual pornography are things like putting pressure on state governments to pass laws against it, which which has been very successful. They crafted example legislative language for state lawmakers to use. They advise tech companies on how to address the problem on their websites. So like helping develop like online removal guides for users, crafting terms of service that ban non-consensual pornography, and so on. They also provide services and resources for victims. In other words, they're taking steps to specifically target the non-consensual pornography. What they don't seem to be doing is calling for these general boycotts of

0:16:30 Lindsey: Websites, websites of porn websites, right, because it does not seem like that it really is an effective and targeted solution to the problem, but yeah.

0:16:37 Thomas: I mean, back in the day, I, I don't know if this really happened or anything, but back in the day you would have had to like, okay, let's say you had some photos, and if, if you're going to do that, you would've had to print out pictures and post them places or something. And this strikes me as like, you, someone's like, okay, we got to take out that bulletin board that somebody posted a picture on. It's like, no, I think you got to focus on the person doing it and not so much the like architecture of how it's happening. Now, again, that's a different story. If someone's like hey, here's the place where you should post all the revenge porn, then no, like yeah, like that. That cut should be gone, but exactly.

0:17:05 Lindsey: That's a different issue. Yeah.

0:17:07 Thomas: So I think that once again, it strikes me as a case of, and we've seen this and we talked about it, Christian activists, and I guess I'll also include certain feminists who have the anti-porn views, use these issues that are real to try to take out things that are already in their firing line anyway for different reasons and I just, don't, I think we should do everything we can to resist that.

0:17:27 Lindsey: I, I totally agree, right? Um, yeah, it's not, it's not a coincidence that these, these specific kinds of calls to action are coming from these organizations, right? It's not really about the revenge porn, it's about the porn. Um, anyway, so that's, that's all I wanted to say on that. I just, I thought that it was worth addressing that, um, that, that part of it. So now the fun stuff, right? How does, how does porn consumption affect consumer's wellbeing? Right. So that, that new, yeah.

0:17:57 Thomas: We Forced a Lindsey bot to watch 10,000 hours of, no, I'm just kidding, uh,

0:18:03 Lindsey: So as that New York times editorial that you quoted from last week noted, there are in fact, decades of research on whether porn has negative effects on the wellbeing and behavior of users. The question is, where does the weight of that evidence actually lead us? So Catherine McKinnon seems to think that the weight of the evidence indicates that, yes, there really are these well-documented effects. I'm not persuaded of that. So there have been studies that purport to show evidence of negative effects on everything from psychological and sexual well-being to to relationship health, to sexual violence. And many of these claims are made against the backdrop or the background assertion that pornography has a dangerously high addictive potential, meaning that its use is likely to become compulsive. And this is kind of the theoretical center of a bunch of other supposed negative effects, such as relationship problems, reduction in commitment to one's partner, and increased motivation to cheat on one's partner, hypersexuality, so having sort of disruptively high sex drive, perpetrating violent and aggressive sexual behavior, increased erectile dysfunction, and somehow also decreases in sex drive. Which, some of these things are hard to square, right?

0:19:11 Thomas: Interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

0:19:15 Lindsey: But I think the idea is that, or the claim, I think people want to use porn more instead of having sex with other people because the porn is just so much more stimulating. But anyway, there's still specific findings that have been used in this narrative that definitely seem to contradict each other. And the studies that I read that purportedly showed these ill effects often include these very dire implication sections and these recommendations for people who want to decrease their quote-unquote dependence on porn and provide resources for those interested in porn abstinence programs. I have to say, it was a little disconcerting to see the word nofap in a peer-reviewed academic journal article. That was, that was fun.

0:19:57 Lindsey: Anyway, so I read a bunch stuff on this topic, including several meta-analyses.

0:19:56 Thomas: Should We make Lindsey define what that is, everybody, pull the audience, for the, for the, uh, for the boomers listening, no, for uh, what does that mean, Lindsay, okay,

0:20:09 Lindsey: I believe it means an abstinence-only approach to masturbation. It's my, it's my impression that.

0:20:19 Thomas: I was trying to try and get you into the etymology, I actually am blanking on what the actual, is it just the sound, okay,

0:20:23 Lindsey: I Think, I think it's onomatopoeia. Yeah, yeah.

0:20:26 Thomas: Yeah, that's what I thought, interesting.

0:20:27 Lindsey: Um, anyway, so, so I read, I read a bunch on this, including several meta-analyses and systematic review papers, just to try to figure out where the bulk of the evidence is on this question, um, and according to the reviews and meta-analyzes that I read, uh, the findings in this literature are incredibly inconsistent, and in aggregate they're very unpersuasive, for a lot of these claims, it seems like this is probably a null effect, right?

