02 - Am I Normal?

Have you ever wondered, 'Am I normal?' The word 'normal' by itself isn't particularly helpful, yet we can't help but question how far off the mark we might be, especially when it comes to our sex lives. Are we watching too much porn? Are we having enough sex? In this episode, we dive into how much porn is “too much porn,” the validity of the term 'porn addiction,' what line dancing has to do with partnered sex, and why Google shouldn’t be the judge of sexual normalcy.

Featured Guests & Links:

Patrick Bluett, certified sex therapist with The American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT), based in Portland, OR. For more information, check out Bluett Counseling.

Materials Referenced:
Sexual Addiction Screening Test (SAST) 

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Porn Nerds is a co-production of Squirm and BOOM Integrated, the podcast division of GRAMMY-winning audiobook leader John Marshall Media. Huge thank yous to Adrien Glover, Uri Mansion, and the team at BOOM Integrated.

Squirm is an educational platform that helps people have productive and compassionate conversations on difficult topics related to sex and relationships. We do this through approachable, inclusive offerings, including games, events, workshops, and audio originals. A lot of sex advice ends with “talk about it.” That’s where ours begins.

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Transcript

Porn Nerds - Episode 02 – Am I Normal?

In case it wasn't obvious from the title, this show will feature adult themes and explicit language. Now that that's out of the way. 

If I'm assessing a client who comes in and they say to me, Patrick, I masturbate every single day.

It's important for anywhere between 30 minutes to even sometimes an hour. On occasion, I even masturbate twice in a day. I even went a week where I masturbated three times every day that week, you know, something like that.

From a clinical perspective, I don't bat an eye. What's much more important to me is what is the meaning of that usage to you? How do you feel and how does it fit into your life? 

I'm Tess. I have a master's in sexuality and have worked with indie porn producers.

And I'm Kels. I'm a director, producer, and daughter of a sex worker. And this is Porn Nerds, a podcast about porn and your sex life.

Today is all about porn's impact on partner sex, porn addiction, and the question, am I normal? 

TLDR from episode one, a lot of people are watching a lot of porn and feeling a lot of guilt about it. We are calling this the central conflict. The central conflict reveals this palpable tension between the fact that people are watching tons of porn and the story that porn is harmful and dangerous.

This tension is causing a lot of confusion about what is normal and healthy and what is abnormal and wrong. Whenever we talk about this, like, am I normal question, I'm transported back to like seventh grade, middle school assembly. Did you have anything like this where it's like, definitely had assemblies.

I just thought we were so edgy. I did go to a hippie school, but even they liked to gather in the gym. Yes, absolutely.

So we'd sit in these like chairs and then there was this group of people and these poor 20 year old theater students. I mean, all of the preteens hated them, but I will never forget they came in and they were like, super high energy. They just like busted onto the risers and they're like, normal, normal, normal.

Am I normal? Like barbershop quartet, like Rockapella. Yes. But like big body movements, like bouncing, bounding up and down all across the theater.

And we're all just staring at them like, what the fuck? But to their credit, I've never forgotten that song. And when we've been prepping for this, in my normal episode, all I can think about is normal, normal, normal. Am I normal? Did they, was that it? Or did they have, was that just the chorus where the verse is like, body hair, cool.

It's all right if you're sweaty. You might smell bad, put on some deodorant. Everyone has B-O, B-O, say it with me.

I say B, you say O. But yeah, what did they actually say was normal? You don't remember. I don't remember. You just remember that.

Yeah. Normal. Am I normal? How did it go? That's not quite the melody.

Normal, normal, normal. I'm really sorry that I didn't get it from the one time that you sang it for me. Oh my God.

Anyway, here's something you maybe do remember. Did you question if you were normal or not when you heard that? Did it land like, oh, maybe everything is okay. Or obviously I'm normal.

Good question. Yeah. I think I definitely questioned if I was normal.