0:20:51 Thomas: On, on one hand, just pausing here, I mean, talking conceptually about the problem here, um, it certainly makes sense that this could exist. I mean, for one, there's already the problem of human behavior with anything. Like there's any thing, if it's an activity, there are humans that could do it to an unhealthy degree. You know, like I could binge television to an, oh, I probably already am doing that. I could, you know, like there, I could, what I, uh, I got really into Pokemon Go that one year, that one summer or whatever. Like, I feel like I was playing that way too much. And so I quit. So I don't know.

0:21:22 Lindsey: Too much fresh air. Yeah.

0:21:24 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, I, I think that like, there's already that problem. And then add in obviously a sexual component, which is something humans tend to be interested in, uh, widely. So like, I could see a strong prima facie case for there being a problem here. Um, so it when you say like these are going to be null effects or whatever, is it, it's not that you're saying there's no such thing as an individual having a problem, it's that it's what it's like, not it's okay. Mm-hmm.

0:21:54 Lindsey: It's not, it's not like particularly addictive, which is the claim. It's like if people, it's like people are saying that, you know, now that porn is so widely available, that it's uh, like this one website that I'll have to, have to find it and link it in the show notes. There's this one, uh, website that's like an advocacy organization against porn, and and they have a quote from some supposed expert on there that says that, you know, porn is like the most dangerously addictive thing on the internet. And the evidence for that idea is not at all persuasive. Right.

0:22:24 Lindsey: So, like, yeah, people there's... there's people that have compulsive behaviors. Right. And those those compulsive behavior can be a lot of things. But the idea that porn in particular has a strong addictive potential does not seem to be supported.

0:22:37 Thomas: Like If there's a thing of M&Ms in the house, I'll eat probably all the M&Ms, and I can't stop, and that's not good, but I don't think we should ban M&M's, I just probably need to not have them around me, is what I think, okay.

0:22:54 Lindsey: I think that's fair. Yeah. So there's two meta-analyses that I want to get into, but I also – I wanted to just briefly talk about this review article that I found from 2017. It's published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine by Fisher and Kohut, and it's entitled Pornography Viewing, Keep Calm and Carry On, which I thought was nice.

0:23:15 Thomas: Interesting.

0:23:16 Lindsey: So, yeah, it's –

0:23:16 Thomas: That's I wouldn't associate that with porn viewing, but okay. Upper lip, everybody. Keep watching.

0:23:22 Lindsey: Brief – yes, indeed. Indeed.

0:23:24 Thomas: Watching the book, hmm.

0:23:26 Lindsey: It's a very, very brief review article. It is really accessible, even if you are not a person who likes to read journal articles, and I recommend that people check it out. They review these many decades of research on this topic, and they argue that the media claims around the negative effects of pornography, which have been around for a very long time, are incredibly hyperbolic, and are not supported by the actual evidence in this area. So just a couple of points to highlight. They note that the evidence regarding the link between pornography and violence against women has been very inconsistent, which we're to talk about more in a minute. So I'm going to table that for now. Stick a palp in it. They also review evidence regarding whether pornography use contributes to sexual dysfunction and relationship satisfaction, where, once again, they say the findings are incredibly mixed. Some studies show no effect of pornography on these outcomes. Some actually show a positive effect on relationship outcomes. Some couples use pornography to enhance their sex lives. And then some studies show a negative effect. So the findings are all over the place. There does not seem to be a clear, consistent finding here that porn harms people in these ways that are being claimed. And also, I should note that I read a couple of primary research articles on this topic. And it seemed like a lot of the papers that I red were correlational. And they were, you know, they're measuring everything at one time.

0:23:55 Thomas: Interesting.

0:24:42 Lindsey: And in the analyses that I was looking at, it seemed like the sexual dysfunction was actually contributing to a preference for porn over partnered sex and not the other way around, which seems like it seems like a plausible alternative account to me, right?

0:24:58 Thomas: Right.

0:24:58 Lindsey: That can be embarrassing, of saying it could lead to avoidance, you know, so

0:25:01 Thomas: So if you know, if you're somebody who maybe has some problems, there, like it's way less stressful to just look at porn and maybe masturbate or successfully or not or just like then then it is to be involved with another person that makes sense.