If not like sitting in that folding chair in the assembly, like throughout the course of my adolescence and into adulthood, I of course questioned if I was normal. Did you question if you were normal or do you still? Yeah. I think I'm a little normal and a lot weird.

I do go through periods of time where I'm probably more concerned with it. If I'm, you know, part of the pack, I think as I've grown up, I've become less concerned with it. And part of it is just the word normal.

I don't really like that much, but sure. I wonder, you know, what people think about me or if what I'm doing is quote unquote normal enough. And definitely when I was a kid, I thought about it a lot being an awkward middle schooler and going through puberty and everything that comes with that.

And you had a back brace. Oh yeah. Back brace, bowl cut and yellow tech vest from old Navy.

That just was the trifecta of cool. Yeah. Well, and I'll say this is a podcast about porn and not puberty.

So you might be wondering why we're taking this like long, big detour into this topic of normalness. And it's because I think in any topic where somebody doesn't know if what they're doing is quote unquote normal, because there's not a lot of conversation about like nitty gritty specifics of what people are doing or what it feels like. We are often left to ask ourselves, am I normal? Am I normal? I still don't know the melody.

Am I normal? Am I normal? Am I normal? I actually did the online therapy for the thoughts that I was having because they were really bothering me. I told her that I masturbate at least twice a day, once in the morning before I go to work, and then once at night before I go to sleep to help me sleep. And I was concerned that maybe that was too, quote unquote, too much.

And my therapist told me that she's like, that's your routine and that's okay. When it comes to sex and porn, at some point, we all ask ourselves, am I normal? We're not going to sing. Don't worry.

Maybe you wonder if you're having enough sex or if you're the only one fantasizing about cooking Ned Flanders. The question of normalcy comes from a bigger fear of being defective or broken in some way. And the word normal is pretty abstract on its own.

It doesn't really mean anything. You have to define the word in order to get somewhere helpful. Like does it mean healthy or legal or just vanilla? Without a definition, normal becomes a concept that gives us more stress than information.

But all that doesn't stop us from wondering if we're some kind of weird outlier. And one of the biggest questions that we hear is what is a normal amount of porn to watch? So while we are here waxing poetic about the unhelpfulness of the word, there are other corners of the internet that tell a different story. A story that can make you feel real abnormal real quick.

Picture this. It's 1:47 AM. You've just finished a porn bender.

Sexy stepsister gets caught masturbating by stepbrother. Hot sluts number three. All babes squirt on dick POV.

You get the point. And maybe you're feeling a little bit of post-nut clarity. A little bit of shame creeps in.

Is this okay? And so you do what any modern adult in 2024 would do. You open a tab and google how much porn is too much porn? Am I watching too much porn? How much porn is okay to watch? Is porn addiction real? What is a healthy amount of porn to watch? Porn bad? How do I know if I'm addicted to porn? What does the bible say about watching? How to help someone with porn addiction? Will God forgive me for watching bad things? How do I know if I'm addicted to sex? This line of questioning might land you at a website like Psychology Tools Today. There you might find a test called the SAST, Sexual Addiction Screening Test.

I think we should go through some of the questions on these tests and just check out exactly what it looks like. So Kelsey, do you often find yourself preoccupied with sexual thoughts? I mean, we've literally been recording for hours about porn and sex. We talk about sex a lot.

Go to a party with us and I'll show you. Has anyone been hurt emotionally because of your sexual behavior? Sure. You know? Dating is rough.

Dating is rough. My friend likes someone when I like them. There's inevitably, unfortunately collateral damage with dating and sex.

How about people in my life have been upset about my sexual activities online? How does your conservative aunt feel about your sexual proclivities? And do we care? Here's one. I visit sexual bathhouses, sex clubs, or video and bookstores as part of my regular sexual activity. What's wrong with going to a bookstore? Or any of those.

A sexual bookstore sounds really wholesome. And the test continues with more questions like I've engaged in sadomasochistic behavior regularly. I've used the internet to make connections online.

Like yikes, that's an easy, easy one for everyone to get. I also like that they double up internet online just in case it's not clear. Look, there's a whole other episode for the syntax of this test.

Or like, have sex and romantic fantasies been a way for you to escape your problems? All of these things that at face value, in my opinion, are pretty benign. According to the test maker, a score of seven or above may indicate a problem with sexual addiction. And when you get your score, you're also given a link to chat online with a licensed therapist.

When I took the test the most recent time, I was met with this page that was like, you must be really scared right now. You must feel really overwhelmed. And we understand.

We're here to help. It was just immediately like, dun dun dun, this is really bad and you need help. You know, our point here isn't to say that there's not sexual behaviors that are distressing or that would make you want to talk with a therapist or make course corrections in your life.

Because absolutely unequivocally, those are really real issues for people. It's more that tests like these are pretty sharky. It's really easy to self-diagnose as an addict.

If some of the questions are just, do you fantasize about sex? Do you think about sex a lot? Do you engage with kink? You know, and some of them also are like totally out of your control. It's like if you were sexually abused as a child or if your parents have had problems with sex. So again, it's not to diminish that there's going to be times where you want to go to a therapist.

It's more just to say that it's very easy to be called an addict. Right. And, you know, there is this longstanding debate as to whether addiction is even a valid label or not for sex and for porn.

Yeah. And Tess and I have talked about this a lot off air. Like it's been a kind of ongoing debate between the two of us.

On the one hand, it's incredibly habit forming. It feels really out of control for people. It presents in similar ways that addictions do.

So at a certain point, to me, it feels a little bit like semantics to say, it's addiction. It's not addiction. It's just the bottom line is that it feels a type of way where it makes you feel really out of control of your behavior.

And that's what needs to be addressed. Call it whatever you need to to move forward. Yeah, I think there's a lot of validity to that because, you know, for someone who does feel addicted to something, it's like really distressing.

But I also do want to defer to more of the experts here because a lot of the psychology, therapy, sex therapist community has moved away from this term addiction. And I think language really does matter when we talk about things. And addiction does mean something specific.

It means something different than like a compulsive behavior. So even though it feels and looks and smells a lot like an addiction, I tend to be wary of using that term because I know there's this large community of people who actively study addiction models and study sexual behavior, and they don't use that anymore. And they've moved away from it to something else.

So the alternate model that sex therapists, you know, the more science-minded sex therapists, I think, like to use is one that is called out-of-control sexual behavior or OCSB for short. That's Patrick Bluett, a Portland-based sex therapist. This is a system that instead of looking at how to treat this from an addiction model, which is very much about sort of relinquishing power, right, admitting that I'm powerless to this disease, to this thing or this substance that has control over me, and then abstaining from it, right, which is the addiction model.

Rather, what I'm saying is I'm taking accountability for my actions. I am admitting that actually I do have a choice in this. I do have power.

And now I get to decide what is my balance that I'm going to choose with this thing. How am I going to interact with this thing in a way that aligns with my values? I'm curious, how does it compare to other things that are like compulsive use-forming, like gambling or gaming or social media? Is it similar? Is it different? How so? Yeah, that's such a good question. So first of all, I hear the word compulsive used a lot.

And I think it's important to delineate between two words. Impulsive, which is I desire something and I'm having a hard time resisting it, and compulsive, meaning if I don't do this, something bad's going to happen, right? So you would compulsively hand wash. You would impulsively eat, for example, right? That can, of course, be reversed.

But those are important terms, I think, to know. Now, gambling addiction is the only behavioral addiction that's listed in the DSM. And so I think for that reason, people really like to compare sex addiction to gambling addiction.

But they're very, very different. And I'll explain briefly why for gambling addiction is because something I've called variable ratio reinforcement. Do you know what this is? Dopamine, right? Dopamine.

It's very much related to dopamine. That if you put like a rat in a cage and you give it a little button, and every time it presses this button, food comes out. Well, then the rat's going to press the button when the rat is hungry.