0:25:16 Lindsey: Know, it doesn't, it doesn't seem like the pull of pornography is so strong that if people actually have sexual opportunities that they are choosing the porn over the sex because it's so much better, like that doesn't seems to be that. Yeah, right. And it, and it doesn't mean that it couldn't be the other way around for some people. And so it's, it's possible that some proportion of people do experience dysregulation and compulsive behavior around porn use, but the evidence doesn't suggest that this is like a widespread problem that porn is likely to cause. Um, and so they, they end their, their review with a note to clinicians who work with clients regarding sexual and relationship problems, and they caution clinicians to keep And I think it's worth reading just a little bit from their conclusion directly here. So they say, quote,

0:25:31 Thomas: Very interesting

0:26:23 Lindsey: And sexual conflicts, yeah, they might have intolerant partners as opposed to excessive pornography use, or, or they might've experienced genuine pornography induced harms, right? Close quote.

0:26:31 Thomas: Man that makes so much sense

0:26:38 Lindsey: This, yeah. Right. I think this is a really nice reminder to all of us, not just clinicians, that we are imperfect observers of our own behaviors. There's lots of apparent relationships that we can observe in the world. And just because we noticed that like, like, hey, I use porn, and hey, I'm having this problem, it doesn't necessarily mean that the porn is causing the problem, right?

0:26:38 Thomas: To me actually Actually, Yeah, it just, what I got from from all that is it does really strike me as an easy first thing to blame, possibly if something else is going on. I think that that, what you read, put it so well. Like, also, you definitely have had friends. I wouldn't be in a relationship like this because I find it absurd. But I have had friend who, you, if their partner is like, you're not allowed to look at porn, that like I could see that, like them looking at porn a couple of times could be described by their partner as a porn problem, you know, and it's like, all right, okay, come on, what year is it, you know, and but like, especially, you know, in more conservative areas too, you know, with people who are maybe more religious, um, I could see that being a huge, huge driver of of overblowing problems where there aren't really problems, all right.

0:27:43 Lindsey: Man, I love it. This is the perfect segue into what I want to talk about next. Yeah. So, yeah, so this point about perceptions of pornography related problems leads us into this meta-analysis about porn addiction, right, and they are talking about religiosity in the context of this in particular, so thank you for setting me up there. Yeah, so this analysis is by Grubbs and colleagues. It was published in 2018. And it's investigating people's self-reported claims of having a quote unquote problem with pornography. In other words, like self-reports of compulsive pornography use or porn addiction. And these researchers were testing the hypothesis that actually many of the studies purporting to demonstrate problems with porn addiction are actually showing problems associated with feelings of guilt and shame as a result of using porn, and not actually compulsive use. So these authors grant that there has been an increase in the past couple of decades in people reporting that they feel addicted to pornography or feel that their porn use is problematic, but they're interested in assessing whether there's good evidence that compulsive use of pornography is actually becoming more common, presumably as the result of, you know, free streaming porn becoming more accessible,

0:28:52 Thomas: Drum.

0:28:52 Lindsey: Or whether perceptions of porn addiction are becoming more common for some other reason. So they say that it's possible that self-perceived problems with porn could result either from actual dysregulation in porn use or from self-preceived problems because of moral incongruence between someone's beliefs about porn and their use of it. And in the beginning of their paper, these authors talk about the fact that religiosity is highly likely to be associated with moral incongruity regarding pornography use. So in other words, more religious folks are more likely to see pornography as immoral. And so religious folks who watch porn are more likely to view their own behavior as immorality, which is going to cause dissonance. So in their meta-analysis, they specifically analyzed studies. So there were 12 studies here, including 37 different effects that examined the relationships between religiosity, moral beliefs about pornography, and self-perceived compulsive use of pornography, as well as measures of just the frequency of pornography used.

0:29:51 Lindsey: And they hypothesized that the strongest predictor of self-perceived problems associated with pornography use would be moral incongruence rather than actual frequency of pornography use. So yeah, right.

0:30:03 Thomas: Roll. Palp. Roll, uh, get two palps, something, yeah.

0:30:07 Lindsey: Yeah. So let's talk about what they found here. So first of all, does religiosity predict moral incongruence around pornography use? Yes, it does. So in six different studies, including over 2,700 participants who reported that they used porn, it was found that religiosity, which they measured, like across these different studies they measured it with questions about religious identity, religious commitment, and the importance of religion in participants' lives. So religiosity strongly predicted various indicators of moral incongruity, like feelings of guilt after using porn and disapproval of porn. And again, since all of these studies are among people who say they use porn, disapprovel of it would indicate that they're engaging in morally incongrueous behavior. So yes, religiosity predicts moral incongruity regarding porn. Also, these were pretty strong effects. So most of the correlations in these studies were between 0.5 and 0.7. That's pretty strong. There was only one that was smaller than that, and that was 0.4, which is also not nothing.