But if you change it, and you make it so that every, you know, after five presses, the food comes out. And then the next time, after 20 presses, the food comes out. And the next time it comes out the first time.

And you just make it random. Then the rat's not going to worry so much about when it's hungry. It's just going to worry about making the food come out.

And it's going to keep pressing that button long after it's hungry. And even when you take the food away, no food will come out no matter how many presses. The rat will keep pressing the button for a very long time.

So this is what gambling is. This is why it's so potent for people is because it is tickling this thing in our brain that's very much tied to dopamine. Operant behavioral conditioning that is causing you to sort of short circuit and do something that's really not in your best interest for the promise of an eventual reward.

So then comparing that to porn, how is it different? Because every time you press the button, you get the food. Right. With porn, if you press the button, yes, the nourishment.

We hear a really wide spectrum of concern around porn use. Some people feel they are truly addicted. 

Testes, testes one, two.

I had some pretty negative experiences in high school. Looking back on it, there was probably some pretty serious anxiety that I did not realize what it was at the time, combined with a pretty tragic event of a friend that I'd grown up with overdosed and died from painkillers. And I just didn't quite know how to handle all that stuff.

And I think that porn was a big part of the soothing process for me in a time when I was in general pretty miserable. Unfortunately, that became my primary soothing mechanism. And the majority of my 20s were spent with what I would say is an addiction.

Then trying to get help with the addiction. And unfortunately, because porn addiction is not recognized within the DSM, that was very, very, very hard to find help for that. And, you know, I don't know how to quite emphasize how negatively that has impacted me.

Yeah. We also hear from people who feel their porn use falls more into a gray area, like this person who DM'd us. We'll call him Clyde, though that's not his real name.

We are protecting his identity, which means protecting his voice. And neither Kels or I could convincingly play a man in his 50s. So I asked my real-life dad if he would read Clyde's letter.

Hi, dad. Hello. We're here with a letter that we received from a subscriber.

I'm wondering if you could read it out loud, starting right here. I'm 59, married faithfully for 28 years, a couple of minor ups and downs, but happy with grown-up children who live away from home. Sex life is pretty normal, I think.

Once or twice a week, predictable but satisfying. We do use a vibrator most times and rely on four or five positions that work for us. But it's always been the case that I enjoy masturbating alone around three times a week now.

I do use online porn to aid arousal for this. I've forever felt huge guilt about this, probably more about the porn than the masturbation. I've never asked anyone about this or discussed it.

I don't know if I'm normal, should seek help to stop or carry on. But I often feel that guilt is a bit of a shadow on my feelings about myself, feeling quite confused at the moment. Thanks.

We wanted to get Patrick's take on Clyde's concerns. And if Clyde were his client, what advice would he offer? Clyde's whole thing was, you know, am I normal? And I think that that's the very first thing that I want to say is that, Clyde, I want to give you a big hug and just tell you that you are normal. And to anybody listening to this and wondering, am I normal? Is this thing about me, this sexual thing about me, is it okay? Having doubt about it isn't okay.

And so we just turn inwards. And that story of aloneness, that story of being abnormal, I think just naturally happens in all of us to some degree. It kind of brings me to another question.

Like, how often do you find that partners are at odds for what they want their porn use to be? Like, say that Clyde likes masturbating three times a week to porn and his wife is not into it. Like, how do you reconcile that? And is that a common problem with your patients? I would say absolutely and more often than not. And it's okay if you have different needs around it, right? So I think the thing that I want to say about this is compromise isn't the end all be all.

If one of you says, absolutely, no way, no how, will porn have anything to do in our relationship? I consider this cheating. And if you engage in it, I will leave you, which is a fairly common narrative. Then I think that that's something to really examine from both sides.

First off, why do I hold such strong views around this? Do those views fit for me? And then for the other person, like, okay, now I know that this is sort of an ultimatum, right? I'm being presented with this fork in the road where either I have this life with my partner forever that's porn-less, or I have this other road where I continue to engage in porn. And for that reason, I lose this person. And this is a really hard, really nuanced conversation.

And there are no easy answers. In general, I think when we're giving ultimatums, I think we want to do that really carefully. And I also think that if you have a need, whether that's porn, whether that's no porn, you don't have to compromise on that.

You do get to assert your needs. You get to assert your boundaries. What you want, what you need is important.

It does matter. There are plenty of people who are totally fine with their partners watching porn. This is not a universal deal breaker.

But for the cases where it is not okay and an ultimatum is given, I think there is a third option that is probably the road more commonly traveled, where you stay with the partner and then you secretly watch porn. And then you feel really shitty about it because when something is a secret, especially if you know that it bothers the other person, it's just like a recipe for shame. I say that that's probably the most common option because I think it's very hard for me to imagine somebody saying, well, I choose porn over you.

But I think often somebody wanting to engage with porn, it's so much bigger than just wanting to watch like cream pies while you're taking a shit in the bathroom. You know, we can't know that. Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it is just like, I just really want to watch. I'm fucking bored. I'm taking this shit and I want to watch a cream pie.

Like, right. But like, I'm, I'm being cheeky. But even that is more than just that video at that time in the bathroom.

It's like, I want a little bit of freedom around my sex life. It's like porn is the example here, but it's indicative of a much broader thing, which is an autonomous sex life. And that doesn't mean that you have free reign of whatever sort of sexual antics you want to get up to.

But having even just mental freedom to know that you can fantasize about what you want to fantasize about and you're not breaking some rule, or you can watch porn and tap into some other side of your sexuality because that's interesting to you and that's just who you are. Right. It's like with Clyde, like he has still a regular good sex life with his wife from his report.

And sometimes he's horny and he wants to get off and watch these videos. Like it's not morally superior to have a partnered sexual experience to having a solo sex experience where you're just tapping into what your desires are. I think about it like traveling.

Like I love traveling with people. I love traveling with partners. I love traveling with friends.

I love families. Okay. Traveling alone is so liberating because you're the only person's needs that you need to take into account.

Like I'm hungry now. I'm going to go get pizza or like I want to take a nap. Like you're not having to navigate your needs and your partner's needs and whatever other factors that like complicate life.

You're able to just be really tuned into yourself and into your experience. And that's beautiful. And porn is a big part of that for some people.

If they're just wanting to have a sexual experience, porn can facilitate that for people. It can be a real tool. I get why it might feel really frivolous for somebody to put their foot down and be like, yes, I want porn even if it's a hard no, because it feels like crazy in a way to advocate for that.

But it is more. It's more. It's about staying connected to your own self.

I really like that analogy. I always go food analogies. And I like that you went travel, even though within that, it's like what you want to eat.

You cannot stop Tess from making a food analogy. I also want to be a fly on the wall during those ultimatum conversations. And I want to hear if it gets any more specific, like the person who's issuing that ultimatum.

Why is porn such a no for you? And maybe it's because their sex life has become completely dominated by the porn that the other person is watching. And in that case, I would kind of get it. I'd be like, OK, to me, porn represents you not wanting to have sex with me, you just wanting to masturbate without my presence.

And that's hurtful. But if it's not an extreme, if it's this personal take on porn or this like assumption that it's categorically bad, you know, that's kind of a different story. But I want to know more about what those conversations are like and if people are actually expressing a specific need that's not being met or if it's more just sort of this black and white porn is bad.

Therefore, you should stop. Porn itself isn't toxic. I think people get this idea that they're absorbing carcinogens through the screen that are somehow like settling and accumulating in their penises and blocking blood flow.

Like the green, like animated goo with like steam coming out of it. Totally. Like a skull and crossbones.

Yeah. But it's like kind of sexy somehow. Actually, that does sound sexy, yeah.