0:31:03 Lindsey: All right. So second question, does frequency of pornography use predict self-perceived problems with pornography use? So they expect like a small correlation here because, you know, using pornography is kind of like a necessary but insufficient condition for perceiving that you have a problem with porn. I don't know that you can have a problem with it if you're not using it. So in eight studies, which included more than 6,300 participants who use porn, they found evidence of a weak to moderate relationship between frequency of pornography usage and self-perceptions of having a problem with porn, which they measured with items like, I believe that I'm addicted to internet pornography, at times I try to arrange my schedule so that I'll be able to be alone in order to view my pornography, and I feel ashamed after viewing pornography online. Line. All right.

0:31:48 Lindsey: Okay. Now, some of these studies that they looked at included, or some of the studies that we looked at were longitudinal studies, meaning that they obtained measures from the same participants over time. And this kind of data can be really helpful in sort of teasing apart different potential causal explanations for non-experimental data. It's like in a normal correlational study, when you measure everything at the same time, there's absolutely no way to tell whether A is causing B or B is causing A. But if you measure things over time, you can rule out some potential explanation. So if you see something happen at time two, right, there's no way that it caused the thing that happened at time one, because that's how time works, right?

0:32:25 Thomas: Says

0:32:32 Lindsey: I know. Yeah, well, yeah, I could be wrong.

0:32:34 Thomas: You, I've been watching a lot of Marvel movies lately, so I was with the kids, I, it all works any way you want it, but we'll ignore that for the time being. Interesting.

0:32:45 Lindsey: That sounds good. Yeah, so longitudinal data can be very valuable in trying to figure out, you know, likely causal relationships among naturally occurring variables. And these longitudinal studies found no associations with how much people were using porn at baseline and their self-perceptions of having a problem with porn a year later, which is evidence against the addictive potential of pornography, right? If it was really addictive, you'd expect that people who are using it more at time one are going to be more likely to report problems with compulsive use at time two, right. Right. It's like if you, you know, measured how many cigarettes somebody smokes at time one, you'd predict that they'd be more likely to be addicted at time two if they're smoking more. Right.

0:33:26 Lindsey: Yeah. So that's inconsistent with that argument that porn is addictive. Right. Now, does religiosity predict perceived problems with porn use? Yes, it does. So in in 10 studies, some of which overlapped with the samples that we've already talked about, 10 studies including more than 4,300 participants, it was found that religiosity correlates moderately with perceived problems with porn. Furthermore, longitudinal work indicates that these associations persist over time, so religiosity at time one predicts perceptions of having a porn-related problem a year later, unlike the frequency thing. So this longitudinal work provides strong evidence that religious beliefs are strong, long-term predictors of perceived problems of pornography, and that it's not porn use per se. Right? That is, and that kind of, that strongly contradicts this addiction narrative that underlies much of this research about the claims of the harm of pornography, right? Okay, so finally, does moral incongruence predict perceptions of porn-related problems, right? So the previous studies have kind of brought us right up to the door of this conclusion, and this is going to drive it home. So in six studies, including more than 3,300 participants, it was found that people who self-reported pornography-related problems were more likely to indicate moral incongruence regarding porn usage. And these included two longitudinal studies indicating that moral incogruence at time one predicted perceptions of compulsive porn use at time two, right? So I thought this was a particularly interesting paper because it provides an alternative account for this narrative that porn has a strong addictive potential, and that people's addiction to porn and compulsive use use of porn is leading to all of these other problems with with sexual well-being and relationship satisfaction and stuff. What may actually be happening with many, if not most, of these folks is that they have a lot of shame around porn or masturbation or whatever it is, and that shame, when they use porn, is actually causing the distress and

0:35:25 Lindsey: Causing the perception their behavior is compulsive. And so, to me, that suggests that we should be dismantling people's feelings of shame, not necessarily encouraging them to do these abstinence-only things, right?

0:35:33 Thomas: Good idea. Yeah.

0:35:36 Lindsey: Right. It just, you know, who is sowing the shame, by the way? Right. I mean, it's, it's religiously based, a lot of the time. Right. I mean it's and it's the same organizations that are promoting these abstinence only programs, which

0:35:51 Thomas: That's such a fascinating study. And I see just as a non-scientist, I was really wondering, like, how are we going to how are you going to demonstrate this? How's the paper going to demonstrate this? But that makes so much sense, you know, that it's more about the religious guilt. But again, all of this should exist alongside the obvious point that, you Know, there's definitely harmful, disturbing kinds of porn that, You know, should probably should not exist, especially if it's like non consensual, to say the least.

0:36:18 Thomas: But even like, you know, consensual porn, that's like a certain level of, you know, violent against women or whatever it is like that, that all may be terrible. And you could be, if somebody were like addicted to that, that could certainly be harmful. This all exists alongside of that. Like, I think that both things can be true for most.

0:36:36 Thomas: I think that most people, and again, if you picture somebody in a conservative environment who maybe, you know, watches some um run-of-the-mill porn, uh, and then like gets lumped in with, like, I have a problem with porn because of all these factors we're talking about, um, that strikes me as something that we should be zero percent worried about versus, you know, somebody who is really into some awful um sadistic kind of stuff that might actually reflect their character or something, or or contribute to their attitudes against women. And that is something that I think we should be concerned about. And I feel like those things can coexist, right?

0:37:11 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:37:12 Thomas: Those points, rather.

0:37:12 Lindsey: Well, once again, you're setting me up beautifully.

0:37:15 Thomas: Oh, okay. This is all not intentional.

0:37:17 Lindsey: Yeah, no, you, you don't have my notes. No. The the next thing I wanted to talk about was violence and porn, um. Yeah.

0:37:23 Thomas: Well, let's do it.

0:37:24 Lindsey: So this is another area

0:37:26 Thomas: Well, I did want to make, well, I'll interrupt my perfect transition to, there was one thing I wanted to, know, a thought I was having that I want to get your opinion on, because it's definitely true that porn as a broad category and certainly uh even like more specific uh fetish type whatever porn is more broadly available now, I, I, part of me is wondering if the reason we're not seeing the effects that that people were thinking we're seeing, with like, oh, it's everywhere now so everybody's gonna be. It's like I was thinking back to, you know, when I was a youth, you know, and like when I found a magazine, we'll say that provided endless amounts of porn content for me. You know what I mean? Like that was I wasn't getting tired of that magazine anytime soon like that, you know, so like in some it would be like I had as much porn as I could. Yes. Nowadays. It's like, oh, but there's all kinds of different porn. You could be looking at. And maybe there is some weird like FOMO thing too. Like I, you know, who knows, maybe that's a component of some of this addiction is like, you're always trying to find the next thing or like the better thing or whatever. But in terms of just like having access to a thing and becoming addicted, I don't know that for most people, this has changed a whole lot in 30 years. You know, it might sound counterintuitive, but honestly, like if you had some good, you uh, I was going to say DVDs, but like, yeah, VHSs or something in like the early nineties, you had unlimited time access to porn, you

0:39:01 Lindsey: A really interesting porn, or It's really interesting, um, yeah, it's like we're on a porn treadmill, you know. It's, it seems like, like there's more availability, but I take the point, right? Yeah, that's interesting.

0:39:12 Thomas: Now? Like, Like, you could have said the same thing about video game addiction. You know, if you compare the video games of today to the video game of 1990 or whatever, it's not, it is like, okay, it was absurd that we were all like playing these things that had two, you know, pixels of thing in them, but like we got really into those games back then, and I feel like if there was a major problem, it wouldn't necessarily be, and and maybe this could change at some later date if there's some like, you know, immersive video game technology that just makes everybody a slave to it or something, but like for the most part the thing is relative to the time, and like we played Street Fighter 2, you know, for hours and hours and hours, and I think if there was like a thing such a thing as video game addiction, which people could, I don't know, argue about, it would have manifested then just as much as now. Yeah, I don't know, maybe that's not right, but that was a thought I was having. I was curious for your uh for your opinion on

0:40:09 Lindsey: I mean, I, maybe I need to think about it more, but like, the, I, I catch that intuition, definitely, right? It's, it, I mean, it makes me think about some conversations we've, we've had in the past about like, you know, this perception that each new technology is going to have this sort of catastrophic effect, and then you look, and you know, people have been saying that since the pony express, and so, yeah, I don't know.

0:40:21 Thomas: It. Well, that got millions of people killed, that pony express, so that was, was a bad example. That was awful.

0:40:29 Lindsey: That's True, yeah.

0:40:32 Thomas: Ponies just rampaging, murdering ponies. But I take your point. All right. Well, I just want to put that out there. Interesting. I was just something I was thinking about while we were going through this. And now my perfect transition over to violence and porn.