It's that Ghostbusters slime. Yes. Yeah.

And that's not happening. There's nothing about porn that is toxic. Here's where I think porn actually can have an impact on the way we experience partnered sex.

And it's something that's called funneled desire. Funneled desire. Basically, what's happening here is that when something sexual, let's just say masturbation, becomes so ritualized and reliable that it becomes this sort of neurological rut.

And it becomes difficult over time to see or experience other stimulus as desirable, interesting, or even accessible. So the analogy I like to use is that imagine like the first time that you heard music. You heard country music and you really liked it.

You liked it so much that you started line dancing to country music. You knew all the places. You knew all the steps.

You hit your mark every single time. But then you started getting older. You started making other friends.

And these friends, they listen to other music. And someday, you know, you're going to make a friend. And this friend, you really, really like them.

You really want to dance with them. And they invite you to a rave. And that's a scary moment.

Because, well, do they listen to country music at raves? How do you dance at a rave, right? It feels really unfamiliar. And now I'm not saying you can't line dance at a rave. You can.

But it's going to make it really hard for this person to participate with you. And so all of this to say that if you're going to use pornography, and if you're going to masturbate to pornography, and you're going to do that, let's just say, quote unquote, a lot, whatever that is. Mix it up, right? Experience it in different ways.

Try it at different times of day. Try it in different rooms. Try it in the shower.

Try it standing up. Try it using different lubricants. Try it using different toys.

Try it with and without porn. Try audio porn. There are so many ways that you can diversify and broaden your experience of pornography so that you are cuing in on more stimulus when you get into these partner situations.

Just given the fact that we're all social creatures who interact with each other all the time and to some degree care about what other people think, it's pretty hard to fully ignore this idea of normalcy. Yeah, well, and I think beyond just caring about what other people think, I feel like I hear the word normal or use the word normal interchangeably with healthy, right? Making sure that you're within this range of what your peers might be doing, especially in private spaces like with porn. I think there is also a real validation in knowing that our experiences are common among others.

That's really comforting to feel like you're on track and gets at that worry that we might be broken in some way. But something that's tricky about the concept of normalcy is that it's such a moving target, right? What was considered normal in the 50s is pretty irrelevant today, or like in 1896 when you couldn't even kiss in public. So it's really hard to use this measure of normalcy when normalcy just keeps changing depending on people's attitudes and cultural beliefs.

Totally. And also just internal personal shifts, right? Like the frequency at which you watch porn and masturbate is going to change based on if you're in a relationship or not, or what your libido levels are. Like we're all moving targets.

And so to try to identify some objective barometer just feels a little bit futile. I think that's what those 20-year-olds were trying to tell me in my middle school assembly. What do you think? That it's just a moving target? You left out the part about how they were just holding these giant archery targets and running around.

They're like, normal, normal, normal, normal. You fully left that out. Am I normal? To Pat's point about funneled desire, porn's impact on our relationships is a big point of concern for people.

So big, in fact, that we're going to spend the next two episodes digging into how porn plays into our sex lives, positively and negatively. 

Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Porn Nerds. I'm Kelsey.

And I'm Tess. You can find more from us at GetSquirmy.com. And please follow us on Instagram at Squirm and rate and review this show. It really, really helps.

Here is a sneak peek of what's coming up next week. 

We're Jedi Knights. We are supposed to be in full control of ourselves at all times.

I don't think I can resist you much longer. Come on, come spill your Kamal inside me. Come mate me.

A Jedi Knight always does her best, even at sex. We're going to give some of our favorite comments from these videos, too. I love, didn't even nut to this one.

I just love hearing that voice. And then the response from Master Yoda is that he's like, how corny you are. 

Porn Nerds is a co-production of BOOM Integrated, a division of John Marshall Media, and Squirm. It is an educational podcast made for your entertainment and curiosity. Any opinions shared by the hosts and guests are solely their own and not intended as therapy or medical advice. Thanks for being here and we'll see you next week.