0:40:37 Lindsey: Well, done. Well done. Um, yes, so what about violence and porn? Okay, so, so this is another area in which a lot of work has been done, and another area which there's a lot variability in terms of the quality of research and the findings, um, so some folks claim that there's strong evidence that all pornography, violent, violent, and nonviolent alike, is associated with increases in sexual aggression in real life. And this is a claim that I've actually seen show up in some textbooks that I use. And I was curious to look into this claim. I wasn't sure. So I read a few different systematic reviews and meta-analyses, including one meta- analytic review by Ferguson and Hartley that was published in 2020. And I thought this was really good. So they reviewed the research on the association between violent and nonviolent pornography on actual violent and aggressive behavior sexually.

0:41:36 Lindsey: And they specifically looked at the evidence from three types of research. And they kind of, they distinguished from these when they did their meta-analysis, right? So the first type of research is correlational, right, so that's where people are just reporting how much they consume various types of pornography, as well as their sexual attitudes and sexual behaviors and criminal offenses, differences, and so this kind of research provides a good sense of whether real world associations exist between between people's porn consumption and their attitudes and behavior, but of course it doesn't allow you to determine causality, um, you can't tell from these cross-sectional correlational things, right? Yeah, huh.

0:42:11 Thomas: Which way it goes. Yeah, yeah.

0:42:13 Lindsey: So it could be the porn's causing the aggression, but it could be that people who are aggressive are for some reason consuming more of this porn, right? Right. Or it could be some other variable that's causing both. You don't know. Right.

0:42:23 Thomas: My initial thought to this was put another way. Do you think people were more sexually aggressive in the 50s or now? Now I wonder, Hmm. We'll see.

0:42:33 Lindsey: Interesting. Yeah. Topic for another show.

0:42:37 Thomas: No topic for this show. Like I genuinely, like it, it may, if you, you know, people might nod along and like, Oh yeah, porn probably now today has made people more sexually aggressive. And I'm sitting here thinking like, okay, that could be true, but I, I don't know, take it another way. And you're like, do we really think that people are more sexually aggressive now than they were in like the frigging fifties? I did. I'd find that hard hard to believe.

0:42:59 Lindsey: I don't, I don't think that's true. In fact, in that, that does come up in a couple of the things that I was reading about, they were saying that like, if anything, rates of sexual aggression have gone down, like sex crimes have gone down since streaming porn became widely available. That's probably not causal. Right, but yeah, no, I don't think that the trends over time support that, yes.

0:43:12 Thomas: Well, and there's always the problem with this kind of stuff, which is things were underreported back in the, probably still are, but like back in the day, it's like, oh yeah, sure. He did this, but like, whatever, you know, being forced by society to kind of like brush stuff off that actually was sexual assault. So like, it would be hard to have that comparison even.

0:43:34 Lindsey: Yeah, exactly. Right, but yeah, no, so the point is, the point is well taken. Um, all right, so that's that's correlational research, right? Uh, second type of research is experimental, where you're randomly assigning people to to watch non-violent porn or violent porn or non-pornographic content and then examining whether those exposures have like a acute effects on attitudes and behavior. So this kind of research can give you a sense of whether in a tightly controlled lab study, you can get a causal effect, but it doesn't necessarily give you a strong sense of weather that effect is meaningful in the context of real world behavior.

0:44:08 Lindsey: So that's, you know, that's the job of correlational stuff. And the third type of research examines population level effects. So looking at population level associations between pornography consumption, and for example, rates of sexual violence, as we were just talking about. Out. So you can examine whether the rate of sex crimes increases in a particular area after pornography is made legal or becomes more widely available or something. So right? If you can get convergent evidence across these three kinds of methodologies for an effect, you can make some pretty strong claims that a cause and effect relationship exists between pornography and aggression and that it has significant practical consequences in the real world. So our question is, does that strong convergent evidence exist, linking nonviolent and, you know, and or violent pornography with sexual aggression.

0:44:56 Lindsey: So Ferguson and Hartley analyzed 73 effect sizes from 59 studies on the relationship between pornography and sexual aggression, and these studies included correlational, experimental, and population level analyses. So they looked at these studies. And they also examined whether a few potential moderators might predict which studies show the largest effects, including whether studies use best practices in their research. So essentially, they coded for methodological rigor, and whether the paper showed evidence of something called citation bias. So they examined whether the papers that they looked at excluded any citations that conflicted with their hypotheses, right, which is a possible indicator of researcher bias.

0:45:41 Lindsey: And in past research, the citation bias has been associated with inflated effect sizes. So like overestimating the sizes of effects. And they said that 23 out of the 59 studies showed evidence of citation bias, by the way. And we'll come back to which one those were. So here are their key findings. Regarding the relationship between nonviolent pornography and sexual aggression, the results overall did not support a relationship between nonviolent pornography use and sexual aggression. And this was true for correlational studies, it was true experimental studies, and it was for population studies.

0:45:56 Thomas: Makes

0:46:16 Lindsey: So there is no convincing, yeah, no convincing evidence for that. And again, that was one of the claims in that editorial that we were criticizing, right? Yeah.

0:46:15 Thomas: Sense to me. Yeah, yeah. It just said porn. Just full stop. All right. So frustrating.

0:46:28 Lindsey: No, and that was an intentional claim. I mean, This claim that, you know, any pornography increases sexual aggression, this is a widespread claim, it is in textbooks, mean, I mean, she would be able to grab a handful of studies that supposedly show this correlation, so yeah right so so again what we're talking about here is a meta-analysis, right, and they're saying that, like, when they do this, this meta-analytic, um, approach, that they don't find an effect overall in the literature, but there are specific studies that they include in their analysis that claim to show an effect. So here's another note on that. They found specifically that better methodology was associated with smaller effects, suggesting that low quality studies are more likely to show a relationship between nonviolent porn and sexual aggression, right? And they also found that studies with citation bias showed larger effects. And studies without citation bias, showed smaller effects, and not just smaller effects, but they showed non-significant effects if they had significant citation bias. And I want to, just a slight aside on this, about the researcher bias angle. I was being very careful to check the conflict of interest statements of the articles that I read. And it was, I didn't do a systematic sort of coding of this, but maybe I'll go back and do it, and I'll report back.

0:46:31 Thomas: I saying, between all porn, oh, okay, well, maybe that's the issue, all right, uh, right okay

0:47:49 Lindsey: It seemed that the conclusion of the paper being pro or anti-porn was a really good predictor of whether or not at least one of the authors declared a conflict of interest, meaning that they were like on the board of, say, some nonprofit that is into abstinence only approaches to masturbation and porn. Right. That's a bad sign.

0:48:08 Thomas: Did, now, in fairness did are you saying that went both ways, was there, you know, the other side that was like, ah, I'm part of the organization that's like super free, like, everybody have porn, no, okay, just goes the one way

0:48:19 Lindsey: It was it was the ones, the articles that were anti-porn were disproportionately more likely to have this conflict of interest statements that's a bad sign, yes yeah yeah it kind of does yeah Yeah, so, um, so yeah, so that's non-violent pornography, uh, the, the evidence here is there's not good evidence here that it actually increases sexual aggression, um, now regarding the relationship between violent pornography and sexual aggression, the correlational studies indicated a small but significant association there, so as violent porn consumption increased, self-reports of, uh, sexual aggression also increased. The experimental studies indicated a small but inconsistent effect, and so the authors interpreted this cautiously. So they didn't completely rule out a potential causal effect in these studies, but the experimental studies also didn't provide overwhelming evidence of an effect, right? So it's

0:48:26 Thomas: Well that makes a whole lot of sense to me, all comes back to Christians in this country anyway yeah hmm yeah

0:49:13 Lindsey: Inconclusive essentially. In terms of the methodological quality, unlike for the non-violent porn studies, the studies of violent porn and aggression did not show a relationship between methodological quality and effect size, right, so it's, it's, uh, it's not the case here it

0:49:27 Thomas: Can you remind me I apologize if you already said, how was sexual aggression, how is that measured exactly, mm-hmm got

0:49:33 Lindsey: It depends on the study, right, but if you're, if you're talking about people self-reporting about their own, uh, uh, like, aggressive behaviors, it's typically things like, um, reporting things like sexual coercion, so this is not like kink, into, into you know know, sadomasochism or anything yeah it's not that, it's, it's like actual coercion and, and, yeah yes, it is, right right, um, but yeah, it does, it does very, it's going to vary widely across the, across the studies as to what they're assessing, there, sometimes they're accessing like, you know, whether people have been convicted of violent sexual crimes, and things like that but yeah

0:49:48 Thomas: I thought that was where I was going, yeah, okay okay gotcha important note, I think, because but again with, with these Christian studies, you never know like how they're defining stuff, but okay.

0:50:12 Thomas: Okay. So first for real stuff, like, yeah, not, not just like a consensual fetish type thing.

0:50:16 Lindsey: Real real stuff? No. Yeah,

0:50:20 Thomas: Gotcha.

0:50:20 Lindsey: That's right. Now, so in terms of that citation bias variable, the studies of violent porn and aggression with citation bias did show larger effects, and the studies without citation bias showed smaller effects, but they were still significant, right? So again, we're not getting sort of the clear indicators of there being a lot of bias in this literature that we are with the non-violent porn stuff, right? So my takeaways from this is that, well, clearly there's no compelling evidence of even an association between nonviolent porn and aggression, let alone a causal relationship between viewing nonviolent porno and engaging in aggressive sexual behavior. There may be some evidence of an association or there is some evidence of a correlation between violent porn consumption and aggression. But whether or not the violent porn consumption is causing an increase in violence, it is inconclusive. I think that needs to be clarified with some additional High quality studies. Um, so,

0:51:12 Thomas: Hard to Say. I mean, yeah, so if it is, it someone already has those proclivities and then seeks out the porn to feel that part of it, or the other way? We don't know, okay, yeah, or feedback looping, I guess, maybe, that's

0:51:20 Lindsey: We don't know, right. And I could, I could, uh, I could genuinely see this going both ways, right, yes, yeah, exactly right, so that's my sex stuff, uh, porn may have some issues, but there is really not good evidence here that it's particularly addictive or that it is causing an epidemic of erectile dysfunction, as some have claimed, or that is causing sexually aggressive and violent behavior, right?

0:51:34 Thomas: Your sex stuff Mm-hmm.

0:51:46 Lindsey: And by the way, I wanted to reiterate one thing. I think this came up last episode, which is that, know, these you relatively newer kinds of models for producing pornography, including OnlyFans and cam modeling and things like that, I think appear to be allowing for potentially a helpful corrective to many of content the problems that characterize more traditionally produced studio porn, right, these models have a lot more control and autonomy over what they produce, and like it seems possible to me that that could change the landscape in terms of problematic content, I mean, I, you know, we'll have to see, but if they're having more control over what that's producing, yeah, yeah, so yeah, yeah,

0:52:18 Thomas: I mean it makes sense to me yeah well also it's just better, obviously, like, I don't know, you know, who, maybe, maybe again, it's a case of like broad appeal, you know, or something, but like the the normie porn, I don't get it, the bad acting pizza delivery guy porn, I don't understand it, I don't, don't get it, I'll never understand it, and being able to get this like boutique whatever porn isn't, that, anyway, it's gonna be, be better, and if it's like, I feel like with OnlyFans or if we were actually, you know, allowing for like ethical sex work online, kind of thing, that will be, that's got to be more consensual on average, claim, I can't, that's gotta be more consensual on average than whatever's on a Pornhub type site on average, right? Don't you think?

0:52:38 Lindsey: Custom Mm-hmm. Yeah, that That is my intuition as well, yeah, it

0:53:12 Thomas: But intuitions aside, I mean, you've laid out the actual science and compelling reasons why a lot of those studies that show these effects may be a little biased, maybe a little coming from a certain Christian angle.

0:53:27 Lindsey: Definitely seems that that way, yeah, I really do want to go back and like sort of just do, just go through all the articles that I downloaded and just actually do an analysis of how many of them had conflict of interest statements, maybe, we could talk about that in the Q&A, yeah.

0:53:39 Thomas: That would be fun. That's fascinating. Yeah, speaking of Q&A, get those questions in for the Patreon thread, great reminder, Lindsay, this, I'm sure we'll have a lot of fun ones about the sex stuff, yeah, lots of good, we could, we could have more discussion on this, we want to hear from you, so patreon.com/seriouspod, there's the September Q&A thread, that'll be the actual Q&A, will come at you next week, but that was a lot of fun doing sex stuff with you, Lindsay, I, uh, I'll leave you a good Yelp review yeah Yeah.

0:53:52 Lindsey: I hope so, yeah, I can't believe we finally finished yeah, it felt like this day would never come it's

0:54:15 Thomas: It really, really, oh man, it really, it really took a while to get this one done, but I'm glad we did. I'm so sorry for all the scheduling problems. It's not, it's not you. It was me. I've got a lot going on right now, you know. All right.

0:54:36 Lindsey: Very generous.

0:54:38 Thomas: Thanks so much for listening, everybody. And yeah, yeah, ask those questions. Can't wait to hear from you and we'll see you next time.

0:54:53 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com/seriouspod. The second best thing you can do, is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, follow me on Twitter at Serious Pod. If would like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com Thomas podcast. If not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com/groups/SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.